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This week’s Israeli incursion into Jenin showed the violence of occupation and blatant disregard for Palestinian rights. At least 133 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the start of this year alone.

A Palestinian waves national flags amid burning tires near the border fence with Israel, east of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 4, 2023, during a protest against an Israeli military raid on the West Bank city of Jenin. (Yousef Masoud / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)

A cool morning breeze became suffocating as black smoke filled the air and tear gas blanketed Jenin camp on Monday, July 3. Ten Israeli air strikes targeted the densely populated West Bank area, followed by a brigade of two thousand soldiers. Armored bulldozers and heavy military vehicles also pushed into the camp.

The Israeli military’s large-scale operation in the refugee camp filled residents with fear. Health crews’ mobility to rescue those stranded under fire were hindered by Israeli checkpoints at the camp’s entrance. Two days later on Wednesday morning, the Israeli army finally announced the withdrawal of its forces, ending a two-day raid that killed twelve Palestinians and left over a hundred others injured.

The raid has raised the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces to 133 since the beginning of the year, in an increasing pattern of persistent attacks on the West Bank. For so long, the Jenin refugee camp has been a symbol of Palestinian resistance and social steadfastness. Israel’s portrayal of the invasion as “targeting terrorism” dismisses Palestine’s century-long struggle for freedom and obscures the broader context of resistance in Jenin and across the occupied West Bank. The use of “security” as a pretext has become a tool for the Israeli military to carry out violent acts against Palestinian civilians.

Despite the army’s statements, the assault was not about Israel’s security — it is collective punishment for the Palestinian people at large. There is no strategic reason to use heavy equipment to destroy civilian infrastructure other than to inflict collective punishment.

Israel invaded Jenin to eradicate the efforts of Palestinian fighters and, ironically, create what they call “stability” in the occupied West Bank. Yet achieving stability under military rule and occupying power will remain elusive. Even if the Palestinian fighters in Jenin were killed or detained, the uprising will continue until the occupation ends.

The word “resist” terrifies Israel, but for Palestinians, it is a matter of survival. It is a refusal to be subjected to physical, psychological, economic, social, and political violence and abuse. Expelling people from their homes and silencing their voices as they fight against discrimination and apartheid in the West Bank will not lead to peace, stability, or calm. Israel, for seven decades, has failed to acknowledge that the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to self-defense is not a crime.

Beyond the tactical news in Jenin surfaced the fact that Israel’s attempts to uproot the indigenous population of the camp, the West Bank, and all of Palestine have failed. If anything, these attempts have further deepened the attachment of subsequent generations to their land. For Palestinians, Jenin and Palestine as a whole are not mere plots of land; they are home, identity, and a testament to their struggle, deeply rooted in their ancestral heritage.

Monday’s raid was the largest attack on Palestinian territory in years. It unveiled a high level of intensification of the Israeli assaults against a Palestinian refugee population in Jenin. Scores of Palestinian families expelled from the camp marked a striking observation that the Nakba is an ongoing tragedy, echoing the forced displacement experienced in 1948. Jenin, already housing refugees from the 1948 Nakba, witnessed a repetition of history, as its residents desperately flee death and terror.

Over the decades, the camp transformed into a thriving community, housing families uprooted from their historic homes. They poured their love, dedication, and sacrifice into this makeshift community, tirelessly striving to create a sense of familiarity amid the unfamiliar.

These people only grew more deeply attached to the land that was taken from them. When the Second Intifada erupted in 2000, they fearlessly stood against the occupation, their unwavering determination etched in their very existence. They refused to back down, even in the face of overwhelming assaults, defending their land and clutching onto their rights until the end.

In Jenin through the passage of time, the great generation found love and formed their own families, weaving the fabric of the camp’s collective identity. Their children, born and raised within these camp’s confines, grew up through the hovering of warplanes and the terror that constantly threatened their lives and the survival of their community.

The people of Jenin stood resolute against the bulldozers that destroyed their homes and shelters during the 2002 siege, known as the “Battle of Jenin.” Their defiance was unwavering. Today, they find themselves embracing a new struggle, fighting to protect their homes and lands in the camp.

For two days, the Israeli military tightened its grip on the people by encircling the camp and sealing off all access points in an attempt to suffocate the fighters’ shelters and armory. The aftermath of this attack reverberated through the lives of thousands of remaining Nakba survivors, forcing them again to abandon their homes and face the painful reality of displacement.

The brave individuals refused to succumb to oppression. They marched forward with unwavering resolve, hoping that their current struggle will eventually resolve in a better future for the generations to come. They carried the weight of history on their shoulders and upheld the legitimacy of resistance they have amplified through the years.

Across Palestine, the suffering in Jenin echoes strength and inspires solidarity among the entire occupied Palestinian population. The brutal raid ultimately failed to achieve Israel’s goals of “security” and was not able to support the Israeli political leadership. Instead, it will likely ignite a fresh wave of unified resistance across Palestine. Reflecting on the failed siege of Jenin in 2002 and many more attacks on the camp since then, it is apparent that enduring solutions have not been found.

As Israeli forces withdrew from the camp, there was fear that Israel — just like it did before — will invade the camp again in the future. But what is vivid on the streets of Jenin is, no matter how many more raids the camp will endure, residents will remain unbroken.

The children who witnessed previous sieges and attacks have now grown up to be today’s fighters. Similarly, the children who lived through the recent siege and raid will sadly be forced to take up arms soon in pursuit of justice and freedom.

“Thank you God, for entrusting David to me for 23 years. You will always live in our hearts.”

By World Israel News Staff

Sergeant First Class David Yehuda Yitzhak, who died on Tuesday in a recent counterterrorism operation in Jenin, was buried on Wednesday at Mount Herzl military Cemetery in Jerusalem in a funeral attended by thousands.

IDF and government officials joined Yitzhak’s unit members, family, and friends to pay their last respects.

Lt. Col. M., the commander of the Egoz unit, eulogized Yitzhak, saying: “You were a fighter and an angel. A man with a heart of gold, dedicated and full of faith, which kept you going… You are the ideal Egoznik.”

Yitzhak was shot at the beginning of the military’s withdrawal in the Jenin refugee camp. The IDF is investigating the possibility that he was shot by friendly fire, but has not dismissed the possibility that he was shot by a Palestinian terrorist.

Yitzhak’s father, Moshe Binyamin, said in his eulogy, “You saw everyone’s pain as if it were your own. You were a boy who is entirely soul, you were embedded into the hearts of everyone you knew, and you always looked for the simple truth.”

“Thank you God, for entrusting David to me for 23 years. You will always live in our hearts,” he added.

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If handled correctly, British Columbia’s new Housing Supply Act can ease municipal roadblocks to adequate housing. In tandem with an increase in nonmarket housing, such legislation has the potential to help stave off the housing crisis.

A condo development under construction in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on September 13, 2022. (Taehoon Kim / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As the housing crisis continues apace, British Columbia’s government is moving ahead with implementation of the Housing Supply Act, passed in November. This is good news because the housing shortage in this province is as severe as ever. Ultra-low vacancy rates have taken hold in the province’s most expensive regions like Vancouver and Victoria, forcing renters to vie for the same scarce apartments at sky-high rents in a competition akin to the Hunger Games.

The legislation — one component of Premier David Eby’s New Democratic Party government’s pivot on housing policy — is designed to address chronic municipal-level roadblocks to new housing, including exclusionary zoning policies and expensive multiyear rezoning and permitting processes. Under the legislation, the province will work with municipalities to assess local housing needs and create binding targets for building homes more rapidly. If cities fail to make clear progress toward meeting the targets, the province has the power to intervene directly including by approving housing projects and amending zoning bylaws.

Boldness Is Key

The BC government recently announced the first cohort of ten cities in this effort: Abbotsford, Delta, Kamloops, North Vancouver, Oak Bay, Port Moody, Saanich, Vancouver, Victoria, and West Vancouver. In selecting these municipalities, the government used a range of indicators to create an index reflecting “the urgency of local housing needs, the availability of the right housing supply, including land availability and unrealized potential for more homes, and housing affordability.” Many more cities will be selected in the future, including another eight to ten of them later this year.

The province will communicate preliminary housing targets to the first ten cities in the coming weeks, and they will be finalized over the summer after a period of dialogue with those cities. According to minister of housing Ravi Kahlon, specific targets for below-market housing will be included.

Implementation details will be key. In particular, the housing-needs assessments for each city must be ambitious. Municipalities left to their own devices have typically underestimated the need for new housing. For example, some have relied too heavily on population trends to estimate housing needs, failing to recognize that existing shortages constrain population growth and suppress household formation (for example, by forcing more young people to live with parents longer into adulthood).

The legislation does have teeth, but the province will have to show it’s willing to use them.

Six months after the targets are set, Minister Kahlon says the province will evaluate progress and step in if municipalities are not demonstrating real progress. First, this will involve appointing an independent advisor who will “review the processes of municipalities that struggle . . . help the provincial government better understand unique challenges of the municipality and provide recommendations for actions the municipality or the Province could take to ensure housing targets are met.” If needed, the provincial government may then begin approving important housing projects and revising zoning rules.

Centralizing Land-Use Decisions

As I argued in a recent report, there is a strong case for strengthening the role of the province in land-use decisions that are currently left to municipalities. Municipal politics don’t give voice to those renters and prospective owners who have already been priced out and excluded from a city but would like to live there. Nor do they account for broader society- or economy-wide ramifications of a housing shortage, driven in part by the accumulation of many highly localized decisions about land use.

A flurry of senior governments in other countries have begun to increase their involvement in land-use decisions, including at the national level in New Zealand and at the state level in California, Washington State, and Montana. In Japan, land-use decisions have long been made at the national level.

As it stands, exclusionary local zoning policies in BC continue to effectively ban apartments on most residential land in our cities. This drives up the price of the scarce parcels where multifamily housing is allowed and makes the construction of new homes more difficult and expensive for public, nonprofit, and private rental developers alike. In a step that could partly address this, the provincial government has said it will bring forward new minimum standards for zoning in urban areas this fall. This is expected to allow three to four units on single-family lots “with additional density permitted in areas well-served by transit,” shifting the default land use to include options other than detached houses.

Here, again, the details will be crucial. Recent municipal “missing middle” housing policies in cities like Victoria and Vancouver have fallen far short of the mark. While these policies and proposals would allow buildings in previously single-family-zoned areas to be divided into multiplexes, the actual additional housing floor space permitted is far too little (a paltry 16 percent increase in square footage in the proposed Vancouver policy, for example). The forthcoming provincial policy must avoid repeating this mistake.

In a recent report, my colleague Marc Lee set out a far more robust agenda for how to meaningfully upzone the Metro Vancouver region, which offers a range of options for missing middle housing allowing two to three times the current floor space maximums, punctuated by larger apartment buildings with higher densities. This provides a good benchmark for what should be on the table in both provincial and local upzoning policy discussions, as does another recent analysis outlining an ambitious multiplex policy.

The Benefits of Upzoning

An encouraging example is the significant citywide upzoning of Auckland, New Zealand, in 2016, which included single-family areas and increased the overall zoned capacity for housing by 50 percent. The results are impressive: a rapid and substantial increase in housing supply and lower inflation-adjusted rents. Absent the upzoning, new research suggests Auckland rents would have been 14–35 percent higher. This shows it’s possible to meaningfully move the needle on housing supply and rents in a relatively short time.

Back in BC, one complaint from municipalities has been about the cost of infrastructure needed alongside new housing such as sewers, water, public transportation, community centers, or schools. The provincial government has signaled that more infrastructure investment will be a “carrot” provided to cities that succeed in meeting their housing targets, alongside the “sticks” described above.

Indeed, it’s important that the province step up to the plate to increase public infrastructure funding. But opposition to new housing based on infrastructure costs is misguided. When we don’t build enough new housing in our high-demand, low-vacancy centers, people still have to live somewhere. Many have to make do with overcrowded or substandard housing, while others move into outlying areas with expanding boundaries where infrastructure still has to be built but alongside low-density housing instead. Often overlooked is the fact that infrastructure to support this type of suburban sprawl development costs much more per person than infrastructure to support denser urban housing.

The housing crisis is complex, and no single policy can fix it. One of the most important complementary measures the BC government can take is to massively expand investment in public and nonprofit housing — a key focus of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’s research agenda. Also needed are progressive taxes to help fund deeply affordable housing, tamp down on speculation. and tackle huge inequalities in land wealth.

But make no mistake: the overall shortage of housing supply is an important part of the crisis, and ending exclusionary zoning is critical to any ambitious public housing agenda. With robust implementation, the Housing Supply Act and broader provincial upzoning measures can play a big role.

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Last week, authorities declared that Joseph Jorgenson, 40, was charged with the murder of Manijeh “Mani” Starren, 33, in her St. Paul, Minnesota apartment in April.

According to a probable cause affidavit, surveillance footage depicted Starren fleeing her apartment on April 21 at approximately 6 p.m., with Jorgenson following her and forcing her back inside. St. Paul Sgt. Mike Ernster stated that Jorgenson was the only one that exited the apartment, and Mani was never seen again.

In June, police discovered Starren’s dismembered body in a Woodbury storage unit, stored in coolers and bags. Mani Starren had three children and had been missing for over two months before her body was found.

The search for Starren began on May 1, when her dad reported her missing and said she told him she was scared of Jorgenson.

The police quickly focused on Jorgenson. On April 28, he was captured on video carrying two duffle bags and a suitcase out of her apartment.

When police obtained a search warrant for Starren’s home, they uncovered a troubling scene, including a smashed TV on the floor and copious amounts of blood in the living room and kitchen that showed signs that “someone was killed or seriously injured in the apartment.”

At Jorgenson’s apartment in Maplewood, the neighbors started complaining about a “foul smell” in mid-May. Shortly after, the building manager and another employee informed police that they saw Jorgenson dragging sizeable black duffle bags out of the apartment, which looked like he was “carrying a dead body.”

When the authorities executed a search warrant on Jorgenson’s apartment on June 26, he quickly barricaded himself in his bedroom and set the apartment on fire. The SWAT team had to force open the door, and Jorgenson allegedly fought with officers. He was arrested and charged with arson, threats of violence, and disarming an officer.

Jorgenson’s cell phone data indicated that the device was close to an iStorage facility on Weir Drive on May 18. Furthermore, someone had utilized Jorgenson’s roommate’s name to reserve a unit in the same month.

Law enforcement officials opened the unit and were met with an overpowering smell of decaying flesh. Upon inspection, Starren’s torso was found inside a large cooler, her head inside a smaller cooler, and her arms and legs in a blue duffle bag.

While the affidavit stated that Starren had died due to homicide, the precise cause of death has yet to be determined. Jorgenson is currently being held on $5 million bail.

The requests, which have not been denied, follow a public Koran burning last week. 

By World Israel News Staff

Swedish authorities have received three new requests to publicly burn religious texts, including a Torah scroll, a week after a Koran was burnt outside a mosque in Stockholm.

The other two requests include a New Testament and a second Koran burning.

One person submitted a request to burn a Jewish and a Christian Bible outside Israel’s Embassy in Stockholm on July 15th as “a symbolic gathering for the sake of freedom of speech.”

A separate individual requested to burn a Koran in Helsingborg “as soon as possible.”

The requests have not been denied and are currently under police review to determine if they meet requisite conditions.

Swedish political figures have expressed shock and horror in response to the requests.

Last week’s incident prompted various Arab countries to call Swedish ambassadors for a summoning.

The Swedish foreign ministry responded by calling the burning of holy texts “an offensive and disrespectful act and a clear provocation.”

“Expressions of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance have no place in Sweden or in Europe,” the Swedish foreign ministry said, but added that the country has a “constitutionally protected right to freedom of assembly, expression and demonstration.”

Rabbi Moshe David HaCohen, co-founder and project director of Amanah, a Swedish interfaith group, said Sweden’s Jewish community was “shocked”.

“We spoke out against the burning of the Koran in recent months and we now condemn the will of local Swedes to burn holy scriptures of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The Swedish government does not understand that this is a hate crime with a threat to religious life in our country,” HaCohen told The Jerusalem Post.

Muslim leaders in Sweden were behind the cancelation of a planned demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy in Stockholm which included the public burning of a Torah scroll.

The post Swedish police receive request to burn Torah, Christian Bible outside Israeli embassy appeared first on World Israel News.

Svalbard, home to 2.8 million inhabitants, sits 1,234 miles north of the Norwegian coast. Roughly half the size of New York State, the archipelago is a site on which the worst aspects of climate change have become inescapable. The Arctic is experiencing an increase in temperatures two to four times higher than anywhere else in […]

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