QALANDIYA CHECKPOINT, West Bank: For many Palestinians, the journey to one of Islam’s most sacred sites on the holiest night of Ramadan begins in a dust-choked, garbage-strewn maelstrom.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian worshippers from across the occupied West Bank on Monday crammed through a military checkpoint leading to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque for Laylat Al-Qadr, or the “Night of Destiny,” when Muslims believe that the Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad centuries ago.
The noisy, sweaty crowds at Qalandiya checkpoint seem chaotic — but there was a system: women to the right; men to the left. Jerusalem residents here, disabled people there. And the grim-looking men stranded at the corner had endured the long wait only to be turned back altogether.
“I’m not political, I’m just devout, so I thought maybe tonight, because of Laylat Al-Qadr, they’d let me in,” said Deia Jamil, a 40-year-old Arabic teacher from the West Bank city of Ramallah.
“But no. ‘Forbidden,’” he said, sinking onto his knees to pray in the dirt lot.
For Palestinian worshippers, praying at the third-holiest site in Islam is a centerpiece of Ramadan. But hundreds of thousands are barred from legally crossing into Jerusalem, with most men under 55 turned away at checkpoints due to Israeli security restrictions. They often resort to perilous means to get to the holy compound during the fasting month of Ramadan.
This year, as in the past, Israel has eased some restrictions, allowing women and young children from the West Bank to enter Jerusalem without a permit. Those between the ages of 45 and 55 who have a valid permit can pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound — one of the most bitterly disputed holy sites on Earth.
Jews revere it as the Temple Mount, home to the biblical Temples, and consider it the holiest site in Judaism. The competing claims are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often spill over into violence.
Israel says it is committed to protecting freedom of worship for all faiths and describes the controls on Palestinian worshippers as an essential security measure that keeps attackers out of Israel. Last month, a Palestinian who crossed into Israel from the West Bank village of Nilin opened fire on a crowded street in Tel Aviv, killing one Israeli and wounding two others.
But for Palestinians, the restrictions take a toll.
“I feel completely lost,” said 53-year-old Noureddine Odeh, his backpack sagging off one shoulder. His wife and teenage daughters made it through the checkpoint, leaving him behind. This year — a period of surging violence in the occupied West Bank — Israel raised the age limit for male worshippers and he was no longer eligible. “You’re tugged around, like they’re playing God.”
Israeli authorities did not answer questions about how many Palestinian applications they’d rejected from the West Bank and Gaza. But they said that so far this month, some 289,000 Palestinians — the majority from the West Bank and a few hundred from the Gaza Strip — had visited Jerusalem for prayers.
Earlier this month, Israel announced the start of special Ramadan flights for West Bank Palestinians from the Ramon Airport in southern Israel. In normal times, Palestinians would have to fly from neighboring Jordan. But Monday, days before the end of Ramadan, the Israeli defense agency that handles Palestinian civilian affairs said only that Palestinians “will soon have the option.”
The crowds squeezing through Qalandiya during Laylat Al-Qadr — one of the most important nights of the year, when Muslims seek to have their prayers answered — were so overwhelming that Israeli forces repeatedly shut the barrier. The sudden closures created bottlenecks of people, most of whom had abstained from food and water all day. Medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent said at least 30 people collapse at the checkpoint on a busy Ramadan day.
Their elbows pressed into strangers’ torsos and heads squeezed under armpits, five women studying to be midwives who had never before left the West Bank entertained themselves with fantasies of Jerusalem. “We’ll buy meat and sweets,” squealed 20-year-old Sondos Warasna. “And picnic in the Al-Aqsa courtyard.”
The limestone courtyard, which teems with Palestinian families breaking fast each night after sunset, became roiled by violence earlier this month, when Ramadan overlapped with the Jewish holiday of Passover. Israeli police raided the compound, firing stun grenades and arresting hundreds of Palestinian worshippers who had barricaded themselves inside the mosque with fireworks and stones. The raid, which Israel said was necessary to prevent further violence, outraged Muslims across the world and prompted militants in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip to fire rockets at Israel.
Anger over access to the contested compound was undimmed at Qalandiya. Throngs of Palestinian girls and older men ostensibly permitted to pass were turned back and told they had security bans they never knew about that barred them from Jerusalem. The secretive system — which Palestinians consider a key tool in Israel’s 55-year-old military occupation — left them reeling, struggling to understand why.
A 16-year-old girl from the northern city of Jenin frantically called her parents who had entered Jerusalem without her. A 19-year-old from Ramallah changed her coat and put on sunglasses and lipstick before trying again.
Others found riskier ways to get to the holy compound — scrambling over Israel’s hulking separation barrier or sliding under razor wire.
Abdallah, a young medical student from the southern city of Hebron, clambered up a rickety ladder with six of his friends in the pre-dawn darkness Monday — then slid down a rope on the wall’s other side — so he could make it to Al-Aqsa for Laylat Al-Qadr. They paid a smuggler some $70 each to help them scale the barrier.
“My heart was beating so loud. I was sure soldiers would hear it,” Abdallah said, giving only his first name for fear of reprisals.
The Israeli military has picked up hundreds of Palestinians who sneaked through holes in the separation barrier during Ramadan, it said, adding that forces would “continue to act against the security risk arising from the destruction of the security fence and illegal entry.”
Abdallah said the experience of Jerusalem’s Old City brought him great joy. But soon anxiety set in. Israeli police were everywhere — occasionally stopping young men and asking to see their IDs. He tried to blend in, wearing counterfeit athleisure like many Jerusalemites and smiling to look relaxed.
“It’s a mixed feeling. At any moment I know I could be arrested,” he said from the entrance to the sacred compound. “But our mosque, it makes me feel free.”
For Palestinians, holiest Ramadan night starts at checkpoint
https://arab.news/262d9
For Palestinians, holiest Ramadan night starts at checkpoint
- Palestinian worshippers cram through Israeli military checkpoint leading to Jerusalem
- For Palestinian worshippers, praying at the third-holiest site in Islam is a centerpiece of Ramadan
Israel builds ‘cyber dome’ against Iran’s hackers
- Israeli cybersecurity agency had thwarted around 800 significant attacks since the Oct. 7 Gaza war erupted
- But some attacks could not be foiled, including against hospitals in which patient data was stolen
TEL AVIV: Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has long shielded it from incoming rockets. Now it is building a “cyber dome” to defend against online attacks, especially from arch foe Iran.
“It is a silent war, one which is not visible,” said Aviram Atzaba, the Israeli National Cyber Directorate’s head of international cooperation.
While Israel has fought Hamas in Gaza since the October 7 attack, it has also faced a significant increase in cyberattacks from Iran and its allies, Atzaba said.
“They are trying to hack everything they can,” he told AFP, pointing to Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement but adding that so far “they have not succeeded in causing any real damage.”
He said around 800 significant attacks had been thwarted since the war erupted. Among the targets were government organizations, the military and civil infrastructure.
Some attacks could not be foiled, including against hospitals in the cities of Haifa and Safed in which patient data was stolen.
While Israel already has cyber defenses, they long consisted of “local efforts that were not connected,” Atzaba said.
So, for the past two years, the directorate has been working to build a centralized, real-time system that works proactively to protect all of Israeli cyberspace.
Based in Tel Aviv, the directorate works under the authority of the prime minister. It does not reveal figures on its staff, budget or computing resources.
Israel collaborates closely with multiple allies, including the United States, said Atzaba, because “all states face cyber terrorism.”
“It takes a network to fight a network,” he said.
Israel’s arch foe Iran is “an impressive enemy” in the online wars, said Chuck Freilich, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, which is affiliated with Tel Aviv University.
“Its attacks aim to sabotage and destroy infrastructure, but also to collect data for intelligence and spread false information for propaganda purposes,” he said.
Iran has welcomed Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Regional tensions have soared, particularly after Iran for the first time fired hundreds of missiles directly at Israel last month in retaliation for a deadly Israeli air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
It was the most dramatic escalation yet after a years-long shadow war of killings and sabotage attacks between Israel and Iran.
Freilich argued in a study published in February that Iran was relatively slow to invest in cyberwarfare, until two key events triggered a change.
First, its leaders took note of how anti-government protesters used the Internet as a tool to mobilize support for a 2009 post-election uprising.
In the bloody crackdown that crushed the movement, Iran’s authorities cut access to social media and websites covering the protests.
Then, in September 2010, a sophisticated cyberattack using the Stuxnet virus, blamed by Iran on Israel and the United States, caused physical damage to Tehran’s nuclear program.
Freilich said the attack “demonstrated Iran’s extreme vulnerability and led to a severe national shock.”
Since then, Iran has gained substantial expertise to become “one of the most active countries in cyberspace,” he said
While Israel is considered a major cyber power, Iran was only likely to improve, said Freilich.
He pointed to assistance from Russia and China, as well as its much larger population and an emphasis on cyber training for students and soldiers alike, adding that the trend was “concerning for the future.”
Atzaba insisted that the quantity of hackers is secondary to the quality of technology and the use it is put to.
“For the past two years, we have been developing a cyber dome against cyberattacks, which functions like the Iron Dome against rockets,” he said.
“With cyber dome, all sources are fed into a large data pool that enables a view of the big picture and to invoke a national response in a comprehensive and coordinated manner.”
The Israeli system has various scanners that continuously “monitor Israeli cyberspace for vulnerabilities and informs the stakeholders of the means to mitigate them,” he said.
Israel’s cyber strength relied on close cooperation between the public, private and academic sectors, as well as Israel’s “white hat” hackers who help identify weaknesses.
“We work hand in hand,” he said.
Kurds deny torturing detainees in north Syria camps
- Rights group alleges cruelty against Daesh militant prisoners and their families
JEDDAH: Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria on Thursday denied claims by Amnesty International that they tortured Daesh militants and their dependents detained in internment camps.
More than 56,000 prisoners with links to the Islamist militant group are still being held five years after Daesh were driven out of their last territory in Syria. They include militants locked up in prisons, and Daesh fighters’ wives and children in Al-Hol and Roj camps.
Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard said Kurdish authorities had “committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, and probably committed the war crime of murder.”
The semi-autonomous Kurdish administration in northeast Syria said it “respects its obligations to prevent the violation of its laws, which prohibit such illegal acts, and adheres to international law.”
Any such crimes that may have been perpetrated were “individual acts,” it said, and asked Amnesty to provide it with any evidence of wrongdoing by its security forces and affiliates.
“We are open to cooperating with Amnesty International regarding its proposed recommendations, which require concerted regional and international efforts,” it said.
Kurdish authorities said they had repeatedly asked the international community for help in managing the camps, which required “huge financial resources.”
Al-Hol is the largest internment camp in northeast Syria, with more than 43,000 detainees from 47 countries, most of them women and children related to Daesh fighters.
Hamas is sending a delegation to Egypt for further ceasefire talks in the latest sign of progress
- US and Egyptian mediators have put to Hamas a proposal -– apparently with Israel’s acceptance — that sets out a three-stage process that would bring an immediate six-week ceasefire and partial release of Israeli hostages
BEIRUT: Hamas said Thursday that it was sending a delegation to Egypt for further ceasefire talks, in a new sign of progress in attempts by international mediators to hammer out an agreement between Israel and the militant group to end the war in Gaza.
After months of stop-and-start negotiations, the ceasefire efforts appear to have reached a critical stage, with Egyptian and American mediators reporting signs of compromise in recent days. But chances for the deal remain entangled with the key question of whether Israel will accept an end to the war without reaching its stated goal of destroying Hamas.
The stakes in the ceasefire negotiations were made clear in a new UN report that said if the Israel-Hamas war stops today, it will still take until 2040 to rebuild all the homes that have been destroyed by nearly seven months of Israeli bombardment and ground offensives in Gaza. It warned that the impact of the damage to the economy will set back development for generations and will only get worse with every month fighting continues.
The proposal that US and Egyptian mediators have put to Hamas -– apparently with Israel’s acceptance — sets out a three-stage process that would bring an immediate six-week ceasefire and partial release of Israeli hostages, but also negotiations over a “permanent calm” that includes some sort of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, according to an Egyptian official. Hamas is seeking guarantees for a full Israeli withdrawal and complete end to the war.
Hamas officials have sent mixed signals about the proposal in recent days. But on Thursday, its supreme leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said in a statement that he had spoken to Egypt’s intelligence chief and “stressed the positive spirit of the movement in studying the ceasefire proposal.”
The statement said that Hamas negotiators would travel to Cairo “to complete the ongoing discussions with the aim of working forward for an agreement.” Haniyeh said he had also spoken to the prime minister of Qatar, another key mediator in the process.
The brokers are hopeful that the deal will bring an end to a conflict that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, caused widespread destruction and plunged the territory into a humanitarian crisis. They also hope a deal will avert an Israeli attack on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have sought shelter after fleeing battle zones elsewhere in the territory.
If Israel does agree to end the war in return for a full hostage release, it would be a major turnaround. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack stunned Israel, its leaders have vowed not to stop their bombardment and ground offensives until the militant group is destroyed. They also say Israel must keep a military presence in Gaza and security control after the war to ensure Hamas doesn’t rebuild.
Publicly at least, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that is the only acceptable endgame.
He has vowed that even if a ceasefire is reached, Israel will eventually attack Rafah, which he says is Hamas’ last stronghold in Gaza. He repeated his determination to do so in talks Wednesday with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Israel on a regional tour to push the deal through.
The agreement’s immediate fate hinges on whether Hamas will accept uncertainty over the final phases to bring the initial six-week pause in fighting — and at least postpone what it is feared would be a devastating assault on Rafah.
Egypt has been privately assuring Hamas that the deal will mean a total end to the war. But the Egyptian official said Hamas says the text’s language is too vague and wants it to specify a complete Israeli pullout from all of Gaza. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about the internal deliberations.
On Wednesday evening, however, the news looked less positive as Osama Hamdan, a top Hamas official, expressed skepticism, saying the group’s initial position was “negative.” Speaking to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, he said that talks were still ongoing but would stop if Israel invades Rafah.
Blinken hiked up pressure on Hamas to accept, saying Israel had made “very important” compromises.
“There’s no time for further haggling. The deal is there,” Blinken said Wednesday before leaving for the US
An Israeli airstrike, meanwhile, killed at least five people, including a child, in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza. The bodies were seen and counted by Associated Press journalists at a hospital.
The war broke out on Oct. 7. when Hamas militants broke into southern Israel and killed over 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, taking around 250 others hostage, some released during a ceasefire on November.
The Israel-Hamas war was sparked by the Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Hamas is believed to still hold around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.
Since then, Israel’s campaign in Gaza has wreaked vast destruction and brought a humanitarian disaster, with several hundred thousand Palestinians in northern Gaza facing imminent famine, according to the UN More than 80 percent of the population has been driven from their homes.
The “productive basis of the economy has been destroyed” and poverty is rising sharply among Palestinians, according to the report released Thursday by the United Nations Development Program and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.
It said that in 2024, the entire Palestinian economy — including both Gaza and the West Bank -– has so far contracted 25.8 percent. If the war continues, the loss will reach a “staggering” 29 percent by July, it said. The West Bank economy has been hit by Israel’s decision to cancel the work permits for tens of thousands of laborers who depended on jobs inside Israel.
“These new figures warn that the suffering in Gaza will not end when the war does,” UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said. He warned of a “serious development crisis that jeopardizes the future of generations to come.”
Syria says Israeli strike outside Damascus injures eight troops
- A security source said the strike hit a building operated by government forces
- Defense ministry acknowledged only that the strike caused some material damage
An Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of Damascus injured eight Syrian military personnel late on Thursday, the Syrian defense ministry said, the latest such attack amid the war in Gaza.
The Israeli strike, launched from the occupied Golan Heights toward “one of the sites in the vicinity of Damascus,” caused some material damage, the Syrian defense ministry said in a statement.
The strike hit a building operated by Syrian security forces, a security source in the alliance backing Syria’s government earlier told Reuters.
The Israeli military said it does not comment on reports in the foreign media.
Israel has for years been striking Iran-linked targets in Syria and has stepped up its campaign in the war-torn country since Oct. 7, when Iran-backed Palestinian militants Hamas crossed into Israeli territory in an attack that left 1,200 people dead and led to more than 250 taken hostage.
Israel responded with a land, air and sea assault on the Gaza Strip, escalated strikes on Syria and exchanged fire with Lebanese armed group Hezbollah across Lebanon’s southern border.
The security source said the location struck in Syria on Thursday sat just south of the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine, where Hezbollah and Iranian forces are entrenched.
But the source said the site struck was not operated by Iranian units or Hezbollah.
Turkiye halts all trade with Israel, cites worsening Palestinian situation
- Turkiye’s trade ministry: ‘Export and import transactions related to Israel have been stopped, covering all products’
- Israel’s FM Israel Katz said that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was breaking agreements by blocking ports to Israeli imports and exports
ANKARA: Turkiye stopped all exports and imports to and from Israel as of Thursday, the Turkish trade ministry said, citing the “worsening humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories.
“Export and import transactions related to Israel have been stopped, covering all products,” Turkiye’s trade ministry said in a statement.
“Turkiye will strictly and decisively implement these new measures until the Israeli Government allows an uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
The two countries had a trade volume of $6.8 billion in 2023.
Turkiye last month imposed trade restrictions on Israel over what it said was Israel’s refusal to allow Ankara to take part in aid air-drop operations for Gaza and its offensive on the enclave.
Earlier on Thursday, Israel’s foreign minister said that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was breaking agreements by blocking ports to Israeli imports and exports.
“This is how a dictator behaves, disregarding the interests of the Turkish people and businessmen, and ignoring international trade agreements,” Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz posted on X.
Katz said he instructed the foreign ministry to work to create alternatives for trade with Turkiye, focusing on local production and imports from other countries.
