Flotillas carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza began in 2008, two years after Israel imposed a blockade on the Strip. Two boats succeeded, despite Israeli attempts to stop them. Since then, Israeli forces have forced several flotillas to turn back, and detained hundreds of activists, sometimes violently and in international waters.
The killing of Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the recently appointed head of Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, has dealt a symbolic blow to the Palestinian group in Gaza, but the impact on its military operations is far from certain. Al-Haddad was killed on Friday in a sophisticated dual-strike on a residential apartment in Gaza City's Remal neighbourhood and a vehicle attempting to flee the scene. The delivery of heavy munitions into a densely populated area, packed with displaced civilians, killed seven other Palestinians, including women and children, and wounded 50 people.
At the bottom of a steep and densely populated valley just below Jerusalem's old city walls, the earth has been shaken in recent weeks by jackhammers and bulldozers. These have been the sounds of Jerusalem for decades as the Israeli state has relentlessly sought to stamp a uniformly Jewish identity on to the occupied east of the city, while erasing its Palestinian character. Typically it is workers for the state and municipality at the wheel of the bulldozers, but in the al-Bustan neighbourhood, in the shadow of the 11th-century al-Aqsa mosque, the clamour is from a more recent development. It is the sound of Palestinians demolishing their own family homes.
Fresh off the seventh forced displacement of his central West Bank Bedouin community since 1948, Abu Najjeh was not in a contemplative mood leading up to Nakba Day. He said he was in a rush, too busy reacting to the crises of the day the continuing third Nakba, as he called it. This is not a proper place to live that's why I'm in a hurry waiting for a car to take me, said Abu Najjeh, the mukhtar, or leader, of the former Bedouin community of Ein Samiya, speaking from a recently erected tent in the outskirts of Rammun before rushing to find his sons amid unfolding violence in Jiljilyya.
When European Jewish settlers embarked on brutal ethnic cleansing to establish Israel in 1948, they thought the Palestinian population would be the least of their problems. In fact, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion believed that the refugee problem would resolve itself. There was deep-seated conviction among Zionists that the Palestinians lacked an identity, and they would just flee to neighbouring Arab countries and assimilate. They would not come back to claim their stolen land.
Since October 2023, a good third of them have focused on Israel's genocide against Palestinians. Many were to be displayed in a May iteration of his show, Drawings Against Genocide, at a London gallery this month. However, the show was abruptly cancelled following an intervention by a group called the UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), which claimed the images were anti-Semitic. The exhibit, which debuted under its current title in Margate earlier this year at Joseph Wales Studios, is comprised of 130 drawings that depict violence against Palestinians, with various blood-bathed military, political, and business leaders.
Shireen's killing was meant to scare Palestinians into silence. Instead, it has inspired many young Palestinians to speak up. I can't remember a time in my childhood when I didn't hear Shireen Abu Akleh's voice. She was one of the few constants in our ever-shifting landscape, an icon that anchored the Palestinian cause firmly in the Arab conscience.
Surveillance footage from the scene shows a man rushing towards the nun, who was dressed in a white habit and black veil, and violently pushing her to the ground where she comes close to hitting her head on a stone block. The man leaves the scene only to return and kick the nun before a passerby intervenes.
The Israeli military confirmed the authenticity of the image that was widely shared online, garnering more than 5 million views on X. An investigation had been opened and appropriate measures will be taken against those involved.
On March 1, Israel closed Gaza's Rafah border crossing with Egypt. The Israeli military's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said the move was a part of several necessary security adjustments that have been implemented in the region due to the war with Iran. The Rafah crossing is considered vital for the delivery of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of critically ill patients from Gaza.
Rafah is the only crossing that connects Gaza to the outside world without passing through Israel, and it has been a vital passage for the delivery of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of patients and the wounded.
This has now become a consistent pattern in which Americans are being killed in the West Bank by settlers or the [Israel Defense Forces (IDF)] without justice or accountability, despite promises from US officials, the lawmakers wrote in the Wednesday letter, which was shared exclusively with the Guardian.
While the world's attention is on the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, the Israeli military has placed the West Bank under a functional lockdown. Checkpoints in and out of most major cities are closed, and Palestinians have been left to look for other travel arrangements. Some residents who spoke with Truthout said they traveled for hours through village back roads in an attempt to reach their destinations.
Of the approximately 5,000 houses built in the International Style in Tel Aviv, most are privately owned and 'the owners do not want to invest in restoration at the moment.' The most significant damaged building was the 'Froma Gurvitz' house, built in 1937 by the architectural firm Zabrodsky and Blacks, which had an additional floor and a half constructed on the roof.
An Arab human rights non-governmental organisation (NGO) has filed a request for United Kingdom sanctions to be lodged against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over incitement to violence and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. British law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn filed the request on Tuesday with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on behalf of the Arab Organisation for Human Rights UK (AOHR UK), seeking targeted financial and travel sanctions against the Israeli leader.
On the shores of the Dead Sea, about 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women had gathered, holding hands and calling for an end to what they called a vicious cycle of bloodshed. It was an October evening in 2023 and they had travelled from villages, settlements and refugee camps around the region for a mass peace rally jointly organised by the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian group Women of the Sun.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
The topics covered are broad and diverse, but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, in addition to touting their own role in negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages, the Qataris made space for a wide range of strongly critical voices of Israel: former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (whose position is that Israel should simply disappear), the American scholars and think tankers Rob Malley and Trita Parsi, Tucker Carlson, numerous distinguished Palestinians.
The political fate of Palestinians is bound to the personal fate of Marwan Barghouti. After more than two decades in an Israeli jail for murder, the charismatic 66-year-old is by far the most popular Palestinian leader, widely regarded as the only figure capable of uniting factions riven by ideology and enmity. Though a member of Fatah, Mr Barghouti has criticised abuses by the Palestinian Authority and has won respect within Hamas ranks.
Israeli security forces killed two Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, reportedly after they had surrendered. The Palestinian Authority said the two men aged 26 and 37 were killed in "the brutal field execution carried out by the Israeli occupation army" and condemned the incident as a "war crime." Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said he "fully supports" the Israeli troops who shot two "wanted terrorists."
You have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza, and this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they're hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they're just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.
