Careem, a Middle Eastern rival to Uber, has become the first ride-hailing firm to operate in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Dubai-based Careem, whose name is a play on the Arabic word for generous or noble, launched in Ramallah in June, aiming to bring digital simplicity to the Palestinian territory.

The Gaza blockade, which will reach its tenth year in June, makes it impossible for Palestinians living there to engage with Palestinians living in the remainder of the Palestinian territory – the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Things changed when Nawal heard of the ‘Virtual Majilis’, an online exchange platform run by UNICEF to help connect students in Gaza with students in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Over the past 10 years, many NGOs and human rights organisations on both sides of the Green Line, have started offering alternative tours of East Jerusalem, Palestine, and Israeli settlements inside the West Bank. These tours take tourists deep into conflict zones. They try to break negative stereotypes about Palestine as an unsafe place infested with terrorists by showing tourists the natural beauty, cultural wealth and hospitality of Palestine.

The international community could actually take a lesson out of the Iran example. [...] Even Iran’s allies such as Russia and China joined hands with the U.S. and Britain to build a global pressure regime which eventually worked in forcing Tehran to compromise. What was one of the most contentious global issues till a few years ago was settled amicably in a rare case of the triumph of public diplomacy. 

Israel seems to be backing off an effort to appoint settler-advocate Dani Dayan as ambassador to Brazil. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced that he was naming Dayan—who has “devoted” much of his life to “expanding the Jewish presence in…disputed historic places across the West Bank”—in a Tweet in early August. 

European Union is to vote on labeling products manufactured in the Golan Heights and West Bank.  Israel's Foreign Ministry has begun all-out diplomatic efforts to try to stop the European Union from labeling of good and products manufactured in the Golan Heights and Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Israeli daily Haartez reported Sunday.

His newly minted deputy foreign minister might want Israel’s diplomats around the world to proudly assert the Jewish state’s historic right to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But does Benjamin Netanyahu seriously believe that Israel is going to be able to annex the West Bank, to bring the biblical Judea and Samaria under long-term Israeli sovereignty? Does he even want to?

A trawler left Sweden on its way to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip 5,000 nautical miles away. The Marianne of Gothenburg departed on Sunday evening and is the first ship in the Freedom Flotilla III to leave for Gaza, according to the website of the Ship to Gaza Sweden campaign.