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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Wednesday January 25, 2012.
Palestinian and Israeli negotiators to meet in Amman Today, meanwhile Israeli military forces demolish six houses near Jerusalem, these stories and more, coming up, stay tuned.
Israeli soldiers invaded, on Wednesday at dawn, the Wa’r Ad-Beik area, that belongs to the Anata town, north east of occupied East Jerusalem, and demolished six sheds; home to six families, including five brothers and their families.
According to the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights, the houses belong to five brothers of Al-Jahalin family and their sister. The demolished houses are home to 36 members of the family. The center also said that the families have been subject to constant harassment and threats not only by Israeli soldiers and policemen, but also by armed Jewish settlers who want to install and expand their illegal colonies and their illegal settlement outposts on the families lands.
Al-Jahalin is one of dozens of Palestinian villages that are “unrecognized” by Israel, an issue that enables the Israeli army, and its military occupation enforced laws, to harass the residents, repeatedly displace them, and demolish their sheds and structures.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights issued a statement on Wednesday condemning the detention of two Palestinians from the sit-in tent at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem.
The statement said that the detention of Palestinian Parliament Member Mahmoud Toutah and former Palestinian Minister, Khaled Abu ‘Arafa is retaliatory act and a form of collective punishment prohibited under Article 33 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 1949.
According to the center, a large force of Israeli security officers stormed the tent set up in the yard of the Red Cross office in Sheikh Jarrah and abducted the two men Monday afternoon.
Abu ‘Arafa, Toutah and Ahmad Attoun, in addition to some other members of the Palestinian Parliament have been protesting since June 2010 to defy Israel’s decision to violate the rights of Palestinian members of Parliament who are residents of Jerusalem.
On 06 September 2011, an Israeli undercover unit kidnapped MP ‘Attoun from the same sit-in tent in Jerusalem and kept him in custody until he was deported to Ramallah on 06 December 2011.
On Tuesday evening, Israeli troops abducted Sheikh Mohammad Freihat, 46 years old. Sheikh Freihat is a religious figure and a political leader of the Hamas movement, in al-Yamoun town, west of the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
Local sources reported that dozens of Israeli soldiers broke into the home of Freihat, forced him and his family out of their home despite of the cold weather, before ransacking their house and messing with their property causing extensive damage. Freihat was seen cuffed and blindfolded and was taken to an undisclosed location.
In political news, senior negotiator Palestinian, Dr. Saeb Erekat, and Israeli negotiator, Yitzhak Molcho, will be holding a meeting in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Wednesday to discuss the resumption of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks and resolving the outstanding issues. The meeting is brokered by Jordan and the European Union.
The Palestinian Authority said this meeting in Amman will be the last in the series of what has been called exploration meetings with Israeli officials.
On Saturday meeting, a clash erupted between Ereikat and Molcho after Ereikat refused to discuss security arrangements in the meeting. Ereikat said this meeting is not to discuss security issues but to talk about the principle of the two-state solution.
That’s all for today from the IMEMC News, this was the Wednesday January 25th daily roundup of news from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We hope you will join us again tomorrow. This has been brought to you by Husam Qassis and me, George Rishmawi.
