Chronology: January 16, 2016 – April 15, 2016

ABBREVIATIONS

• AFP, Agence France-Presse

• AJE, Al Jazeera English

• Al Arabiya

• AP, The Associated Press

• BBC

• Bloomberg

• CNN

• Daily Star (Lebanon)

• Dawn

• The Guardian

• Gulf News, GN

• Haaretz

• Hürriyet Daily News

• JP, The Jerusalem Post

• JT, The Jordan Times

• LA Times

• NYT, The New York Times

• RFE/RL, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

• Reuters

• WP, The Washington Post

• WSJ, The Wall Street Journal

Arab-Israeli Conflict See also Israel, Palestinian Territories

Jan. 17: Over the course of three months of intensified violence, 12 young Palestinian men died in the town of Sa‘ir, located near Hebron in the West Bank. Sa‘ir residents made up seven percent of the total Palestinian death toll since October. The high mortality rate was attributed to the village’s exceptionally high unemployment rate of 40%, 15 percentage points higher than the Hebron Governorate’s average, and volatile relations with nearby Israeli settlements. [AJE, 1/17]

Jan 21: The Israeli defense ministry announced that it was in the final stages of expropriating 380 acres of arable land in the southern Jordan Valley, near the city of Jericho. The confiscation, the largest since August 2014, drew angry criticism from the international community for further endangering prospects of peace. Palestinian leaders condemned the seizure as part of a larger effort by Israel to expand its control of the Jordan Valley, which encompassed the West Bank’s border with the Kingdom of Jordan. [Reuters, 1/21]

Jan 25: After Hamas fired rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) retaliated by striking a Hamas military site. The rockets had landed in an open area in the Sha‘ar ha-Negev region of southern Israel. Neither side reported casualties. [JP, 1/25]

Feb 2: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed 23 houses in the West Bank villages of Khirbat Janba and Khirbat al-Halawa. Over 100 people from 12 families were left to scavenge among the rubble of their former homes and village buildings and begin the rebuilding process. The villages were part of a territory the IDF designated as Firing Zone 918 in the 1970s despite objections citing the illegality of an occupying power establishing military zones in occupied territory. [Guardian, 2/2]

Feb 3: Israeli border police cadet Hadar Cohen died after three Palestinian men opened fire on an entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City. Other Israeli security forces in the area intervened, shooting and killing the three men. Although Hamas praised the men as martyrs, the three had no known ties to militant organizations. All three were from the northern West Bank town of Qabatiyya, where their families’ homes were later destroyed by Israeli forces in a punitive operation on April 3. [BBC, 2/3; JP, 4/4]

Feb. 26: Muhammad al-Qiq, a Palestinian journalist detained by Israel, ended his three-month hunger strike after securing an April release date. Al-Qiq’s hunger strike was a protest against Israel’s use of administrative detention, which allowed him to be held without trial or charges against him. [AJE, 2/26]

Mar. 1: A young Palestinian man was shot and killed by the IDF in the West Bank after two IDF soldiers using the mobile navigation application Waze mistakenly ended up near Qalandiya Refugee Camp in the West Bank between Jerusalem and Ramallah, which prompted violence between Palestinians and Israeli forces. An IDF spokesperson announced that the incident was being investigated, as the soldiers had been under orders to use maps rather than mobile navigation systems during operations. [NYT 3/1]

Mar 3: A Hamas militant died while digging a smuggling tunnel in the Gaza city of Khan Yunis after the tunnel collapsed. In the first two months of 2016 at least 10 Hamas members had perished in similar tunnel collapses. The IDF had prioritized the destruction of Hamas tunnels in and out of the Gaza strip, spending more than $250 million since 2004 toward their detection. [Haaretz, 3/3]

Mar 9: A 21-year-old Palestinian man wounded 10 people and killed American citizen Taylor Force in the coastal town of Jaffa. US vice president Joe Biden, who had been...