US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said that President Donald Trump’s administration might halt funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – the UN body tasked with helping Palestinian refugees – until the Palestinians agree to engage in peace talks with Israel again.

“It’s not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries, and others,” he said. “As an example, we pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect.”

Trump threatens to shatter not only the underlying assumptions of the framework that subsidizes the Israel occupation (through Palestinian institutions and the UN), but also the illusion of a peace process and the two-state solution.

Palestinians condemned as blackmail on Wednesday U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to withhold future aid payments over what he called the Palestinians’ unwillingness to talk peace with Israel.

Deflecting suggestions it is unusual for US officials to visit settlements, David Friedman says he only came to pay respects.

Last month’s vote on Jerusalem in the UN’s General Assembly was a repudiation of the view, increasingly voiced by Israeli and American officials, that the world no longer cares about Israel-Palestine. It likewise revealed increasing, not decreasing, unity among key nations and groupings of nations in opposing Israeli and American policies in this arena.

The European Union said on Wednesday that it opposes an Israeli bill that would makes it easier for military courts to sentence terrorists who commit murder to death. The bill received preliminary backing from the Knesset on Wednesday.

Remarks by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan indicate that there were significant holes in the police investigation that led prosecutors to accuse Breaking the Silence’s spokesman of being a liar – an investigation that state prosecutors have since reopened.

“Netanyahu and the Israeli right’s alternative to the two-state solution appears to be taking shape. There are only so many ways of describing that shape, and the reality to which it leads,” writes Mike Omer-Man.

“Many Palestinians have been quietly, and at times admirably, resisting Israeli occupation of their villages and cities and farm lands for 50 years now. What they do may be illegal, but it is not immoral. It deserves notice and respect,” writes Jane Eisner.

Netanyahu’s party and government are finally making explicit what has long been implied: rejecting the premise that the Palestinians will ever have a state of their own.

The chairwoman of the Meretz party on Thursday reached an agreement to hold open primaries in March, ending a months-long internal spat within the left-wing party.

Hours after the Israeli Parliament approved new obstacles to a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition stripped from a bill they were about to enact language that would have made it easier to exclude Palestinians from the map of Jerusalem.

At the request of the Palestinian Authority, Israel will resume selling 120 megawatts of electricity a day to Gaza, as it had been doing until half a year ago.

Military Police have opened an investigation into the death of Gaza double-leg amputee Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, who was killed in clashes with Israeli troops at a Gaza border demonstration in December, due to the significant disparity in the findings of an army inquiry into the incident and those of Palestinian groups inside the Gaza Strip.