News stories by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, page 2

For Taiseer Khatib and his wife Lana, the most difficult aspect of Israel’s policy of forced family separation is the impact it is having on their children. 'Our children are paying the price psychologically. We are trying to protect them, but they have a good sense of what’s going on and they understand that there’s something wrong,' Khatib, who has two children under the age of five, Adnan and Yosra, tells IPS.

After a recent Israeli Supreme Court decision allowed Israeli companies to maintain quarrying and mining activities in the occupied West Bank, local human rights groups and activists say the decision has opened the door dangerously to Israel’s pillaging of other Palestinian resources.

Palestinians in East Jerusalem can once again go to the movies, after Al Quds Cinema reopened its doors this week after being closed for 25 years. Organisers say this signals the rebirth for Palestinian arts and culture in the city.

In a case that has highlighted Israel’s abuse of Palestinian detainees, an Israeli military court recently acquitted a Palestinian man after it became clear that Israeli interrogators used excessive physical and psychological abuse as a way to coerce a confession from him.

Representatives from over 65 organisations and countries convened in Amman, Jordan last week in an effort to lay the groundwork for the United Nations’ goal of creating a Middle East without nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

Standing across the street from the American embassy in Tel Aviv, more than 200 Eritrean asylum seekers chanted 'Yes to justice! Yes to humanity!', and demanded international intervention to stop torture camps in the Egyptian Sinai. Protests by African asylum seekers in Israel are growing, in the face of increasingly tough policies by the Israelis.

Ahmed Qaraeen walks with a limp, more than two years after he was shot twice, in the hip and left knee, by an Israeli settler near his home in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan.

As 18 international activists remain in an Israeli prison following the take-over of two Gaza-bound aid ships late last week, the activists have condemned their respective governments for failing to apply pressure on Israel to release the detainees and to respect international law.

As Israel moves ahead with a plan to forcibly displace tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank, Mohammad Al-Korshan and his family are facing the real prospect of not only losing their home, but their traditional way of life.

Rawda Odeh had mixed feelings when she heard the news that her son, 33- year-old Loai Mohammad Ahmed Odeh, was going to be released from prison as a result of the recently brokered prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas.