“I do not have any permission issued by the Israeli authorities to enter Jerusalem, and I do not recognise the fact that Israel has the power to issue permits to Palestinians to enter their city. We are here on the day in which Israel is establishing facts on the ground, to show that we will never give up Jerusalem.”

Mustafa Barghouti, the Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, attended a demonstration in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, on Sunday in protest of the re-opening of a former military base.

On Thursday morning over 250 Palestinian protesters, joined by dozens of Israeli and international activists, braved foul weather conditions to demonstrate in Hebron against the closure of Ash’Shuhada, the street which, since Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994 has been progressively “sterilised” by closing it off to all forms of Palestinian movement.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to add two holy sites in the occupied Palestinian territories to a list of national heritage sites was met with immediate condemnation from Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative.

Dr Mustafa Barghouthi’s speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) began with the words of Nelson Mandela: “Our Freedom will never be complete until the Palestinian people are free.”

Planting trees against occupation, settlement expansion and land expropriation – this is the symbolic action carried out by popular committees of resistance who joined a tree-planting action in Aboud, North-West of Ramallah, last Sunday.