Israel’s deadly siege of Gaza Strip enters seventh month after Hamas’ Oct 7 attack
UN says half of Gaza population experiencing “catastrophic” hunger as threat of famine looms
Israel plans ground operation in overcrammed Rafah refugee camps
Concerns of wider conflict grow as Iran strikes Israel following attack on consulate in Syria
Israel’s blocking of investigators entering the Gaza Strip is hampering an independent probe into recently discovered mass graves, Kenneth Roth has told Al Jazeera.
Roth, a visiting professor at Princeton University and former executive director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said it was possible to carry out an investigation of mass graves even in the middle of a conflict.
“This would require simply cooperation by both sides, but Israel doesn’t want to allow these kinds of independent investigations,” Roth said.
“It just wants to sweep the issue under the rug or it will say we’re going to investigate ourselves,” he said, adding that such a process usually ends up with nobody held accountable by Israeli authorities.
The UN and the EU have been calling for an independent probe following the discovery of 392 bodies, including some with their hands tied, stripped of their clothes, and shot in the head.
The US has also called for an investigation, but it is not demanding that the probe be independent, Roth noted.
Pakistan has again demanded that the United Nations and the international community consider further measures to secure Israel’s adherence to a ceasefire in Gaza, Radio Pakistan reports.
At a ministerial-level debate at the UN Security Council, Pakistan’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Usman Jadoon said Israel continued to defy the UNSC resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and was hampering the flow of humanitarian assistance, creating the reality of famine in Gaza.
The ambassador highlighted that Israel has also refused to abide by the interim injunctions of the International Court of Justice, the report added.
Condemning Israel’s relentless violence in Gaza, Jadoon reiterated Pakistan’s unwavering support for Palestine’s quest for self-determination and emphasised that UN membership was a crucial step towards rectifying historical injustices and fostering conditions for meaningful negotiations.
He also reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment to a two-state settlement based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
Palestinians continue to mourn people killed in Israeli bombardment of Rafah, the crowded southern Gaza city where Israel says it is advancing plans for a ground invasion, AFP reports.
Aid groups warn any invasion would add to already-catastrophic conditions for Gaza’s 2.4 million people. Israeli officials have vowed to enter Rafah, near the Egyptian border, but even before any ground operation the area has been regularly bombed.
Rafah resident Abu Abdallah said “a very powerful strike” hit a house where displaced Gazans were sheltering. “This is not a life,” he told AFP.
“We can no longer live in our home, our neighbourhood, or walk anywhere. The war has been going on for too long.”
At the city’s Al-Najjar Hospital on Thursday, among the mourners were two men crouching, grief-stricken, in front of a white body bag. Belgium said an Israeli strike on Rafah killed Abdallah Nabhan, 33, who worked for its Enabel development agency.
The lack of safe and unimpeded humanitarian access has a devastating in Gaza, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said in a post on X.
“As the weather gets warmer, the risk of disease spreading increases across the Gaza Strip,” the agency said.
“UNRWA services are critical, but not possible without access,” it added.
Pakistan has joined the call by the United Nations (UN) for a “clear, transparent and credible investigation of the mass graves” in Gaza and the “massacres of men women and children by the Israeli occupation forces”.
“The discovery of mass graves at two major hospitals in Gaza have shocked the human conscience,” Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, the FO spokesperson, said. She added that Pakistan condemned Israeli “barbarianism and crimes against” the Palestinian people.
She stressed that a “further independent and impartial investigation must be held” to fix “responsibility and punish the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza”.
“We urge the international community, especially the backers of Israel to take urgent measures to bring an end to the war on the people of Gaza,” she added.
Soft. Entitled. Snowflakes. Lazy. These are some of the characterisations about Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) pushed in the media by older generations who have largely failed to connect with and understand what they are all about. But these disparaging words used to describe the generation are, in fact, baseless — these young individuals are anything but passive.
To put it simply, this generation isn’t waiting for change; they’re demanding it. Over the past six months alone, they’ve orchestrated movements that have sent shockwaves through the status quo, leaving elites squirming in discomfort. It’s time to recognise their power, their passion, and their potential to reshape our world that has been long ruined by decades of complacency.
We are seeing this play out at university campuses across America, where administrators resort to police intervention to suppress anti-war protests and encampments, only to witness a resounding backlash that reverberates far beyond their expectations.
Read more from political economist Uzair Younus here.
The northern Gaza Strip is still heading toward a famine, the deputy UN food chief has said, appealing for a greater volume and diversity of aid to be allowed into the enclave and for Israel to allow direct access from its Ashdod port through Erez crossing.
According to Reuters, Israel pledged three weeks ago to improve aid access after US President Joe Biden demanded steps to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying the US could place conditions on support if Israel did not act.
“We certainly welcome those commitments and some of them have been partly implemented. Some remain to be implemented,” World Food Programme (WFP) Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told reporters, adding that for WFP there had been an “uptick” in getting aid in and some progress in accessing northern Gaza.
“But it’s far from enough. We need volume and we need diversity of goods and we really need consistency,” he said. “We’re still heading towards a famine (in the north).”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the outpouring of US student solidarity with the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as “horrific” and “reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s”, Al Jazeera reports.
Netanyahu said the wave of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests that has swept across US campuses “has to be stopped”.
In a speech shared on social media, Netanyahu also said several university presidents had responded shamefully to the protesters, and he appeared to endorse a crackdown on the student-led rallies that have seen some 550 people arrested in the past week.
“Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently, but there has to be more. More has to be done,” he said.
Columbia University has backed off from an overnight deadline for pro-Palestinian protesters to abandon an encampment there as more college campuses in the United States sought to prevent occupations from taking hold, AFP reports.
The office of New York-based Columbia University president Minouche Shafik issued a statement at 11:07 pm (0307 GMT Friday) retreating from a midnight deadline to dismantle a large tent camp with around 200 students.
“The talks have shown progress and are continuing as planned,” the statement said. “We have our demands; they have theirs.”
The statement denied that New York City police were invited on the campus. “This rumor is false,” it said.
A student, identifying herself only as Mimi, told AFP she had been at the camp for seven days.
“They call us terrorists, they call us violent. But the only tool we actually have are our voices,” she said.
Israeli forces have carried out raids and arrests across the occupied West Bank, including arresting a female Palestinian teacher from the Jalazoun refugee camp, north of Ramallah, and two brothers in Hebron.
Israeli soldiers fired live bullets and detonated sound bombs when they raided the home of the brothers in the Talaat al-Takrouri aread of southern Hebron, Palestine’s state news agency Wafa reports.
Israeli forces also stormed the following villages, towns and cities: Azzun and Jayyus towns, located east of Qalqilya City; communities in the east of Nablus city; Qabatiaya, south of Jenin; Ya’bad town and the villages of Tura and al-Taram, located southwest of Jenin; Dura town, south of Hebron, where local people confronted the raid by Israeli forces who fired fired noxious gas and stun grenades.
Donald Trump on Thursday criticised the mostly peaceful protests on US college campuses over Israel’s offenisve in Gaza, describing them as “tremendous hate,” while saying that the violence at a white nationalist rally in Virginia when he was president was by comparison “a little peanut”, Reuters reports.
In remarks to media following the day’s testimony in his criminal trial in New York City, Trump referenced the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 between white nationalists and counter-protesters, in which one woman was killed, and claimed the current college protests over Israel were far worse.
“Charlottesville was a little peanut. And it was nothing compared to – and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here,” Trump said, repeating an assertion he made on his social media platform on Wednesday.
The protests by students opposed to Israel’s offensive in Gaza have escalated at universities across the United States in recent days, although they have been largely peaceful, with no known deaths and none of violent clashes between demonstrators seen in Charlottesville.
A pro-Palestinian US group filed a federal civil rights complaint against Columbia University following last week’s mass arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters after the school called police to clear demonstrator encampments, the group said on Thursday, Reuters reports.
Palestine Legal, an organisation that seeks to protect the rights of people in the US to speak out on behalf of Palestinians, urged the US Education Department to probe the school’s actions, which it alleges were discriminatory against those who are pro-Palestinian.
Columbia University declined to comment.
Last week, the university tried to shut down campus demonstrations by force when Columbia President Minouche Shafik took the unusual move of inviting New York City police to enter the campus, drawing the ire of many human rights groups, students and faculty. More than 100 people were arrested, reminiscent of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War at Columbia more than 50 years ago.
Protests have since continued at Columbia and spread to other US campuses where hundreds have been arrested in the last week.
Advocacy groups note a rise in hate and bias against Jews, Arabs and Palestinians.
Students from several universities in the Washington Metropolitan Area have joined forces to demand their schools cut ties to Israel and for an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Yasmine, a student leading the protests that have grown into an encampment, says they are calling for their universities to “divest from any companies that sell weapons or technology” to Israel.
They are also calling on their universities to drop all charges against students “who spoke up or students who are pro-Palestine”, Yasmine told Al Jazeera.
“Many of us are […] facing repression and charges and hearings from our universities for simply protesting,” she said.
Many of the protesters, she added, wear masks because of the “heavy targeting and the heavy doxing […] against us”.
Students do expect the police to intervene later today in a bid to break up the gathering, according to Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, DC.
A ceremony for seven aid workers of the World Central Kitchen killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza was held in Washington, AFP reports.
The founder of the US-based charity, Spanish-American chef Jose Andres, attended the interdenominational “celebration of life” at the National Cathedral in the US capital.
“They risked everything to feed people they did not know,” Andres said at the ceremony attended by Doug Emhoff, the husband of US Vice President Kamala Harris.
American cellist Yo-Yo Ma was expected to perform at the ceremony.
In a broken voice, Andres paid tribute to the seven volunteers — three Britons, a US-Canadian dual national, a Pole, an Australian and a Palestinian.
Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the Palestinian group’s political bureau, has reiterated that the group will not accept a truce deal without a permanent ceasefire and a complete halt of Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.
“We are leading serious talks and among our demands is a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza,” al-Hayya told Al Jazeera Arabic in a televised interview.
The Israeli military has said it was ready to go in Rafah whenever the cabinet sets a date, Al Jazeera reports.
It said it would first evacuate all the more than a million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah.
About 150,000 have already left, it said, adding that when they will get the order, the rest will be evacuated — but that will take several weeks.
Between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinians have crossed into Egypt from Gaza since the start of the war triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the Palestinian ambassador to Cairo said.
Ambassador Diab Allouh told AFP that they had made their way over the frontier, without specifying how.
The Rafah border crossing is the sole entry and exit point to Gaza not directly under the control of Israeli forces.
A senior advisor with Amnesty International Donatella Rovera has said that a lack of resources and continuous airstrikes in Gaza will hinder efforts to investigate human rights abuses.
“The expertise, the skills, the resources — such as the ability to carry out DNA tests — none of that is available [in Gaza], and to make matters worse, there is the constant bombardment,” Rovera told Al Jazeera.
“Where there is evidence of a crime committed yesterday may be destroyed by a bombardment committed today,” she said.
Furthermore, Rovera noted, human rights investigators have not been allowed inside Gaza for years.
“Something can be done immediately that is for the Israeli authority to allow independent investigators immediately, if they have nothing to hide they should have no reason in preventing them in getting into Gaza,” she added.
Palestinian Civil Defence member Mohammed al-Moghier says his team is ready to prepare an evidential report for an independent investigation into the mass graves discovered at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital.
“This can be the foundation for work to be conducted by an international investigation committee — we are ready to help their work in order to push the Israelis to refrain from committing crimes against people in Gaza,” al-Moghier told Al Jazeera.
The Nahal Brigade, one of the Israeli military’s key infantry units, has been withdrawn from Gaza to prepare for a looming Rafah invasion, Al Jazeera reports quoting The Times of Israel.
The brigade, which recently completed five operations in central Gaza, is now being given time to rest, train, and review plans for “future offensives”, reports The Times of Israel.
The leaders of the United States, Britain, France and more than a dozen other countries have called for Hamas to release the scores of hostages it is holding in a joint statement, AFP reports.
“We call for the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for over 200 days. They include our own citizens,” the leaders said.
“We emphasise that the deal on the table to release the hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza, that would facilitate a surge of additional necessary humanitarian assistance to be delivered throughout Gaza, and lead to the credible end of hostilities,” they said.
“We strongly support the ongoing mediation efforts in order to bring our people home.”
Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib has summoned Israel’s ambassador after an employee with the Belgian development agency Enabel and his son were killed in an Israeli strike on southern Gaza.
“Bombing civilian areas and populations is contrary to international law. I summon the ambassador of Israel to condemn this unacceptable act and demand an explanation,” Lahbib said on X.
