Aerial view of the destruction in Rafah by the Jews.
Compilation of news reports – IAK staff
NOTE: The Gaza Health Ministry’s daily casualty figures are based on the number of dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals, and does not include victims that are under the rubble or elsewhere, where ambulance and civil defense crews can not reach them.
In Gaza, at least 27 people were killed in Israeli attacks over the last 24 hours, according to a ministry statement.
Israeli forces also killed two Palestinian men in the West Bank on Friday. Nour Abdel Karim Mohammed Al-Baytawi, 34, the commander of the Jenin Battalion, and, Hakmat Shawqi Muhammad Abd Al-Nabi, 42 were killed near Nablus.
US to use Gaza aid plan as ‘bait to force displacement’: UNICEF
The US is planning to establish a new non-governmental foundation to distribute aid in the Gaza Strip without the Israeli military’s involvement, US officials announced on 9 May, without giving additional details.
US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said an announcement from the foundation would be made “shortly.”
Israel will not be part of distributing aid in Gaza, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee said on Friday morning.
“A 14-page document from the newly registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) envisions four distribution centers in Gaza providing up to 1.2 million Palestinians with food, water, and hygiene kits,” Haaretz reported.
The foundation will establish additional distribution centers over time, and promises a “vital lifeline through an independent, rigorously audited model that gets assistance directly – and only – to those in need.”
However, a UN agency active in Gaza has criticized the plan, which will force Palestinians into small enclaves within Gaza under tight surveillance, surrounded by armed private contractors.
“It appears the design of a plan presented by Israel to the humanitarian community will increase ongoing suffering of children and families in the Gaza Strip,” said UNICEF spokesperson James Elder.
“The use of humanitarian aid as a bait to force displacement, especially from the north to the south will create this impossible choice: a choice between displacement and death,” Elder added.
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Exterminating Gaza was always Israel’s plan, but now it’s official
It has been a year since Israel first invaded Rafah and crossed Biden’s illusory “red line.” The Israeli army destroyed the Rafah crossing, isolating Gaza from Egypt and completely cutting it off from the outside world. Israel was free to conduct the mass displacement of Palestinians away from the Egyptian border, but it never admitted to that goal.
But now, Rafah is no more, and Israel’s recently approved plan to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely has made explicit what many have already expected for months: that the ulterior motive of creating permanent military installations and buffer zones in Gaza is to facilitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Israel is now openly announcing its intentions and publicly advertising ethnic cleansing as “voluntary migration.” This didn’t happen overnight, but has been the result of a slow, deliberate process of hemming Palestinians into concentrated sub-ghettoes under fire while creating vast military buffer zones on swathes of flattened Gazan territory. The plan has been implemented in piecemeal over the past 18 months, but now those pieces are falling clearly into place (continue reading here).
RELATED: Israeli soldiers are using slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s face for target practice
Trump cuts ties with Netanyahu over manipulation concerns: Report
US President Donald Trump has decided to cut off direct contact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a report said Thursday.
Yanir Cozin, a correspondent for Israeli Army Radio, said in a post on his X account that Trump made the decision after close associates told Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer that the president believes that Netanyahu is manipulating him.
An Israeli official said that people around Trump told him that “Netanyahu was manipulating him.”
“There is nothing Trump hates more than being portrayed as a fool or someone being played. That’s why he decided to cut contact with Netanyahu,” the official added.
Cozin pointed to the Israeli government’s failure to present concrete plans regarding Iran, Yemen’s Houthis, and Gaza as a source of the worsening US-Israel relationship.
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Israel launched a campaign against Kissinger after he blamed it for the breakdown of negotiations with Egypt in 1975, British documents reveal
Israel launched a campaign against former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after he blamed the Israelis for the breakdown of his mission to achieve an interim agreement with Egypt following the 1973 war, according to declassified British documents
The documents, unearthed by MEMO in the British National Archives, showed that the Israeli government lobbied US Congressmen to turn American opinion against Kissinger, accusing him of “delivering” Israel to Egypt and “humiliating” Israeli ministers.
In late March 1975, Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Egypt collapsed. Although he initially avoided publicly assigning blame, he privately told his UK counterpart, James Callaghan, that Israeli leaders were primarily responsible (continue reading here).
Rümeysa Öztürk, one of several pro-Palestine scholars kidnapped and imprisoned by the Trump administration under its dubious interpretation of an 18th-century law and a Cold War-era national security measure, was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody Friday following a federal judge’s order.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions III in Vermont ruled that Öztürk—a 30-year-old Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Fulbright scholar—was illegally detained in March, when masked plainclothes federal agents snatched her off a suburban Boston street in broad daylight in what eyewitnesses and advocates likened to a kidnapping and flew her to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana.
“Thank you so much for all the support and love,” Öztürk told supporters outside the facility following her release.
The government admits that Öztürk committed no crime. She was targeted because of an opinion piece published in Tufts Daily advocating divestment from Israel amid the U.S.-backed nation’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonization in the rest of Palestine. Öztürk was arrested despite a U.S. State Department determination that there were no grounds for revoking her visa.
“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed,” said Sessions, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. “That literally is the case” (continue reading here).
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