West Bank
Israeli army demolishes homes in Jenin, continues raids across West Bank
The Israeli army has demolished several Palestinian homes in the Jenin refugee camp as it continues the deadly raids across the occupied West Bank that it launched on January 21. Explosions echoed throughout the camp overnight as Israeli forces demolished the civilian homes, Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, reported on Friday. Witnesses said Israeli forces reinforced their presence around the camp and conducted intensive drone surveillance. The army also continues to besiege Jenin Governmental Hospital, having bulldozed the main entrance and the main road leading to it earlier in its raids. Earlier this week, it carried out the demolition of residential blocks in Jenin for the first time since 2002, as reported by Jenin Governor Kamal Abu al-Rub.
Israeli drone attack kills two in expanding occupied West Bank operation
An Israeli drone attack on a vehicle near the occupied West Bank town of Qabatiya has killed two people, the Palestinian Ministry of Health says on the fourth day of a large-scale Israeli operation in and around the nearby city of Jenin. The Israeli military said the air attack on Friday in the Jenin governorate hit a vehicle with what it said was a "terrorist cell" inside, but it gave no further details. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that it was a drone attack that happened just before Israeli forces stormed Qabatiya and began "sweeping operations". The air attack coincided with the ongoing military operation against Palestinian fighters in Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp, which has already resulted in the deaths of 14 Palestinians and injured about 50 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. The Israeli military also announced the arrests of 20 people it considers "wanted suspects" and said it had seized weapons.
SinaTools: Open Source Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing
Hammouda, Tymaa, Jarrar, Mustafa, Khalilia, Mohammed
We introduce SinaTools, an open-source Python package for Arabic natural language processing and understanding. SinaTools is a unified package allowing people to integrate it into their system workflow, offering solutions for various tasks such as flat and nested Named Entity Recognition (NER), fully-flagged Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), Semantic Relatedness, Synonymy Extractions and Evaluation, Lemmatization, Part-of-speech Tagging, Root Tagging, and additional helper utilities such as corpus processing, text stripping methods, and diacritic-aware word matching. This paper presents SinaTools and its benchmarking results, demonstrating that SinaTools outperforms all similar tools on the aforementioned tasks, such as Flat NER (87.33%), Nested NER (89.42%), WSD (82.63%), Semantic Relatedness (0.49 Spearman rank), Lemmatization (90.5%), POS tagging (97.5%), among others. SinaTools can be downloaded from (https://sina.birzeit.edu/sinatools).
At least 5 killed in Israeli drone strike on car in occupied West Bank
An Israeli air attack on a car in the occupied West Bank city of Tubas has killed at least five Palestinians and left others wounded, local media and medical workers report. Israel said early on Thursday morning that military aircraft took part in "three different attacks" on Palestinian fighters who "posed a threat" to their forces in the Tubas region. Palestinian medics reported that five people were killed in an Israeli air strike targeting a car and two people were injured, one of whom was critical, according to the Palestinian state news agency, Wafa. The Reuters news agency later reported that the number of those killed in the drone attack had risen to at least six. According to Wafa, the attack was carried out by an armed drone, and Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance crews brought the bodies of the five deceased men and two wounded people to the Tubas Turkish Government Hospital.
Protests, clashes in Jerusalem and West Bank as Israel-Gaza war rages
Israeli security forces restricted young Palestinians from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for prayers on Friday and deployed in strength across the Old City and beyond to quell any unrest spilling over from the conflict in Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops killed four Palestinians during raids, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said. Two of the dead were identified by fighter groups as their members. Large numbers of Israeli police kept guard around Al-Aqsa, a flashpoint and often the scene of clashes, as Palestinians gathered for Friday prayers, reports said. At one point, the police fired tear gas at the Palestinians, according to Reuters.