Israel approves 454 new settler homes in occupied East Jerusalem

“The Cabinet decision was made after a series of in-depth discussions with all the relevant legal and security advisers in order to stop the risky incitement from and prevention of harm to innocent civilians”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

The global community opposes Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and the Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state.

In 2010, Israel announced plans to build 1,600 settler homes in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in mainly Arab east Jerusalem. The group’s leaders, known for their fiery rhetoric, have spearheaded accusations that Israel is plotting to take over a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem.

A US school has identified a recent graduate visiting Israel as among three people killed in an attack in the West Bank.

According to one minister who participated in the latest deliberations, as cited by Haaretz, Cohen said the northern branch had more than 10,000 members – Arab citizens of Israel – and it was neither wise nor practical to declare all of them criminals.

Israeli police lock the front doors of the Jaffa Association for Charity after ordering the closure of 17 relief groups affiliated with the Islamic Movement of Northern Israel. The Shin Bet also said the bank accounts of these organizations that were used “for the movement’s activities against state security” had been frozen overnight, and that computers and documents found in the offices during an overnight raid had been seized.

Raed Salah, head of the organisation, and two other officials were summoned to a police station in the northern city of Haifa for questioning.

Speaking to Reuters, he played down the prospect of a backlash from Israeli Arabs, saying the government planned to increase investment in their communities and that some charities linked to the northern Islamic Movement might be spared closure.

In October, Salah was sentenced to 11 months in jail on charges of inciting violence at the mosque compound in a 2007 speech. In 2013 he set up a special team to examine the issue and when the current wave of violence began in September on the Temple Mount, Netanyahu raised the possibility again.

The horrific terror attacks in Paris last week completely overshadowed a significant story earlier in the week, the European Union’s issuing of new guidelines for the labeling of products from illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The local news site Yaffa 48-an affiliate of the Islamic Movement-reported Israeli police arrested the group’s Director of External Relations Dr. Joseph Awawdeh from his home in the Galilee.

But, while Netanyahu vehemently discounts claims of Israeli encroachment at al-Aqsa and even blames the Northern Islamic Movement via the Morabitat for escalations at the site, numbers show that what has changed at al-Aqsa is not so much the presence of the Morabitat, but that of nationalist-religious Israelis.

The Palestinian Authority condemns settlement building as a violation of worldwide law aimed at preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. “It’s not just a religious symbol, and he calls to defend it”, Bartal said. In 1996 the faction split in two-the Islamic Movement of Northern Israel and the Islamic Movement of Southern Israel.

Arab citizens make up 20 percent of Israel’s population of eight million.

Arab groups condemned Tuesday’s decision as another step by Israel to marginalize them.