Palestine weekly: Settlement sanctions spark diplomatic crisis
New B'Tselem report frames events on ground as Israel's 'project of elimination' of Palestinians.
This past week, a flurry of Western countries announced forthcoming sanctions on Israel – limited, for now, to its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s response was swift and aggressive: on September 9, it gave the United Kingdom 30 days to close its consulate in occupied East Jerusalem.
As Israel hardened its international defiance, such diplomatic moves did little to slow the dispossession of Palestinian land and identity in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the ongoing killings and deterioration of basic conditions in Gaza.
Such efforts can be difficult to grasp as a single, coordinated process. But a newly released B’Tselem report attempts to do exactly that, describing the overarching colonial system as being driven by aspirations of “elimination” – “the sustained undermining of the conditions that allow Palestinians to exist as an independent collective with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history and a social and political horizon”.
Following two days of multiple air raids on Gaza wounding women and children, on September 10, Israeli warplanes killed a family of four – father, mother and their two daughters – in the Beit Lahia housing project. Israel alleged the father was involved in attacks. This was followed the next day with a drone strike near the Sumoud camp in Khan Younis, killing Jihad Ismail, 33, and wounding 12 others.