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Gaza cut off from food, water and fuel as Israel’s punishing bombardment continues [1]

['Leila Molana-Allen', 'Jonah Anderson', 'Teresa Cebrián Aranda']

Date: 2023-10-11 18:55:37-04:00

Leila Molana-Allen:

Well, these tensions from down in Gaza are really boiling over, and you can see that this has actually been the most violent year in nearly two decades in the West Bank already, before any of this was happening.

I was here in July reporting on that. And now, of course, that violence has shifted down to Gaza, but we're seeing it spread. In the piece there, you saw the retaliation by security forces against young men in Jerusalem.

But we're also seeing battles between civilians. There was a bus driver I met today, an Arab bus driver in Jerusalem, who was driving his normal bus route for the main Israeli bus company. And some settlers saw him, young settlers on the street, and attacked the bus, throwing rocks, and managed to injure his eye. He'd lost the vision in one eye. He'd stopped working.

He was too scared to go back to work. And he said this has happened to a few of his other colleagues in the last couple of days, people seeing an Arab driver and attacking them.

We contacted the company for a comment, and the company said to us, "This is a time of war, and we have no further comment" about their own employees. So that's how difficult this is getting.

And, of course, once you get outside of East Jerusalem, which is contested, you're then in the West Bank, which is even more contested, because, of course, there are settlements being built there. And as more and more of these settlements are built, the reason this is such an issue, they are deemed internationally illegal, but also the reason it's so important is, that's where a two-state solution would be.

So the more Israeli settlements that are built in the West Bank, the less chance there ever is of that two-state solution So we drove out. We heard that settlers were blocking the roads, which is something they do quite often when they're angry about something, when they have an axe to grind.

There have been several Palestinian villages that have been burned by settlers this week. We got a certain amount down the road and we suddenly started seeing smoke, we started hearing gunfire. And this wasn't settlers. It was Ramallah.

And I went and spoke to the IDF who were standing outside, the soldiers there. And they said: "Look, take care of yourself. We're expecting serious trouble, and there's nothing we can do for you if something kicks off, because we have been told to be here and alert."

What's happened is that they have been threatening to do this for several days. They have now blocked off the entrances to every Palestinian town and village in the West Bank. You are not allowed to move as a Palestinian unless you have a very special permit for health or an emergency.

So inside those towns, and Ramallah being one of the biggest, they're now protesting. They're having big, violent protests. So, we were there for a while. We eventually moved on, moved away. And we could see it escalating behind us. And as we drove back down the road, we got a call that, in Qusra, four Palestinians had been murdered by settlers attacking the town.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gaza-cut-off-from-food-water-and-fuel-as-israels-punishing-bombardment-continues

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