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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Thursday, July 16th, 2015.
Israeli air force targets Gaza meanwhile in the West Bank the Israeli army order the demolishing of a village. These stories, and more, coming up stay tuned.
The Israeli Air Force carried out, on Thursday at dawn, two air strikes targeting sites in the northern and central parts of the Gaza Strip; the army claims it was responding to a rocket fired into an area in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council.
Palestinian sources said the army fired two missiles into the Civil Administration Office, in Jabalia town, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, causing damage but no casualties. The army also fired missiles into a site, used by an armed resistance group, in the al-Boreij refugee camp, in central Gaza, causing damage but no casualties.
Israel said the airstrikes came in retaliation to a shell that was allegedly fired from Gaza into the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, approximately at 2 after midnight.
In other news, Israeli soldiers arrested, Thursday, a Palestinian teenage girl, who allegedly stabbed a soldier, east of the Central West Bank city of Ramallah, according to the Israel Security Agency (Shabak). The Shabak said Rawan Abu Matar, 17 years of age, stabbed a soldier, on Wednesday afternoon, at a military roadblock, outside of the Nahliel settlement, northwest of Ramallah.
The woman is from Beitello town, east of Ramallah; soldiers forced her onto the ground, cuffed and arrested her, before moving her to an interrogation facility. The Shabak claimed that the woman “confessed she intended to kill a soldier,” and that she is not affiliated with any Palestinian group. The wounded soldier, 20 years of age, was transferred to Tel HaShomer Israeli Hospital, near Tel Aviv.
Also on Thursday at dawn, Israeli soldiers kidnapped a Palestinian university student from Rommana village, west of the northern West Bank city of Jenin. Invasions and homes searches were reported in the southern West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Hebron.
In other news, Israeli authorities ordered the demolition of around half of the homes, in a village south of Hebron, to be carried out after Ramadan.
Rabbis for Human Rights and B’Tselem said, in a statement, that pressure fromIsraeli settlers had led to the decision to carry out demolition orders in the village of Khirbet Susiya after Ramadan, although a high court hearing regarding the case is currently scheduled for August 3.
The court case has been ongoing since 2012, when residents of Khirbet Susiya applied for the Israeli Civil Administration to approve an outline plan for northern part of the village. Susiya villagers reportedly built homes in 1986 on agricultural land they owned, after being evicted by Israel from their previous dwellings on land declared as an archaeological site.
And that’s all for today from the IMEMC News; this was the Thursday, July 16th, 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 Ghassan Bannoura.
