Tag: palestine

Israel declares 600,000 in Gaza City ‘military targets,’ cuts off lifeline from south

At least 600,000 Palestinians are currently under siege in Gaza City amid the Israeli army’s ongoing bombardment, encirclement, and expulsion campaign, the New Arab reported on 2 October. 

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that all Palestinians remaining in the city must abandon their homes, pass Israeli checkpoints, and move to tent encampments in the south, stressing that anyone who stays will be considered a “terrorist” or “terrorist supporter” and targeted by invading Israeli forces.

Now is the “last opportunity for Gaza residents” to move south, Katz said. 

Israeli forces have currently blocked all travel northward on the Rashid coastal road, cutting off the city’s last surviving lifeline for humanitarian aid and preventing Palestinians who had moved south temporarily in search of food and shelter from returning.

“The only safe road for bringing in food and medicine has been cut. Announcements and speeches mean nothing if aid cannot reach civilians,” stated Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson of the Gaza civil defense, in a press statement.

While the Israeli military expected a mass exodus to the south, between 600,000 and 700,000 Palestinians remain in Gaza City, the UN estimated.

Those remaining are either unwilling or unable to leave their homes.

“We are not leaving. Yesterday, a drone dropped grenades on the rooftop of our building, but we are not leaving,” said 24-year-old Hani while speaking to Reuters.

“We are afraid that if we leave, we will never see Gaza City again.”

The closure of Rashid Street to northward travel is part of an effort to cleanse the northern strip, according to Ramallah-based political analyst Hani al-Masri. 

“Turning the road into a one-way corridor south is a tool of collective pressure, a strategy to forcibly reshape Gaza’s population,” Masri told the New Arab.

Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud reported Thursday that the Israeli military was creating “mayhem and panic” by ordering people to leave their homes, but then pursuing them on the Rashid Road south with helicopters, drones, and tanks. 

“A big part of the reason that people are not now leaving Gaza City is because of the fear and the intimidation created by the Israeli military,” he said.

Al-Akhbar reported on Thursday that Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of strikes on Gaza City, including in the neighborhoods of Al-Nasr, Sheikh Radwan, and Al-Shati in the city’s northwest, as well as Al-Daraj, Al-Tuffah, and Al-Nafaq in the northeast, and Al-Sabra in the south.

Gaza’s Health Ministry continues to record an average of 100 Palestinians killed per day, Al-Akhbar added, not including the dozens missing whose bodies rescuers are not able to retrieve due to Israeli fire. 

One strike on Wednesday killed the son of Gaza’s civil defense commander and injured several other rescue officers.

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Israel’s Katz Says Civilians in Gaza City Have ‘Last Opportunity to Leave,’ Will Be Treated as ‘Terrorists’

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday issued a threat to Palestinian civilians in famine-stricken Gaza City, warning they have their “last opportunity” to leave the besieged city and that they will be treated as “terrorists” if they remain.

Katz said in a post on X that the IDF has almost encircled Gaza City. “This is the last opportunity for Gaza residents who wish to do so to move south and leave Hamas terrorists isolated in Gaza City itself, facing the IDF’s ongoing operations at full force,” he wrote.

“Those who remain in Gaza will be considered terrorists and terror supporters,” he added.

Israel’s goals for Gaza City involve cleansing it of its Palestinian population and razing every single building to the ground. The IDF has claimed that more than 780,000 civilians have fled, while other estimates put the number around 400,000. Either way, hundreds of thousands of civilians remain for several reasons, including the fact that many are too sick for another displacement.

Among the civilians remaining are the Christians based at the two churches in Gaza City: the Holy Family Catholic Church and the St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church. The clergy have stated they will not leave since they are assisting hundreds of displaced Palestinians sheltering at their facilities.

Palestinians in Gaza City also have reason to believe they will still be targeted in southern Gaza as the IDF continues to bomb the areas it’s telling them to flee to. On Tuesday, Israel bombed a tent in the al-Mawasi camp in the south, killing seven people, including four women and a child, who had fled Gaza City earlier this month.

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Israeli Knesset Advances Bill To Execute Palestinian Prisoners Who Killed Jews

In yet another development which will certainly complicate current Trump administration efforts to find peace in Gaza, the National Security Committee in the Israeli Knesset is advancing a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners detained for killing Israelis.

Killings which are deemed motivated by “racism or hostility to the public” or aimed at harming the “State of Israel” or seeking to thwart the “revival of the Jewish people” would be a capital offensive, according to the legislation. Interestingly, the wording highlights Jewish citizens of Israel are the priority – and not for example Christian, Muslim, or Druze citizens.

It has unleashed immediate controversy both within and outside of Israel. For starters, some Israeli officials as well as families of Oct.7 victims fear that this puts the remaining hostages in Gaza at immediate risk. Notably, the bill does not apply the opposite direction – that is, it would not apply to Israelis who kill Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s coordinator for negotiations on the captives, Gal Hirsch, has gone on record as vehemently opposing the bill.

“It’s not for nothing that we are asking not to hold this discussion. I completely disagree with your assessment of the situation, Minister [Itamar] Ben Gvir,” he said in a communication protesting the initiative. “Especially when we are engaged in a combined military and diplomatic effort to bring back the hostages, this discussion does not help us.”

An initial Sunday Knesset committee vote was 4-1 in favor, while more of rounds of votes needed for the bill to become law, according to protocol. 

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has been leading the charge, resisting calls to postpone the vote due to the precariousness of the hostage situation. 

One Palestinian rights group had this to say:

The Israeli bill was denounced by the Palestinian Commission for Detainees’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner Society as an “unprecedented savagery,” warning that it would entrench what they described as “systematic crimes” against detainees through legislation.

Increasingly, there have been shootings and terroristic attacks by Palestinians in places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, related to ongoing events in Gaza and the West Bank.

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Britain was wrong to let Jews settle in Palestine and is responsible for decades of ethnic violence including the Gaza war, Labour conference told

Britain should not have let Jews settle in Palestine and is responsible for decades of ethnic violence that followed in the Middle East, the Labour Party conference heard today. 

Dr Victor Kattan claimed that the current bloody conflict in Gaza was ‘made in Britain’ as he campaigned for the UK to apologise and make ‘reparations’ to Palestinian Arabs.

At a fringe event attended by left-wing Labour MPs and peers he said that the period of British rule between 1917 and 1948 before Israel was created had witnessed policies of ‘occupation, repression and partition’.

The Labour politicians, who include Jeremy Corbyn ally John McDonald, are supporting the campaign, ‘Britain owes Palestine’, which demands the UK take responsibility for ‘serial international law violations’ including alleged war crimes committed during what was known as the British Mandate.

It also criticises the UK for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which set out support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.

Dr Kattan told the event in Liverpool that British control of the Middle East ‘violated the legal standards of the time’, with policies that included ‘large-scale demographic engineering, involving the mass immigration of Jewish persons to Palestine, a country which, when Britain occupied it in 1917, was more than 93 per cent Palestinian Arab’.

He added: ‘When the British government, British armed forces left Palestine, the Jewish population constituted 33 per cent of the total population, having grown from less than 5 per cent of the population when Britain had arrived.

‘Throughout those years Britain denied self-government to the Arab majority, suppressed opposition to Zionism violently and then abandoned the country in the summer of 1948 leaving Palestine in a state of chaos and anarchy.’

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UN Declares Genocide in Gaza While 250 US Lawmakers Are in Israel 

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a report on September 16 that charged Israeli authorities and security forces with having committed, and continuing to commit, acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The 72-page report, replete with 495 footnotes, was compiled by senior independent rights investigators appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Specifically, the report concludes that Israel is responsible for committing four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely:

  • (i) killing members of the group;
  • (ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  • (iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
  • (iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

This report brings the UN into line with leading human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Oxfam, all of whom have explicitly labeled Israel’s crimes in Gaza genocidal. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) also recently passed a resolution stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

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When Palestinians Die in Israeli Captivity, US Media Almost Never Take Note

The different treatment accorded to the plights of Palestinian and Israeli prisoners by US corporate media illustrates a persistent double standard that treats some people as more human than others.

Take 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ahmed Saeed Tazaz’a, who died in Israel’s Megiddo Prison after nearly three months of illegal detention, according to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs (CDA), an agency of the Palestinian Authority (8/3/25).

Tazaz’a, who was from Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank, was imprisoned on May 6 of this year without a charge or a trial. He was held under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention,” which locks up Palestinians indefinitely “on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future,” according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Tazaz’a did not suffer from prior health problems before his arrest, according to his family (WAFA, 8/7/25).

There are currently some 3,613 Palestinians under administrative detention in Israeli prisons, according to the July 2025 CDA report, and more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli custody (not including those held in military camps) in total. Even Israel’s own military intelligence only identifies a quarter of its detainees from Gaza as “fighters,” while human rights groups and Israeli soldiers have reported even fewer—roughly 15%—as Hamas members (Guardian, 9/4/25).

The CDA reports that Tazaz’a was the 76th identified Palestinian to die in Israeli custody since October 7, 2023. 

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How Europe Lost Its Credibility in Gaza

Recently, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said that US support for “everything that the Israeli government is doing” limits the EU’s leverage to change the situation on the ground in the Gaza Strip.

Subsequently, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, proposed sanctions to Israeli ministers and partial suspension of Israel trade deal. On Wednesday, the EU Commission’s review discovered – after 21 months of mass atrocities in Gaza and violent pogroms in the West Bank – that actions taken by the Israeli government in the Palestinian-occupied territories represent a ‘breach of essential elements relating to respect for human rights and democratic principles,’ which permits the EU to suspend the agreement unilaterally.

Last weekend, these sentiments were reinforced with the recognition of the state of Palestine by U.S. allies – the UK, Canada and Australia – and others to follow soon.

Observers of Brussels declared that the EU had become tough on genocide. In reality, it was a last-minute effort by the two EU leaders to fuse rising outrage against EU’s Gaza policies and charges they were complicit in Israel’s atrocities.

How Kallas emboldened Israel in Gaza

Addressing the annual EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) conference in Brussels, Kajas said that US backing of Israel undermines EU leverage to stop the “Gaza war.” Yet, the United States has supported Israel for more than half a century.

US backing of Ukraine and Israel, division on Gaza

“We are struggling because 27 member states have different positions,” on the issue, Kallas explained. “Europe can only use full force when it acts together.” In this way, accessorial complicity is first deflected to Washington and then attributed to the absence of European unity, which Kallas has long called for, to confront Russia. In other words, the EU Gaza apology was a thinly-veiled effort for a plea to unity Kallas hoped to turn against Russia in Ukraine.

When asked about “double-standard” accusations towards the bloc on its Gaza policy, Kallas said it is not true that the EU is inactive on Gaza. Yet, previously she had opposed intervention in Gaza. In mid-July, Kallas and the foreign ministers of the EU member states chose not to take any action against Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza war and settler violence in the West Bank.

The then-proposed sanctions against Israel would have included suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement, suspending visa-free travel, and blocking imports from Israeli settlements. This decision emboldened the Netanyahu cabinet, which saw the EU’s decision not to impose sanctions on Israel as a diplomatic victory. It also led UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese to conclude that EU officials like Kallas were complicit in Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner, accounting for a third of Israel’s total trade in goods with the world in 2024, whereas Israel is only the EU’s 31st largest trading partner. Consequently, the EU could easily have sanctioned Israeli trade right after the first genocidal atrocities in late 2023, yet it chose not to. Why?

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US Plan Would Tap Tony Blair As Postwar Gaza Leader

In one of the most absurd and comical headlines of the year, The Wall Street Journal on Friday says it knows who will be tapped to oversee Gaza once the Israel-Hamas war is over: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

That’s according to a controversial White House plan now being proposed to Arab and Israeli leaders. The 72-year old is being presented as a peace-maker, despite his record of being George W. Bush’s biggest allied supporter in the disastrous, blood-soaked invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. 

“As Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair helped negotiate a landmark peace agreement to end three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland,” WSJ writes, apparently without intending irony. “Now, President Trump might want him for an even more difficult job: Helping Gaza get back on its feet once the conflict ends.”

The plan calls for a Gaza International Transition Authority (GITA) – which sounds a bit like the Bush-era’s Coalition Provisional Coalition (CPA) which oversaw nation-building in Iraq. And so it seems Blair will be the Paul Bremer for the Gaza Strip, according to the plan.

The idea is that this would be a UN-overseen initiative. “The United Nations-backed body would control the enclave for at least several years, staffed in part by Palestinian technocrats and supported by an Arab-led international peacekeeping force, until it could hand over full control to the Palestinians, officials say,” WSJ continues.

However, US admin officials have said Blair is but one of several officials under consideration for heading up the GITA mission. The plan would have to gain the cooperation and backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and presumably whatever Palestinian officials remain in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.

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Western news agencies demand Israel grant international journalists access to Gaza

The world’s most prominent news agencies released a short film and a joint statement on 25 September calling on Israel to allow international journalists into Gaza to report on the horrors of the ongoing war.

The video, produced on behalf of the BBC, Reuters, AP, and AFP, features iconic photos and clips of news reports from previous wars over the past century alongside the message that “history is told by those who report it.”

“The world ignored Rwanda until reporters revealed thousands a day were being massacred; the report of a child’s body washed up on a beach revealed the stark reality of the Syrian refugee crisis; in Ukraine, journalists from around the world risk their lives every day to report the suffering of the people,” BBC journalist David Dimbleby narrates.

“But when it comes to Gaza, the job of reporting falls solely to Palestinian journalists who are paying a terrible cost, leaving fewer to bear witness,” Dimbleby states as photos of the devastation from Gaza are shown.

“The Israeli government will not allow international reporters into Gaza to do their work and to document freely what they see. International journalists must now be allowed into Gaza to share the work with Palestinian reporters there so we can all bring the facts to the world,” he concludes.

Since Israel began its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, it has blocked access for foreign news correspondents unless they are embedded with the Israeli army. Their reports are then reviewed and approved by Israel’s military censor before publication.

In perhaps the only exception, CNN journalist Clarissa Ward briefly entered Gaza via Rafah in a convoy of UAE medical volunteers in December 2023.

As foreign news agencies relied on local journalists to produce reports on the ground, the Israeli military has mercilessly targeted them for assassination.

According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), at least 210 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza since the war began nearly 23 months ago.

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Microsoft reduces Israel’s access to cloud and AI products over reports of mass surveillance in Gaza

Microsoft said Thursday it had disabled services to a unit within the Israeli military after a company review had determined its artificial intelligence and cloud computing products were being used to help carry out mass surveillance of Palestinians.

The action comes after The Associated Press and The Guardian published reports earlier this year revealing how the Israeli Ministry of Defense had been using Microsoft’s Azure platform to aid in the war in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, wrote in a blog post that the company was taking steps to enforce compliance with its terms of service.

An AP investigation in February showed that the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft products skyrocketed after a deadly surprise attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023. The AP’s report cited internal Microsoft data showing the Israelis were using gigabytes of cloud storage and massive amounts of AI-enabled language translation services.

The AP also reported that Israel’s military used Microsoft Azure to compile information gathered through mass surveillance, which it transcribes and translates, including phone calls and text messages. That intelligence is then cross-checked with Israel’s in-house AI systems for targeting airstrikes.

AP reported that internal Microsoft data showed multiple Azure subscriptions were tied to Unit 8200, an elite cyber warfare unit within the Israeli Army responsible for clandestine operations, collecting signal intelligence and surveillance.

Following AP’s report, Microsoft acknowledged in May that it had sold advanced AI and cloud computing services to the Israeli military during the Gaza war and aided in efforts to locate and rescue Israeli hostages. But the company said an internal review found “no evidence” its Azure platform was used to target or harm people.

The Guardian, working in partnership with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, reported in August that the commander of Unit 8200 had met directly with Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella in 2021. The Israeli unit then used Microsoft products to aid in the development of an AI-powered mass surveillance system that was sweeping up, translating and analyzing millions of telephone calls per day made by Palestinian civilians. The report also revealed that data from the Israeli surveillance system was being stored at Microsoft cloud data centers in Europe.

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