Israel is angry that envoys from the European Union and other Western countries visited Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque last Wednesday, Israel Hayom reported on Sunday.

According to the Israeli newspaper, the delegation, which included around 30 diplomats from EU countries, Canada, Australia, and Argentina, did not coordinate with the occupation authorities.

Instead, it was reported, they coordinated with the Islamic Waqf of Jerusalem, which is the religious administrative body covering the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa.

Last October, reports emerged that during an Israeli military operation in Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, ground forces were supported by combat helicopters and armed drones, although the equipment was not used offensively. 

More than 130,000 demonstrators came out Saturday to protest the new government’s plans to weaken Israel’s court system. The vast majority of the protesters, 120,000, were in Tel Aviv, while thousands of others participated in protests in Jerusalem, Haifa and Be’er Sheva.

Some 110,000 protesters participated in the main protest, centered on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, while another 10,000 protesters attended a parallel event at nearby Habima Square. There were 4,000 at the protest in Jerusalem and 6,000 protesters in Haifa. Several hundred also protested in Be’er Sheva.

Israeli settlers have destroyed 350 olive trees in groves near the village of Jit, to the east of Qalqilya, in the latest attack on Palestinian livelihoods in the West Bank. 

A group men from the Kedumim settlement felled hundreds trees on Palestinian land, many of which were over 13 years old, according to the farmer’s brother.  

A group of neighbors standing on al-Rasheed street of Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City watch their homes falling down, bit by bit. Fathers and sons sit in front of their homes all day, observing the demolition as it is carried out by the Hamas-led government in Gaza. Some families have already moved to temporary housing for rent, but they keep coming back for a last look before their memories are forever erased. 

Among the onlookers, Abu Khalil Al-Hinawi, 45, and his son Khalil, 23, appear the most devastated, unable to process what they are seeing. 

Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical rightwing ministers’ agenda is to “empty the West Bank of Arabs.” And yet high Biden officials are meeting with Netanyahu today, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due out within a couple of weeks, all to give Biden’s blessing to the “unbreakable” bond between the two governments — and perform what the State Department admitted yesterday is “triage” on the complete failure of the two-state solution.

New York City officials have agreed to remove 441,083 ineligible voters from its voter rolls after a legal watchdog found the liberal-led government refused to clean up its list of voters as required by federal law.

Judicial Watch, a non-profit public interest law firm, filed the lawsuit after an investigation found that in six years, out of 5.5 million voters, only 22 names had been removed for moving away, dying or otherwise becoming ineligible to vote.

On Monday morning, January 16, Ahmad Kahla, 41, from the village of Ramoun 12 km east of Ramallah, was killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers. 

At approximately 8:00 a.m., Kahla and his 20-year-old son, Qusai, were on their way to work in their car when they were stopped by Israeli soldiers at a flying military checkpoint near the neighboring town of Yabrud. 

In 1969, Golda Meir, the first woman to become the Prime Minister of Israel who oversaw a major conflict in the Yum Kippur War of 1973 once proclaimed that

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, it is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country.  They didn’t exist.”