Euro-Med warns of imminent Israeli ‘massacre’ in Beit Lahiya The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says the Israeli military will likely carry out a “new massacre” in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya, after the army issued new evacuation orders to people who have remained in the area. Israeli forces will be “wipe out the last remnants” of Beit Lahiya, and will cause yet another wave of mass displacement in the area, where some 50,000 Palestinians reside, the monitor said in a statement. Earlier, Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X the military “will use extreme force against terrorist infrastructure and subversive elements in the region”, telling residents to “evacuate the area immediately and head towards known shelters in blocks number 1770, 1766”. However, rights groups have repeatedly said that “nowhere is safe” in the besieged territory, pointing to Israeli attacks on places previously deemed “safe”. The shelters the Israeli army asked Palestinians to flee to, Euro-Med said, are destroyed areas that are “unfit for any form of life, and lack water supply as well as functioning sewage systems”. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/live...donors-to-resume-unrwa-funding?update=2855757
Dozens arrested at Yale and NYU as pro-Palestinian student protests spread Authorities move to break up encampments at two more US universities on Monday, as Columbia University cancels in-person classes Erum Salam and agencies Tue 23 Apr 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...s-pro-palestine-protest-israel-gaza-war#img-1 Yale University in Connecticut and New York University in Manhattan, as student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza continue to roil US campuses. On the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, authorities arrested at least 47 protesters on Monday evening, the university said in a statement. Students who were arrested will be referred for disciplinary action. The police crackdowns came after Columbia University canceled in-person classes on Monday in response to protesters setting up tent encampments at its New York City campus last week. Several hundred people had been protesting on the Yale university campus, demanding the university divest from military weapons manufacturers. Yale said it had repeatedly asked students to leave, and warned them they could face law enforcement and disciplinary action if they didn’t. Several hundred students and pro-Palestinian supporters rally on the campus of Yale University in New Haven on Monday. Photograph: Ned Gerard/AP In New York, officers moved on an encampment at Gould Plaza near New York University shortly after nightfall. There, too, hundreds of demonstrators had defied university warnings that they faced consequences if they failed to vacate the plaza. Video on social media showed police taking down tents in the protesters’ encampment in a tense and at times chaotic scene. Some officers tossed tents, and others grappled with demonstrators. Protesters tussled with officers and chanted, “We will not stop, we will not rest. Disclose. Divest.” A New York police spokesperson said arrests were made after the university asked police to enforce trespassing violations but the total number of arrests and citations would remain unknown until much later. Police arrest protesters at New York University (NYU) on Monday. Photograph: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images The Washington Square News, the student newspaper, reported that the NYPD said over a loudspeaker announcement that students were being arrested for “disorderly conduct” and that protesters were unlawfully blocking traffic. The law enforcement actions at Yale and NYU came after a tense few days on campuses across the US. Columbia University president, Nemat Minouche Shafik, called in New York police last week to clear a tent encampment on its main lawn of students demanding the university divest from companies with ties to Israel. More than 100 students were arrested on Thursday on charges of trespassingand the university and the affiliated Barnard College have suspended dozens of students involved in the protests. On Monday, Columbia University announced it was canceling in-person classes on its New York City campus to try to “reset” the situation and “deescalate the rancor.” Protesters light flares outside One Police Plaza after NYPD officers arrested students and faculty while clearing the New York University (NYU) “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”. Photograph: Derek French/REX/Shutterstock A new encampment has now emerged and hundreds of faculty members have held a mass walkout to protest against the president’s handling of the situation. Bassam Khawaja, an adjunct lecturer at Columbia law school and supervising attorney at the school’s human rights clinic, told the Guardian she was “shocked and appalled that the president went immediately to the New York police department”. “This was by all accounts, a non-violent protest,” she said. “It was a group of students camping out on the lawn in the middle of campus. It’s not any different from everyday life on campus.” After the crackdown at Columbia, students across the US launched their own protests in solidarity, many of them calling for their universities to back a ceasefire in Gaza and divest from companies with ties to Israel. Students at Brown, Princeton and Northwestern held protests on Friday and over the weekend. Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Emerson College, both in the Boston area, have started their own protest encampments. Other institutions that saw protest actions included Boston University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
UN rights chief 'horrified' by mass grave reports at Gaza hospitals 7 hours ago By David Gritten, BBC News Reuters Palestinian workers are exhuming bodies at Nasser hospital with shovels because they have no heavy machinery The UN's human rights chief has said he is "horrified" by the destruction of Gaza's Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals and the reports of "mass graves" being found at the sites after Israeli raids. Volker Türk called for independent investigations into the deaths. Palestinian officials said they had exhumed the bodies of almost 300 people at Nasser. It is not clear how they died or when they were buried. Israel's military said claims that it buried bodies there were "baseless". But it did say that during a two-week operation at the hospital in the city of Khan Younis in February, troops "examined" bodies buried by Palestinians "in places where intelligence indicated the possible presence of hostages". Ten hostages who have now been released have said that they were held at Nasser hospital for long periods during their captivity. Prior to the Israeli operation at Nasser, staff there had said they were being forced to bury bodies in the hospital's courtyard because nearby fighting prevented access to cemeteries. There were similar reports from al-Shifa before the first Israeli raid on the hospital took place in November. The Israeli military has said it has raided a number of hospitals in Gaza during the war because Hamas fighters have been operating inside them - a claim Hamas and medical officials have denied. The war began when Hamas gunmen carried out an unprecedented cross-border attack on southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people - mostly civilians - and taking 253 others back to Gaza as hostages. More than 34,180 people - most of them children and women - have been killed in Gaza since then, the territory's Hamas-run health ministry says. A spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office said it was currently working on corroborating reports from Palestinian officials that 283 bodies had been found in Nasser hospital's grounds, including 42 which had been identified. "Victims had reportedly been buried deep in the ground and covered with waste," Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva. "Among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others... were found with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes." Mr Türk called for independent, effective and transparent investigations into the deaths, adding: "Given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators." "Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law. And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees, and others who are hors de combat [not participating in hostilities] is a war crime." On Monday, a spokesman for the Hamas-run Civil Defense force told BBC Arabic's Gaza Today programme that it had received reports from local Palestinians that the bodies of a "large number" of people who had been killed during the war and buried in a makeshift cemetery in the hospital's courtyard were moved to another location during the Israeli raid. "After research and investigation, we learned that the occupation [Israeli] army had established a mass grave, pulled out the bodies that were in Nasser hospital, and buried them in this mass grave," Mahmoud Basal said. Gaza Today also spoke to a man who said he was searching there for the bodies of two male relatives which he alleged had been taken by Israeli troops during Israel's recently concluded offensive in Khan Younis. "After I had buried them in an apartment, the [Israelis] came and moved their bodies," he said. "Every day we search for their bodies, but we fail to find them." Hamas has alleged that the bodies include people "executed in cold blood" by Israeli forces, without providing evidence. BBC Verify authenticates video from key moments in the story of Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on Tuesday: "The claim that the IDF buried Palestinian bodies is baseless and unfounded." "During the IDF's operation in the area of Nasser Hospital, in accordance to the effort to locate hostages and missing persons, corpses buried by Palestinians in the area of Nasser hospital were examined. "The examination was conducted in a careful manner and exclusively in places where intelligence indicated the possible presence of hostages. The examination was carried out respectfully while maintaining the dignity of the deceased. Bodies examined, which did not belong to Israeli hostages, were returned to their place." The IDF said that its forces had detained "about 200 terrorists who were in the hospital" during the raid, and that they found ammunition as well as unused medicines intended for Israeli hostages. It also insisted that the raid was carried out "in a targeted manner and without harming the hospital, the patients and the medical staff". However, three medical staff told the BBC last month that they were humiliated, beaten, doused with cold water, and forced to kneel for hours after being detained during the raid. Medics who remained at Nasser after the Israeli takeover said they were unable to care for patients and that 13 died because of conditions there, including a lack of water, electricity and other supplies. Reuters The UN Human Rights Office said it had received reports that 30 bodies were buried in the courtyard of al-Shifa hospital On 1 April, Israeli troops withdrew from al-Shifa hospital, which is in Gaza City, following what the IDF said was another "precise" operation carried out in response to intelligence that Hamas had regrouped there. The IDF said at the time that 200 "terrorists" were killed in and around the hospital during the two-week raid. More than 500 others were detained, and weapons and intelligence were found "throughout the hospital", it added. After a mission gained access to the facility five days later, the World Health Organization (WHO) said al-Shifa was "now an empty shell", with most of the buildings extensively damaged or destroyed, and the majority of equipment unusable or reduced to ashes. It also said that "numerous shallow graves" had been dug just outside the emergency department, and the administrative and surgical buildings, and that "many dead bodies were partially buried with their limbs visible". The IDF also said it had avoided harm to patients at al-Shifa. But the WHO cited the acting hospital director as saying patients were held in abysmal conditions during the siege, and that at least 20 patients reportedly died due to a lack of access to care and limited movement authorised for medics. Spokeswoman Ms Shamdasani said reports seen by the UN human rights office suggested that a total of 30 bodies were buried in the two graves and that 12 of them had been identified so far. Gaza's civil defence spokesman told CNN on 9 April that 381 bodies had been recovered from the vicinity of al-Shifa, but that the figure did not include people buried in the hospital's grounds. The UN human rights chief also deplored as "beyond warfare" a series of Israeli strikes on the southern city of Rafah in the past few days, which he said had killed mostly women and children. The strikes included one on Saturday night, after which a premature baby was delivered from the womb of her pregnant mother, who was killed along with her husband and other daughter. Mr Türk also again warned against a full-scale Israeli ground assault on Rafah, where 1.5 million displaced civilians are sheltering, saying it would lead to further breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights law. In response, the IDF said it was "operating to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities". "In stark contrast to Hamas' intentional attacks on Israeli men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm," it added.
Opinion What it means to be (visibly) Jewish in the Ivy League Behaviour that would be scandalous if aimed at other minorities is treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. Bret Stephens Contributor Updated Apr 24, 2024 https://www.afr.com/world/north-ame...ish-at-an-elite-us-university-20240424-p5fm6b Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vermont, is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values”. Pro-Palestine supporters rally at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. AP It hasn’t worked out that way. On Saturday evening, he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, visited the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment. “I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said a demonstrator jammed a Palestinian flag into her left eye. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me. Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on October 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza – whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust – provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension. But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage. At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets”, a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the October 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.” Double standards of antisemitism What do such acts mean for Jews on campus? There’s a certain eagerness in some media stories to highlight Jewish students who have joined the protests as a way of acquitting anti-Israel groups of charges of antisemitism. But as Jonathan Chait astutely noted in New York Magazine, “this does not settle the question of their relation to antisemitism any more than ‘blacks for Trump’ puts to rest concerns about Republican racism”. Others have suggested that some of the more aggressive expressions of antisemitism have come from outside agitators rather than from students themselves. Maybe, though there’s plenty of evidence of atrocious student behaviour. But that still leaves open the question of why these students regularly chant slogans like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution”, which (if they didn’t know it before) they know now is an incendiary call to violent action against Jews. The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behaviour that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers? What I find now, walking around campus, is people flipping me off, yelling at me. There’s no escaping it. — Netanel Crispe, Jewish student at Yale What goes for the student demonstrators is true of faculties, too. At Columbia, almost 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that “one could regard” October 7 as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation”. Leaving aside the lawyerly language, there’s little question about where the sympathies of the signatories lie. What are Jewish students – including the Israelis enrolled at Columbia – supposed to do when faced with such militant hostility not only from their peers but also from their professors? I asked Crispe and Tartak if they had given thought to leaving Yale. “I have to stay,” Tartak said. Crispe felt similarly. “I’m going to stay around Yale to support my peers as long as I need to,” he said. But he also had regrets. “I entered Yale extremely proud to be one of the first Hasidic Jews to go as an undergraduate,” Crispe said. “I looked forward to sharing experiences with students from diverse backgrounds while living proudly in my own skin. What I find now, walking around campus, is people flipping me off, yelling at me. There’s no escaping it.” The defiance of Crispe and Tartak commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals – and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry – history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Human nature, it works both ways. Prior to the Hamas attack in Israel, Jews were basically left alone to do their business. The Hamas attack just brought everything into plain view, how Israel have mistreated Palestinians for years. Jews hate being criticized, every criticism is labeled "Antisemitism". Jews thought they could mistreat Palestinians with impunity, now it is biting them back. The big misjustice imo is American support for Israel when they blatently kill thousands of civilians. This too will bite America in the bum, America has been exposed as the great hypocrite. Always comes back to the same thing imo, the bullshit Jewish religion. I'm fairly sure, in the article above, if those Jewish students wore plain clothes like everyone else, they wouldn't have been attacked. But they are outwardly displaying their religious biggotry, what did those dumb fukkers otherwise expect?
Another ex-State Department official alleges Israeli military gets ‘special treatment’ on abuses By ELLEN KNICKMEYER April 25, 2024 https://apnews.com/article/us-israel-military-aid-international-law-1e9b612631a7c20438053189c3b62187 WASHINGTON (AP) — A former senior U.S. official who until recently helped oversee human-rights compliance by foreign militaries receiving American military assistance said Wednesday that he repeatedly observed Israel receiving “special treatment” from U.S. officials when it came to scrutiny of allegations of Israeli military abuses of Palestinian civilians. The allegation comes as the Biden administration faces intense pressure over its ally’s treatment of Palestinian civilians during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. And matters because of who said it: Charles O. Blaha. Before leaving the post in August, he was a director of a State Department security and human rights office closely involved in helping ensure that foreign militaries receiving American military aid follow U.S. and international humanitarian and human rights laws. Blaha said his departure from the State Department after decades of service was not related to the U.S.-Israeli security relationship. He is the second senior State official involved in that relationship to assert that when it comes to Israel, the U.S. is reluctant to enforce laws required of foreign militaries receiving American aid. “In my experience, Israel gets special treatment that no other country gets,” Blaha said. “And there is undue deference, in many cases, given” to Israeli officials’ side of things when the U.S. asks questions about allegations of Israeli wrongdoing against Palestinians, he added. He spoke to reporters at an event where he and other members of an unofficial, self-formed panel of former senior U.S. civilian and military officials released a report pointing to civilian deaths in specific airstrikes in Gaza. They said there was “compelling and credible” evidence that Israeli forces had acted illegally. Blaha’s comments echoed those of another State Department official and panel member, Josh Paul. Paul resigned as a director overseeing arms transfers to other countries’ militaries in October in protest of the U.S. rushing arms to Israel amid its war in Gaza. Asked about the allegations from the two, a State Department spokesman, Vedant Patel, said “there is no double standard, and there is no special treatment.” Israeli officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Israel consistently says it follows all laws in its use of U.S. military aid, investigates allegations against its security forces and holds offenders accountable. Israel historically is the United States’ biggest recipient of military aid, and Biden on Wednesday signed legislation for an additional $26 billion in wartime assistance. But Biden has come under growing pressure over that support as Palestinian deaths mount. The latest Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two militant groups backed by Iran, carried out a cross-border attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel. Israel responded with an offensive in Gaza that has caused widespread devastation and killed more than 34,000 people, according to local health officials. In coming days, the administration says it will announce its official findings from reviews it did into allegations of especially serious human rights abuses by specific Israeli military units. Those units would be barred from receiving U.S. military aid if the U.S. review confirms those allegations. Separately, the Biden administration also is expected to disclose by May 8 whether it has verified assurances from Israel that the country is not using U.S. military aid in a way that violates international or human rights law. Both Israel’s written assurance and the U.S. verification were mandated by a new presidential national security memo that Biden issued in February. The February agreement was negotiated between the Biden administration and members of his own Democratic Party, who had been pushing for the U.S. to begin conditioning military aid to Israel on improving treatment of Palestinian civilians. Panel members released their report Wednesday to urge the U.S. to scrutinize specific attacks in Gaza that the former officials argued should lead to a conclusion that Israel was wrong when it confirmed it was complying with the laws. If that determination is made, the U.S. could then suspend military aid. Wednesday’s unofficial report points to 17 specific strikes on apartments, refugee camps, private homes, journalists and aid workers for which the former U.S. officials and independent experts allege there’s no evidence of the kind of military target present to justify the high civilian death tolls. They include an Oct. 31 airstrike on a Gaza apartment building that killed 106 civilians, including 54 children. Israeli officials offered no reason for the strike, and a Human Rights Watch probe found no evidence of a military target there, the officials said. Israel has said in many of the instances that it is investigating.
Weird isn't it, when Israel made a (bs) claim UNRWA the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was a front as such for Hamas, America IMMEDIATELY froze all its aid. Now we have seen for months, accuations about Israel's attrocities and what do we get..... Israeli PM thanks US lawmakers for approving further $26 billion aid package, including $4 billion for missile defense and $9 billion for Gaza. Netanyahu emphasizes strong US-Israel alliance. 21 Apr 2024, Israel thanks the US for military aid (REUTERS)
Don't forget---> A ban on Tik-Tok too. You Aussies following suit? Or do you want your little joeys corrupted by the Chinese?