Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Tuesday, October, 18, 2016.
Israeli troops attack villagers harvesting their olives and kidnap school children in separate attacks in the West Bank. These stories, and more, coming up, stay tuned.
Israeli soldiers assaulted, Tuesday, several Palestinians while picking their olive trees, in their own orchards, north of the northern West Bank city of Nablus, and chased them out of their lands. The soldiers invaded the orchards, extending seven kilometers alongside the nearby settlers road, and attacked the villagers.
The army also forced the Palestinians out of their own orchards, after preventing them from picking their olive trees, and did not even provided a justification for this violation.
Elsewhere, The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) has reported that Israeli soldiers have kidnapped, on Tuesday afternoon, 15 Palestinians, including 10 children from a school for orphans, and the school’s headmaster, in occupied East Jerusalem, and three Palestinians in Ramallah.
Eyewitnesses said the soldiers chased many children while leaving a local school for orphans, and invaded its campus, in the Old City of Jerusalem, assaulted many of them and kidnapped ten.
The Israeli army claimed that some students hurled stones at their vehicles, and at soldiers stationed near the main gates of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
In the meantime, Around 200 Israeli extremists, on Tuesday, held provocative tours of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in East Jerusalem’s Old City district, heeding calls by parent organizations to increase Jewish presence on the holy site during the Jewish holidays, according to mosque officials.
Beefed up police escorts kept a buffer zone between the Jewish and Muslim worshippers, to prevent any confrontations between them.
Moreover, Israeli forces, on Tuesday, broke into and closed down a local market in Hebron to allow Israeli settlers’ “safe” passage to the Ibrahimi Mosque.
According to a report by the Palestine Information Center, Israeli soldiers stormed, in large numbers, the local market and forced residents to leave the area before closing all commercial stores.
Troops also fired teargas bombs at the stores’ owners, causing a number of suffocation cases among them.
And that’s all for today from the IMEMC News; this was the Tuesday, October, 18, 2016, news round-up from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. From more news and updates, please visit our website at www.imemc.org Today’s report has been brought to you by George Rishmawi and me Ghassan Bannoura.
