Israel says Lebanon negotiations will only be held ‘under fire’

Israel says Lebanon negotiations will only be held ‘under fire’
Destroyed shops and buildings at commercial street that hit Saturday night by Israeli airstrikes, in Nabatiyeh town, south Lebanon, on Oct. 13, 2024. (AP)
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Updated 16 October 2024
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Israel says Lebanon negotiations will only be held ‘under fire’

Israel says Lebanon negotiations will only be held ‘under fire’
  • “Hezbollah is in great distress,” Gallant said near the border

JERUSALEM: Israel will not stop fighting a now weakened Hezbollah before it can safely return its citizens to their homes near the Lebanese border and any ceasefire negotiations will be held “under fire,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday.
“Hezbollah is in great distress,” Gallant said near the border, according to a statement from his office. “We will hold negotiations only under fire, I said this on day one, I said it in Gaza and I am saying it here.”


Trump warns that arrest of Palestinian activist at Columbia will be ‘first of many’

Trump warns that arrest of Palestinian activist at Columbia will be ‘first of many’
Updated 15 sec ago
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Trump warns that arrest of Palestinian activist at Columbia will be ‘first of many’

Trump warns that arrest of Palestinian activist at Columbia will be ‘first of many’
  • The Department of Homeland Security has said the arrest was in response to Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism
  • But a Manhattan judge Monday ordered he not be deported until a lawsuit challenging his detention is considered
NEW YORK: President Donald Trump warned Monday that the arrest and possible deportation of a Palestinian activist who helped lead protests at Columbia University will be the first “of many to come” as his administration cracks down on campus demonstrations against Israel and the war in Gaza.
Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful US resident who was a graduate student at Columbia until December, was detained Saturday by federal immigration agents in New York and flown to an immigration jail in Louisiana.
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
But a federal judge in New York City ordered Monday that Khalil not be deported while the court considered a legal challenge brought by his lawyers. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
Khalil’s detention drew outrage from civil rights groups and free speech advocates, who accused the administration of using its immigration enforcement powers to squelch criticism of Israel.
He is the first person known to be detained for deportation under Trump’s promised crackdown on student protests.
Federal immigration authorities also visited a second international student at Columbia on Friday evening and attempted to take her into custody but were not allowed to enter the apartment, according to a union representing the student.
Khalil, 30, had not been charged with any crime related to his activism, but Trump has argued that protesters forfeited their rights to remain in the country by protests he claimed support Hamas, the Palestinian group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The US has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Khalil and other student leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest have rejected claims of antisemitism, saying they are part of a broader anti-war movement that also includes Jewish students and groups. But the protest coalition, at times, has also voiced support for leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Islamist organization designated by the US as a terrorist group.
The US Education Department on Monday warned some 60 colleges, including Harvard and Cornell, that they could lose federal money if they fail to uphold civil rights laws against antisemitism and ensure “uninterrupted access” to campus facilities and education opportunities. The Trump administration is already pulling $400 million from Columbia.
A group of Columbia faculty members expressed concern Monday that Khalil’s detention was intended to suppress free speech by students and staff who are not US citizens.
“The attack on Mahmoud Khalil is intended to make them quake in their boots, and to make all of us quake in our boots,” said Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor. “Our message to Washington is that we are not silenced, we are not afraid, and we stand together, determined to defeat this ongoing assault on our fundamental rights.”
In their legal complaint, Khalil’s attorneys accused the government of retaliating against him for his “constitutionally protected advocacy on behalf of Palestinian human rights.”
Typically, the government has to meet a higher bar to expel a person who has permanent residency in the US, like showing someone has been convicted of a serious crime.
Born in Syria to Palestinian parents, Khalil entered the US to attend Columbia in 2022. He subsequently got married to an American citizen, who is now eight months pregnant.
Khalil emerged as one of the most visible activists in large protests at Columbia last year, serving as a mediator on behalf of pro-Palestinian activists and Muslim students. That role put him in direct touch with university leaders and the press — and drew attention from pro-Israel activists, who in recent weeks called on the Trump administration to deport him.
“He took a public facing role, and now he’s being targeted for speaking to the media,” another student protester, Maryam Alwan, told The Associated Press.
More recently, Khalil faced investigation by a new disciplinary body set up at Columbia University, which sent him a letter last month accusing him of potentially violating a new harassment policy by calling a school official a “genocidal dean” online.
Khalil told The Associated Press last week that he served as a spokesperson for protesters but did not play a leadership role.
“They are alleging that I was the leader of CUAD or the social media person, which is very far from reality,” he said, using the acronym for Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Khalil received a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs last semester. He previously graduated from the Lebanese American University in Beirut with a computer science degree and worked at the British Embassy in Beirut’s Syria office, according to his biography on the Society for International Development’s website.
A few hundred protesters rallied near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Manhattan on Monday to demand Khalil’s release.
“By arresting Mahmoud, Trump thinks he can strip us of our rights and strip us of our commitment to our people,” Ibtihal Malley, a New York University student, told the crowd. “To that we say: You are wrong.”
Back on campus, Columbia sophomore Pearson Lund was among those who found the potential stripping of Khalil’s green card concerning.
“At what point does this process stop?” the physics student said as he entered campus through a security line guarded by city police officers.

Israel-Gaza war behind record high US anti-Muslim incidents, advocacy group says

Israel-Gaza war behind record high US anti-Muslim incidents, advocacy group says
Updated 5 min 6 sec ago
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Israel-Gaza war behind record high US anti-Muslim incidents, advocacy group says

Israel-Gaza war behind record high US anti-Muslim incidents, advocacy group says
  • Muslim advocacy group says it recorded over 8,600 incidents in 2024
  • Rights advocates have noted rising Islamophobia, antisemitism since start of Israel-Gaza war

WASHINGTON: Discrimination and attacks against American Muslims and Arabs rose by 7.4 percent in 2024 due to heightened Islamophobia caused by US ally Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting college campus protests, a Muslim advocacy group said on Tuesday.
The Council on American Islamic Relations said it recorded the highest number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints — 8,658 — in 2024 since it began publishing data in 1996.
Most complaints were in the categories of employment discrimination (15.4 percent), immigration and asylum (14.8 percent), education discrimination (9.8 percent) and hate crimes (7.5 percent), according to the CAIR report.
Rights advocates have highlighted an increase in Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias and antisemitism since the start of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza.
The CAIR report also details police and university crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests and encampments on college campuses.
Demonstrators have for months demanded an end to US support for Israel. At the height of college campus demonstrations in the summer of 2024, classes were canceled, some university administrators resigned, and student protesters were suspended and arrested.
Human rights and free speech advocates condemned the crackdown on protests which were called disruptive by university administrators. Notable incidents include violent arrests by police of protesters at Columbia University and a mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“For the second year in a row, the US-backed Gaza genocide drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States,” CAIR said. Israel denies genocide and war crimes accusations.
Last month, an Illinois jury found a man guilty of hate crime in an October 2023 fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy.
Other alarming US incidents since late 2023 include the attempted drowning of a 3-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York and a Florida shooting of two Israeli visitors whom a suspect mistook to be Palestinians.
In recent days, the US government has faced criticism from rights advocates over the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who has played a prominent role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.


Hundreds of thousands return home in Sudan

Hundreds of thousands return home in Sudan
Updated 11 March 2025
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Hundreds of thousands return home in Sudan

Hundreds of thousands return home in Sudan
  • Displaced families have headed back in droves, even to burned homes

PORT SUDAN: Nearly 400,000 Sudanese have returned to their homes over the past two and a half months after being displaced by the ongoing conflict, the United Nations migration agency said on Monday.

Between December and March, “approximately 396,738 individuals” returned to areas retaken from paramilitary forces by the army, which has advanced through central Sudan in recent months, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been locked in a brutal conflict between army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Nearly all the returnees moved back to their homes in the central Sudanese states of Sennar, which the army largely recaptured in December, and Al-Jazira after it was retaken the following month.

Thousands more have returned to the capital Khartoum, where the army regained large areas last month and appeared on the verge of expelling the RSF.

Displaced families have headed back in droves, even to looted and burned homes, after more than a year of displacement.

Across the country, 11.5 million people are internally displaced, many of them facing mass starvation in what the UN calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

A further 3.5 million people have fled across borders since the war broke out.

Parts of the country have already descended into famine, with another 8 million people on the brink of mass starvation.

On Monday, the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said only 6.3 percent of the funding necessary to provide lifesaving aid had been received.

Nationwide, nearly 25 million people are suffering dire food insecurity.

The conflict divided the country into two parts, with the army controlling the country’s north and east while the RSF holds nearly all Darfur and parts of the south.

A medical source said RSF shelling on Sunday on a strategic city in Sudan’s south killed nine civilians and injured 21 others.

El-Obeid, the state capital of North Kordofan, came under attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, said the source at the city’s main hospital and several witnesses.


Boatless in Gaza: using old fridge doors to catch fish

Boatless in Gaza: using old fridge doors to catch fish
Updated 11 March 2025
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Boatless in Gaza: using old fridge doors to catch fish

Boatless in Gaza: using old fridge doors to catch fish
  • Israeli bombardment over more than 15 months of war has destroyed most of the boats in the harbor, wrecking the fishermen’s means of making a living

GAZA CITY: Balanced calmly on top of what was once a refrigerator door, fisherman Khaled Habib uses a makeshift paddle to propel himself through the waters of Gaza City’s fishing port.

Israeli bombardment over more than 15 months of war has destroyed most of the boats in the harbor, wrecking the fishermen’s means of making a living.

“We’re in a very difficult situation today, and struggling with the fishing. There are no fishing boats left. They’ve all been destroyed and tossed on the ground,” said Habib.

“I made this ‘boat’ from refrigerator doors and cork — and thankfully it worked.”

So he could continue feeding his family, Habib came up with the idea of stuffing cork into old fridge doors to make them buoyant.

He covered one side with wood and the other with plastic sheeting to help make the makeshift paddleboard waterproof.

Habib also crafted a fishing cage out of wire because of the lack of nets but admitted that his resulting catch was “small.”

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said in December that the conflict had taken Gaza’s “once thriving fishing sector to the brink of collapse.”

“Gaza’s average daily catch between October 2023 to April 2024 dropped to just 7.3 percent of 2022 levels, causing a $17.5 million production loss,” the FAO said.

Habib now fishes mainly inside the small port area using dough as bait.

Despite the fragile ceasefire that came into force on Jan. 19, which essentially halted the fighting, Habib said that fishing outside the port is prohibited.

“If we go (outside the fishermen’s harbor), the Israeli boats will shoot at us, and that’s a problem we suffer from a lot.”

Habib said he catches enough fish to feed his family and tries to help others by selling the rest at an affordable price.

After dividing his catch into small plastic bags, the fisherman sells some at the high prices at the harbor market.

The first phase of the Gaza truce, which ended on March 1, had enabled the entry of vital food, shelter, and medical assistance into the Palestinian territory.

Israel announced on March 2 that it was blocking aid deliveries to Gaza, where Palestinians say they fear food shortages and price hikes.

Several other fishermen, particularly the younger generation, have also used the new makeshift floating platforms.

Habib sees the homemade paddleboards as having a dual purpose.

“If we wanted to raise a new generation to learn how to swim, boats should be made from refrigerator doors, and then everyone would learn how to swim, row, and sail,” he said.

“Thank God, now they’ve learned how to swim,” he added, looking over the water at children trying to keep their balance.


Israel’s halt to food and aid deliveries worsens Gaza conditions

Israel’s halt to food and aid deliveries worsens Gaza conditions
Updated 11 March 2025
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Israel’s halt to food and aid deliveries worsens Gaza conditions

Israel’s halt to food and aid deliveries worsens Gaza conditions
  • Israel last week blocked the entry of goods into the territory in a standoff over a truce that has halted fighting for the past seven weeks
  • Underscoring the fragility of the ceasefire, an Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinians in the Bureij camp in central Gaza Strip, medics said

CAIRO: Israel’s suspension of goods entering Gaza is taking a toll on the Palestinian enclave, with some bakeries closing and food prices rising, while a cut in the electricity supply could deprive people of clean water, Palestinian officials said.
The suspension, which Israel said was aimed at pressuring militant group Hamas in ceasefire talks, applies to food, medicine and fuel imports.
The UN Palestinian refugees agency UNRWA said the decision to halt humanitarian aid threatens the lives of civilians exhausted by 17 months of “brutal” war. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were dependent on aid, it said.
Hamas describes the measure as “collective punishment” and insisted it will not be pushed into making concessions.

A youth pushes a bicycle loaded with filled-up water containers outside the Southern Gaza Desalination plant, which stopped working after Israeli after cut off electricity supply to the Gaza Strip, in Deir el-Balah in the centre of the Palestinian territory on March 10, 2025. (AFP)

Abdel-Nasser Al-Ajrami, head of the Gaza bakers’ union, told Reuters that six out of the 22 bakeries still able to operate in the enclave had already shut after they ran out of cooking gas.
“The remaining bakeries may close down in a week or so should they run out of diesel or flour, unless the crossing is reopened to allow the goods to flow,” he said.
The bakeries were already unable to meet the needs of the people, he said.
Israel last week blocked the entry of goods into the territory in a standoff over a truce that has halted fighting for the past seven weeks. The move has led to a hike in prices of essential foods as well as of fuel, forcing many to ration their meals.
Displaced from her destroyed house and living in a tent in Khan Younis, 40-year-old Ghada Al-Rakab said she is struggling to secure basic needs. The mother of six bakes some goods for her family and neighbors, sometimes renting out a clay makeshift oven.
“What kind of life are we living? No electricity, no water, no life, we don’t even live a proper life. What else is left there in life? May God take us and give us rest,” Al-Rakab said.

’ENVIRONMENTAL AND HEALTH RISKS’
Israel’s onslaught on Gaza has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians since October 2023, according to Gaza health officials, left most of its people destitute and razed much of the territory to the ground.
The war was triggered by a Hamas-led cross-border raid into southern Israel in which militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
In Israel’s latest punitive measure, Energy Minister Eli Cohen said on Sunday he had instructed the Israel Electric Corporation not to sell electricity to Gaza in what he described as a means of pressure on Hamas to free hostages.
Israel already cut power supply to Gaza at the war’s start but this move would affect a wastewater treatment plant currently supplied with power, according to the Israeli electricity company.
The Palestinian Water Authority said the decision suspended operations at a water desalination plant that produced 18,000 cubic meters of water per day for the population in central and southern areas of Gaza Strip.
Mohammad Thabet, the spokesperson of the Gaza power distribution plant, told Reuters the decision will deprive people in those areas of clean and healthy water.
“The decision is catastrophic, municipalities now will be obliged to let sewage water stream into the sea, which may result in environmental and health risks that go beyond the boundaries of Gaza,” Thabet said.
All the aid supplies being distributed by the Palestine Red Crescent are dwindling and it is having to ration what remains, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies said.
“If it is possible to find the basics like eggs and chicken, the prices have rocketed and are out of reach for the majority of people in Gaza,” IFRC spokesperson Tommaso Della Longa said.
It is also concerned that a lack of medical supplies and medicines may impact the treatment of patients.

MEDIATORS TRY TO SALVAGE TRUCE
Fighting in Gaza has been halted since January 19 under a truce, and Hamas has exchanged 33 Israeli hostages and five Thais for some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
But the truce’s initial 42-day stage has expired and Hamas and Israel remain far apart on broader issues including the postwar governance of Gaza and the future of Hamas itself.
Underscoring the fragility of the ceasefire, an Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinians in the Bureij camp in central Gaza Strip, medics said.
The Israeli military said the air force struck three individuals in Nuseirat, central Gaza, who were accused of trying to plant explosives. It also said soldiers shot at several militants in Gaza City who were also allegedly attempting to plant explosives.
Arab mediators, Egypt and Qatar, and the US are trying to salvage the ceasefire deal. They held talks with Hamas leaders and are set to receive Israeli negotiators in Doha on Monday.
Hamas spokesperson Abdel-Latif Al-Qanoua told Reuters on Monday the group was committed to the original phased agreement and expected mediators to “compel” Israel to begin talks on implementing the second stage. Phase two is intended to focus on agreements on the release of remaining hostages and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
Israel demands Hamas free the remaining hostages without beginning phase two negotiations.