Five Palestinians Injured, Two Missing in Israeli Strike on Rafah

RAFAH, July 14, 2011 (WAFA) – Five Palestinians were injured Thursday at dawn and two others were reported missing after an Israeli air strike on the tunnels in Rafah, south of Gaza.

Medical sources in the al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah said the five people arrived with burns and wounds in different parts of their body after the attack by Israel F-16 warplanes.

The sources also reported two missing people that emergency crews are searching for.

The Israeli army had launched two air strikes at Gaza late last night, the first targeting the tunnels area and the second al- Shajaeya neighborhood east of Gaza City, with no injuries reported.

Settlers attack Palestinian car near Jenin

JENIN (Ma’an) -- A Palestinian teenager sustained bruises after Israeli settlers pelted his car with stones near the site of the former Israeli settlement of Homesh, which was evacuated in 2005.

One of the car's passengers, Kamal Abu Awwad, said that he and some friends were driving from Nablus to Jenin when they saw a man, who they assumed to be a hitchhiker, waiting by the roadside near the evacuated Homesh settlement.

As they approached the man began shouting at them and five armed settlers emerged and began throwing stones at the car, Awwad told Ma'an.

Basim Mousa Al-Khatib was hit in the head with a stone.

“If we had stopped, we would have been killed. We heard them loading their guns which they pointed at us. It was really a narrow escape,” Awwad said.

Al-Khatib was taken to a public hospital in Jenin where medics said that his injury was a superficial wound.

A recent report by the Palestinian Authority found that settler violence against Palestinians had increased 'dramatically' in June 2011.

Annual figures compiled by Israeli rights group Yesh Din have repeatedly shown that nine out of 10 police investigations about settler offenses fail to lead to a prosecution.

IOA imposes $900,000.00 in fines on Jerusalemite children in past 10 months

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- The Israeli occupation authority has imposed $900,000.00 in fines on Jerusalemite children in Silwan for throwing stones at Israelis vehicles and settlers over the past ten months.

Fakhri Abu Diab, a member of the committee for the defense of Silwan real-estate, said in a press release on Wednesday that the Israeli courts blackmail the Silwan inhabitants by imposing heavy fines on their children, because they know the families would be forced to pay the fines to secure the release of their children.

He said that many Jerusalemites go in debt to secure the money while others could not and their sons remain in jail.

Abu Diab said that large sums of money go to bail out the detained children and are liable to be lost in the event the court conditions were not met.