Israel’s reckless policies across Palestine – war on Gaza Day 537

Compilation of news reports – IAK staff

At least 39 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

The health ministry in Gaza said on Wednesday that at least 830 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since Israel resumed large-scale strikes on 18 March. Nearly 40 percent were children.

Also on Wednesday, Israeli soldiers fatally shot a young Palestinian man, Ismael Samer Othman Shorafa, 18, from the town of Beita, south of Nablus. near Nablus, in northern West Bank.

The UN on Wednesday reported that at least 142,000 people have been displaced in the Gaza Strip in one week, as Israeli bombardments and displacement orders escalate.

Told to fix notorious prison, Israel just relocated alleged abuses, detainees say

Under pressure from Israel’s top court to improve conditions at a facility notorious for mistreating Palestinians seized in Gaza, the military transferred hundreds of detainees to newly opened camps.

But abuses at these camps were just as bad, according to Israeli human rights organizations that interviewed dozens of current and former detainees and are now asking the same court to force the military to fix the problem once and for all.

What the detainees’ testimonies show, rights groups say, is that instead of correcting alleged abuses against Palestinians held without charge or trial — including beatings, excessive handcuffing, and poor diet and health care — Israel’s military just shifted where they take place.

“What we’ve seen is the erosion of the basic standards for humane detention,” said Jessica Montell, the director of Hamoked, one of the rights groups petitioning the Israeli government.

Asked for a response, the military said it complies with international law and “completely rejects allegations regarding the systematic abuse of detainees.”

Detainees transferred to Ofer and Anatot say conditions there were no better, according to more than 30 who were interviewed by lawyers for Hamoked and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. The Associated Press is the first international news organization to report on the affidavits from PHRI (continue reading here).

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Netanyahu, Defense Minister Katz vow to ‘seize territory’ in Gaza if captives not released

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on 26 March that Israel will continue to exert pressure on Hamas until the resistance movement releases all captives held in the Gaza Strip. 

“The fighting in Gaza continues. The more Hamas persists in its refusal to release our hostages, the more powerful the pressure we will exert. And I say to Hamas: This includes seizing territory, and this includes other things that I will not list here,” the premier said during a speech in Knesset. 

Netanyahu’s comments at the Knesset echo those made by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz a day earlier. 

“If Hamas continues with its intransigence, it will pay heavy prices that get higher and higher in the taking of territory (by Israel) and in taking out militants and terror infrastructure until its complete surrender,” he said. 

Over 3,250 housing units in the Jenin refugee camp have become uninhabitable due to Israel’s ongoing military offensive in the northern West Bank, the Jenin municipal chief said on Wednesday.

“The situation in Jenin camp is entirely catastrophic,” Mohammed Jarrar told Anadolu. “Israeli forces continue to demolish, bomb, and burn Palestinian homes.”

Jarrar revealed that Israel rejected a Palestinian appeal against plans to raze 93 additional residential buildings, containing about 300 housing units.

“We expect the demolition could happen at any moment,” he warned, adding that such a move would deepen the humanitarian crisis in the camp.

He stressed that the camp’s entire infrastructure has been obliterated, rendering it “completely unfit for living” and in dire need of genuine reconstruction after years of repeated Israeli operations.

A specialized committee estimated the operation’s toll on Jenin and its camp at $310 million, Jarrar noted.

Israel has refused to open all hallways of the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron for prayer on Laylat al-Qadr (Night of Destiny), the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs said on Wednesday.

Laylat al-Qadr is the holiest night in Islam, when the Holy Quran was first revealed. It falls on one of the odd nights in the last 10 days of Ramadan.

“This is an arbitrary and dangerous precedent in this holy place, a brazen provocation of Muslim sentiments, and a lack of respect for the sanctity of the holy month of Ramadan and the Ibrahimi Mosque complex,” Awqaf Minister Mohamed Najm said in a statement.

He called on Palestinians to mobilize and gather at the mosque “to affirm Palestinian Islamic presence there.”

“This is the best way to counter this invasive occupation in these difficult times for the Palestinian people,” the minister stressed.

The Ibrahimi Mosque is located in the Old City of Hebron, which is under Israeli occupation. It is home to around 400 illegal settlers guarded by approximately 1,500 Israeli soldiers.

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US Embassy Tells US Doctor in Gaza ‘Not Our Role’ to Protect Them From Israeli Bombings

With the sun setting over Gaza’s skyline and warplanes flying overhead, trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter huddle in front of their webcam at Nasser Hospital in the south of Gaza to describe some of the horrors they have seen over the last week.

“We’re losing friends all the time. We all have medical student friends that we befriended last year that are now dead,” Dr. Perlmutter tells Mehdi, adding that the dire situation at the hospital has left it remarkably compromised. “I would clean a patient’s arm before I repaired a broken elbow on a baby with tap water. They received no antibiotics, and their supplies are as bad as they were a year ago.”

Dr. Sidhwa, meanwhile, had a closer-than-usual brush with death this week when an Israeli airstrike on the hospital killed his 17-year-old patient, “He would have gone home yesterday, the day after the bombing,” says Dr. Sidhwa, who was contacted by the US embassy after his tweet on the attack, pointing out how he was almost killed by the Israeli airstrike, garnered over a million views on Twitter.

“I got a call from the US Embassy after I sent out that tweet, because I think people saw it, and the lady said, ‘Hi, this is the embassy. We just want to make sure you’re okay.’

And I was like, yeah, I’m fine. If you want to be sure I stay okay, maybe you could ask the Israelis not to bomb Nasser Hospital again, and I swear to God, she goes, ‘Actually, that’s not our role, sorry.’”

For both doctors, this is not their first mission to Gaza since the genocide began in 2023, and much of the carnage, death, and destruction they saw the first time persists. “Just like when we were here last year, 40% to 50% of the casualties we’re seeing, and most of the severely injured casualties, are kids,” says Dr. Sidhwa (go here to see the interview).

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US: Tufts University student detained for pro-Palestine views transferred to Louisiana

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national on a student visa, is currently being held in detention in Louisiana, according to her lawyer, Middle East Eye can reveal.

A Massachusetts judge ordered her not to be removed from the state, but it is unclear whether she was moved before or after the order was delivered. 

Masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached and physically restrained the Tufts University doctoral student while on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Wednesday before taking her into custody for “pro-Palestine” views. She is being held at the South Louisiana Processing Center.  

Chilling video footage of the incident on Tuesday shows a man approaching Ozturk, while she was on the phone with her mother, and grabbing her wrists. Five other agents surrounded her, removed her backpack, and placed her in handcuffs before escorting her away.

Ozturk was working as a research assistant and undertaking her PhD at the Eliot-Pearson department of child study and human development at Tufts University.

She holds a master’s from Columbia University’s Teachers College and graduated from the developmental psychology program with a focus on children’s media in 2020. She is a grantee of the prestigious Fulbright Scholar program, which aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and people from other countries.

Friends of Ozturk believe she may have been targeted because of a doxxing campaign for co-authoring a March 2024 opinions article in the university newspaper, Tufts Daily, renewing calls for the university to adopt the Tufts Community Senate Resolutions, to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel”.

RELATED: Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib slams arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk

Yale Investments in Companies Selling Arms to Israel Violate State Law, Says an Official Complaint

Yale University’s investments in weapons manufacturers violate Connecticut state law, organizers at the school allege in a complaint filed Wednesday with Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.

The complaint asks the attorney general to investigate Yale’s refusal to heed campus protesters’ calls for divestment from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers amid Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.

“Financially prudent investments may be ineligible for investment if they are deeply incompatible with the University’s mission and purposes,” the complaint says, citing state law and the university’s own investment policies.

The organizers allege that Yale trustees breached their fiduciary duties by maintaining investments that expose the university endowment to profit from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers aiding war crimes by Israel  (continue reading here).

Motion Picture Academy refuses to issue a statement on behalf of Hamdan Ballal after his lynching by Israeli settlers

Earlier this month, Hamdan Ballal and the film’s other directors appeared on stage at the 97th Academy Awards in Los Angeles to accept the Oscar for best documentary. Since then, Ballal’s village in the West Bank has seen an escalation of violence by Israeli settlers, “not only against me,” Ballal said, “not only against the activists and other crew members of the film, but against all the residents.”

The No Other Land co-director Yuval Abraham claimed on X that the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Oscars, “sadly, declined to publicly support Hamdan Ballal while he was beaten and tortured by Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Several US Academy members – especially in the documentary branch – pushed for a statement, but it was ultimately refused. We were told that because other Palestinians were beaten up in the settler attack, it could be considered unrelated to the film, so they felt no need to respond.

“In other words,” Abraham added, “while Hamdan was clearly targeted for making No Other Land, he was also targeted for being Palestinian – like countless others every day who are disregarded. This, it seems, gave the Academy an excuse to remain silent when a film-maker they honored, living under Israeli occupation, needed them the most.”

Speaking after he accepted a special fellowship award for the Society of Editors conference, BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen said that while Palestinian journalists were doing “fantastic work”, he and other international media colleagues wanted to contribute to reporting on the ground in Gaza.

“Why don’t they let us in,” he said. “Because there’s stuff there they don’t want us to see. Beginning after those Hamas attacks on 7 October, they took us into the border communities. I was in Kfar Aza when there was still fighting going on inside it. They had only just started taking out the bodies of the dead Israelis. Why did they let us in there? Because they wanted us to see it.

 

“Why don’t they let us in to Gaza? Because they don’t want us to see it. I think it’s really as simple as that. Israel took a bit of flak for that to start with, but none now, certainly not with [President] Trump. So I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

The Israeli government has been approached for comment. However, Israel’s military has previously said that it has escorted journalists to Gaza to allow them to report safely (continue reading here).

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