Compilation of news reports – IAK staff
Israeli forces killed eight Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday. The victims included a Palestinian girl who was shot and killed near Deir el-Balah.
UNICEF: 90% of Palestinians in Gaza lack access to clean water
Israel was providing only 1% of needed electricity to Gaza – now that is gone too
Israel provided the Gaza Strip with only five megawatts of electricity since last November before its recent decision to cut off power to the enclave, a Palestinian spokesman said on Tuesday.
“These five megawatts were used solely to operate a desalination facility in central Gaza after interventions by international and UN agencies,” Mohammad Thabet, a spokesman of the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company, told Anadolu.
He said the Palestinian enclave’s actual needs for electricity are estimated at around 500 megawatts per hour.
Israel cut off the electricity supply to Gaza on Sunday, in the latest move to tighten a stifling blockade on the Palestinian enclave despite a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement.
NOTE: Gaza has been experiencing an electricity crisis for years. Before the war, nearly all of its residents were subject to an unpredictable rolling blackout, and had electricity for just a few hours a day.
On October 7, 2023, Israel shut off the supply of electricity to Gaza. The sole remaining power station as the main supplier ran out of fuel on 11 October 2023. Since then, Gaza’s people, medical facilities, bakeries, and water processing plants have relied on occasional fuel deliveries to function.
Israel did supply enough power to keep one water desalination plant running, but that is now cut off.
Under international law, Israel is required to provide for the basic needs of the people of Gaza:
“The occupying power has the duty to ensure that the adequate provision of food and medical supplies is provided, as well as clothing, bedding, means of shelter, other supplies essential to the survival of the civilian population of the occupied territory, and objects necessary for religious worship (GCIV Arts. 55, 58; API Art. 69).”
Not only has Israel refused to provide these essentials itself, it has been blocking the entrance of all of these supplies to Gaza by charitable organizations trying to do Israel’s job for it.
RELATED: Families of Israeli captives give Netanyahu 24hrs to reverse Gaza power cut decision
Israeli police raid Palestinian bookshop in East Jerusalem twice in a month
Israeli police have raided the leading Palestinian bookshop in East Jerusalem for the second time in a month, detaining one of its owners for several hours and seizing some of its stock.
The deputy state attorney’s office had warned police that they overstepped their authority with the first raid on the shop in February. Officers again arrived at the Educational Bookshop without a warrant on Tuesday morning, staff said.
They searched stock using Google Translate, confiscated about 50 books and arrested one of the owners, 61-year-old Imad Muna, his brother Morad Muna told the Guardian.
“They chose books by the cover, taking books that had a Palestinian flag, or just the word Palestine in the title,” Muna said. “They were using Google Translate and took photos to send to their bosses.”
The confiscated books included titles on the work of British artist Banksy, and others by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé and the US academic Noam Chomsky. After taking them, the police locked the shop and left with the key, taking Imad Muna to a nearby police station before releasing him without charge in the afternoon (continue reading here).
TO FIND OUT ABOUT THE FIRST RAID OF THIS BOOKSHOP, READ Israeli police raid Jerusalem bookshops and arrest Palestinian owners
Israeli army launches house-to-house raid in Palestinian town amid West Bank escalation
The Israeli army launched a house-to-house raid in the Palestinian town of Azzun, east of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank on Tuesday, in the latest escalation in the occupied territory, witnesses said.
Israeli forces searched several houses in the town and held around 200 people for field interrogation before setting them free, witnesses said.
Several people, however, were taken into custody during the raid.
Footage and photos shared by activists on social media showed Palestinian residents stripped to their underwear during their arrest.
NOTE: Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 932 Palestinians in the West Bank (~186 children).
West Bank Bedouin community says Israeli settlers stole hundreds of sheep
Manpower crisis poses ‘danger’ to Tel Aviv as preparations to resume Gaza genocide continue
With preparations ongoing to resume the genocidal war in Gaza, the Israeli military is facing a troop shortage that could be worsened by the refusal of reservist soldiers to report for duty, Haaretz reported on 11 March.
“Fr the first time, it seems that there is a danger that some reserve soldiers will not report for service if the return to war is controversial this time,” the Hebrew report reads.
“Even so, in many units, only about half of the soldiers have been reporting recently, and the army is trying to obscure this in various ways,” the paper added.
In recent weeks, the military has been preparing for the possibility that negotiations for a second stage of the ceasefire in Gaza will collapse, causing the fighting against Hamas to resume.
Haaretz added that right-wing ministers who wish to resume the war, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, continue to “express a sweeping indifference to the burden placed on reserve soldiers and the regular army.”
Families of Israeli captives give Netanyahu 24hrs to reverse Gaza power cut decision
Israel minister says expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza is a ‘realistic’ solution
Israeli Minister Idit Silman, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, stated that the “only solution for the Gaza Strip is to remove its Palestinian population,” calling the idea “realistic.”
Speaking to Reshet Bet public radio, Environmental Protection Minister Silman asserted that Netanyahu’s government is committed to promoting Palestinian expulsion from Gaza. She further claimed that “God has sent us the US administration,” interpreting this as a signal that Israel should “inherit the land.”
According to Haaretz, Silman also insisted that Israel would reestablish illegal Jewish-only settlements in Gaza, specifically mentioning Gush Katif, a former settlement bloc dismantled in 2005. “There’s no question about it,” she said. “It could be in single-family homes or Trump-style towers, but we will definitely go back. I see no other solution to terrorism. The answer to terrorism is sovereignty.”
NOTE: Forced population transfer is a crime against humanity, and a form of ethnic cleansing. If world leaders truly want to offer Gazans a good life outside Gaza, the just solution would be to return them to their homes in historic Palestine.
ICE Secretly Hauled Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana as Retaliation, Lawyers Allege
Mahmoud Khalil’s wife watched as agents from the Department of Homeland Security handcuffed her husband and whisked him away from their New York City apartment in an unmarked vehicle on Saturday evening.
Agents ignored the pleas of Khalil’s wife who tried to show them legal papers proving her husband was a green card holder. They wouldn’t heed her requests to share where they were taking him, according to court filings. Eventually, one of the agents offered a terse response: Check the local immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.
By next morning, however, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator indicated Khalil was no longer in New York. Instead, it showed him at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. When Khalil’s wife visited the jail, she was turned away.
Without warning to Khalil’s wife or his immigration attorney Amy Greer, who the same morning had filed a petition to challenge her client’s arrest as a violation of his First Amendment free speech rights, ICE agents had transferred Khalil to a different facility.
This time, they moved him thousands of miles south of his New York home to a facility in Louisiana. It wasn’t until Monday morning that Khalil’s exact whereabouts were updated in the ICE online system: the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a private jail operated by the GEO Group.
Attorneys for Khalil allege the move from the New York metropolitan area to Louisiana was a “retaliatory transfer” intended to restrict his access to lawyers and family, and position what has grown into a closely watched First Amendment case in a jurisdiction more friendly to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies (continue reading here).
The Trump White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday the administration had given the university names of multiple individuals it accused of “pro-Hamas activity”, reiterating the administration’s intention to deport activists associated with pro-Palestinian protests.
“Columbia University has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity, and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus,” Leavitt said in a press briefing. “And as the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that.”
NOTE: While President Trump described Khalil as a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student,” and that he was just one of many, Middle East Eye reports that Khalil previously worked for the British embassy in Beirut, and was ‘cleared to work on sensitive issues for the British government.’
Former British diplomat Andrew Waller, who was a policy advisor at the Syria Office while Khalil worked there, told MEE that the US government’s depiction of Khalil was false and defamatory.
“He went through a vetting process to get the job and was cleared to work on sensitive issues for the British government,” Waller said.
“It’s outright defamation what Trump has done. Mahmoud is an extremely kind and conscientious person and he was loved by his colleagues at the Syria Office,” he added.
RELATED:
Jewish groups slam White House for using ‘shalom’ to taunt Columbia grad Mahmoud Khalil
Mahmoud Khalil Was Detained by ICE Agent Honored by Trump at State of the Union
Marco Rubio Personally Signed Off to Detain Mahmoud Khalil on ‘Foreign Policy Grounds,’ Sources Confirm
Sixty U.S. Universities, Colleges Threatened With Federal Funding Cuts Over ‘Antisemitic Harassment’
The U.S. federal government sent letters to 60 institutions of higher education on Monday, warning them of funding cuts if they did not fulfill their legal obligations to protect Jewish students.
The letters, issued by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, were sent to all the universities and colleges currently under review for possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.
The department cited violations “relating to antisemitic harassment.”
The list includes a wide array of public and private institutions of higher education, among them Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Rutgers, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Ohio State, Temple, Swarthmore, The New School, Tufts, Tulane, Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Boston University.
“U.S. colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by U.S. taxpayers,” a statement issued by the Office for Civil Rights said. “That support is a privilege and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
The letters were sent just days after the Trump administration announced it would be cutting roughly $400 million in federal grants to Columbia “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” signaling that the other schools could be next in line (continue reading here).
Actual antisemitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans would like us to think. A large portion of what they call antisemitism is simply criticism of Israel, the self-proclaimed “Jewish State.”
Most of the animosity Israel experiences is opposition to Zionism. Zionism is not a benign philosophy, but a supremacist ideology – the ideology under which Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinian people and exiled them to Gaza and other locations. The so-called “demonization” of Israel is in most cases a legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, and other illegal practices.
The reality of Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza and the West Bank has also forced many Jews in the diaspora to recognize that Israel has not been their defender. To the contrary, the mixing of Judaism with Zionism—religion and bellicose nationalism—has fueled antisemitism.
MORE NEWS:
Middle East Monitor: Israel escalates violations of female Palestinian prisoners during Ramadan
Middle East Eye: No Other Land shows Israeli occupation cannot be whitewashed
Anadolu Agency: 1,784 Palestinian detainees disappeared in Assad’s prisons: Palestinian ambassador to Syria
STATISTICS OCTOBER 7, 2023 – MARCH 11, 2025 (ongoing count):
- At least 49,399 Palestinians killed, 119,816 injured – including:
- at least 48,467 killed in Gaza (~14,550 children)
- at least 932 killed in the West Bank (~186 children)
- at least 111,913 injured in Gaza
- at least 7,903 injured in the West Bank
WAR STATISTICS OCTOBER 7, 2023 (Hamas attack) – JANUARY 22, 2025 (Ceasefire):
Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – January 19, 2025: at least 48,143 – including at least 47,283 in Gaza (~20,600 children), and 916 in the West Bank (~183 children). Palestinian injuries: at least 118,472 – including at least 111,629 in Gaza, and 7,000 in the West Bank.
Thousands of those killed in Gaza have yet to be identified, and an estimated 11,000 more are still buried under rubble.
Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – January 19, 2025: ~1,616 (or 1,590) – including ~1,139 on October 7, 2023 (~36 children), 436 (or 405) military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza, 46 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel.
NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.
- Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
- Israeli torture: Urinating on Palestinian prisoners, burying them alive and beating the sick
- Israel left a “gift of death” in my home
- Israel’s still killing Israeli hostages with the Hannibal directive – but now in Gaza itself
- How Israel partisans skewed the California election for Democratic Party delegates
- Israel is building a ChatGPT-like tool weaponizing surveillance of Palestinians
- Israel’s War Decimated Gaza’s Farmlands and Killed Most of its Livestock
- Israeli forces issue administrative detention order against youngest Palestinian child on record
- Class action lawsuit against California Congress members over Gaza genocide goes international
- Israel threatens a second Nakba, yet denies the first ever happened
- As Freed Palestinians Describe Torture, Trump OKs $3 Billion Arms Package for Israel
- The Oscar-winner Israel partisans blocked Americans from seeing
- BBC & Guardian Editors Held Private Meetings With Israeli General
- Israel’s bombing of Gaza caused untold environmental damage − can it recover?
- Netanyahu only ever saw the hostages as his path back to genocide
- Hamas explained why it attacked Israel on October 7, 2023
- Palestinian Prisoners: Harrowing Reports Of Systemic Torture – 2 articles
- A brief history of Israel’s theft and trafficking of Palestinian organs
- The Last Thing Gaza Needs Is Another Blackwater
- Remembering Aaron Bushnell
