Still from the banned documentary on the Palestinian youth of Gaza, “How to Survive a War Zone.”
+ The Netanyahu government has circulated a plan for Gaza that places the Strip under tighter Israeli control than before the war, shattering any notion that Israel is preparing to end its occupation. Under the plan, which Israel sent to the UN and humanitarian aid groups, aid would be distributed inside “humanitarian bubbles” under the control of the IDF and only to “vetted” Palestinians. Rafah would remain an occupied and closed city. UNRWA would be evicted from Gaza and only one border crossing would remain open.
+ Israel’s finance minister, Belazel Smotrich, claimed credit this week for the delay in releasing Palestinian prisoners last week and predicted that the Israelis would soon reoccupy Gaza with the aid of the US:
Our influence on decision-making is very great, including the decision not to release the 600 [Palestinians] on Saturday night. We do not take our eyes off the goal for which we are still in the government, which is to ensure the achievement of all the war goals, most notably the complete destruction of Hamas militarily, civilly and politically. We have the opportunity to participate in a series of steps that will change the course of history, which will enhance Israel’s security and strength in the coming years and on all fronts.
Hamas knows very well that their time on earth is limited, until the state of Israel returns to fight with full force, speed and lethality that will overwhelm and destroy them.
When we decide that the time has come to resume the war, you will be surprised by the strength, intensity and lethality of the occupation of Gaza.
+ At a right-wing Israeli rally this week titled “This Time We Must Triumph — Occupy, Expel, Settle,” Israel’s Environment Minister Idit Silman, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for expelling all Palestinians from Gaza: “The only solution for Gaza is to empty Gaza of Gazans. God sent us Trump [who said] explicitly to us that the time has come to inherit the land…There is no other solution to terrorism… [We must] inherit in Gaza, in [West Bank Palestinian cities] Jenin, Nablus, the answer to terrorism is sovereignty and inheriting the land.”
+ At the same Jerusalem event, Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank: “The Land of Israel is for the People of Israel. Gaza is for Jews, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is for Jews. They are ours in the merit of our fathers and the merit of our deeds. The expulsion of our enemies needs to be forever. We are here not only to expel but to inherit, to establish flourishing settlements which are full of life. Victory will be when all of Gaza returns to our hands, where Jews [will] establish new generations of courageous settlers.”
+ Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, the leader of the Israeli opposition (so-called) to Netanyahu, said that the control of Gaza should be turned over to Egypt for at least the next 15 years, in exchange for paying off its international debts.
+++
+ Here are Trump’s rambling comments on Gaza and Israel at last week’s CPAC conference…
We have a ceasefire in Gaza, and we’re joined today by several survivors of the captivity under Hamas, including Noah Arghamani and Ilana Gretusky. Britt Uski. Wow.
Look at that. How beautiful. What a beautiful group of people. Wow. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. And you’re sitting next to a great guy, Sebastian Gorka, who’s also now in the administration. From day one. Right, Sebastian? He’s been—he’s been a loyalist from day one. We love Sebastian. Thank you very much, Sebastian. Thank you, everybody. That’s very nice. Beautiful.
We’re going to make it work somehow. You know? We’re doing the best we can. We started—it should’ve never happened. That’s the sad part. Would’ve never happened. If I were president, then I should’ve been. If I were president, it would’ve never happened, but it did so. We’re doing the best we can with it. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Also with us are family members of some individuals who are still hostages, and we will not rest until all of the hostages have been returned back home. Some of them are coming home in very bad condition, and some of them are coming home only as bodies. They’re—they’re dead. We have a lot of them coming home now.
They’re dead. And these are largely young people. Young people don’t die. Young people are young people. They don’t die like this, but they’re dead.
And the parents come to me, and they say, “Please, sir, could you get my son back?” How old is he, sir? “My son is dead.” It’s important just as important as if that son were alive to get the body back. It’s amazing, actually.
Amazing. Just as important. Thank you. It’s amazing, though, that the parents—these—the parents are strong. I mean, look strong.
What does strong mean? Strong is their life is ruined. Really, it’s ruined. I see the people. But they come up to me, and it’s so important to get the body back.
They know. And some are—are not sure. They’re eighty percent sure he’s dead or she’s dead, but they have that little glimmer of hope. And I say, let him have that hope. Right?
Let him have that hope. But getting the body back is just as important as getting the son back healthy or the daughter back healthy. It’s amazing to see when I—when I see the level of intensity and love and, sorrow and tragedy.
As I said in my inaugural address, it’s my hope that my greatest legacy will be as a peacemaker, not a conqueror. I don’t want to be a conqueror.
+ On Friday, the Trump administration approved another $3 billion “emergency” arms sale to Israel. The package includes 35,529 MK 84 or BLU-117 general-purpose bomb bodies, 4,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads, MK 83 and BLU-110 bomb bodies and JDAM kits guidance kits, and D9R and D9T Caterpillar bulldozers.
+ Jewish Voice for Peace on Steve Bannon’s appearance at CPAC:
Over the weekend Steve Bannon:
– Proclaimed support for Israel
– Did a Sieg Heil salute
–Issued threats against progressive American Jews.Bannon and his actions epitomize what it means to be an antisemitic supporter of Israel in our government.
+++
+ Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 1,000 medical workers in Gaza and arbitrarily detained more than 100 others, subjecting them to sadistic forms of abuse and humiliation.
+ According to Health Care Workers for Rights, over the last 16 months, Israel has arrested at least 339 medical workers in Gaza, holding most of them without charges and incommunicado for months. More than 163 medical workers remain in custody.
+ Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital, who was detained for seven months in Israeli prisons before being released without charge, told the Guardian: “Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” “I am talking about clubbing, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there … I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”
+ Naji Abbas, Physicians for Human Rights, described on Democracy Now! the systematic torture of detained Palestinian doctors by Israeli prison guards and interrogators: “You hear about the brutal violence of the [IDF] unit called Unit 100. And some of these units it has been revealed have raped some of the detainees in the last summer. And this same unit enters every two days a week with dogs, inflicting beatings and letting the dogs attack doctors and detainees, without any cause, without any logic, without any reason to try to understand what they are looking for. It’s just a way of torturing people.”
+ In the last two weeks, at least seven Palestinian newborns have frozen to death, bringing the total child deaths from hypothermia this winter in Gaza to at least 16.
+ Dr. Mimi Syed, a professor of emergency medicine at WSU Medical School who has done two medical missions in Gaza, on child deaths in Gaza: All of this is preventable. These are manufactured life-threatening conditions caused by the Israeli government, and it continues to happen. These are violations of the ceasefire agreement. There was a promise that 60,000 mobile homes would enter, 200,000 tents, a fraction of which has entered. Unfortunately, children are at the receiving end of this cruelty. I’m told by the doctors at Nasser Hospital they barely have the equipment, especially in North Gaza or around Gaza City to take care of these babies coming in with hypothermia. The medical equipment at the hospital has been vandalized and destroyed by the Israeli military. They don’t have the things that they need to take care of these patients. The staff has either been imprisoned or been killed. So there aren’t enough doctors to take care of these children.”
+ There are still more than 14,000 injured Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 4,500 children, needing urgent medical evacuations. So far only 900 (around 7 percent) have made it out.
+++
+ Between February 18 and 25, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported the killing of 57 Palestinians and the injury of 39 others.
+ On February 17, two Palestinians, a boy and a man, were killed by Israeli snipers near the Al Awada Roundabout in central Rafah.
+ On February 19, one Palestinian was killed, and others injured, when an Israeli air strike in Ash Shokat area in south-eastern Rafah hit a group of people.
+ On February 23, a Palestinian man was killed, and four others were injured, when a vehicle reportedly escorting a delivery of humanitarian aid overturned after Israeli forces fired at it near Rafah Crossing. Later that day, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian boy named Abdul Rahman Hussam Al-Helo near his home in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of eastern Gaza City.
+ Since the ceasefire came into effect, a total of 722 bodies have been retrieved from the rubble.
+++
Still from drone footage of the destruction of residential neighborhoods in the central Gaza village of Al-Mughraqa posted on X by Gaza Notifications.
+ According to the Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (IRDNA), a report prepared by the UN, World Bank and European Union analyzing damages, losses and reconstruction needs, the total recovery and reconstruction needs in Gaza will cost at least $53 billion over the next decade. The report says that the housing sector in Gaza accounted for about 53 percent of the total damage, followed by commerce and industry (20 percent), transportation (eight percent), and water, sanitation and health infrastructure (five percent).
+ According to the Gaza Municipal government: Gaza City is experiencing a severe environmental and health crisis due to the accumulation of waste since the beginning of Israel’s military operations in the Strip, posing a direct threat to residents’ health. Over 170,000 tons of waste have piled up in the streets, leading to severe environmental pollution and exposing residents to the risk of diseases and epidemics. The city managers reported that 80 percent of the municipality’s machinery, including equipment used for waste management, has been destroyed by the Israelis. Amid these deteriorating conditions, Israel refuses to allow access to the main landfill in Juhor ad-Dik for safe waste disposal.
+ Francesca Albanese at The Rights Forum on the role of the Western media in normalizing the genocide in Gaza: “I think of the day when there will be an investigation on the role of Western corporate media in this genocide. Because this is not a genocide that has been just overlooked. This is a genocide that has been justified and enabled [by the media.] They have maintained a line sticking to the Israeli military narrative, using their terminology, amplifying sometimes the fabrications, like there was a Hamas headquarters under al-Shifa Hospital, which justified the destruction of the entire hospital. They have repeated incessantly the mantra of the ‘human shields’ of the terrorists. The subliminal effect of normalizing a situation, which is pathetically unlawful, by inserting into the language words that create a sort of mental dogma that the Palestinians for some reason have brought this havoc upon themselves. “
+ Bowing to pressure from the Israeli government, the BBC removed the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone and issued an apology, not for their heavy-handed censorship, but for airing the program at all, saying there were “serious flaws” in the production. Yet none of these alleged “flaws” involved any factual inaccuracies in the film. The real problem seems to be that the film humanized Palestinian kids.
+ Reporter, question Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the BBC’s decision to: ‘The BBC has today admitted serious flaws over the recent Gaza coverage – Does the BBC still have your trust?’
+ Keir Starmer: ‘I’ve been concerned about the program in question. The secretary of state had a meeting with the BBC.’
+ Karishma Patel, former Middle East correspondent for BBC News:
Let me make one thing clear. I left BBC News last year after covering Gaza for months because I could see evidence accumulating into the robust conclusion that Israel has been committing war crimes & crimes against humanity. I watched my org fail to shape coverage around this, as it does with other evidence-based findings (e.g. that climate change is real). We are long past the point at which Israel’s culpability is up for debate, just as we’re past debating that climate change is happening. Too many mistake constant debate for good journalistic practice. Journalists need to be coming to evidence-based conclusions. Reaching conclusions after thorough investigation doesn’t make me “biased”, it makes me good at my job. As the old saying goes, the journalist’s job isn’t to report that it may or may not be raining – it’s to look outside and tell the public if it is. And let me tell you: there’s a storm.
+++
+ Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of Israel’s Parliament and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, went on a racist rant against Palestinians this week in an interview with the ultra-Orthodox Israel radio station Kol BaRama.
“Who is innocent in Gaza? Civilians went out and slaughtered people in cold blood … We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate.” Vaturi described Palestinians in Gaza as “scum and subhumans” and claimed “no one in the world wants the civilians in Gaza, everyone is pushing them into Israel….We will soon turn Jenin into Gaza.” Vaturi said the Palestinian captives released under the Gaza ceasefire deal should be sent to Jenin so they could be “eliminated” by Israeli raids: “Erase Jenin. Don’t start looking for the terrorists … if there’s a terrorist in a house, take it out.”
+ The World Health Organization has said that US suspension of aid funding could leave six areas of the Gaza Strip underfunded.
+ Anneliese Dodds, the UK’s international development minister, resigned this week in protest of the Starmer government’s slashing of foreign aid in order to boost defense spending, a move many interpreted as bowing to the demands of Donald Trump. Dobbs warned that the cuts will seriously degrade humanitarian efforts in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine.
“Ultimately, these cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people – deeply harming the UK’s reputation, “Dodds wrote to Starmer. “I know you have been clear that you are not ideologically opposed to international development. But the reality is that this decision is already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAID.”
+++
+ Five Microsoft employees were removed during a company town hall meeting after protesting the company’s contracts to supply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing services to the Israeli military. During a presentation by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the employees unveiled T-shirts asking: “Does Our Code Kill Kids, Satya?”
+ The faculty and staff union at City University of New York sent a letter condemning New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to order the cancellation of a job posting at the university for a professorship in Palestinian Studies. Hochul defended her intrusion into academic freedom by alleging the position might be used to “promote anti-semitic theories.”
In their letter to Hochul, the union wrote: “We strongly object to your removal of a job posting for a Palestinian Studies faculty position as a violation of academic freedom at Hunter College,. We oppose anti-Semitism and all forms of hate, but this move is counterproductive. It is an overreach of authority to rule an entire area of academic study out of bounds.”
+++
+ Palestinian filmmaker Basal Adra: “Our film is going to the Oscars. But here in Masafer Yatta, we’re still being erased. As the world watches ‘No Other Land,’ Israeli settlers are raiding and burning our villages while soldiers arrest us, abuse us, and demolish our homes.”
+ The Israeli human rights group, Kerem Navot, released a report this week documenting the construction of 60 illegal Israeli settler “outposts” in the West Bank last year. The report notes that “more than one-fifth” of the 284 settler outposts developed since 1997 were created in 2024 alone. Karem Navot says, “Many of the new outposts have few settlers, sometimes fewer than ten. However, they are taking over large areas and establishing infrastructure there, with the aim of allowing more settlers to arrive in the future…this is how they endlessly expand the area where settlers roam freely and Palestinians do not, gradually creating a settlement contiguous area in a large part of the West Bank. Unlike in the past, when the Israeli governments still sought to project an image of upholding the rule of law by evacuating a token number of outposts, the current government ordered the army and the Civil Administration not to enforce any evacuations.
+The report emphasized that Israeli settlers in these outposts are the “primary perpetrators of violent nationalist crimes in the West Bank.”
+ Sky News’s Middle East correspondent Diana Magnay on Israel’s military operations in the West Bank: “If you look at the destruction, the fact they’ve bombed homes, destroyed the infrastructure, taken out the water systems, the electricity, it looks like the ultimate aim is to make it impossible for Palestinians to return”
+ Israel’s defense minister, Isaac Katz, proclaimed this week that any attempt by Syria’s new government to establish themselves in the country’s southern zone, where the Israeli military has established a security zone will be met with fire.
+ Nael Barghouti, the longest-held Palestinian prisoner, was released this week after spending 48 years in Israeli prisons: “First of all, we salute all our people in Gaza, including children, women, soldiers, and leaders of the resistance, and the land of Gaza. No matter what words or dictionaries there are, they will not do justice to the brave, resistant people of Gaza.”
Barghouti was released into exile in Egypt and Israel has prohibited his wife from leaving the West Bank to join him.
+++
Let’s give the last word this week to former French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin…
Gaza is the biggest historical scandal of…well, I don’t even dare to find a reference and of which nobody talks about in this country anymore. There is silence. It is a taboo. The media don’t talk about it anymore. I have to Google to find a press release that gives me news of the number of deaths that occur in Gaza. It is a real scandal in terms of democracy and all this in the name of what? In the name of war! “Oh, it’s war! It’s war. Wars are like that.” OK, but it’s not. It’s not exactly a war like the others in Gaza, since it is civilian populations who die.
So we are in absurdity. And France is fading away. It is France that is footing the bill. And I can’t accept that…It is an unfortunate, every day reality. In Gaza, bodies torn to pieces. Hearts are in pieces. Souls are in pieces. Heads are in pieces. One must see that Israel is in the process of creating the conditions of a reoccupation of Gaza, whether in the southern line, whether it is in the line that cuts in the middle, Israel has regained possession of Gaza. Gaza is completely besieged. And this at a time when the West Bank itself is decomposing. We see it in the northern West Bank and in the southern West Bank. We are facing a real-time bomb.
We have levers to use. We have levers in terms of armaments. We have economic levers. We continue to trade with several territories, where colonization by Israel is active. Still, we refuse to use these levers, defending with arguments that are absolutely unreal, culturally and intellectually speaking, like: “We must leave Israel to fight its war until the end.” But what end? Yoav Gallant, the former Israel Defense minister, says Hamas has been eliminated in Gaza. So, what is the end? It is the same problem in Ukraine and Gaza, we have no political objective and when you have no political objective, the only thing you can do is war. In Ukraine, we did not give them the means to achieve their objectives and we do not really know what these objectives are. That’s why today, everyone starts talking about peace again and we are unfortunately excluded from these discussions.
In the same way in Gaza, there is no political objective on the part of Israel, there is a security objective, there is an identity objective, there is a Messianic madness, and that explains the catastrophe.
The world is watching all of this and the world draws the conclusions. And this is why we French, we Europeans, we westerners today are pointed out as being peddlers of double-standards. This can only be solved by international law and the return of justice. We will have to expend cash in terms of effort and legitimacy. For our right to talk and provide advice again in international matters. We will need to make amends.”
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