LONDON 21 Sep (ANA) - Israel’s occupation forces killed 19 Palestinians, including four children, and wounded 1,600 during August, Quds Press has reported. 

 

The killings took place in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. According to a report issued by the PLO’s Abdullah Al-Hourani Centre for Documentation and Studies, 17 Palestinians were killed in Gaza while they were taking part in the Great March of Return protests, one was killed in Israel itself and the other was killed in the West Bank.

 

Those who were wounded, it revealed, were targeted during the Gaza protests as well as the confrontations between unarmed Palestinians and heavily-armed Israeli forces in the West Bank.

 

Around 400 Palestinians were arrested by Israel last month, most of them in the West Bank. The Israelis also demolished 31 Palestinian-owned buildings and issued demolition orders for 39 others.

 

Meanwhile, the occupation authorities approved building permits for more than 1,000 housing units on illegal Jewish settlement and expropriated hundreds of dunams of Palestinian land.

 

The PLO report also documented dozens of attacks on Palestinians and their properties in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers. Three incidents involved cars being used as rams, and more than 600 olive and fruit trees were destroyed. 

 

In another development, the crew and passengers of the Freedom Flotilla ships, Al Awda and Freedom, returned to their home countries in August after being hijacked, interrogated and imprisoned by Israeli commandos.

 

The outcome may have appeared anticlimactic, since many supporters had hoped for a triumphant arrival by the flotilla ships in Gaza Harbor and a  breaking of Israel’s illegal 12-year land and sea blockade of the small Palestinian enclave.

 

Reports say the 2018 Freedom Flotilla mission has achieved its goals—which were to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza, raise public awareness of the blockade and other human rights violations, and let the people of Gaza know that they are not alone.(ANA)

FA/ANA/21 September 2018-------