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SvennoJ on 07 February 2025
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Main events from Janurari 6th

  • President Trump has signed an executive order authorising economic and travel sanctions targeting people who work on International Criminal Court investigations of US citizens or US allies, such as Israel, repeating action he took during his first term.
  • Egypt has said Trump’s Gaza plan to displace millions of Palestinians from Gaza will “incite a return of fighting”, while Jordan has warned it will spread chaos throughout the Middle East and jeopardise the kingdom’s peace with Israel.
  • Trump has said Israel will hand Gaza over to the US once fighting in the besieged enclave ends, and that no US soldiers would be needed during the process.
  • Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced he had ordered the army to prepare a plan to allow Gaza residents who wished to leave to exit the enclave “voluntarily”.
  • Israel has said it “will not participate” in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), following in the footsteps of the US, which announced its withdrawal earlier this week.
  • Strong winds, rain and winter cold are adding to the suffering of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, while the UN World Food Programme has urged the international community and “all donors” to help feed millions of people in Gaza and rebuild the war-ravaged territory.

Palestinians determined to rebuild Gaza after devastating war: UN relief chief

UN Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher has told Al Jazeera that he has “never seen anything like” the scale of destruction that has taken place in Gaza.

Fletcher described conditions faced by Palestinians in Gaza as “pretty grim” and worse than anything he had seen in Darfur, Syria or on the front lines of the Ukraine-Russia war.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Fletcher said. “This is the toughest day of my working life. It is utterly, utterly pitiful what we’re seeing here.”

Fletcher added that the two-week ceasefire has nursed a “growing defiance” among the Palestinians he has spoken to.

“After two weeks of the ceasefire, people have managed to get a bit more sleep. They’ve managed to get a bit more food inside them, there is a sense of growing defiance, which I’m hearing everyone, everyone has come up to me and insisted on telling their story,” he said.


Israeli military continues days-long offensive on Tulkarem

The Israeli military has arrested several young men from the outskirts of Tulkarem, in a continuation of its 11-day operation against the occupied West Bank city, the Wafa news agency reports.

Multiple military operations have been carried out across Tulkarem over recent hours, targeting the Tulkarem refugee camp and a hospital, while Israeli forces are also occupying buildings throughout the city.

Wafa reports that the Israeli military assaulted a young man and arrested four others from the Thinnabeh neighbourhood, east of Tulkarem, after raiding several homes.

Wafa also reports that the Israeli military has stormed the town of Attil, north of Tulkarem, where they raided and searched several homes, while a separate unit raided the nearby village of Kafr al-Labad.



Israel given free hand to create ‘mini-Gazas’ in the occupied West Bank

There is large scale destruction in the occupied West Bank because of Israel’s continued military assault, especially targeting Jenin and Tulkarem. Palestinians are drawing parallels between Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what they’re going through in the occupied West Bank.

They see this as part of one war against Palestinians. They take the evidence from statements by Israeli political and military leaders, who say Jenin and Tulkarem must understand what was done in Gaza will be done to them because they support resistance.

These military operations not only target members of armed groups and members of political groups who oppose the Israeli occupation, they also punish the population. Wide scale destruction of infrastructure, of homes, of entire residential blocks, and the uprooting of thousands of Palestinians, in effect, creates mini-Gazas in the occupied West Bank.

In the current atmosphere where Israel feels like it has a free hand to talk about the uprooting of Gaza’s entire population, what is happening in the occupied West Bank is slipping below the radar, and it is being normalised because Netanyahu has an ally in the White House.