Chronology: April 16, 2016 – July 15, 2016

ABBREVIATIONS

• AFP, Agence France-Presse

• AJE, Al Jazeera English

• Al Arabiya

• AP, The Associated Press

• BBC

• Bloomberg

• CNN

• DS, 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 Jordan, Turkey

Apr. 18: Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Sergeant El’or Azariyah was charged with manslaughter for killing a Palestinian attacker on March 24. The incident had taken place in the West Bank city of Hebron, where two Palestinians had stabbed an Israeli soldier with knives. Responding to the attack, the Israeli military had killed one attacker but only wounded the second; Azariyah then fatally shot the wounded assailant. A video of the incident stirred international condemnation due to his alleged breach of IDF procedure. [AP, 4/18]

A bus bomb injured at least 21 people in Jerusalem. This first attack on an Israeli bus in several years signified the resilience of the half-year-long surge of violence that erupted following an Israeli-Palestinian clash at the al-Aqsa Mosque in October 2015. The bombing took place more than a week after Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed that violence was diminishing. [NYT, 4/18, 4/10]

The IDF announced that it found and then destroyed a deep, underground tunnel connecting the Gaza Strip to Israel. The passageway was the first to be uncovered since 2014, and Prime Minister Netanyahu cited new technology as being instrumental in its discovery. Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controlled the Gaza Strip, had used tunnels to carry out attacks on Israel during the 2014 war, during which Israel had claimed to destroy at least 32. [Reuters, 4/18]

Apr. 20: Israeli security forces arrested a six-member Jewish extremist cell for targeting the homes of Palestinian families with arson in the West Bank. The group had claimed it had been inspired by the lethal arson attack on a Palestinian family in summer 2015. The Israel Security Agency’s investigation indicated that a larger militant organization of Israelis was operating in the West Bank settlement of Nahali’el. [Guardian, 4/20]

Apr. 24: Twelve-year-old Dima al-Wawi, the youngest Palestinian prisoner in Israel, was released six weeks ahead of schedule. Wawi had been imprisoned in February 2016 for attempting to stab a security guard at the Karme Tsur settlement near her home in Halhul, but obtained an early release date because of her age. According to a prison representative and Defense of Children International–Palestine, minors accounted for 430 prisoners in Israel, which more than doubled the number that existed prior to the six-month spate of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. [NYT, 4/24, 4/29]

Apr. 27: Two Palestinian siblings, aged 16 and 23, were shot and killed by Israeli police in the West Bank town of Qalandiya. The police reported that the brother and sister were planning to attack the guards stationed at the checkpoint with knives. An investigation revealed that the guards responsible for their deaths were Israeli civilians contracted by the Defense Ministry and not Israeli police, thereby circumventing a police investigation. [Reuters, 4/27; Haaretz, 5/1]

May 3: In the West Bank, near Ramallah, a Palestinian man intentionally hit three IDF soldiers with his car, leaving one in critical condition. He was then killed by other IDF soldiers on the scene. Israeli authorities returned the man’s body, despite the fact that Palestinian funerals had often served as rallies that called for retaliation. [Reuters, 5/3]

An Israeli gang leader, Yosef Hayim Ben-David, received a life sentence for abducting and brutally killing 16-year-old Palestinian Muhammad Abu Khudayr in 2014 in East Jerusalem, which had set off a wave of protests and riots that summer. Although Ben-David attempted to plead insanity, he had earlier professed that he was motivated by Hamas’s abduction of three Israeli teenagers, and the court rejected his appeal. Two other defendants involved in the killing, Ben...