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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Tuesday October 25, 2011
The Israeli Army demolishes a family’s house and olive trees, and Tel-Aviv confirms plans to create thousands of new settlement units south of Jerusalem, these stories and more coming up; so stay tuned.
The Israeli army has demolished a 120 square-meter house and uprooted many trees in the village of ‘Anata, in the northeastern part of East Jerusalem on Tuesday.
A large military force invaded the village, followed by jeeps and bulldozers, who demolished the house and uprooted several olive trees.
Army personal claimed that the house was built without a construction permit, documentation which is nigh on impossible to obtain.
In other incursions into the West Bank, the Israeli army arrested ten Palestinians in a series of raids.
Soldiers entered several areas in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron and arrested nine men, with the tenth person being taken from the village of Um Salamoneh, near the city of Bethlehem.
Ahmad Rabee’, 29, was killed this Tuesday morning when his tunnel collapsed upon him.
Medical sources claimed the rescue operation took several hours to locate his body, and confirmed that he was the only person in the tunnel.
The tunnel was located in the Al-Barazil neighborhood, just east of the Rafah crossing with Egypt. While the exact cause of the collapse is unknown, nearly two hundred Palestinians (including 10 children) have been killed in collapsing tunnels since 2006.
In one of the worst incidents, the Israeli army bombarded the tunnels in an attempt to destroy them. Unfortunately, people were in the tunnels at the time, and 20 people were killed.
The Israeli authorities have prevented Awad Yonis al-Rugoob, 60, from traveling to the Gaza strip to meet his son, who was released in the first phase of the prisoner-swap deal and exiled to Gaza.
He claims there is no reason for this, and that he has been denied seeing his son for nearly a decade, and that Israel is merely placing obstacles in the way of the families of released detainees to ruin their happiness.
He has appealed to human rights groups to intervene and secure him passage to travel to the Gaza Strip to see his son.
Israeli media sources reported that the Israeli government recently approved a new plan to construct a settlement “neighborhood” called Givat Ha-Matos, near Beit Safaf, south of Jerusalem.
Israeli media reported that the new “neighborhood” will be built in three stages to construct four thousand units for Jewish settlers.
They added that the implementation of the new project in the southern part of Jerusalem will help complete the “Jerusalem Belt”, by completely surrounding the city with settlements and creating a link between Gilo settlement and Har Homa; a development that will eventually seal the southern entrance of Jerusalem.
Thats all for today from the IMEMC. This was the Tuesday October 25 daily roundup of news from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We hope you will join us again tomorrow. This was brought to you by Husam Qassis and me William Gibson
