Tag: palestine

Israeli Soldiers Ordered to Fire on Aid-Seekers in Gaza

Israeli soldiers speaking with Haaretz say they received orders to fire on desperate Palestinians attempting to reach aid distribution sites in Gaza. Over 550 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid in the past month. 

“Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites,” the outlet explains. Conversations with officers and soldiers reveal that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat.”

Earlier this week, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that 549 Palestinians have been killed and over 4,000 injured since Israel restarted aid distribution near the end of May. The IDF has even fired on Palestinians waiting to receive aid with drones and tanks. 

One soldier explained to Haaretz, “It’s a killing field.” They added that the Israeli soldiers fired at the Palestinians even though the aid seekers did not present a threat. An officer told the outlet, “It’s neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach, or fail to reach, a [humanitarian zone] under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells.”

A doctor in Gaza speaking to NBC News about the aid sites in Gaza said, “It’s a death trap, it’s a slaughterhouse.” They report receiving dozens of patients daily who were wounded near the aid sites. 

Haaretz reports that Israeli forces opened fire at Palestinians near aid sites at least 19 times over the past month. Soldiers said some Palestinian militias backed by Tel Aviv have also fired on civilians, including the ISIS-linked Abu Shabab. 

On Thursday, at least 18 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli air strike while attempting to receive aid that the Gaza police had recovered from looters. 

At the beginning of March, Tel Aviv broke a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal with Hamas by cutting off all aid entering the Strip. Near the end of May, Israel began allowing the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to distribute a limited amount of aid in Gaza. 

Human rights groups warned that the GHF’s distribution plan would be insufficient. Over the past week, children have died of deprivation. On Thursday, two infants at the Al-Nassar Hospital in Khan Younis died due to a lack of formula. 

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Canadian PM Carney Calls for ‘Zionist Palestinian State’

In an interview Wednesday Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada would only accept a “Zionist Palestinian state”. Two week earlier foreign affairs minister Anita Anand described Canada’s “unwavering support for Israel’s security” and next week an RCMP commissioner is set to speak at an event to assuage the concerns of Canadians who’ve fought in Gaza that they may be investigated under Canada’s war crimes legislation.

Canadian policy towards Israel is unique. No other faraway state has received a constant flow of Canadians joining its military. No other wealthy faraway country receives a remotely comparable amount of registered charity funds. No other state has a publicly financed special envoy to deflect criticism of its colonial violence or gets Ottawa to send letters threatening the International Criminal Court on its behalf. Nor is there another country in which the government sues to block proper labels on its wines or the Canadian embassy hosts parties for Canadians fighting in its military or the foreign minister says Canada would act as an “asset” for it on the UN Security Council.

I’ve written extensively about Canadian governments’ violating international law while professing its importance. In the case of Israel, the duplicity is even more glaring. Our governments have repeatedly failed to uphold Canadian law. The Minister of Justice, Global Affairs, RCMP and other government agencies have ignored their legal responsibilities regarding a genocidal apartheid state.

Issuing arms permits to Israel contravenes Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act yet Ottawa refuses to stop the flow of arms. According to the federal government, “Under the Export and Import Permits Act (EIPA), the Minister of Foreign Affairs must deny exports and brokering permit applications for military goods and technology if there is a substantial risk that the items would undermine peace and security, or could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws.”

By any credible account, the Israeli military has long committed “serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws.” Israel has launched a series of deadly wars on the besieged population of Gaza (2008, 2014, 2021). It’s also killed over a thousand in the West Bank and beginning in 2013 Israeli forces began bombing Syria on a near weekly basis.

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IDF Chief Says ‘Campaign Against Iran Not Over’ But Focus Will Shift to Gaza for Now

Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, said on Tuesday that while a “chapter” in the conflict with Iran is over, Israel’s “campaign” against the country is not and that for now, the IDF will focus on the destruction of Gaza.

“We have concluded a significant chapter, but the campaign against Iran is not over. We are entering a new phase, one that builds upon the achievements of the current operation,” Zamir said after a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran began to hold.

“Now, the focus returns to Gaza, to bringing the hostages home and toppling Hamas rule,” Zamir added. During the 12 days of Israeli attacks on Iran, the Israeli military continued its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, killing dozens of Palestinians each day.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also said that Israel will now turn all of its “strength” on Gaza. “Now [we turn] with all our strength to Gaza, to complete the task: to destroy Hamas and return our hostages and to ensure, with God’s help, many years of security and growth from strength for the people of Israel,” he said.

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HARVARD REPORT: The Hidden Numbers Behind Gaza’s Real Death Toll

A recent report prepared by Garb Yaakov, a Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and published on The President & Fellows of Harvard College Dataverse website, has substantiated what critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza have long asserted, regarding the actual number of individuals killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip. The report suggests that the real number significantly surpasses the officially reported death toll, as victims who are buried under debris or dismembered are not included in mainstream reports.

Yaakov Garb’s report [Garb, Yaakov, 2025, “The Israeli/American/GHF ‘aid distribution’ compounds in Gaza: Dataset and initial analysis of location, context, and internal structure”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QB75LB. Harvard Dataverse] has analysed the Israeli military’s own data and combined these with careful spatial mapping to reveal a “demographic horror story”. The report presents maps, locational data, and an initial concise analysis of the Israeli/American/GHF aid distribution facilities that were swiftly constructed and commenced operations in Gaza in May 2025. The overall geographic relationship of these facilities to the Gazan population and the infrastructures of Israeli military control over Gaza, along with their consistent internal design, indicates that their architecture is primarily tailored to align with Israeli military strategies and tactics, rather than being focused on a comprehensive humanitarian relief effort. The reports unequivocally demonstrate that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) compounds are strategically placed and built to be inaccessible to most, particularly to the one million residents of Gaza City, cut off by the Netzarim corridor. The current system fails to support the 1.85 million accounted for, let alone the 377,000 missing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

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Israeli Forces Kill 59 Palestinians in Gaza Aid Massacre

Israeli tank fire killed at least 59 Palestinians in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, as they were trying to get food from aid trucks, Reuters reported on Tuesday, marking the deadliest aid massacre since the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operating in Gaza at the end of May.

While many Palestinians have been killed near GHF sites, the massacre in Khan Younis did not appear to be related to the GHF, as the crowd that was fired on was waiting for aid trucks to pass through, according to witnesses speaking to Reuters.

Medics said another 221 people were injured in the massacre, and Gaza’s Health Ministry published photos of victims being treated at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Footage from social media shows dozens of bodies strewn along a street in Khan Younis.

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Leftist Protesters Attempting “Global March To Gaza” Get Beaten And Arrested In Egypt

There is perhaps no group more tiresome and naive than western progressives; constantly seeking to socially engineer not just their own nations, but nations on the other side of the world.  If they can’t do it through the monetary manipulation of subversive bureaucratic institutions like USAID, then they will try to do it directly with protests, marches and mobs.  The problem is, no one likes them and no one wants them around.  The tolerance they enjoy in Europe and the US does not exist in other countries and they don’t seem to get it.

Just as leftists ignorantly demand multiculturalism without understanding the inevitable and violent consequences of inviting the third world into the west, they also tend to invite themselves overseas into the backyards of civilizations that despise everything the political left supposedly stands for.

Thousands of activists, primarily from western countries, have descended on Egypt this week for a “Global March to Gaza,” a movement aiming to break the Israeli blockade that they argue has pushed the region to the brink of famine.  Some 4,000 volunteers from over 80 countries joined the protest, according to organizers.  This number is unconfirmed and footage of arriving protesters shows much smaller groups.

They planned to land in Cairo, take buses to the city of Arish in northern Sinai, and then march around 30 miles through the desert peninsula to the Egyptian side of the Gaza border at Rafah. Organizers said the activists would sleep in tents along the route and expected to arrive at the border on Friday.

The idea was clearly ill conceived from the beginning, with protesters believing they have the ability to march 30 miles across the Egyptian desert towards a war zone without interference, but the group never actually made it beyond Cairo.  Egyptian authorities detained at least 200 pro-Palestinian activists in Cairo on Thursday (with more reportedly being held).  Among the detainees were people from Australia, France, Morocco, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.

Footage shows activists being beaten by an angry mob of Egyptians (possibly security forces) after they attempted a sit down protest and locked arms.

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GOP Rep Introduces Resolution Labeling ‘Free Palestine’ Slogan as ‘Anti-Semitism’

The resolution is non-binding but seeks to exploit the recent violence in Boulder, CO for political purposes

Colorado GOP Congressman Gabe Evans introduced a non-binding resolution on Friday that labels ‘Free Palestine’ as “an antisemitic slogan.” The bill seeks to limit immigration of people who oppose Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv’s genocidal onslaught in the besieged Gaza Strip. The bill is expected to be voted on some time next week.

The bill reads, “Whereas, while shouting ‘Free Palestine,’ an antisemitic slogan that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and Jewish people, Mohammed Sabry Soliman attacked the peaceful demonstrators with homemade Molotov cocktails.”

The term “Free Palestine” refers to the desire to end the nearly 60 -years-long brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, illegal per international law. It also implies support for ending Israel’s apartheid regime, replacing it with either a two-state solution or a single state with equal rights, including the right to vote, for all citizens currently living under the rule of the Israeli government.

The introduction of the bill follows a terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado by 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national who was living in the United States on an expired nonimmigrant visa. He had applied for asylum subsequent to his visa’s expiration. Over a dozen people were injured after the assailant threw Molotov cocktails at attendees at a small pro-Israel demonstration.

The attendees were calling for the release of the hostages taken during the October 7th Hamas attack in southern Israel. Hamas has repeatedly offered to release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza including the end to the blockade on the Strip which has pushed the population closer to full-scale famine amidst constant bombardment. Both Tel Aviv and Washington strongly oppose a ceasefire despite the fact that it is the only way to secure the hostages’ release and safety. Top Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are committed to continuing the war and finishing its ethnic cleansing campaign.

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Gaza now in “stage of mass death”

Israeli forces carried out massacres across the Gaza Strip this week, killing 497 Palestinians and wounding nearly 2,100 between 5 June and 11 June, targeting Palestinian men, women and children in residential buildings, school shelters, tent shelters, and at so-called aid distribution points.

Israel killed at least 123 Palestinians between Tuesday and Wednesday alone, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.

Nearly half of those deaths recorded in those 24 hours were people killed while trying to retrieve meager parcels of aid at the US-Israeli distribution points.

Since the shadowy, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began its operations two weeks ago, the health ministry says that more than 220 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,800 injured while trying to obtain food.

The Red Cross Field Hospital in Rafah has had to activate its mass casualty incident procedure 12 times since the aid scheme began, receiving high numbers of patients with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, reporting that an “overwhelming majority of patients from the recent incidents said they had been trying to reach assistance distribution sites.”

On 5 June, Doctors Without Borders said that physicians began donating their own blood to save their patients after scores of Palestinians were gunned down trying to get food aid.

In northern Gaza, Israel relentlessly pounded areas of Jabaliya and Gaza City this week.

On Saturday, 7 June, 30 people were reported killed in an airstrike on a residential building in Gaza City, according to the Palestinian civil defense, while four new displacement orders were issued for areas in northern Gaza.

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Gaza Tribunal in Sarajevo Documents How Genocide Has Eroded International Law

Dozens of lawyers, academics, human rights advocates, and journalists from Palestine, Israel, and global civil society issued a call to conscience on May 29 from a gathering in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dubbed the Sarajevo Declaration, the 2,000-word document was the culmination of the three-day preliminary hearing of the Gaza Tribunal, a newly formed people’s justice initiative aiming to voice “collective moral outrage” over what it described as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the decades of impunity for atrocities leading to it.

Throughout three eight-hour days, the tribunal heard 45 back-to-back testimonies of research and analysis on the conditions of life and death in Gaza and across the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The entries — about obliteration of cultural heritage, violations of reproductive and disability rights, the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism, capital accumulation on Gaza’s rubble and in the West Bank, and otherwise — made a case beyond the charge of genocide, which members of the tribunal and a growing proportion of the global human rights community view as fact. Unbound by formal procedure and jurisdiction, tribunal members also brought in analysis of the context predating October 7, 2023. All together, they built an argument that the present stage of genocide in Palestine is the logical end point of a Zionism’s project of domination initiated before 1948 — and that the exceptions that have allowed it have also undermined international law, global cooperation and the United Nations system for all.

Israel and those enabling its actions “want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law,” said Raji Sourani, a Palestinian attorney from Gaza and founder and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City, in his address at the close of the tribunal’s first day. “Not for Gazans, not for Palestinians, but for the whole world.”

The semi-closed session on the hushed campus of the International University of Sarajevo was the Gaza Tribunal’s first meeting, with the final verdict planned for a last session in October. The proceedings — in their quasi-academic format of panels, PowerPoints, and papers — were both desperate in their desire to impede atrocities and self-conscious of the impossibility to meet the present horror: Israel’s military has intensified its aerial bombardment and blockade of Gaza, in addition to opening fire on people queued for food, leading to some of the deadliest days since Israel broke the last ceasefire in March.

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Israel confirms it is arming Hamas rivals in operation opposition calls ‘complete madness’

Israel is arming local militias in Gaza in an effort to counter Hamas in the besieged enclave, officials say, as opposition politicians warned that the move endangers national security.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the covert enterprise on Thursday, calling it “a good thing.” In a video posted on social media, Netanyahu said Israel had “activated clans in Gaza which oppose Hamas,” and that it was done “under the advice of security elements.”

Former defense minister and Netanyahu rival Avigdor Liberman divulged the move on Israel’s Ch. 12 News on Wednesday, saying that Israel was distributing rifles to extremist groups in Gaza and describing the operation as “complete madness.”

“We’re talking about the equivalent of ISIS in Gaza,” Liberman said one day later on Israel’s Army Radio, adding that Israel is providing weapons to “crime families in Gaza on Netanyahu’s orders.”

“No one can guarantee that these weapons will not be directed towards Israel,” he said, a warning echoed by one of the officials who spoke with CNN. After Liberman’s revelation, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement saying, “Israel is acting to defeat Hamas in various ways upon the recommendation of the heads of the security establishment.”

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