Palestine

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — One of the men was hospitalized with kidney failure and 11 broken ribs. Another was nearly unrecognizable to his wife when he was wheeled into a courtroom. A third was stitched up after being attacked by a security dog.

Then the three Palestinians were returned to their Israeli interrogators. They had been swept up in a sprawling manhunt launched after a roadside bomb killed a 17-year-old Israeli girl and wounded her father and brother as they hiked down to a spring last August in the occupied West Bank.

RAMALLAH, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is to address the UN Security Council (UNSC) next week over the U.S. Middle East peace plan, better known as the Deal of the Century, a senior Palestinian official announced Wednesday.

Riyad Mansour, permanent representative of Palestine in the United Nations, told the official Voice of Palestine radio that Abbas will arrive in New York on Monday and address the UNSC on Tuesday.

The senior Palestinian diplomat revealed that Palestine will submit a draft resolution to the UNSC.

GAZA (Reuters) - Returning to his fields for the first time in 14 years, Palestinian farmer Naser Abu Isaeed surveyed the toll taken by conflict on formerly productive soil.

“I saw an empty area full of holes and dry weeds,” said Abu Isaeed, who once grew fruit on the tracts along Gaza’s volatile border with Israel.

He is one of about 600 Palestinian farmers who regained access to their fields along the border to cultivate crops under a project launched by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

RAMALLAH, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Palestine on Sunday reiterated its rejection of the U.S. Mideast peace deal, describing it as a "declaration of hostility" against the Palestinian people.

"The plan poses a serious threat to the rules-based international order and the foundations of international law," according to a position paper issued by the Palestine Liberation Organization's Public Diplomacy and Policy Department.

It said that the proposed plan grants Israel "immediate rewards of annexation," leaving Palestinians with no sovereignty at all.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said “a thousand no’s” to the Mideast peace plan announced Tuesday by President Donald Trump, which strongly favors Israel.

The Palestinians remain committed to ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a state with its capital in east Jerusalem, Abbas said at a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Western-backed Palestinian Authority is headquartered.

“After the nonsense that we heard today we say a thousand no’s to the Deal of The Century,” he said.

GAZA, Jan. 25 (Xinhua) -- Israeli warplanes on Saturday night carried out several airstrikes on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in response to the launch of balloons carrying explosives into southern Israel, security sources in Gaza said.

The sources told Xinhua that the warplanes struck posts belonging to Hamas movement's armed wing in southern and central Gaza Strip.

No injuries or damages were reported.

RAMALLAH, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- Palestine on Sunday accused the United States of trying to turn the future Palestinian state into cantons under the Israeli control.

"The U.S. administration wants to transform the Palestinians into small cantons in an entity that is under Israeli control," said Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Executive Committee of Palestine Liberation Organization.

BETHLEHEM, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye declared on Saturday that Palestine will invest 100 million U.S. dollars to establish an alternative energy sources company.

"At the World Economic Forum at Davos, we will announce the creation of a company with 100 million dollars investment to support projects for alternative energy sources in Palestine," Ishtaye said.

His remarks came in a speech during a groundbreaking ceremony for four new hotels in Bethlehem city in the south of the West Bank.

GAZA (Reuters) - The interim head of the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees accused the United States on Thursday of lobbying foreign parliaments to stop donations to the organization, to which Washington cut off funding in 2018.

Christian Saunders, in an interview with Reuters in his Gaza office, also said Israel was seeking to replace United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) services for Palestinians, mandated by the U.N. General Assembly, in occupied East Jerusalem with those of its own.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Abdullah Abu Rahma has been arrested by Israeli soldiers eight times in the last 15 years, spending weeks or months in prison and paying tens of thousands of dollars in fines for organizing protests.

He’s among a growing number of Palestinians who have embraced non-violent means of protesting Israel’s military rule and expanding settlements, and who are increasingly finding those avenues of dissent blocked.