TV News LIES

In Qusra, in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian families have spent August imprisoned inside their own homes.

Israeli settlers pitched tents in their yards and cut them off from the outside world. Water and electricity were severed. Food ran short. 

Armed men gathered outside, smashed windows, threw stones, and stole appliances. Inside, parents tried to calm frightened children, never knowing whether the next sound at the door would be the start of another attack.

In one home, Qusai Abu Rida was trapped with his teenage son. Thousands of miles away in Ohio, his brother Loai watched through security cameras as settlers surrounded the house - until Israeli soldiers removed the camera.

Nearby, Ruqaya Hassan endured the siege with her children, among them four-year-old Kinda, who she said were living in fear.

Elsewhere in Qusra, Marmar Ouda has effectively turned his home into a cage to protect his family. Metal fencing surrounds the house, and bars cover the windows. Nearby, someone spray-painted in Hebrew: “Death to Arabs.”

Five months earlier, Ouda says a settler shot dead his nephew and wounded his brother in front of him. He complained to Israeli police, but the attacks continued.

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Israeli authorities have formally allowed Jewish prayer for the first time inside Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, in an unprecedented violation of the site’s decades-old status quo.

Israeli police allowed settlers raiding the site on Sunday to bring in siddurim, or Jewish prayer books, and perform group prayers, according to a Palestinian source from the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf.

While such practices have occurred in the past, they have largely been carried out without official approval. The decision to officially permit them marks a significant shift.

The source, who requested anonymity, said the move represented the latest breach of the site’s status quo.

“There is an important distinction between coming to visit the site and coming to pray there,” the source said.

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Life under genocide has its familiar daily rituals. A discerning eye detects latent horrors in the scenes that unfold in succession across screens.

Elsewhere, the scene itself disappears beneath rubble, entombing the bodies of thousands of Palestinians whose breath was cut off below, while their families remain unable to retrieve them.

In the Gaza Strip, modern brutality has made its terrible presence felt through atrocity after atrocity, in full view of the entire world.

These horrors were caused not by a natural disaster, but by the tsunami of modern genocide carried out by Israel using American and western weapons, munitions and technologies.

Genocide has taken possession of the defining features of everyday life in all their details, leaving its tragic imprint on the population in every sphere.

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Haitham Rashaidh was among the last to leave his home near Ein al-Auja, a natural spring and waterfall north of Jericho in the occupied West Bank. 

His family packed up their tents and heaped all their belongings onto a tractor, and then began the two-hour journey across difficult terrain towards al-Balqa, a sparsely populated area of the Jordan Valley, where they set up camp alongside their displaced neighbours.

Leaving Ein al-Auja felt like losing a part of themselves, Rashaidh explained mournfully. Water once flowed here in a torrent, estimated at thousands of cubic metres daily - yet today, the ground is parched, the spring that once supported a Bedouin community of more than 100 families reduced to a trickle.

Palestinians used to treasure Ein al-Auja as an oasis of calm in a region under siege. But Israel’s diversion of water, alongside continuing settler attacks, ultimately made life in the community untenable.

“We did not leave the first time they tried to push us out,” Rashaidh told Middle East Eye. “We came back, rebuilt what we could, and tried to continue our lives.

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Home demolitions by Israeli forces; attacks on healthcare infrastructure, homes, and schools; mass displacement of Palestinians; and the expansion of illegal settlements across the West Bank have brought the occupied Palestinian territory to “the breaking point,” said a top humanitarian official at the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, calling for a “coordinated international effort” to end the violent Israeli occupation.

At a meeting on the situation in the territory, Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, addressed the council as families in the town of Qusra, northern Nablus, were facing days of attacks by Israeli settlers.

That violence exemplified what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem called an escalating “ethnic cleansing” operation that Israel’s military allows.

As B’Tselem said Wednesday, settlers had established an illegal outpost in the yards of two Palestinian families’ homes, “forcing the families out and taking over their homes,” and the US-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had done nothing to protect the Palestinian residents.

“Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in full view of everyone,” Yuli Novak, president of B’Tselem, told Anadolu Agency, adding that the settlers’ seizure of the Palestinian homes was “not an isolated incident.”

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Since Andy Burnham became prime minister, there has been a serious shift in approach to British foreign policy.

But so far none of it has been made public, beyond a change in the rhetoric of government ministers.

This is set to change after parliament's summer recess.

The government is poised to announce a raft of new policies in September, multiple Whitehall and civil society sources told Middle East Eye.

These policies are still under discussion, but are set to include a ban on goods from illegal Israeli settlements.

Sources said discussions are underway in the Foreign Office over whether the measures will involve legal sanctions for companies and organisations that have business or other links with settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.

This comes as the Charity Commission, the UK's charity regulator, is investigating several British charities accused of sending money to settlements.

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