“The highlight of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights conference that concluded Sunday in St. Paul was a speech by U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) that was that very rare and brave thing in mainstream US politics: an unapologetic endorsement of Palestinian human rights.”

My family and I moved to Washington in April 2017, just a few months after President Trump took office. I’d been sent as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s general delegation to the United States — effectively the Palestinian ambassador in Washington.

On 31 August, US President Donald Trump’s administration announced it was terminating its funding commitment to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). 

For decades, Palestinian leaders have engaged in a rigged peace process, seeking to force the international community’s blueprint for a Palestinian state onto the population of the West Bank and Gaza. The United States, meanwhile, has sought to maintain the fiction that it is an honest broker and neutral mediator.

Twenty-five years ago this month, the signing of the Oslo Accords ushered in a new paradigm in Israeli-Palestinian relations, with negotiations at the forefront. Over the course of several years, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held countless meetings replete with handshakes and photo-ops.

PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, said that Shakira’s decision dashes Israel’s hopes “to use her name to art-wash its latest massacre in Gaza.”“Artists, especially UN goodwill ambassadors, have a moral duty not to be complicit in covering up human rights violations and apartheid,” PACBI added.

Jerusalemite activists have launched a hashtag on Twitter – #we are not hungry – as a rejection of Ramadan meals provided by the UAE for visitors to Al-Aqsa Mosque. They argue that the Gulf State is consorting with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, having sent a team to cyclists to participate in the international Giro d’Italia cycle race which passed through occupied Jerusalem on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba.

Israel has turned Gaza’s sea into a battlefield.Israel’s military routinely fires on boats, injuring, killing and arresting Palestinian crew members.“In the past, the sea used to be open. We would fish whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted,” Rashad al-Hissi, a 74-year-old Gaza fisher, told The Electronic Intifada. According to the 1993 Oslo accords, Gaza’s fishing zone was supposed to extend 20 nautical miles out from shore.

Years have passed and the prison bars still won’t let us live our lives. You stand here alone: fighting death with hope, watching everything grow older while you are still fighting for your own existence. You live your life facing one battle after another, trying to defend your name and save your dreams.