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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Thursday, August 27th, 2015.
Israeli fighter jets attack areas in Gaza and in the West Bank; troops invade communities and kidnap civilians. These stories, and more, coming up, stay tuned.
The Israeli air force, on Thursday morning, has reportedly shelled a site of the Hamas movement, claiming that a rocket was fired from there into Israel. Damage was reported but no injuries.
According to Israeli media sources the Israeli attack came after a rocket was fired from Gaza into Eshkol, in an open area of the Negev desert, with no damages reported.
Reuters said that there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday’s rocket, but Israel says that it holds Hamas accountable for any attacks from the enclave of 1.8 million Palestinians.
Elsewhere, ten Palestinian civilians were kidnapped by Israeli troops during predawn invasions targeting West Bank communities on Thursday.
Kidnappings and homes searches were reported in Bethlehem, Hebron, Jenin and East Jerusalem, local sources reported.
Also on Thursday, dozens of Palestinians protested in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran near the town of Hura, in the Negev, as Israel’s construction of a Jewish town on the village’s land continues, local sources said.
The Umm al-Hiran community — around 700 strong — is unrecognized by the Israeli government and residents’ lands were claimed by the state in 2013 in order to make way for the expansion of the Beersheba metropolitan area.
As a march set off from the village and moved towards the site of construction, protesters said they were able to force Israeli police to remove the bulldozers from the area.
In other news, Two people were killed when gunmen briefly opened fire in Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, breaching a tense ceasefire, Palestinian sources said on Thursday. A Fateh official and a civilian had been killed in fire by ‘unidentified gunmen’ overnight, in Ain al-Hilweh, southern Lebanon.
The breach threatened a ceasefire that ended several days of clashes between Fateh and an Islamist group in the camp.
And that’s all for today from the IMEMC News; this was the Thursday, August 27th, 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.
