Compilation of news reports – IAK staff
Two Palestinians were killed and three others injured by an Israeli drone strike Monday in central Rafah city in the southern Gaza Strip.
Israel prepares Gaza ‘hell plan’ to pile pressure on Hamas – reports
The Israeli government is reportedly planning to ratchet up its blockade on Gaza as part of what it has called a “hell plan” to pressure Hamas into further hostage releases without a troop withdrawal from the Palestinian territory.
Food, medicine and shelter stockpiles in Gaza are limited and aid intended for Palestinians in desperate need may spoil following Israel’s suspension of deliveries to the enclave, humanitarian agencies said on Monday.
With the six-week-old ceasefire in limbo, and no sign of movement towards a second phase that was due to start last weekend, both sides were taking contingency steps to return to a war footing.
The government of Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to have made preparations to go beyond the suspension of food and fuel announced on Sunday, to implement a program of steadily increased isolation of the coastal strip and its population of about 2.2 million, according to the national public radio station, Kan, which said the government was referring to the program of measures as the “hell plan”.
The plan would involve cutting off electricity and remaining water supplies, and moving Palestinians in northern Gaza back down to the south, to pave the way to the potential resumption of full-scale war.
Israeli sources indicated that this escalation may take place within a week – but already the Deir al-Balah Municipality announced, on Monday, that the Israeli government cut off the supply of electricity to its two desalination plants, which supply approximately 70% of the population of Deir al-Balah and surrounding areas.
Israel’s Channel 12, citing an Israeli official, said on Monday that the government has set a deadline 10 days from now for Hamas to release the remaining captives in Gaza before a return to fighting.
Israel violated ceasefire more than 900 times since 19 January, says Gaza govt. media office
The government media office in Gaza announced on Sunday that the Israeli army has committed more than 900 violations of the ceasefire agreement since it came into effect on 19 January, killing and wounding hundreds of Palestinians in various governorates across the Palestinian enclave, Anadolu has reported.
“These violations included aerial and artillery bombardment, intensive drone flights, preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, opening fire on citizens, demolishing homes and targeting cars,” explained the director general of the media office, Ismail Al-Thawabta. “Also included were the prevention of fuel entering Gaza, hindering the entry of civil defense vehicles and heavy machinery, and preventing the entry of 260,000 tents and caravans.”
Earlier on Sunday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza announced that the total number of those killed since the ceasefire with Israel came into force on 19 January had risen to 116, with at least 490 wounded {some sources say 132 Palestinians have been killed].
Only 15 mobile homes entered Gaza out of 60,000 needed: Media office
The number of trucks entering Gaza during the first phase of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas represented only 75% of what was expected, Salama Maarouf, the head of the office, told Anadolu.
Maarouf said that Gaza requires 200,000 tents, but the number delivered falls well below half of that total. Additionally, only 15 mobile homes have entered the enclave, far from the 60,000 needed to accommodate displaced families.
He pointed out that the shortages extend beyond tents and temporary housing. The enclave also faces critical shortages in other shelter-related items including generators, batteries, solar power systems and heavy machinery.
He confirmed that Gaza has identified a need for 500 vehicles to support relief and reconstruction efforts but reported that only nine bulldozers had entered the territory as part of the first phase of the agreement.
The Israeli government halted the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza early Sunday, hours after the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement expired.
Five rights organizations, including Israeli nonprofit Gisha, have asked Israel’s Supreme Court for an interim order barring the Israeli government from preventing aid from entering Gaza, saying the move “constitutes a war crime”.
Palestinian detainee tortured to death in Israel’s Megiddo prison
A Palestinian detainee from Jenin Refugee Camp, Khaled Mahmoud Qasim Abdullah, has died under torture in Israel’s Megiddo Prison, two Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups announced on 3 March.
The Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) reported that Abdullah died on 23 February of this year in Megiddo Prison in northern Israel.
He had been detained and held under administrative detention without trial since 9 November 2023.
Abdullah is among “the growing list of Palestinians who have died as a result of the systematic crimes committed by the Israeli prison system, which has escalated since the beginning of the genocide,” the rights groups said.
Abdullah was married and a father of four children. Two of his brothers are also being held under administrative detention in Israeli prisons.
According to his family, he had no prior health problems before his detention by Israeli forces.
The Commission and PPS stated that Abdullah is the third Palestinian detainee to die in Israeli prisons in the past week, while 61 have died since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
At least 40 of those who have died are from Gaza, while the remainder are from the occupied West Bank.
The Commission and PPS affirmed that the “ongoing mistreatment of detainees is part of the larger genocide strategy, which aims to execute and eliminate more Palestinians through systematic means.”
The rights groups warned that more Palestinians are at risk of being killed in Israeli prisons, where they face daily abuse, including torture, starvation, medical neglect, sexual violence, and conditions that lead to serious and contagious diseases.
NOTE: Israeli torture of Palestinians has been widespread and well-documented since October 7th and long before – including torture of children. Torture is a war crime.
NOTE: Israel is currently holding 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in inhumane conditions where many are systematically tortured – 365 of them are children, 15 are women, and over 3,300 are administrative detainees – being held without charge or trial. Administrative detention is intended to be used only in “exceptional” circumstances, but Israel uses it widely. Read more here.
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Hostages of Israeli revenge in the Gaza Strip: Testimonies of 100 released Palestinian detainees reveal crimes of torture, cruel treatment.
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Shocking testimony: Torture in Israeli prisons, “sexual assaults even using dogs”
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Welcome to Hell
Israeli soldiers vandalize and desecrate West Bank homes
Feces, urine and used condoms – these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault on the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, south of Tubas in the northern occupied West Bank, last month.
Fidaa Abu Zeina’s home was one of them. Abu Zeina, 46, his wife and three children were forced out at gunpoint on 2 February, the first day of the assault. Given their home’s location at the entrance to the camp, theirs was the first case of expulsion.
Using his home as a military outpost, soldiers lived, slept and ate in Abu Zeina’s house for 11 days, during which they vandalized it beyond recognition, leaving a stench of urine, and feces and used condoms on the floors and in the closets.
“I lost my mind when I saw the inside of my home for the first time after they withdrew. It’s a garbage dump, it’s uninhabitable. There’s no home anymore,” Abu Zeina, a former welder, told The Electronic Intifada from his bare living room, which he had to empty of all the furniture that had been ruined by soldiers.
“They told us we had five minutes to grab our belongings and leave, and to come back a month later,” Abu Zeina said.
In September 2024, his son Majed, 16, was executed by soldiers in the street as he pleaded for his life. Soldiers then mutilated the boy’s body with an armored bulldozer and paraded him around the camp, documented in a widely shared video (contiinue reading here).
That Musk’s post has been viewed by nearly 20 million people makes it even more concerning, as it only takes one deranged individual who has read it to decide to respond by striking out in an act of violence.
This past week began on a deeply disturbing note. Elon Musk reposted on X (formerly Twitter) a dangerously false attack on more than a dozen American entities who had received USAID or State Department grants over the past decade. The original post referred to the groups as “terrorist-linked.” In his repost Musk commented, “As many people have said, why pay terrorist organizations and certain countries to hate us when they’re perfectly willing to do it for free?”
The groups listed in the original post had apparently been compiled by an individual with an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bias. He appears to have gone through a list of grant recipients and randomly culled out entities with “Arab” or “Muslim” in their name or who had done work in the Middle East.
I [James Zogby] don’t know all of the groups mentioned, but those I do know—for example, American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA)—have been in the forefront of providing lifesaving support to refugees or victims of war or natural disasters, and, in the process, building better ties between the U.S. and affected communities in need across the Middle East. Other groups I recognized had equally important, impressive records of service.
What was obviously most troubling to me was that my organization, the Arab American Institute, was second on the list. This was upsetting for two reasons: The charge was profoundly off-base and irresponsibly dangerous (continue reading here).
Third student expelled from Columbia’s Barnard College for pro-Palestinian activism
A third student was expelled from Barnard College on Friday for pro-Palestinian activism that took place on campus last year – ten months after disciplinary proceedings started against them.
The student was expelled for “allegedly protesting the University’s investments in genocide and for allegedly participating in the occupation of Hind’s Hall”, according to a statement released by the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (Cuad) Defense Working Group. Barnard is part of Columbia.
This is the first Columbia student targeted for their alleged participation in the protests which erupted last spring. The expulsion comes a week after two other students were expelled for staging a protest during a class in January, making Barnard the first university to expel students over the Gaza war.
The surprise third expulsion came the day after the office of public affairs notified Columbia University that a federal taskforce would be visiting it, as well as nine other universities, because it was “aware of allegations that the schools may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination, in potential violation of federal law”.
