From PressTV
Israeli soldiers clash with Palestinians in West Bank
On Friday, clashes broke out as Palestinian protesters took to the streets in al-Quds (Jerusalem) to express their resentment over the fatal shooting of 32-year-old Moataz Hejazi by Israeli troops in the Abu Tor neighborhood of East al-Quds two days earlier.
Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets to disperse the angry crowd.
Similar clashes were also reported in the Palestinian village of Kalandia in the West Bank.
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From PressTV
Gazans protest against Israel’s closure of al-Aqsa Mosque
Demonstrators came together in the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday to show their support for fellow Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, who are under security lockdown by the Tel Aviv regime.
The protest in the Gaza Strip comes as tensions are mounting in al-Quds (Jerusalem) after the Israeli regime imposed restrictions on Palestinian worshippers.
Israeli authorities have deployed nearly 1,000 security forces across al-Quds.
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From the Jewish Telegrapic Agency
Jewish school enrollment up 12 percent, fueled by haredi Orthodox growth
NEW YORK (JTA) – Jewish day school enrollment in the United States is up 12 percent from five years ago, primarily due to growth in haredi Orthodox schools.
Nearly 255,000 students are enrolled in 861 Jewish day schools from the pre-K level through 12th grade, according to a new census of the schools conducted by the Avi Chai Foundation. The day school survey, which has been conducted every five years since 1998-’99, found 59 more schools and 26,437 more students since the last study, in 2008-’09. Previous surveys found enrollment growth rates of about 11 percent in each five-year period.
The primary drivers of growth have been Hasidic students, whose enrollment has increased by 110 percent since the first census 15 years ago, and yeshivish (haredi non-Hasidic) schools, which have grown by 60 percent since the 1998-’99 survey.
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From the Jewish Telegrapic Agency
Ukrainian Jews satisfied with far-right’s crash in elections
(JTA) – Representatives of Ukraine’s Jewish communities said they were pleased with the stinging defeat of nationalist candidates in parliamentary elections.
In Sunday’s parliamentary elections – the first since the ouster of president Viktor Yanukovych in February in a revolution that triggered a territorial conflict with Russia – the far-right Svoboda party saw its take halved from 10 percent of the vote in 2012 to under the five-point threshold for seats, acount of 99 percent of the votes showed.
The newly-formed Radical Party won 8 percent of the vote but “the small number of right-wing radicals” who made it into parliament “cannot have any significant effect on the situation” there, Josef Zissels, head of the Vaad Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations of Ukraine, wrote in an email to JTA.
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From PressTV
Israeli forces destroy Palestinian homes in West Bank
On Monday, Israeli bulldozers escorted by a convoy of eleven army vehicles entered the village of Um Al Kheir in the southern city of al-Khalil (Hebron) and destroyed all the Palestinian structures there, according to Palestinian sources.
The structures, some of which donated by the United Nations, belonged to five families with thirty people.
The village was located close to the Israeli settlement of Karmel, which was established during the beginning of the 1980s and expanded in the recent years.
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