#israeli-palestinian-conflict

#israeli-palestinian-conflict

On March 1, Israel closed Gaza's Rafah border crossing with Egypt. The Israeli military's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said the move was a part of several necessary security adjustments that have been implemented in the region due to the war with Iran. The Rafah crossing is considered vital for the delivery of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of critically ill patients from Gaza.

This has now become a consistent pattern in which Americans are being killed in the West Bank by settlers or the [Israel Defense Forces (IDF)] without justice or accountability, despite promises from US officials, the lawmakers wrote in the Wednesday letter, which was shared exclusively with the Guardian.

While the world's attention is on the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, the Israeli military has placed the West Bank under a functional lockdown. Checkpoints in and out of most major cities are closed, and Palestinians have been left to look for other travel arrangements. Some residents who spoke with Truthout said they traveled for hours through village back roads in an attempt to reach their destinations.

An Arab human rights non-governmental organisation (NGO) has filed a request for United Kingdom sanctions to be lodged against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over incitement to violence and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. British law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn filed the request on Tuesday with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on behalf of the Arab Organisation for Human Rights UK (AOHR UK), seeking targeted financial and travel sanctions against the Israeli leader.

On the shores of the Dead Sea, about 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women had gathered, holding hands and calling for an end to what they called a vicious cycle of bloodshed. It was an October evening in 2023 and they had travelled from villages, settlements and refugee camps around the region for a mass peace rally jointly organised by the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian group Women of the Sun.

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From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

The topics covered are broad and diverse, but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, in addition to touting their own role in negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages, the Qataris made space for a wide range of strongly critical voices of Israel: former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (whose position is that Israel should simply disappear), the American scholars and think tankers Rob Malley and Trita Parsi, Tucker Carlson, numerous distinguished Palestinians.

Israeli security forces killed two Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, reportedly after they had surrendered. The Palestinian Authority said the two men aged 26 and 37 were killed in "the brutal field execution carried out by the Israeli occupation army" and condemned the incident as a "war crime." Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said he "fully supports" the Israeli troops who shot two "wanted terrorists."

You have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza, and this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they're hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they're just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.

"It was an indescribable journey of suffering hunger, unfair treatment, oppression, torture and curses more than anything you could imagine," said Kamal Abu Shanab, a 51-year-old Fatah member from the West Bank town of Tulkarem. His face was gaunt. He said he lost 139 pounds (59 kilograms) in prison. "We don't recognize him. He's not the person we knew. Our uncle doesn't look like our uncle," said his niece, Farah Abu Shanab.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding that Israel be held accountable for the violence perpetrated against Palestinian Americans by Israeli soldiers and settlers. "The grief and outrage of the families of American citizens killed and detained by Israeli forces was palpable," Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pennsylvania) posted on social media on Wednesday. "I am so grateful for their courage and advocacy driven by the hope that more families do not have to experience the pain they do." Since 2022, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 10 American citizens in the West Bank and Gaza, according to Lee's office. No one has been prosecuted in connection with any of the deaths, reports.

While Rubio was on this tour of ancient Jerusalem, Israeli planes bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City, pulverising three decades of archaeological work. The battle over history has long been part of the broader Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Officials from the Israel Antiquities Authority have followed Israeli troops into occupied zones in search of artefacts. But that struggle has seldom been as conspicuous as in the past month.

According to Gaza's health ministry, more than 63,000 people have been killed in the territory the majority of them civilians with the true toll likely far higher. UN-backed experts have confirmed parts of Gaza, much of which has been reduced to rubble, are now in a man-made famine. In response, a growing number of academic bodies are now distancing themselves from Israeli institutions.

The veteran negotiators Hussein Agha, representing Palestine, and Robert Malley, an American diplomat, played instrumental roles in that long effort, including the critical Camp David summit of 2000. But, in their new book, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," they conclude that they were part of a charade. "A waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it," Malley notes bitterly. "At the end of that thirty-year-or-so period, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse situation than before the U.S. got so heavily invested."

The State Department fired its top press officer for Israeli-Palestinian affairs following multiple disputes over how to characterize key Trump administration policies, including a controversial plan to relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip that critics consider ethnic cleansing, according to U.S. officials and documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Monday's firing occurred days after an internal debate about releasing a statement to the news media that said, "We do not support forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended the government's decision to expand army operations and reoccupy Gaza City, which has faced severe international condemnation.

Netanyahu argued that we have to contend with the campaign of vilification done by so-called reputable news media. He mentioned a New York Times story showcasing a Palestinian mother with a supposedly starved child, claiming the child had cerebral palsy, highlighting the media's misrepresentation of facts. "It takes time. People will see the humanitarian surge. People will see our efforts to prevent civilian casualties," he said, emphasizing that eventually, truth prevails.