“Palestine leader Mahmoud Abbas insists the authority he heads will survive to see the rise of a sovereign state alongside Israel. However, those closest to Abbas warn that without world intervention to revive prospects for a two-state peace, that future state bordering Israel could very well bear the black banner of the Islamic Caliphate,” writes Barbara Opall-Rome.

The US State Department came out in support of a European Union move to distinguish West Bank settlements from Israel proper, and said that settlement product labeling is not tantamount to a boycott.

U.S. and European criticism of Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank have drawn a furious response from Israel this week, including a former official dismissing the U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv as a “little Jew boy”.

Raed Jaradat was 22, an accounting student from a well-to-do family here, already working part time with his father in his stone quarry and construction business. After Dania Ersheid, 17, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers who said she had pulled a knife at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, a version disputed by Palestinians, Mr. Jaradat wrote an angry post on Facebook: “Imagine if this were your sister!”

The Israeli government will announce the allocation of 370 acres of West Bank agricultural land near the Palestinian city of Jericho as state lands, the largest such land appropriation since August 2014.

Israeli authorities on Wednesday demolished a home under construction belonging to a Palestinian in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition and chairman of the center-left Zionist Union party, said Wednesday that the two-state solution is not a realistic option in the near future. “I don’t see a possibility at the moment of implementing the two-state solution,” he told Army Radio. “I want to yearn for it, I want to move toward it, I want negotiations, I sign on to it and I am obligated to it, but I don’t see the possibility of doing it right now.”

“Israel’s Army Radio conducted a poll of Jewish citizens of Israel and asked them whether Arab citizens of Israel should have equal rights. No, this is not the start of a joke. Yes, over 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab. No, not a single one of those Arab citizens were asked whether they themselves think they should have equal rights. (Or whether Jews should, for that matter),” writes Michael Omer-Man.