The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will bring avowed friends and supporters of Israel to the White House in January. Their approach towards the Middle East is likely to be very different in both style and substance to the outgoing administration. Biden’s commitment to Israel is long-standing. One Read more…
Mystery surrounds the death of a top commander of the armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party who was killed on Saturday. Hatem Abu Rizek, a leading figure in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, died at the Balata refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Nablus. Abu Rizek is said Read more…
The Palestinian Authority has been ordered by Jerusalem’s District Court to pay nearly £3m to the family of a couple who died in a 2002 terror attack. Tzipi and Gadi Shemesh (pictured) and their unborn twins were murdered in central Jerusalem’s King George Street in March 2002 when suicide bomber Read more…
A military court in Gaza this week convicted three Palestinian peace activists for holding a video call with Israelis in April. Rami Aman, the head of the Gaza Youth Committee, was sentenced to a year in prison after being found guilty of “weakening revolutionary spirit”. However, the court said it Read more…
Israel has given the Palestinian Authority control over three power stations in a bid to help stabilise and boost the supply of electricity to the West Bank. The three power stations – in Tarqumiyah, near Hebron, Qalandiyah, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and Nablus – were handed over by the Israel Read more…
The European Union has said it won’t bail out the Palestinian Authority with additional aid for so long as it refuses to accept tax revenues collected by Israel, it has been reported. President Mahmoud Abbas announced in May that the PA would stop accepting $150m a month in tax revenues Read more…
More than 20 members of the European parliament from 15 nations have urged the European Union to partially withhold funding from the PA until Ramallah makes sweeping changes to its controversial school curriculum. The new curriculum, introduced in 2017, incites violence, glorifies terrorism and contains antisemitic content. The UK government has Read more…
Both Donald Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attempted to paint the Democratic party as anti-Israel and suggested that the election of Joe Biden would be detrimental to the Jewish state. This weekend, David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, went further and suggested that a victory for the former Read more…
Israel’s foreign minister urged the Palestinians to “return to the negotiating table” this week. Gabi Ashkenazi was speaking after his historic first meeting with the United Arab Emirates foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, in Berlin on Tuesday. “Only through direct negotiations can we advance a solution for the Read more…
The services that peacebuilding organisations provide for their communities are not just nice – they are necessary, a new report from the Alliance for Middle East Peace says this week. The study, A Resilient Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Sector in the Face of the Coronavirus Pandemic, looks at the impact of the Read more…
In his virtual address to the UN General Assembly last week, Mahmoud Abbas predictably denounced the historic normalisation agreements signed earlier this month by Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. But the president also announced new elections – the first for over 14 years – will take place in Read more…
Steve McCabe has welcomed the normalisation agreements signed by Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain earlier this month. In a parliamentary debate last week, LFI’s chair also urged the government to restore funding to peace-building coexistence projects. “I hope other countries in the region will follow [the UAE and Bahrain] Read more…