The Israeli team travels to Doha for drawn-out peace negotiations with ‘broad mandate’ for accord

The Palestine Liberation Organization charges that Israeli prison authorities are mistreating Fatah Central Committee member Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms for plotting three terror assaults that killed five Israelis during the Second Intifada.

In a statement, the PLO says that the Israeli prison administration has subjected Barghouti to “isolation and torture,” and is “waging a war on Palestinian prisoners that is no less fierce than the field battle in Gaza and the West Bank.”

The plea was submitted after lawyers who visited detainees in Megiddo prison heard and reported that Barghouti was lately subject to harassment and beatings, according to a statement from the Campaign to Free Marwan Barghouti and All Prisoners.

Barghouti’s popularity on the Palestinian street has made him a top future candidate to run the Palestinian Authority. Hamas has named him among the hundreds of terror detainees it hopes to see released in exchange for hostages abducted from Israel on October 7, even though Barghouti is a member of its rival movement Fatah.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a prominent assistant to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and Qadura Fares, director of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, also urge the international community to intervene to end coercive measures against Barghouti and compel Israel to free him.

In January, Barghouti petitioned an Israeli court in January to be transferred from isolation at the Ayalon prison, where he was at the time, alleging harassment by guards and bad conditions.

The PLO statement also called on international organizations to ensure equitable treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, and demands “the immediate release of 7,000 West Bankers who have been arrested since October 7.” The IDF puts the amount at 3,500, including more than 1,500 associated with Hamas.

A UN-backed assessment warns starvation is predicted in approximately 70% of families in the north of the Gaza Strip between now and May.

Across the whole of the Gaza Strip, the number of people facing “catastrophic hunger” has climbed to 1.1 million, roughly half the population, says a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a collaboration of over a dozen international organizations, including many UN agencies.

“Famine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates and is expected to become manifest during the projection period from mid-March 2024 to May 2024,” it states. The research also argues it is not too late to avoid famine from taking hold.

“The rapidly escalating hunger crisis in the Gaza Strip must immediately be curbed. This involves putting a halt to the hostilities, mobilizing necessary resources and ensuring the secure delivery of humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza,” the report reads.

The planned presentation of a law supporting appointments of additional municipal rabbis is heating up tensions in the wartime coalition headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Erstwhile partners Benny Gantz and Gideon Sa’ar both object to the anticipated relaunch of the law from 2023, which was halted by the conflict, to appoint hundreds of additional city rabbis at a cost of tens of millions of shekels annually, officials of their parties said.

Ze’ev Elkin, a member of Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope party, has informed coalition whip Ofir Katz of Netanyahu’s Likud party of the objection, citing an agreement signed by all coalition members to refrain from advancing any legislation without the pre-approval of all coalition parties, Makor Rishon reports. The bill’s advancement threatens to breach the deal’s conditions, Elkin warns.

Gantz’s National Unity party also opposes the anticipated progress of the Jewish Religious Services Bill, Makor Rishon writes.

The story does not clarify whether New Hope and National Unity are explicitly threatening to pull out of the wartime coalition, forged following Hamas’s October 7 offensive.

The bill, introduced in June by Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman and Shas’s Erez Malul, is due to be up for a preliminary debate and potentially a vote tomorrow at the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

Critics of the law believe it gives Shas disproportionate power over municipally employed rabbis, because of its dominance inside the chief rabbinate and its municipal rabbis, who would play a key role in appointing neighborhood rabbis under the new bill. Suspected drone incursion alarms have sounded in the Galilee Panhandle, near the border with Lebanon.

The warnings are triggered in the communities of Sde Nehemia, Amir, Gonen, Shamir, Kfar Blum, Kfar Szold, Neot Mordechai, and Lehavot Habashan. Rocket sirens also ring in Yesod Hama’ala and Hulata, reportedly owing to an interceptor missile being launched. The IDF Home Front Command says the situation is over, without adding further.