 For more videos on People's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch. Today is May the 13th and as we speak, the Israeli offensive on Gaza and the whole of Palestine continues. Of course, we've been seeing since Monday a series of bombardments on Gaza leading to close to 100 deaths. Israeli forces are also massing near the borders according to reports, ground forces that is. But this is part of a continuous trend of increasing assaults over the past few weeks. We saw the incidents in the Damascus gate some weeks ago. We saw attempts to evict residents from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem, places where they had been living for generations. So to talk more about the situation there, we have with us Asalaa Pukherir, who represents the Union of Palestinian Women Committee. Thank you so much for talking to us. And first of all, I just wanted to quickly ask you about the current situation on the ground there because we do know that he's occupied East Jerusalem, where you are at is in the epicenter of a lot of the resistance as well as Israeli attempts to target the resistance. So could you maybe take us through what is right now happening on the ground there? First of all, of course, as you see in the news, it's really dangerous that there are when the Israeli soldier, the occupation soldiers and Palestinians there because of many reasons. First, Sheikh Jarrah and then Laksa Mosque, invading Laksa Mosque by settlers. The settlers attacks. So it's just a punch of reasons why Palestinians can't take it anymore and they just repelion and say, we have to stop this. We can't take it anymore. So it's really dangerous. Soldiers, the occupation soldiers are just attacking Palestinians, unarmed Palestinians with their heavy weapons, rapid bullets, with its gas bombs. So the last day, a settler attacked my sister and he hit her with a glass, with a bottle glass on her head, which caused her a crack in her head. So it's really dangerous. There's a lot of injuries, a lot of people who lost their eyes, a lot of people in hospitals. There's a lot of arrests. There's no freedom of speech, even if you don't do anything and you're in the ground saying, no, abusing what's happening, you might go to jail. For instance, the last time I just asked soldiers, why are you trying to remove Palestinians from the street while giving the chance to settlers just to sit there and stay there? This is discrimination. This is not right. And they attacked me and they wanted to arrest me just for saying that I didn't even hit, I didn't throw anything, I didn't do anything. So it's really crazy here, but the most important thing is dignity. It's a human nature. You can't just see oppression, you can't be repressed and not do anything about it. So Palestinians have a lot of dignity, we're going to fight to the end. Even if we're unarmed, we're going to fight with our souls, our bodies, our thoughts, our faith in our rights. Absolutely. So this context also wanted to ask you a bit about the situation specifically in East Jerusalem because we know that occupied East Jerusalem and the Israeli agenda there is at the heart of their occupation because ever since the occupation of East Jerusalem itself, the kind of demographic changes they've been trying to make, the kind of incidents by settlers, the kind of settlement policy that they've been trying to introduce. So maybe could you take us through slightly larger perspective on what is happening in East Jerusalem itself and how on a day-to-day basis it affects lives and what the government and settlers are trying to do? So when we want to talk about Jerusalem and what's happening in Jerusalem and the policies that the occupation is trying to implement there, we have to go back to history and what happened in East Jerusalem because this is all part of what happened and still happening until now. So to start with, in 1948, as we all know, the terrorist Zionist gangs occupied parts of Palestine, including the west side of Jerusalem. After this, the illegal annexation and colonial occupation of the east side of Jerusalem in 1967, in addition to the excessive use of physical force and land acquisition, Israel has worked to develop laws and policies that would enable it to seize control and expand its settler colonial project throughout Palestine. So it has applied Israel-domestic laws in East Jerusalem. After that in 1974, a radical Israel settler group called Ghosh Emonim built the first settlement in East Jerusalem, which is called Ma'ali Adumim, in contravention of international law, which considers East Jerusalem as an occupied Palestinian territory. They did that by theft, forgery, and confiscation of lands. And by this illegal building of these settlements, Israel has segregated the city from the rest of the occupied territory. Physically, it has disrupted the contiguity of the occupied Palestinian territory, preventing any political chance of having a Palestinian state in the future, of course. These illegal settlements in East Jerusalem besieged Palestinian villages, preventing its natural geographic development and expansion, and also by the construction of the bypass roads that serve only the movement of settlers between East and West Jerusalem. And by basing dozens, another way of controlling East Jerusalem is basing a dozen of laws and procedures that limits the urban expansion of Palestinians in East Jerusalem due to the lack of structure planning in the marginalized Palestinian villages, which is the responsibility of the occupying power. So under this pretext, Israel prevents Palestinians from building and frequently demolishes Palestinian houses, which we can consider as an ethnic cleansing process. Furthermore, imposing a lot of taxes on Palestinians without any services, including the lack of adequate infrastructure or work opportunities. Over 80% of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are below the poverty line. Also trying to empty Jerusalem of its national and civil institutions by closing its headquarters and arresting its employees and consider them among the last of terrorism. Moreover, establishing institutions affiliated with the occupation municipality in East Jerusalem to impose the Israeli curriculums in Palestinian school. Of course, the occupation is trying to control both sides of Jerusalem, East and West, and to do that, in order to implement that on the ground, they follow several policies. One of these policies is the building of the annexation wall annexed and confiscated many Palestinians land in order to implement the master plan for Jerusalem and make all of it the capital of Israel and the center of the Jewish people. Where the demographic target for 2020 would constitute 60% Jews and 40% Arabs. Furthermore, the Israeli parliament, Kineset, has played a significant role in furthering Israel's demographic concerns and reinventing a Jerusalem that fits one narrative and one people only is Zionist Jewish narrative by passing a basic law, Jerusalem, the capital of Israel in 1980 that defines a united Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The occupation wants to redraw the municipal borders of Jerusalem by the building of the wall to annex East Jerusalem and exclude Palestinian neighborhoods therein and to annex instead settlements, which lead to the expelling of almost 150,000 Palestinians from the borders of Jerusalem. And of course, I want to talk about the lows. This all what I mentioned before is just to indicate the idea that Israel is a apartheid country that discriminates against Palestinians in all aspects of life. And now I'm going to mention how it discriminates against Palestinians and how it's an apartheid country when it comes to their laws and the laws that they establish. There are many Israel basic laws that we have to mention here to expose Israel's apartheid and discrimination against Palestinians. For example, the Guardian of Absentee property. This position was created based on the absentee Israel law in 1950, which defines Palestinians who were expelled and displaced after 29th of November 1947, mainly after the Nakba and the war, as well as their immovable properties, mainly lands, houses and bank accounts, etc., as absentee. So Israel used that law to seize Palestinian lands and property. Another law is very important, the law of return in 1950, which gives any Jew in the world that hasn't any relation to Palestine to live in Palestine and have a citizenship. On the contrast, Palestinian refugees or displaced Palestinians that were forcibly expelled in 1948 don't have the right to return to their homes that were stolen by Jewish terrorist gangs. Another important law also is the Israeli nationality law in 1952, which gives any Jew from all over the world the Israeli citizenship, while prevents Palestinians in East Jerusalem, especially from any citizenship, and consider the indigenous Palestinians, which are us, as residents in their own country. And last but not least, the basic law Israel is a Jewish nation state law in 2018, which has distinct apartheid that guaranteed the ethnic religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish, and while discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systematic inequality, encouraging the building of illegal settlements in contravention of international law. This is not all the law, all the laws, there's a lot of procedures that discriminate between Palestinians and Israelis, these are just examples of these laws. And finally, just wanted to ask you a question also about the kind of resistance that has been building up in recent weeks, of course, but also recent years, because we do see that fresh, young generation of Palestinians taking to the streets, sometimes even slightly skeptical of existing political establishments, and they have been at the forefront of this resistance. So could you maybe talk a bit also about the forces that drive them, the kind of mobilization that's taking place right now on the ground? So when it comes to Palestinian youth, Palestinian youth has been deprived of supporting institutions or the opportunity to learn and study. And because of the economic situation, all forms of repress and persecution have been practiced against them in order to control them and brainwash them to prevent any awareness, block their brawlers and marginalize them, in addition to the security pursuit and oppression that they are exposed to. Considering the young generation is the most targeted by the occupation, of course. So it's very natural for youth to be the most enthusiastic group in exploding their accumulated anger and expressing their identity, which the occupation tries to repress in all forms that they even prevent us as youth to raise the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem. They are the spearhead of the confrontation and they are the fuel of this fight, as their response to the occupation attempt to restrict them and their prisons in Bab el-Amoud, Damascus Gate area, formed a push forward for them and they have now an iron will to confront and support the battle of Sheikh Jarrah, for example. Absolutely. Right. Thank you so much for talking to us. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.