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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Tuesday, February 10th, 2015.
Israeli troops demolish Palestinian homes in Jerusalem and kidnap civilians during invasions targeting West Bank communities. These stories, and more, coming up, stay tuned.
Israeli military bulldozers demolished, on Tuesday morning, a house belonging to the al-Absi family of the Silwan neighborhood, to the south of al-Aqsa Mosque, occupied East Jerusalem.
According to eyewitnesses, Israeli forces again went ahead with demolition procedures under the pretext of building without permission. Crews of municipality accompanied the soldiers and provided security to them while the demolition took place. Another home was destroyed by Israeli Authorities in the Lod town near Jerusalem on Tuesday.
From January 20-23, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recorded the Israeli demolition of 42 Palestinian-owned structures in the Ramallah, Jerusalem, Jericho and Hebron governorates. In 2014, OCHA recorded 590 Palestinian-owned structures in Area C and East Jerusalem destroyed by Israeli authorities,
displacing 1,177 people. It is the highest number recorded since the agency started monitoring displacement in 2008.
On Tuesday at dawn, Israeli soldiers kidnapped eight Palestinians, including a 12-year-old child, in the occupied West Bank, and Jerusalem, during military invasions into several Palestinian communities.
In related news the Israeli authorities, on Tuesday,
sentenced nine Palestinian detainees to serve administrative detention terms, ranging between four and six months in prison, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS).
While some of those prisoners received administrative sentences for the first time, others had their old orders renewed.
There are currently around 500 detainees serving administrative detention in several Israeli jails, 18 of whom are members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
According to international law, administrative detention can be used only in the most exceptional cases, as the last means available to preventing danger that cannot be thwarted by less harmful means. Yet Israel uses this form of collective punishment systematically, and has been doing so since the days of British Mandate over the region.
And that’s all for today from the IMEMC News; this was the Tuesday, February 10th, 2015, news round-up 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 George Rishmawi and me Ghassan Bannoura.
