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Palestinian Authority security forces clashed with hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday who were protesting the killing of a local man beaten to death while in PA police custody.

According to reports in Palestinian media, the protesters were dispersed by tear gas and chased through alleys by PA forces as they marched from a local university to downtown Nablus.

The demonstrators were calling for the resignation of PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdalah, Nablus Governor Akram Rajoub, and Palestinian security head Nidal Abu Dukhan, the Palestinian news site Safa said.

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Earlier on Tuesday, Rajoub confirmed that Ahmed Halawa, the alleged ringleader in the killing of two Palestinian policemen in Nablus last week, was severely beaten by PA security personnel, lost consciousness and later died in the city's Jneid prison.

لحظة قمع الأجهزة الأمنية لمسيرة نابلس المنددة بمقتل أحمد حلاوة قبل قليل. pic.twitter.com/xY3T5YQVlI

- شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) August 23, 2016

"We'll examine the incident and draw lessons from it," he told the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, as Hamdallah announced a special committee would look into Halawa's death.

Amnesty International has accused Palestinian security forces of routinely mistreating prisoners, with torture common and committed with impunity.

The northern West Bank has seen a number of Palestinian police raids in recent months. The area has witnessed factional infighting within the governing Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

Hamas, the Islamist terror group ruling the Gaza Strip and bitter rival of the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority ruling the West Bank, condemned Halawa's "execution," saying it showed "the bloody nature of the Palestinian Authority's security services."

المسيرة التي خرجت وسط نابلس قبل قليل تنديدًا بمقتل أحمد حلاوة على يد الأجهزة الأمنية بسجن الجنيد. pic.twitter.com/ASoLf6naKu

- شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) August 23, 2016

Hamas and Fatah are due to contest municipal elections across the Palestinian territories in October.

Halawa, a senior member of the Fatah-linked al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, was the fifth Palestinian to die in the PA's ongoing hunt for members of a criminal gang wanted by Ramallah authorities.

Under the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel, Palestinian police operate in most of the major Palestinian towns, including Nablus.

Overnight Thursday, a firefight erupted between gang members and PA police after officers entered Nablus's Old City, a densely populated warren of alleyways that was one of the flashpoints of the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005.

Two police officers and two gunmen - both of whom he said were on a police wanted list - were killed in the operation, Rajoub confirmed at the time.

Gun violence is rampant in the West Bank, PA police spokesman Loaie Izrekat said in June. Recently, the house of Nablus Mayor Ghassan Shakeh came under fire. The late governor of Jenin Qadura Mussa had attempted to crack down on weapons dealing and died of a heart attack after assailants fired at his home in 2012.

On June 30, five Palestinians, including two PA security officers, were killed in separate shootings in the West Bank, while 16 people were injured.

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Clashes in Nablus after Palestinian police kill suspect in custody

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Palestinian Authority security forces clashed with hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday who were protesting the killing of a local man beaten to death while in PA police custody. According to reports in Palestinian media, the protesters were dispersed by tear gas and chased through alleys by PA forces as they marched from a local university to downtown Nablus.

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Welcome to Palestine Today, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for Tuesday, August, 23, 2016.

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Misunderstood Pro-Palestinian efforts on US Campuses

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Misunderstood Pro-Palestinian efforts on US Campuses

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Sheldon Adelson, the Nevada casino mogul and conservative mega-donor, is leading a campaign against pro-Palestine groups on US college campuses and has funded a group that has publicly accused individual students of supporting terrorism and promoting "Jew Hatred".

The multimillion-dollar effort, which has launched at six campuses in California, is targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has become increasingly popular among American university students protesting the Israeli government.

At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), recentposters named 16 students and professors, saying they "have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetuate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus". It further claimed BDS was a "Hamas-inspired genocidal campaign to destroy Israel".

Robert Gardner, a 25-year-old UCLA senior, saw his name on one of the posters outside a grocery market. "I was really shocked and felt really disturbed," he said.

"They are trying to cast us as antisemitic, that we are somehow a discriminatory group," said the political science student, who is a member of the college's Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. "That is a completely spurious accusation. One of our core principles is anti-oppression and anti-racism."

Tensions surrounding Israel-Palestine campus activism have escalated in recent years, but SJP leaders said the posters identifying specific students were particularly aggressive and had led some of them to face online harassment and death threats.

Adelson - who has poured money into Republican campaigns and last year purchased Nevada's largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal - recently launched the so-called Maccabee Task Force to "combat the BDS Movement through education and meaningful conversation about Israel truths".

The billionaire gambling magnate, who has reportedly supported Donald Trump, helped inject the conflict into the US presidential race.

While Adelson and his new task force have focused on building support for Israel through social media campaigns, partnerships with student groups and subsidized trips to Israel, the tactic of calling out students on public posters and linking them to terrorism has earned widespread condemnation.

"This definitely felt like a more direct escalation," said Omar Zahzah, a 28-year-old graduate student at UCLA who was also named in the recent posters. "It wasn't just slandering SJP anymore. It was attacking specific individuals."

Zahzah, a comparative literature student, who is Palestinian, added: "It's easy to joke about and dismiss. But at the end of the day, it's still pretty intimidating, which is the point."

The UCLA posters included the hashtag #StopTheJewHatredOnCampus and linked to the website of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative Los Angeles-based group that has repeatedly been accused of promoting Islamophobia.

David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, said in a statement to the Guardian that the group had approved a "modest grant" to the Horowitz Freedom Center "to focus on the true nature of pro-BDS organizations, but we did not ask for or approve the poster campaign that targeted student activists, and were not aware that our money had been used to support it. It should not have been.

"The Maccabee Task Force does not believe that focusing on student activists who conduct themselves civilly is an appropriate or effective way to combat the BDS movement on campus," Brog added.

A spokesman declined to disclose the size of the grant but said the Maccabee Task Force plans to expand to 20 additional college campuses this fall.

On Wednesday, two days after publication of this article, the Maccabee spokesman said that the Horowitz center has since confirmed that it did not use any funding from the Adelson group for its poster campaign, contradicting its earlier statement acknowledging that its money had gone toward the effort.

The Horowitz center and representatives for Adelson did not respond to inquiries on Monday. Horowitz, however, defended the posters in an interview with the Los Angeles Times and said he planned to produce similar ones at other campuses.

SJP and BDS activists have repeatedly argued that their efforts are not antisemitic and that they are simply calling for Israel to be boycotted due to its continued occupation of Palestinian territories.

In recent months, some Black Lives Matter activists have aligned themselves with pro-Palestine groups, which has intensified the campaigns against the BDS movement.

Robin Kelley, a UCLA history professor who was named on the Horowitz poster, said there were many Jewish students who support SJP. He also noted this was not the first time critics had gone after SJP students in a harassing and threatening manner.

Still, he said, for some of them, it was "devastating" and "traumatizing".

"To try to destroy a young person's life because you disagree with their politics is reprehensible," said Kelley, who is a member of the advisory board for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. "It can affect their job prospects, their future ... These kids don't have the capacity to destroy Sheldon Adelson's life."

An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of David Brog

This article was amended on 24 August to clarify a new statement from the Maccabee group which now claims that the Horowitz center did not use any of the Maccabee funding for its campus posters

Topics

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GOP mega-donor funds group calling pro-Palestine US students 'Jew haters'

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Sheldon Adelson, the Nevada casino mogul and conservative mega-donor, is leading a campaign against pro-Palestine groups on US college campuses and has funded a group that has publicly accused individual students of supporting terrorism and promoting "Jew Hatred".

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The Israeli army has carried out dozens of air and tank strikes across northern Gaza, injuring at least four Palestinians, in response to a rocket launched from the Palestinian territory into Israel.

Palestinian medical officials said on Monday that a 17-year-old youth was among those wounded in Sunday night's air strikes.

No one has claimed responsibility for the rocket that was fired from Gaza into the southern city of Sderot. No casualties or damage were reported from the rocket strike.

"We conducted strikes against several dozen targets in the Gaza Strip," an army spokeswoman told the AFP news agency on Monday.

The Israeli army also said on its official Twitter page that the "IAF [Israeli Air Force] and armoured corps targeted 2 Hamas posts in the northern Gaza Strip".

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Hamas movement, which governs the Gaza Strip, said Israel "carries responsibility for the escalation in the Gaza Strip and this new aggression will not succeed" in weakening the movement, according to AFP.

In a Facebook post, Iyad al-Bozum, the spokesman for the interior ministry in Gaza, said that "the Israeli aggression against our [Palestinian] people targeted many facilities and caused significant damage to infrastructure in different areas of the Gaza Strip".

There were no reports of further attacks Monday.

Turkish condemnation

The Israeli strikes were also criticised by Turkey, which voted on Saturday to ratify the normalisation of its ties with Israel following a six-year rift.
READ MORE: Israel and Turkey reach deal to restore relations
"We want to clearly express that these attacks against civilians were not approved," Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters in the capital Ankara on Monday.

"The normalisation of our relations with Israel will never prevent, stop our stand for Palestinians' justified cases and our common action with them," added Yildirim.

The country's foreign ministry also released a statement condemning Israel's attacks which it said "caused injuries to innocent Palestinian civilians" and was "not acceptable regardless of their grounds".

Emmanuel Nahshon, spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, responded by calling Turkey to "think twice before criticising the military actions of others".

"The normalisation of our relations with Turkey does not mean that we will remain silent in the face of its baseless condemnations," he said on Monday, according to the Associated Press news agency.

"Israel will continue to defend its civilians from all rocket fire on our territory, in accordance with international law and our conscience."

Israel ended its permanent military and civilian presence in the Gaza Strip in 2005 in what it called the "Gaza disengagement", in which all the Israeli Jewish-only settlements in the strip were dismantled and the Israeli citizens living there evicted.

However, the area remains effectively occupied as Israel retains control of its airspace, seafront and all vehicle access, blocking trade and free movement for the territory's close to two million Palestinian residents.

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and agencies

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Gaza: Four Palestinians injured in Israeli strikes

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The Israeli army has carried out dozens of air and tank strikes across northern Gaza, injuring at least four Palestinians, in response to a rocket launched from the Palestinian territory into Israel. Palestinian medical officials said on Monday that a 17-year-old youth was among those wounded in Sunday night's air strikes.