From the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), April 14:

Today, our friend and colleague, Vittorio Arrigoni, a journalist and human rights defender working in the Gaza Strip, was kidnapped by Salafists, members of a very small extremist group in Gaza.

Israeli actor and political activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, who ran a theater project in the West Bank's Jenin refugee camp, was shot dead by unknown masked men on April 4 outside the theater he founded there. Khamis, 52, had received threats for his work in Jenin, but continued to divide his time between the camp and his home in Haifa. Khamis appeared in a number of Israeli films after his first film role in the 1984 production of the John Le Carre novel The Little Drummer Girl, about Mossad's hunt for a PLO bomber. Born to a Jewish mother and an Arab Christian father, he established the Freedom Theater group in Jenin during the first Intifada to promote co-existence.

Israeli air-strikes and artillery fire struck Gaza nine times April 8, killing eight, and bringing the total number of dead over the past 24 hours to thirteen, some half of them civilians. A mother and daughter, and elderly man were killed in two separate strikes near Khan Younis, a fourth—identified as an al-Qassam Brigades fighter—was killed near Gaza City, and two unidentified men was killed when a shell hit his home east of Gaza City. A statement from the Israeli Defense Forces acknowledged civilian casualties, saying that the military "regrets that the Hamas terrorist organization chooses to operate from within its civilian population, using it as a 'human shield'."

Israeli artillery fire killed five Palestinians and injured some 40 after an anti-tank missile from the Gaza Strip hit a school bus in southern Israel, injuring two people, April 8. One of the dead is reported to be a small child. Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for the missile attack, saying it was an "initial response" to Israel killing three of the group's leaders last weekend, when an air-strike hit their car in southern Gaza. But the escalation comes one day after the Hamas administration in Gaza said it had got most armed Palestinian factions in Gaza to sign on to a ceasefire in a bid to prevent further Israeli strikes. (Ma'an News Agency, April 8)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 3 called on the UN to retract the Goldstone Report following statements made by Richard Goldstone in a Washington Post op-ed. Netanyahu said the Goldstone Report, which found that Israel committed war crimes in Operation Cast Lead after a fact finding mission, is called into question by Goldstone's April 1 article, where he wrote: "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document." According to Goldstone, new evidence has shown that Israel never targeted civilians in the conflict as originally alleged.

The National Resistance Brigades announced April 2 that the ceasefire was over in the Gaza Strip, following an overnight Israeli air-strike that killed three leaders of Hamas' armed wing. The brigades, military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said they would retaliate to the killings and that Israel "would have to bear the repercussions of this crime."

Israel's Knesset on March 28 passed a law enabling the judicial system to revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of terrorism, espionage, treason or helping the enemy during times of war. The bill, which was passed by 37-11 in a late-night session, was initiated by two Knesset members from the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. "Without loyalty, there can be no citizenship," Lieberman said just minutes after the bill was passed. "Any person who harms the country cannot enjoy the benefits of citizenship and its fruit." The law is part of Lieberman's "no loyalty, no citizenship" campaign, which is widely understood to target Israel's Arab minority.

Evacuation and demolition orders were handed out to a Bedouin family east of Tubas on March 27, local officials told Ma'an News Agency. The orders come amid concern from UNRWA officials who noted a near two-fold increase in home demolitions during the first two months of 2011. Nabil Mustafa Daraghmeh, the head of a Bedouin family in the Ein Al-Hilwa area outside of Tubas in the northern West Bank, was served papers demanding he and his family evacuate their tent home and move their herds elsewhere. Palestinian security officials said several Israeli military patrol cars arrived in the area to serve the papers, which gave Daraghmeh one day to leave the area.