Palestinian

The Supreme Court has revived long-running lawsuits against Palestinian authorities from Americans killed or wounded in attacks in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The United States Supreme Court has upheld a statute passed by Congress to facilitate lawsuits against Palestinian authorities by Americans killed or injured in attacks abroad as plaintiffs pursue monetary damages for violence years ago in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The 9-0 ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that the 2019 law, the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, violated the rights of the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization to due process under the US Constitution.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, said the 2019 jurisdictional law comported with due process rights enshrined in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

“It is permissible for the federal government to craft a narrow jurisdictional provision that ensures, as part of a broader foreign policy agenda, that Americans injured or killed by acts of terror have an adequate forum in which to vindicate their right” to compensation under a federal law known as the Anti-terrorism Act of 1990, Roberts wrote.

The US government and a group of American victims and their families had appealed the lower court’s decision that struck down a provision of the law.

Among the plaintiffs are families who in 2015 won a $655m judgement in a civil case alleging that the Palestinian organisations were responsible for a series of shootings and bombings around Jerusalem from 2002 to 2004. They also include relatives of Ari Fuld, a Jewish settler in the Israel-occupied West Bank who was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian in 2018.

The ruling comes even as Jewish settlements on Palestinian-owned land are considered illegal under international law.

“The plaintiffs, US families who had loved ones maimed or murdered in PLO-sponsored terror attacks, have been waiting for justice for many years,” said Kent Yalowitz, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

“I am very hopeful that the case will soon be resolved without subjecting these families to further protracted and unnecessary litigation,” Yalowitz added.

Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, and now Iran, served as a backdrop to the case. Since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, more than 55,000 people have been killed and 130,000 wounded, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

US courts for years have grappled over whether they have jurisdiction in cases involving the Palestinian Authority and PLO for actions taken abroad.

Under the language at issue in the 2019 law, the PLO and Palestinian Authority automatically “consent” to jurisdiction if they conduct certain activities in the United States or make payments to people who attack Americans.

Roberts in Friday’s ruling wrote that Congress and the president enacted the jurisdictional law based on their “considered judgment to subject the PLO and PA (Palestinian Authority) to liability in US courts as part of a comprehensive legal response to ‘halt, deter and disrupt’ acts of international terrorism that threaten the life and limb of American citizens”.

New York-based US District Judge Jesse Furman ruled in 2022 that the law violated the due process rights of the PLO and Palestinian Authority. The New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.

President Joe Biden’s administration initiated the government’s appeal, which subsequently was taken up by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on April 1.

June 20 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld a federal law that allows victims of terrorism to sue two Palestinian entities in U.S. courts.

The decision reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals in the New York-based 2nd Circuit that found the law denied the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority fair legal process.

All nine justices ruled that the bipartisan 2019 law, called the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, does not violate due process rights of the PLO and PA.

The lawsuit and appeal involve cases from the early 2000s and not the Israel-Hamas war and airstrikes between Israel and Iran. It was based on the Antiterrorism Act of 1990, which creates a federal civil damages action for U.S. nationals injured or killed “by reason of an act of international terrorism.”

Founded in 1964, the PLO is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. The PA, founded in 1994, is the Fatah-controlled government body that exercises partial civil control over the Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 46-page opinion that included a concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas and backed by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wanted to define the boundaries of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

Lawsuits by U.S. victims of terrorist attacks in Israel can move forward in American courts.

“It is permissible for the Federal Government to craft a narrow jurisdictional provision that ensures, as part of a broader foreign policy agenda, that Americans injured or killed by acts of terror have an adequate forum in which to vindicate their right to ATA compensation,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

In April, the high court consolidated two cases for arguments: a Justice Department appeal and an appeal by the family of Israeli-American Ari Fuld, who was fatally stabbed at a shopping mall in the West Bank in 2018.

The Biden administration initially intervened in Fuld’s case and another one brought by 11 American families who sued the Palestinian leadership groups and were awarded $650 million in a 2025 trial for several attacks in Israel.

Video shows a young man carrying his dead father on a bicycle, after he was shot while trying to secure food parcels at a US-backed aid site in Gaza. Israeli forces, backed by gangs, have killed more than 220 people at the aid distribution sites in Rafah and the Netzarim corridor since they opened.

Israel’s far-right finance minister says he wants to cut Palestinian banks off from the global financial system.

Bezalel Smotrich’s plan has not yet been approved by the Israeli government.

But if it does happen, what could the consequences be?

Presenter: 

Cyril Vanier

Guests: 

Raja Khalidi – Director-general at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute

Shahd Hammouri – Lecturer in international law at the University of Kent

Mustafa Barghouti – Secretary-general at the Palestinian National Initiative

A Palestinian man in a red cap walks down the narrow alleyway in Nablus’s old city towards a group of Israeli soldiers, clearly unarmed.

He attempts to talk to the soldiers, who had flooded into the occupied West Bank city in the early hours of Tuesday as part of Israel’s latest military raid – believed to be the largest carried out in Nablus in two years.

The soldiers immediately kick and shove the man – 40-year-old Nidal Umairah – before his brother walks over, attempting to intervene. Gunfire follows, and soon the two brothers are lying dead.

Nidal and his brother 35-year-old brother Khaled were the latest victims of Israel in the West Bank, after they were killed late on Tuesday. It is unclear which brother had initially been detained, but witnesses were adamant that the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers was an unnecessary escalation that led to the deaths of yet more Palestinians.

Ghassan Hamdan, the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Nablus, was at the scene of the killings.

“There were at least 12 soldiers and they all fired their automatic machine guns at once,” said Hamdan.

After the two men fell to the ground [medics] asked the soldiers if we could treat their wounds. They answered by firing at all of us.”

“We all took cover behind the walls of the old city,” he told Al Jazeera.

Hamza Abu Hajar, a paramedic at the scene, said that the Umairah brother who had initially approached the Israeli soldiers had been trying to go to his house to move his family out and away from the Israeli raid.

“They lifted his shirt up to prove he was unarmed,” Abu Hajar said. “They then started shooting at him, and at us as well.”

The Israeli army said it acted in self-defence after one of the Umairah brothers tried to seize a weapon from a soldier. It said that four soldiers had been injured in the incident.

West Bank raids

The raid in Nablus, which lasted more than 24 hours, is the latest Israel has conducted in the West Bank.

Israel has taken advantage of the world’s focus on its own war on Gaza since October 2023 to escalate its land theft and violence in the West Bank.

During that span, Israel has killed at least 930 people in the West Bank, 24 of whom were from Nablus, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Many of these deaths are the result of violent Israeli raids ostensibly aimed at clamping down on Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, but which have resulted in mass destruction and thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes.

According to Hamdan, Israeli troops mainly targeted Nablus’s old city by storming into hundreds of homes in the middle of the night. Dozens of people were also reportedly arrested.

Young people in the city protested by burning tyres and throwing rocks at Israeli troops, yet they were met with heavy tear gas, injuring at least 80 Palestinians in the raid.

In the past, Palestinian protesters have been imprisoned on “terrorism” charges or shot and killed for simply resisting Israel’s occupation by throwing rocks or defying Israeli soldiers.

This time around, the Israelis classified the entire old city in Nablus as a closed military zone for 24 hours. No ambulances or medics were allowed inside to aid distressed residents, said Hamdan.

“Nobody was allowed in or out. Nobody was allowed to make any movement at all. We [as medics] could not enter the area during the entire raid to try and help people in need,” he told Al Jazeera.

Assault and vandalism

During the raid, Israeli troops stormed into several apartments after blowing off door hinges with explosives.

Umm Hassan, a 58-year-old resident who did not want to give her full name, recalls feeling terrified when several Israeli soldiers broke into her home.

About five months ago, her husband passed away from cancer, an illness that also claimed two of her children years ago.

Umm Hassan is also battling cancer, yet she said Israeli soldiers showed her no mercy. They flipped her television on the ground, broke windows and tossed her paintings off the walls and onto the living room floor.

They even vandalised her books by throwing them on the ground, including the Quran.

“I told them to leave me alone. I was alone and so scared. There was nobody to protect me,” Umm Hassan told Al Jazeera.

Another woman, Rola, said that Israeli soldiers stormed into her home two times in the span of six hours during the raid.

When Israeli soldiers returned the second time, Rola said that they attacked her elderly father, hitting him on the head and chest with the butts of their guns.

Rola described her three nieces and nephews – all small children – cowering with fear as Israeli soldiers vandalised and destroyed their home.

“The second time they came to our home, they put us all in a room and we weren’t able to leave the room from 8am until 3:30pm,” said Rola.

“We [Palestinians] always talk about being resilient. But the reality is when Israeli soldiers come into your private home, then you get very scared. It’s natural. We are humans and humans get scared,” she told Al Jazeera.

Psychological warfare

More than 80 Palestinians received treatment from the Palestine Red Crescent Society during the raid, 25 of them as a result of gunshot wounds.

While Israel says its raid was “precise”, inhabitants of Nablus say that the attack on the city was the latest attempt to intimidate and frighten Palestinians.

“Honestly, what were Israeli soldiers searching for in my home? What did they think they were going to find?” asked Rola. “The reason for their raids [violence] is to uphold the [illegal] occupation.”

20 Palestinian children have been evacuated by the World Health Organization to receive urgent medical treatment abroad. Dr. Alaa al-Najjar and her surviving son are amongst those being evacuated. Her husband and nine other children were killed when an Israeli strike hit their home.

Israel says it plans to build 22 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank – the largest number approved to be built at one time.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says the settlements are intended to block the creation of a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army continues its expanded offensive, destroying homes, roads and facilities, such as waterways and hospitals, essentially making areas of the occupied West Bank uninhabitable.

And settler violence against civilians, including destroying crops and uprooting trees, is at an all-time high, according to the UN.

Europe has hit back against the move to build more illegal settlements by threatening sanctions. But can they have a real impact?

What does this mean for millions of Palestinians? And is a Palestinian state now becoming nearly impossible?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Xavier Abu Eid – Political analyst and a former adviser to the PLO’s negotiation team

Ori Goldberg- an Israeli author, academic, and political commentator

Salman Shaikh – CEO of The Shaikh Group, an organisation working on diplomacy and mediation in the Middle East

Beirut, Lebanon – For decades, Palestinian groups in Lebanon have run their affairs themselves. In the refugee camps established for Palestinians displaced by Israel in 1948 and 1967, Palestinian factions have overseen security and many have retained their arms.

Those days, however, appear to be coming to a close. Instead, the Lebanese state is attempting to take advantage of a period of weakness for the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, as it struggles to regroup from its war with Israel, to exercise its power over the country.

Lebanon’s new government – formed in February and led by former International Court of Justice judge Nawaf Salam – has the backing of regional and international powers to disarm all non-state actors. That includes the many Palestinian groups that have carried arms since a 1969 agreement that allowed them to have autonomy in the 12 official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

And on Wednesday, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas gave his blessing during a visit to Lebanon. A joint statement from Abbas and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun declared that both sides had agreed that the existence of “weapons outside the control of the Lebanese state has ended”.

“Abu Mazen [Abbas] came to say that we are guests in Lebanon and not above Lebanese authority,” Mustafa Abu Harb, an official with Fatah, the largest political faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), told Al Jazeera. “We do not accept weapons in the hands of anyone other than the Lebanese state.”

Is Hamas on board?

Abbas, on his first trip to Lebanon since 2017, also met Prime Minister Salam and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to discuss the challenging prospect of disarming Palestinian factions in Lebanon and improving the rights and conditions of the estimated 270,000 Palestinians in the country.

Palestinians in Lebanon do not have the legal right to work in a number of professions, they may not own property or businesses and cannot access public service employment or the use of public services, such as healthcare and social security, according to UNRWA, the United Nations body created in 1948 for Palestinian refugees.

“We reaffirm our previous position that the presence of weapons in the camps outside the framework of the state weakens Lebanon and also harms the Palestinian cause,” Abbas said in the meeting with Aoun, according to the Palestinian state news agency Wafa.

However, questions remain as to whether the divisive Abbas, who has not faced an election since 2005, has the authority to disarm the different Palestinian groups.

A senior Hamas official in Lebanon, Ali Barakeh, told the AFP news agency on Wednesday that he hoped the talks between Abbas and Aoun would go further than just Palestinian groups’ disarmament.

“We affirm our respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty, security and stability, and at the same time, we demand the provision of civil and human rights for our Palestinian people in Lebanon,” Barakeh said.

Hamas, which – along with Hezbollah – is considered part of the wider Iranian-allied “axis of resistance” network, has already cooperated with the Lebanese state on at least one occasion since the ceasefire with Israel. In May, the Palestinian group handed over a fighter suspected of firing rockets at Israel, according to the Lebanese army, and called them “individual acts”.

The group has also said it respects the ceasefire and is willing to work with the Lebanese state.

‘Not our president’

Over the course of his two-decade reign, Abbas’s popularity among Palestinians in Lebanon has sharply eroded.

That lack of support can be seen in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, where posters of Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat, as well as Hamas’s spokesperson, Abu Obeida, can be seen far more than those of the PA leader.

“None of the Palestinians, except Fatah, claim that he’s our president,” Majdi Majzoub, a community leader in Beirut’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, Shatila, said. “This president doesn’t honour us and doesn’t represent us because he supports the occupation and adopts the occupation’s decisions.”

Aside from Abbas’s unpopularity, other factors may lead to a pushback against any attempt to disarm Palestinian groups in Lebanon.

Nicholas Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow with the US-based think tank Atlantic Council, said it “could be interpreted as a win for the Israelis if the Palestinians … were obliged to give [their weapons] up”.

Blanford also pointed out that defenders of the continued presence of armed Palestinian groups in Lebanon point to events such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians were killed over two days by right-wing Christian nationalist forces with Israeli support in 1982.

Blanford, however, believes that the consensus is moving towards the disarmament of at least heavy weaponry from the Palestinian factions in Lebanon, and that some Palestinians welcome the move.

“We as a Palestinian people certainly welcome [the initiative] because things have changed,” Majzoub said.

Majzoub said bad-faith actors have taken advantage of the Lebanese state’s lack of authority over the Palestinian camps to avoid being held accountable for crimes.

Lebanon’s armed forces rarely enter the Palestinian refugee camps.

In 2007, the army besieged the Nahr al-Bared camp in north Lebanon and clashed with the Fatah al-Islam group, which was based in the camp. Hundreds died in the battle, which left large swaths of the camp uninhabitable.

The Lebanese army has also, on occasion, infiltrated camps to arrest individuals.

The security situation can at times be tense in the camps, as it is in other parts of Lebanon.

On Monday, local media reported that armed clashes between rival drug dealers in Beirut’s Shatila camp forced residents to flee.

Among the worst incidents in the past few years were the large-scale battles that erupted in the summer of 2023 between armed groups in Ein el-Hilweh camp, in southern Lebanon, after a botched assassination attempt on a Fatah official. More than two dozen people were killed in the fighting before a ceasefire was negotiated.

Carrying weapons in the camps was once seen as a right of resistance. But after more than seven decades of displacement and insecurity, some Palestinians in Lebanon today feel that carrying arms is undercutting their struggle for liberation.

“Palestinian weapons have become a threat to the Palestinian revolution,” Majzoub said. “Now, it is better for us to live under the protection of the Lebanese state.”

On 1 December, Netflix began streaming Farha (2021) worldwide, despite immense pressure directed at the platform to prevent its debut. The film is director Darin J. Sallam’s first full-length feature and chronicles the coming-of-age story of its heroine, Farha, a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager who possesses a voracious appetite for books and learning. Farha’s cultural background is that of a villager – her Arabic dialect infused with the authenticity often associated with Palestinian grandparents, particularly the generation born in the decade just before or that of the Nakba itself. Yet, what makes Farha a distinguished heroine isn’t necessarily her linguistic veracity, it is her bravery and her desire to pursue her education at a school in the neighbouring city. At the start of the film, she is seen at one with the land, collecting water from the local spring, eating figs straight from the communal trees and collecting almonds in her satchel, still intact and unpeeled. She goes through the motions of her chores in the village, but her mind often wanders into the literary worlds of the books she reads, novels gifted to her by her best friend Fareeda, who is from a city-dwelling family not far from the village from which Farha hails.

The first scenes of the film show Farha as a dreamer, a girl who urges her father, a man of mayoral standing, to register her in the city’s school. Her father is hesitant as he believes her economic livelihood is best secured through the arrangement of marriage and that the local Quran recitation learning groups provided by the Sheikh are a sufficient education. Still, Farha fights for her desire to learn and secures the support of many an ally in her extended family and community to finally convince her father. On the eve of the Nakba, he signs her enrolment certificate. Throughout the film, there are peripheral present-absent signifiers of just how troubling the situation in Palestine has become. Talk of resistance tactics and meetings between rebels and the officials hint that the historical events of the Nakba and its tragedy are on the cusp of eruption. These more politicised characters weave in and out of frames of the film, infiltrating the scenes with reminders, only to give way to Farha’s experience, which remains at the centre. Slowly but surely, the viewer’s understanding expands organically with Farha’s, and we see that this curious girl, who had very little understanding of the depth of this dire situation, is forced to contend with its brutality as a witness and as a survivor of violence, loss and dispossession. In fact, Farha’s father hides her in a closet where she remains trapped throughout the most violent moments that befall her village, and she is left alone to deal with the aftermath.

The film was produced by TaleBox, a production company co-founded by Sallam and producer Deema Azar. Ayah Jardaneh also served as the producer of the film. The film likewise received support from Laika Film & Television, Chimney, The Jordan Film Fund – Royal Film Commission, the Swedish Film Institute and the Red Sea Film Fund (an initiative of the Red Sea Film Festival). It remains a largely Jordanian-based initiative, highlighting the lived experience of Palestine and Palestinians, with support from European-based organisations. On a political level, Farha has depicted the tragedy of the Nakba for the first time through film and employs what the late Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said, has called the “permission to narrate” the Palestinian experience against many odds.

OPINION: Israel’s terror against Gaza’s children on Netflix

In response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath, Said penned “Permission to Narrate” for the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1984. In it, he notes: “A disciplinary communications apparatus exists in the West both for overlooking most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light and for punishing those who try to tell the truth.” In short, Said’s argument can be summed up as such: despite declassified archives, countless human rights reports, international organisation inquiries and both official and ethnographic accounts of Palestinian plight and dispossession from Nakba to diaspora and from Nakba to military occupation, the Palestinians have been denied the right to narrate their own stories. They have also been denied the privilege of seeing their experience reflected back at them through film and literature and, by extension, preventing them from experiencing the catharsis that comes with artistic acknowledgement and representation. Farha has granted the Palestinian diaspora permission to narrate this story on one of the world’s largest entertainment streaming platforms. More importantly, Farha’s story has been recounted, in numerous iterations and manifestations, 700,000 times by the first generation of the dispossessed. The trauma of that memory remains forever fixed in the minds of the descendants of those who were forcibly displaced – a global diasporic population of nearly six million people and counting – approximately half of the total population of 12 million Palestinians across the historical homeland and outside of it. This population has been classified by the international community, despite its many failures towards it, as ipso facto stateless.

Palestinian’s culture and heritage is the best weapon against the Occupation – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

While on the one hand, Farha has been hailed by many viewers as an incredible feat, it comes as no surprise that the film has been targeted by Israeli officials and has caused outrage. Israel’s Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman issued a statement condemning Netflix, stating his belief that: “It’s crazy that Netflix decided to stream a movie whose whole purpose is to create a false pretence and cite against Israeli soldiers.” Though Farha has been screened globally in many film festivals and series since its debut in 2021, at venues such as Dubai-based Cinema Akil and intentional film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival, the Red Sea Film Festival and others, it is its recent reincarnation on Netflix and its screening at Saraya, a theatre in Jaffa that has caused the most outrage towards the film. The Israeli government has threatened to act against Saraya and has encouraged a mass exodus of subscribers to Netflix. While many regional and international news networks hail the film for its artistic and historical merits, there is also a cacophony of discordant opinions about it, with publications like Fox News and The Times of Israel labelling the film as “terrible” or as “lies and libels”, whilst other major publishers such as The New York Times tiptoe around the film’s representations, selecting its words carefully to maintain its readership. Sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have seen an onslaught of divided reviews: either five-star glowing recommendations from the film’s supporters or comments of rage and disbelief from its detractors.

In all the opinions emerging in the now global conversation surrounding this film, there has been no mention of Sallam’s other smaller work, The Parrot, a 2016 short film she co-directed with Amjad Al-Rasheed. In eighteen powerful minutes, The Parrot follows the story of a Tunisian Jewish family who arrives in Haifa and takes up residence in a home belonging to a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox family. Their clothing, blue-tinted walls and Christian iconography, which borrow heavily from the aesthetic and colour-scape of local churches, are left behind by the displaced family. The breakfast and tea on the table are still hot, and the new occupants, played by Tunisian actress Hend Sabry as Rachel and Palestinian citizen of Israel Ashraf Barhom as Mousa, are haunted by the spectre of the family that once lived there and by the constant echoes of the parrot that was left behind and calls out after the Palestinian boy who owned him asking for a kiss. The parrot also repeats “where are you?” and “why are you looking at me like that” incessantly.

OPINION: Healing with humour, Palestinian comedians strike a chord in occupied cities

Yet, for viewers who are unaware of the Nakba, this imagery and the story of Palestinian displacement remain subliminal. Instead, what takes centre stage is the othering of Eastern Jews who find themselves in Euro-Israeli modernity, one that they can’t quite figure out. As such, by the end of the short film, many viewers would engage in a conversation about the depiction of an intense encounter between the Tunisian Jewish family and their Ashkenazi neighbours, who look at the architecture and structure of the house in Haifa with envy, bewildered at how Eastern Jews, othered and orientalised, had acquired such luck. The film is as much a critique of ethnic relations among Israelis as it is about the Palestinian exodus, and, like Farha, it tells a tragic tale through beautifully directed cinematography and crafted set and costume designs. The pleasing nature of Sallam’s use of pastels, verdure and white stone almost works as an antidote to the harsh emotional blow to the nerves that her cinematic tales have delivered thus far and will continue to do in the future.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Process launched after visit by Palestinian President Abbas, who said weapons ‘hurt’ Lebanon and Palestine cause.

A joint Lebanese-Palestinian committee tasked with the removal of weapons held by Palestinian factions in Lebanon’s refugee camps has met for the first time to begin hashing out a timetable for disarming the groups.

The Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee, a government body serving as interlocutor between Palestinian refugees and officials, met on Friday with Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in attendance.

The group said that “participants agreed to launch a process for the disarmament of weapons according to a specific timetable”.

It added that it also aimed to take steps to “enhance the economic and social rights of Palestinian refugees”.

A Lebanese government source told the news agency AFP that disarmament in the country’s 12 official camps for Palestinian refugees, which host multiple Palestinian factions, including Fatah, its rivals Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a range of other groups, could begin in mid-June.

Under a decades-old agreement, Lebanese authorities do not control the camps, where security is managed by Palestinian factions.

The meeting comes as the Lebanese government faces increasing international pressure to remove weapons from the Iran-aligned Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel last year.

“The message is clear. There is a new era, a new balance of power, and a new leadership in Lebanon, which is pushing ahead with monopolising arms in the hands of the state,” said Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut.

“It has already begun to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, and the next phase appears to be the disarmament of Palestinian groups in camps before it addresses the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons in the rest of the country,” she said.

Earlier this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, dominated by his Fatah party, visited Lebanon and said in a speech that the weapons in the camps “hurt Lebanon and the Palestinian cause”.

During Abbas’s visit, he and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun announced an agreement that Palestinian factions would not use Lebanon as a launchpad for any attacks against Israel, and that weapons would be consolidated under the authority of the Lebanese government.

Al Jazeera’s Khodr signalled that several factions appeared to be against disarmement.

“While Abbas’s Palestinian Authority may be recognised internationally as the representative body of the Palestinian people, there are many armed groups, among them, Hamas and [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad, who … believe in armed struggle against Israel,” she said.

“Without consensus among the factions, stability could remain elusive.”

NEW YORK — Less than three weeks after his release from an immigration jail, the Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi strode across the graduation stage at Columbia University on Monday morning, savoring a moment the Trump administration had fought to make impossible.

Draped in a keffiyeh, Mahdawi, 34, paused to listen to the swell of cheers from his fellow graduates. Then he joined a vigil just outside Columbia’s gates, raising a photograph of his classmate Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in federal custody.

“It’s very mixed emotions,” Mahdawi told The Associated Press. “The Trump administration wanted to rob me of this opportunity. They wanted me to be in a prison, in prison clothes, to not have education and to not have joy or celebration.”

Mahdawi, a 34-year-old legal resident of the U.S., was detained during an April 14 citizenship interview in Vermont, part of the widening federal crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists.

He was released two weeks later by a judge, who likened the government’s actions to McCarthyist repression. Federal officials have not accused Mahdawi of committing a crime but argued that he and other student activists should be deported for beliefs that may undermine U.S. foreign policy.

For Mahdawi, who earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Columbia’s School of General Studies, the graduation marked a bittersweet return to a university that he says has betrayed him and other students.

“The senior administration is selling the soul of this university to the Trump administration, participating in the destruction and the degradation of our democracy,” Mahdawi said.

He pointed to Columbia’s decision to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands — including placing its Middle Eastern studies department under new leadership — as well as its failure to speak out against his and Khalil’s arrest.

He said Columbia’s leadership had denied his pleas for protection prior to his arrest, then ignored his attorney’s request for a letter supporting his release from jail.

A spokesperson for Columbia University did not return an emailed inquiry.

Mahdawi was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014. At Columbia, he organized campus protests, led a Buddhist association and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Khalil.

Khalil would have received his diploma from a Columbia master’s program in international studies later this week. He remains jailed in Louisiana as he awaits a decision from a federal judge about his possible release.

As he prepares for a lengthy legal battle, Mahdawi faces his own uncertain future. He was previously admitted to a master’s degree program at Columbia, where he planned to study “peacekeeping and conflict resolution” in the fall. But he is reconsidering his options after learning this month that he would not receive financial aid.

For now, he said, he would continue to advocate for the Palestinian cause, buoyed by the support he says he has received from the larger Columbia community.

“When I went on the stage, the message was very clear and loud: They are cheering up for the idea of justice, for the idea of peace, for the idea of equality, for the idea of humanity, and nothing will stop us from continuing to do that. Not the Trump administration nor Columbia University,” he said.

The School of General Studies graduation comes two days before Columbia’s university-wide commencement, as colleges across the country are bracing for possible disruptions.

Last week, New York University announced it would withhold the diploma of a student speaker who criticized Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in his graduation speech.

Offenhartz writes for the Associated Press.

What happened in Palestine in 1948?

Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

Having secured the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, on May 14, 1948, as soon as the British Mandate expired, Zionist forces declared the establishment of the State of Israel, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war.

Zionist military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

The fighting continued until January 1949 when an armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria was forged. The 1949 Armistice Line is also known as the Green Line and is the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank. The Green Line is also referred to as the (pre-) 1967 borders, before Israel occupied the rest of Palestine during the 1967 war.

Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict that continues to shape every part of Palestinians’ lives.

Mapping the Palestinian villages Israel destroyed

Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

On April 9, 1948, Zionist forces committed one of the most infamous massacres of the war in the village of Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. More than 110 men, women and children were killed by members of the pre-Israeli state Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist paramilitary organisations.

Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta documented detailed records of what happened to these 530 villages in his book, The Atlas of Palestine.

Where are Palestinian refugees today?

Some six million registered Palestinian refugees live in at least 58 camps located throughout Palestine and neighbouring countries.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides assistance and operates hundreds of schools and health facilities for at least 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, 1.5 million refugees in Gaza, 870,000 refugees in the occupied West Bank, 570,000 refugees in Syria and 480,000 refugees in Lebanon.

The largest camps in each are Baqa’a in Jordan, Jabalia in Gaza, Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Yarmouk in Syria, and Ein el-Hilweh in Lebanon.

More than 70 percent of Gaza’s residents are refugees. About 1.5 million refugees live in eight refugee camps around the Gaza Strip.

According to international law, refugees have the right to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced. Many Palestinians still hope to return to Palestine.

The plight of Palestinian refugees is the longest unresolved refugee problem in the world.