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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Wednesday February 22, 2012.
Palestinian leaders to meet in Cairo to discuss reconciliation meanwhile power problem in the Gaza Strip remains unsolved, these stories and more, coming up, stay tuned.
Chiefs of Palestinian factions and leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PL0) and speaker of the Palestinian National Council in addition to some independent Palestinian figures are set to meet in Cairo on Thursday to discuss the latest political developments and the ongoing efforts toward Palestinian reconciliation.
A Palestinian informed source said that Reconciliation and evaluation of the performance of the committees which emerged from the Cairo agreement in addition to the election of a new leadership to the Palestinian National Council will dominate the agenda.
The conveners would address the formation of a technocrat government to be headed by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as agreed in Doha between Abbas and Hamas chief Khalid Mashaal.
In the meantime, the Israeli prisons’ administration transferred approximately 120 prisoners from Negev Desert Prison to an unknown location.
A press statement issued by the prisoners published by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, said that 120 prisoners were transferred without allowing them to take their belongings after two special military forces broke into the prison with weapons and dogs.
They also said that the prisons’ administration informed the prisoners that it would cancel all previous agreements with them, and that it would escalate the procedures against them.
In other news, Israeli troops invaded, on Tuesday afternoon, Al-Khader town, west of the West Bank city of Bethlehem, and fired rubber-coated metal bullets and gas bombs at dozens of youth who hurled stones and empty bottles at them.
The soldiers also attacked dozens of bystanders, and violently struck and beat a 15-year-old, youth identified as Issa Yousef Sbeih, before kidnapping him and taking him to an unknown destination.
In related news, soldiers kidnapped, on Tuesday at dawn, three Palestinians who approached the border fence area, east of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
Eyewitnesses identified the three as Ashraf As-Sufi, Mohammad Abu Ghadra, and Saddam Abu Ghadra; all from Rafah.
Israel enforces a no-man zone in areas that are close to the border, an issue that prevents hundreds of residents from entering their own farmlands.
Several casualties were reported when Israeli troops opened fire, and even fired shells, at residents who approached the “no-man” zone.
Ismail Haniyya, head of the Hamas-led Palestinian government in the Gaza Strip, stated that the electricity crisis in the Gaza Strip will be resolved soon, and that certain mechanisms to resolve the issue will be implemented soon, in direct agreement and cooperation with Egypt.
Egyptian Minister of Electricity and Energy, Hasan Younis, stated Tuesday that Egypt will be providing Gaza nearly 22 megawatts by the beginning of next week.
The Gaza’s only power station that provides 1/3 of the Gaza Strip with electricity had to shut down, again, on February 14, due to fuel shortage.
That’s all for today from the IMEMC News, this was the Wednesday February 22 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.
