Palestine

>> In October 2023, Gili was called up for reserve duty in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and assigned to the Northern Command...

>> ... “We downplayed the northern front to avoid causing public panic, even though there were constant launches [by Hezbolla]... I remember feeling we were creating an inaccurate picture: We showed far more strength than vulnerability.”

>> The experience left Gili, who requested to use a pseudonym, questioning the very system she had served for years. “It was always easy to repeat that ‘The #IDF is prepared for any scenario,’” she continued. “Who were we to question it? But in reality, it was bullshit...

Gaza (QNN)- An Israeli airstrike killed Palestinian journalist Mohammed Washah, a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher, after targeting his vehicle in western Gaza City. The strike hit near Al-Nabulsi roundabout in the Sheikh Ajleen area, killing Washah and another Palestinian.

Local sources confirmed that the attack directly struck the vehicle, leading to the immediate deaths. The killing adds to a growing toll of journalists targeted during Israel’s military operations in Gaza, raising renewed concerns over press safety in the besieged territory.

Elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli forces continued their bombardment across multiple areas. Three civilians suffered injuries on the same day as shelling and gunfire intensified. Two civilians were wounded after Israeli artillery targeted Sheikh Nasser neighborhood in central Khan Younis, while a third person was injured by Israeli gunfire in the southern part of the city.

A prominent Palestinian children's rights charity has shut down its operations after decades of documenting violations against Palestinian children, blaming sustained Israeli pressure and restrictions.

In a statement posted on X on Tuesday night, Defence for Children International - Palestine (DCIP) said it had been forced to end its work due to an increasingly hostile environment that made continuing operations for the charity impossible.

“After 35 years of defending Palestinian children’s rights, we are not able to overcome operational challenges resulting from Israel’s targeted criminalisation of Palestinian human rights organisations," the charity, which is headquartered in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said in its post.

Before the war, our home garden was more than just a patch of green. It was a refuge I retreated to whenever the world felt too heavy. Bougainvillea climbed the walls, and flowers in every color filled the corners — tended by my mother as if they were her own children. In one corner stood a pomegranate tree we had brought from a nursery in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza — a city long known as the Strip’s food basket, with its fertile agricultural lands.

When the war began, our priorities shifted entirely. There was no longer space for beauty. Survival became the only goal. The flowers withered, and the once-vibrant garden turned into a silent gray space. We uprooted the blossoms and planted onions in their place, trying to ease the burden of hunger and soaring prices. Only the pomegranate tree remained — an enduring reminder of an agricultural city whose lands were bulldozed and whose residents were denied return.

Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, which once supplied much of Gaza with fruits and vegetables, have been reduced to devastated terrain. By late 2025 and into early 2026, satellite analyses from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Satellite Center show that up to 98 percent of fruit-bearing tree cropland — including olives and pomegranates — has been destroyed, while more than 87 percent of overall cropland and more than 80 percent of greenhouses have been damaged or wiped out. Only a tiny fraction of Gaza’s agricultural land — somewhere between 1.5 percent and 4 percent — remains both accessible and undamaged, mostly in limited southern areas, leaving the north largely off-limits due to restrictions, contamination, and military zones. This was not merely collateral damage. It was a direct assault on food security and livelihoods that continues to unfold even after the fragile ceasefire began in October 2025.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45256582

With brutality.. Occupation soldiers take turns in savagely assaulting a young man, near the "Qalandia" camp north of occupied Jerusalem.

Officials detained Salah Sarsour, the president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, saying he had been convicted of crimes by Israel and had lied on a green card application in the 1990s.

April 2, 2026

The president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this week after the authorities said he had been convicted of crimes by Israel more than three decades ago and had lied on his American green card application.

The president, Salah Sarsour, 53, has led the group, which is the largest Islamic organization in Wisconsin, for five years. In a statement on Thursday, the group said that he was a legal permanent resident who had lived in the United States for more than three decades.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45153338

Incident from Feb, 2024: https://xcancel.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1754696557373649200

97 per cent of Gaza’s animal wealth has been destroyed by Israeli bombing, starvation, and looting: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6811/

Apr 02, 2026

Police in Paris apprehended and briefly detained European Parliament Member Rima Hassan Thursday on suspicion of “apology for terrorism”—an allegation critics slammed as “judicial harassment” aimed at silencing her outspoken criticism of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the French government’s support for it.

The Sorbonne-educated jurist was one of the leaders of the June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla Madleen mission, along with climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and others. Hassan and others aboard the Madleen were intercepted by Israeli forces and arrested in international waters as they attempted to deliver food, children’s prosthetics, and other desperately needed supplies to Gaza’s besieged and starving people. Hassan said that she was beaten in Israeli custody.

While far-right and pro-Israel French lawmakers celebrated Hassan’s detention and called for her to be stripped of parliamentary immunity, Palestine defenders condemned the arrest.

April 1, 2026

Palestinians across the occupied West Bank observed a general strike on Wednesday in protest against a new Israeli law allowing the execution of prisoners, as international condemnation mounted.

Fatah, the movement led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, called for the strike, describing the legislation as a “dangerous escalation” against Palestinians.

“This criminal law will not break the will of our people or the determination of our prisoners, but will instead strengthen our resolve to continue the struggle for their freedom and legitimate rights,” it said in a statement.

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972Magazine [published in Israel]
March 29, 2026

After decades consolidating their control over Area C, Israeli settlers are expanding into Areas B and A — nominally under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction — and displacing communities, Oren Ziv and Ariel Caine revealed in a joint investigation with Local Call and The Nation.

As al-Barghouti notes, as part of the “deception strategy,” al-Sinwar spent the two years prior to the Tufan al-Aqsa operation feigning containment; for instance, he “went to the Egyptians to develop trade” and “spoke with the Qataris about expanding the economy in Gaza.” Al-Barghouti recounts that “[a]ll these matters were taking place as part of the deception.”[12] Simultaneously, al-Sinwar publicly “disbanded the Elite Force (Quwwat al-Nukhba)” of al-Qassam to further deepen the appearance that Hamas was seeking normalized relations with the occupation; after the “Elite Unit,” or al-Nukhba Force, was dissolved, “everything was restructured into brigades.” This cell-based rearrangement, in many ways a return to the early distributed al-Mujāhidūn al-Filasṭīniyyūn and Qassam formations of the mid-to-late 1980s and the First Intifada, would allow for decentralized structures that could, should conditions permit, operate semi-autonomously.

One of the more perspicacious covert preparations was al-Sinwar’s creation of a paragliding shell company that, though initially open for public use, soon imposed exorbitant prices, which prohibited non-militants from flying and thereby licensed the resistance to train using its equipment. As Mahmoud Mardawi states in the interview, the “paragliding that people saw” on 7 October 2023 “was part of a long-term plan from the start.”[15] Hamas created a company that would rent out the flying gear. Initially, “anyone who wanted to fly could do so.”[16] However, soon “the price was raised so high that not everyone could afford it. They raised the price on the assumption that people wouldn’t be able to pay.”[17] After most would-be ordinary paragliders were discouraged, the company lowered the price again, but by this point “essentially it was only for training the Qassam Brigades,” as all future sessions had been booked.[18] Indeed, as Mohamed Abdou argues in his “Communiqué #3” article from 20 May 2025, Sinwar’s spearheading this endeavor was galvanized by a broader instrumentalization of “covert deception”; Abdou’s article, which remains the sole scholarly reflection on this mechanism at the point of this article’s writing, also illuminates how:

On 12 September 2023, Palestinian resistance groups conducted the joint exercise “Al-Rukn Al-Shadid 4” (Mighty Pillar 4), designed to evaluate the speed and coordination of the resistance’s response in the event of an emergency. When Abdel Fattah al-Tanani—commander of a sniper squad in the Northern Battalion of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—returned from the exercise, he characterized it in striking terms. His remarks were neither casual nor a routine summary of training; rather, he stated plainly: “This time is completely different.”[22]

According to al-Tanani, the distinction lay not in technical details but in the underlying concept of the exercise. The offensive model implemented during the drill moved beyond hypothetical defensive scenarios and centered on above-ground maneuvering and the storming of the occupation’s fortifications using vehicles, in a simulation designed to approximate as closely as possible what would later unfold at zero hour.

The exercise, organized by the Joint Operations Room, carried particular weight because it was directly overseen by Ayman Nofal—the Al-Qassam Brigades’ commander of military relations, a member of its military council, commander of the Central Province Brigade, and former head of military intelligence. His leadership underscored the exceptional importance attributed to the Joint Operations Room in the broader context of preparations for the Battle of Al-Aqsa and the development of a comprehensive defensive framework to confront any large-scale assault by the occupation’s military on the Gaza Strip.

In an exclusive interview with Metras, a fighter from the PFLP’s Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades stated that the recent sessions conducted under joint command placed significant emphasis on anti-armor capabilities. For the first time, the Yassin 105 weapon was incorporated into the joint training environment, accompanied by direct attention from senior military leaders. This involvement was reflected in field inspections and visits to training sites attended by commanders from the Al-Qassam Brigades, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Saraya Al-Quds, and the Al-Nasser Brigades. As Hamas member Mahmoud Mardawi notes in the aforementioned interview with Ahmed Mansour, al-Sinwar had directed the commanders overseeing this training operation to ensure that the training was done publicly “because the enemy would detect any covert operation through aircraft.”[23] This is, at least, the reasoning that he provided the resistance soldiers who participated in the training session. The real reason was, in fact, far-sighted: if the exercise was conducted openly, al-Sinwar determined, it would give the impression that Hamas was attempting to quell its rank-and-file who—given the recent disbanding of the al-Nukhba Force, Hamas’ increased appearances of “containment,” and the Qassam leadership’s recent decision not to participate directly in the 5–7 August 2022 “Unity of the Fields” and 9–13 May 2023 “Revenge of the Free” confrontations between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the occupation—were worried that Hamas was abandoning its decades-long strategy of militarily confronting the occupation. Indeed, this is precisely how the occupation’s own Shin Bet received the open military exercise, as evidenced by its own after-action assessment.[24]

Land Day (1976)

Tue Mar 30, 1976

Image: Land Day, 1978 (Photo: Gidon Gitai)

On this day in 1976, Palestinians initiated a campaign of resistance, including a general strike, occupations, and violent confrontation with police, in opposition to Israeli settlement plans. The uprising is commemorated annually as Land Day.

Land Day was not a spontaneous uprising, but the result of months of planning. On May 21st, 1975, activists and Arab intellectuals held a meeting in Haifa to discuss a strategic response to Israel stepping up its campaign to appropriate Palestinian-owned land. This began a series of meetings over which the campaign was conceptualized, including a general congress that was the largest public gathering of Palestinians in Israel since 1948.

On February 14th, 1976, more than 5,000 residents rallied in the village of Sakhnin, calling for a general strike in response to Israeli repression. To prepare for the strike, local land defense committees and branches of the Communist Party distributed leaflets, organized demonstrations, and held meetings in several Arab towns and villages.

The first confrontations began on the eve of Land Day, March 29th as demonstrators in Arraba demanded the release of a local activist, closing the streets and setting fire to tires. Israeli soldiers fired on demonstrators with live ammunition, injuring many of them.

The following day, the general strike was initiated in Arab towns and villages, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and refugee camps in Lebanon. Israeli troops and border guards in military trucks and tanks raided Arab communities to arrest activist politicians and disperse demonstrators.

In total, six people were killed, approximately fifty were injured, and three hundred were arrested. When some of the injured applied for compensation, the Israeli Ministry of Defense categorized the Land Day confrontations as "combat activity".

The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question describes Land Day's legacy this way: "Land Day was a turning point in the orientations and tools adopted for Palestinian struggle inside Israel. After Land Day the Palestinians in Israel gradually structured their presence as a national group inside Israel in a way that went beyond their local struggles."

During Land Day protests in 2018, seventeen Palestinians were killed, including five Hamas members, and more than 1,400 were injured in shootings by the Israeli Army during a march calling for the Palestinian right of return at the borders with Gaza.

• Date: 1976-03-30
• Learn More: www.palquest.org, jacobinmag.com, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #GeneralStrikes, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/62854515

Britain, France, Germany and Italy on Sunday voiced deep concern over Israeli plans to expand the use of the death penalty in a bill expected to be voted on next week. The Council of Europe’s rights body also opposed the draft law, warning it would significantly broaden capital punishment.

Of course they want to kill people without using their military.