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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Wednesday September 12th, 2012.
The Palestinian President said he supports the government in the decision taken to soften the crises in the Palestinian territories, meanwhile, Israel confiscates wide areas of privately-owned Palestinian land, these stories and more, coming up, stay tuned.
Following a wave of protests in most of the Palestinian areas in the West Bank, the Palestinian Government, headed by prime minster Dr. Salam Fayyad decided on a set of procedures to be taken which will supposedly ease the situation. The government decisions were approved by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The government decided to pay half the salary of August, and to lower the prices of Diesel, Gasoline and cooking gas, however, the gas used for cars, remained at almost 2 dollars per liter.
The government decided also to lower the Value Added Tax, or the sales tax, from 16.5 per cent to 15 percent, which is an increase by .5 percent to the old rate.
This however, was not satisfactory to the public, although the protests calmed down, since there is no guarantee that such crises will not happen agine.
In the meantime, India decided to grant the Palestinian Authority $10 million dollars to help with the financial crises.
Israel on the other hand released $62 million dollars of due tax money to the Palestinian Authority. Israel collects the tax money at the borders, because the Palestinian Authority has no control over the borders.
Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist said in an article published on Haaretz earlier this week that the main problem lies in the Oslo accords and the Paris protocols, which relived Israel from the burden and put it on the shoulders of the Palestinian Authority without granting it enough privileges and space to move and act.
In other news, the Israeli military and its so-called, Civil Administration Office in the occupied West Bank, decided to confiscate 675 thousand squared meters of privately-owned Palestinian lands in the Nablus district, in the northern part of the West Bank.
Ghassan Doghlus, in charge of monitoring settlement activities in the northern West Bank, said the Israeli military handed over confiscation orders to the residents of Burin and Awarta villages, southeast Nablus early Wednesday. Most of the land in question is olive orchards.
He added that Israeli military has handed, on Tuesday, confiscation orders to people in four other villages north of Nablus. The land in question is around 800 thousand square meters.
Such confiscation orders come shortly after the Israeli government approved the upgrade of an Israeli college in the illegal settlement of Ariel into a university, a decision that created uproar among Palestinian, International and Israeli academics.
That’s all from Palestine Today; This was the Wednesday September 12th round-up of news from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. For more news and updates please visit our website at www.imemc.org. Today’s report has been brought to you by Hussam Qassis and me, George Rishmawi.
