Businesses should stop operating in, financing, servicing, or trading withIsraeli settlements in order to comply with their human rights responsibilities, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Those activities contribute to and benefit from an inherently unlawful and abusive system that violates the rights of Palestinians.

EU foreign ministers on Monday agreed a statement on the stalled Middle East peace process and Israeli settlements after resolving differences over wording which some felt was too critical of Israel.

Israel is temporarily banning all Palestinian workers from West Bank settlements in the wake of two attacks in two days.

Jerusalem’s Dormition Abbey has been vandalized for the second time in two years, with violent and threatening graffiti scrawled across its exterior. The incident is the latest in a series of attacks on Christians in Israel.

“Students who open up the Education Ministry’s new civics textbook won’t find a word about military rule or discrimination against 20 percent of the population,” writes Gil Gertel. “There’s a reason for that.”

According to media reports, a Palestinian stabbed Israeli civilian Dafna Meir to death yesterday evening on the threshold of her home and fled. Meir, 39, was a mother of six from the settlement of Otniel in the South Hebron Hills.

Haaretz investigation: Pro-settlement group Regavim commissioned and paid for private investigation into prominent human-rights lawyer and the organizations he represents.

“There is nothing new about the multi-pronged attack on human rights and anti-occupation activists in Israel, but there’s something different this time,” writes Michael Omer-Man. “Something scarier.”

“The Israeli Left with which most Palestinians are familiar speaks the same language as the Right — of segregation and safeguarding a racist regime. The ‘other Left’ needs to develop a new discourse, and we should all hope it succeeds,” writes Sawsan Khalife’.

A carwash in Petah Tikva was set on fire and spray-painted with graffiti against the employment of Arabs. An investigation reveals it was a deliberate fire.

The sprayed herbicides by the Israeli army could constitute a real hazard for the population, officials say.