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
Students at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) are conducting a sit-in to protest the Israeli military offensive in Gaza.
“One thing to know is our school is a leading school when it comes to political sciences, when it comes to international relations and international law, so it is important for us, regarding what is happening right now in Palestine, to speak up,” Sophie, a spokesperson for the students, told Al Jazeera.
She added that they are calling for a town hall, for Sciences Po to cut ties with Israeli universities and for all investigations into pro-Palestinian students to be cancelled.
“We feel silenced because we are not heard by the administration. We have been demanding what I’m telling you since October now. Plus we have been under several threats every time we were organising events,” she said.
Gabriel Romanelli, the sole Catholic parish priest in Gaza, has said 33 Palestinian Christians have died during Israel’s military offensive in the area, Al Jazeera reports.
Twenty were killed by Israeli military attacks and 13 lost their lives due to insufficient medical care and other reasons, the report added.
Their deaths mean Gaza’s small Christian population, believed to number about 1,000 people, has shrunk by more than 3 per cent, the priest told Sky News during a visit to Glasgow.
“Our church will always be an oasis for people. Unfortunately, this oasis has become a shelter, a hospital and a cemetery,” Romanelli said.
Several Israeli media outlets, citing unnamed officials, have said that the war cabinet discussed a new plan for a Gaza truce and hostage release, ahead of an Egyptian delegation’s visit, AFP reports.
Aid groups warn any Rafah invasion would add to already catastrophic conditions in Gaza where, according to the World Food Programme, famine is “a real and dangerous threat”.
Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told AFP that Israel “will not achieve what it wants” in Rafah.
After nearly seven months of war Israel had not achieved its goals, “whether eliminating Hamas or returning the captives”, he said.
Hamad warned that an invasion “will undoubtedly threaten the negotiations” and show “that Israel is interested in continuing the war”. The official spoke by phone from Qatar where a number of senior figures from Hamas’s political bureau are based.
A delegation from mediator Egypt is travelling to Israel today, a source close to the Israeli government told AFP, in what local media said is a bid to reignite stalled hostage-release negotiations.
The source told AFP that Egypt’s delegation was travelling to Israel “for security coordination”.
The effort comes alongside preparations for a military push against Hamas in southern Gaza’s Rafah, and with spillover from the Gaza conflict leading to stepped-up exchanges of fire over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
Israel’s army on Friday said missile fire near that border killed an Israeli civilian.
A Hamas official told AFP that any push into Rafah, where much of Gaza’s population is sheltering, would threaten negotiations.
The US Central Command has said that its forces “successfully engaged and destroyed” two drones in a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen a day ago, Al Jazeera reports.
The US strike occurred hours after a missile was launched from the area in Yemen towards the Gulf of Aden, near where US coalition ships are stationed. The missile fire caused no casualties, Centcom said.
The European Union has announced it is giving an extra €68 million ($73m) to provide desperately needed aid to Palestinians in Gaza, AFP reports.
“In light of the continued deterioration of the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the steady rise of needs on the ground, the (European) Commission is stepping up its funding to support Palestinians affected by the ongoing war,” an EU statement said.
“This support brings total EU humanitarian assistance to €193m for Palestinians in need inside Gaza and across the region in 2024.”
The EU said the new aid would focus on food deliveries, clean water, sanitation and shelters, and would be channelled through local partners on the ground.
The health ministry in Gaza has said at least 34,356 people have been killed in the territory during more than six months of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, AFP reports.
The tally includes at least 51 deaths in the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 77,368 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since fighting between Israel and Hamas began.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that pro-Palestinian campus protests sweeping the US are a part of democracy, AFP reports.
“It’s a hallmark of our democracy that our citizens make known their views, their concerns, their anger, at any given time,” Blinken told reporters in China, which tightly controls protests, adding: “I think that reflects the strength of the country.”
A baby girl who was delivered from her dying mother’s womb in a Gaza hospital following an Israeli airstrike has herself died after several days, Reuters reports.
The baby had been named Rouh (Soul). Her mother, Sabreen Al-Sakani, was seriously injured when an Israeli strike hit the family home in Rafah, the southernmost city in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Sabreen, who was 30 weeks pregnant, was rushed to the Emirati hospital in Rafah. She succumbed to her wounds but doctors were able to save the baby, delivering her by Caesarean section.
However, the baby suffered respiratory problems and a weak immune system, said Doctor Mohammad Salama, head of the emergency neo-natal unit at Emirati Hospital, who had been caring for Rouh.
Pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom have announced that they have taken over the piazza and formed an encampment, Al Jazeera reports.
“As the University of Warwick continues to reject our demands to cut ties with genocide, we rise up in unison with fellow students all over the world, from Columbia, NYC, to Paris, to Sydney. We say no business as usual as long as Warwick sponsors colonial genocide,” the group Warwick Stands for Palestine wrote on X.
UNRWA says that the healthcare provided by its team in Gaza is critical for saving lives in the Palestinian enclave.
“More children and families rely on our support. Safe and unimpeded access across #GazaStrip can’t wait any longer,” it said in a post on X.
The Israeli army has said that a civilian was killed near the country’s northern border with Lebanon, as near-daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah rage, AFP reports.
“Overnight, terrorists fired anti-tank missiles toward the area of Har Dov in northern Israel,” the Israeli army said, referring to the disputed Shebaa Farms district.
“As a result, an Israeli civilian doing infrastructure work was injured and he was later pronounced dead.”
Israeli media reported that the victim was an Arab-Israeli truck driver.
Police told AFP they had not identified the body, but said it was the only one found after a truck was hit.
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.
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 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.
