Reports and Commentary

Mark LeVine: Microwork centred on the internet can allow Palestinians to work from their jail cells, offering them subsistence wages.

Following their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, many Palestinian intellectuals, businessmen, and craftspeople fled to Syria and established themselves as an integral part of Syrian society. Today that life has been broken and many Palestinian refugees from Syria have joined the ranks of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees, who some call the “forgotten people.”

U.S secretary of state expresses optimism after round of talks in Jerusalem and Ramallah, but offers few specifics.

Batsheva Sobelman: The Jerusalem District Court sentenced an American-born Israeli to two life sentences and another 30 years in jail for murdering two Palestinians and additional crimes Tuesday.

Former Palestinian prisoner and hunger striker Thaer Halahla, 35, was rearrested in the West Bank on Wednesday, nearly a year after his release, a Palestinian official said.

Haggai Matar: Physicians are extremely worried by the deteriorating medical condition of Palestinian prisoner Samer Issawi, who has not put food in his mouth for more than half a year.

An Israeli court on Monday sentenced a Palestinian cartoonist to five months in jail and ordered him to pay a 10,000 shekel fine, his lawyer said.

President Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor for communications and information technology Sabri Saydam Sunday said that Israel decided to respond to the cyber attacks against it by arresting several Palestinian activists.

Dina Elmuti: Transcribing the vivid details of the account engraved into the fabric of her memory, I am transfixed by all that she’s held onto for 65 years. From paper to pulse, I write the story buried deep in her consciousness to affirm her truth. Without her, it never would be written at all.

Robert Fisk: The Long View: This exhibition of the work of the first Palestinian photographer helps fulfil the Palestinian narrative, but it also shows a country that will never return.

Hadani Ditmars: It took the murder of his niece to galvanize Miko Peled, son of IDF General Matti Peled who later became a champion of Palestinian rights, to follow a journey that has led him to embrace a democratic one-state solution.

Nadezhda Kevorkova: One of the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command is located in a basement in central Damascus. All secrecy measures are there: one cannot drive through the area; hidden guerillas everywhere, and several dozen CCTV cameras. This is the Palestinian group whose headquarters and weapons were seized in December last year by the Syrian militants in Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria near Damascus.

Scott L. Morgensen: Critics of Israeli pinkwashing in the United States and Canada have increasingly engaged in comparative critiques of settler colonialism. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto has invoked this critique for many years.

Kareem Khadder: A well-known Palestinian prisoner died of cancer in Israeli custody on Tuesday, sparking outrage among Palestinian groups who accuse Israel of denying him treatment.

Israeli warplanes bombed the Gaza Strip early Wednesday, causing damage but no injuries, in the first airstrike on the enclave since a November ceasefire.

Barak Ravid: United States Secretary of State John Kerry will return to Israel and the Palestinian territories for the second time in less than two weeks, as part of the Americans’ efforts to kick-start the long-stalled peace process.

Hamas passes new law ordering gender segregation in schools that will go into effect in September.

A group of Palestinian activists have paid for New York subway ads calling for an end to “Israeli Apartheid” and asking the US to stop providing foreign assistance to Israel. The ads have sparked outrage of Jewish groups, but will remain for four weeks.

Anna Lekas Miller: On March 30, 1976 the Israeli government announced a plan to confiscate 20,000 dunums of Palestinian land in the Galilee region. Palestinians called for a general strike, taking to the streets en masse in the first Palestinian act of mass resistance inside of Israel. Six Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) that day.

Noam Sheizaf: I went to the weekly demo against the Wall in the Palestinian village Bil’in yesterday, after several months that I haven’t visited the West Bank at all (I try not to travel beyond the Green Line when it’s not for work). A colleague visiting from the U.S. joined me, and we arrived at the village shortly after noon.