Top news stories from Israel/Palestine: April 18, 2018

What We’re Reading

Occupation/Human rights

Israelis and Palestinians hold controversial alternative Memorial Day ceremony,

Thousands of Jewish and Arab Israelis joined by dozens of Palestinians held an alternative Memorial Day ceremony in Tel Aviv.

Israel Deports Palestinian Mom to West Bank, Cutting Her Off From Her Jerusalem Family ,

After living 17 years in East Jerusalem, Ibtisam Abid was separated from her husband and three children, and expelled to the West Bank.

Jewish extremists scrawl 'price tag' threats in Palestinian villages,

Vandals believed to be Jewish extremists scrawled threatening slogans and punctured the tires of dozens of vehicles during an overnight penetration of two Palestinian villages near Nablus, according to Zakaria Sadeh, field worker for the NGO Rabbis for Human Rights.

Israeli soldiers fire crowd control weapons at heads of two boys, aged 10 and 14, injuring them,

In February 2018 B’Tselem documented two instances in the Ramallah area in which soldiers, in contravention of open-fire regulations, fired crowd control weapons at the heads of children, injuring them. The soldiers fired during protests and other stone-throwing incidents, and in both cases, neither the soldiers nor anyone else was facing mortal danger.

US-Israeli/Palestinian relations

Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump mull attending Jerusalem embassy opening,

US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Kushner’s wife, White House adviser Ivanka Trump, are considering traveling to Israel next month to inaugurate the US embassy in Jerusalem, The Times of Israel has learned.

BDS and Settlement Boycotts

Israel bans pro-BDS French mayor from entering West Bank,

Patrice Leclerc, the mayor of Gennevilliers, a Paris suburb, was trying to cross to the occupied West Bank from Jordan with his wife when Israeli authorities refused to let him into the Palestinian territories, Haaretz reported.

HSBC faces protests over links to Israel human rights abuse,

According to activists, the bank “profits from Israel’s military violence against Palestinians through investments and loans to companies which supply military equipment to Israel”.