Compilation of news reports – IAK staff
A five-year-old Palestinian girl was killed Monday near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza when Israeli forces struck an animal-drawn cart that was among the crowd of Palestinians returning to northern Gaza. The Israeli military claimed its aircraft fired on a group of Palestinians that “posed a threat” to IDF troops.
The Gaza Government Media Office has said that more than 300,000 people have returned to northern Gaza since Monday morning.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said teams retrieved 10 decomposed bodies Monday from various locations along Gaza’s Rashid Street.
Masses of Palestinians return to north Gaza after one year of displacement
Tens of thousands of Palestinians began returning to the northern Gaza Strip via the Netzarim corridor on 27 January after over a year of displacement and a genocidal Israeli war.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are expected to return for the first time since being displaced at the start of the war in October 2023 and in the months that followed.
“The scenes of the return of the masses of our people to the areas from which they were forced to flee, despite their destroyed homes, confirm the greatness of our people and their steadfastness in their land, despite the depth of the pain and tragedy,” Hamas said in a statement.
Member of the Hamas political bureau Ezzat al-Rishq said the return of Palestinians to their homes “shatters all the dreams and illusions of the occupation in displacing [the Palestinian] people.”
About the massive northward movement of Palestinians, said Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit Party, said, “This is not what ‘total victory’ looks like – this is what total surrender looks like,” adding, “we must return to war — and destroy!”
Al Jazeera journalist Tamer Almisshal said of the day: “It’s a significant and historic moment for the Palestinians because it’s the first time since 1948 those who have been forced out of their homes and land managed to get back – despite the destruction and despite the genocide.”
North Gaza needs at least 120,000 tents to accommodate returnees
An official from the Gaza Government Media Office told Al Jazeera that at least 120,000 tents are needed to shelter those displaced people who returned to destroyed homes.
Officials have set up 33 camps to accommodate the displaced, prepared about 50 shelters, and dug wells.
More than 350 UNICEF aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip
UNICEF has accelerated the distribution of supplies and services to children in the Gaza Strip, with more than 350 trucks entering in the first week of the long-awaited ceasefire.
The trucks, filled with water, hygiene kits, malnutrition treatments, warm clothes, tarpaulins and other critical humanitarian aid, have been entering from crossing points at both the north and south of the Gaza Strip and being distributed with partners to families in need.
West Bank: Israel continues offensive in Jenin for 7th day
Israeli Forces Assassinate Two Palestinians, Injure Six, in Tulkarem
West Bank: Israel to demolish entire village east of Bethlehem in latest land grab
On January 26, Israeli authorities notified the residents of al-Numan village, located east of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, of plans to demolish all homes and displace dozens of Palestinian families in order to annex their land to the boundaries of occupied Jerusalem, according to Hassan Breijieh, director of the Wall and Settlement Affairs Commission Office in Bethlehem.
“The demolition orders were issued under the pretext of lacking building permits, despite the village being established before 1948, with the last house built in 1993,” Jamal al-Daraawi, head of the al-Numan village council, said to reporters.
Daraawi highlighted that the Palestinian village, which covers an area of 1.5 square kilometers, is home to 150 residents who live in houses made of old stone and built before the Nakba of 1948.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israel demolished 1,058 Palestinian structures in Area C of the occupied West Bank throughout 2024.
NOTE: Israel admits that its construction permit system is highly discriminatory. Between 2016 and 2020, 99.1 percent of Palestinian requests for building permits were rejected, according to data provided by the IDF’s Civil Administration.
RELATED: Israel has turbocharged West Bank housing demolitions under the cover of war
West Bank: In shades of Gaza, Israeli soldiers film themselves in Palestinian women’s lingerie
RELATED: In shades of Gaza, Palestinian medics in the West Bank have become Israel’s targets
Israeli soldiers parade Palestinian women’s lingerie
Footage circulating on social media shows Israeli occupation soldiers parading around in a Palestinian woman’s lingerie during a raid in Bethlehem, the occupied West Bank. During Israel’s 15-month genocide in the besieged Gaza… pic.twitter.com/fAS5JcbnyG
— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) January 27, 2025
‘A moral wreckage that we need to face’: Peter Beinart on being Jewish after Gaza’s destruction (excerpt)
Interviewer: Over the years, you’ve shown a willingness to change your mind and to do it publicly. Not a lot of people are willing to publicly admit they were wrong. Why do you think that is?
Peter Beinart: My learning process has been slow partly because of fear. I think perhaps that I was too comfortable living in an environment where I was not really exposed to many things, a relatively privileged and cloistered existence.
But I’ve also always been afraid of what the consequences would be, career-wise and interpersonally, if I became too radically out of step with people around me. It’s still something I worry about all the time.
For me, there was a process of unpeeling, like an onion, that began when I first went to the West Bank more than 20 years ago. It’s one thing to know in an abstract way that it’s not great for Israel to be occupying people…but there was always a notion of wanting to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. But the more one looked, the more that was just unsustainable.
I was also forced to confront the degree to which I had dehumanized Palestinians…I realized that I wasn’t engaging with Palestinians as human beings.
What Israel has done in Gaza is the most profound desecration of the central idea of the absolute and infinite worth of every human being. And yet the organized American Jewish community acts as if Palestinians in Gaza have essentially no value. Their deaths are dismissed on the flimsiest of pretexts. These people are basically saying that the state has absolute value, but the human beings who live in this state, if they have the misfortune of being Palestinian, don’t have value.
There was a real shock that came with engagement with ordinary people and the realization that these were human beings who were enduring these things that I and the people around me would never be willing to tolerate. I was able to shed the preconceptions that I was raised with, that so many Jews are raised with, about Palestinians, that they have a tendency towards violence. I was able to unlearn those things. So that has been for me an experience of liberation (read the full interview here).
Trump’s call to ‘clean out’ Gaza serves as ‘explicit support for Israel’s crime of genocide’: Rights group
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor expressed “deep concern” Sunday over US President Donald Trump’s proposal to resettle Gazans in Jordan and Egypt, calling for a regional and global stance opposing it.
Describing Gaza as a “demolition site,” Trump said Saturday that “we (should) just clean out” the Palestinian enclave and resettle Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt.
The Geneva-based group said these remarks, which were made after Israel egregiously violated international law by committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, are “deeply concerning.”
“The Palestinians, who are already suffering from the devastating effects of Israel’s attempts to annihilate them, should not have to pay a further price for this genocide by being forcibly displaced outside of their homeland,” it said in a statement.
