One of at least two air strikes overnight on southern Rafah killed 13 children and two women – all from the same family, according to Gaza hospital records.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has faced wide international opposition to a plan for a ground invasion of Rafah, where the military says the last remaining brigades of Hamas are located and where the remaining 133 Israeli captives are believed to be held.

The war has killed at least 34,049 Palestinians and wounded another 76,901 since October 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. At least two-thirds of casualties have been children and women.

Despite international demands to abandon plans for a ground invasion of Rafah, Israel says it is going ahead with its offensive. It has also intensified air and artillery attacks on the overcrowded southern Gaza area.

Lana Zakout, 12, survived an attack on her home. “We were sleeping and all of a sudden I heard my sister shouting and crying. The roof was coming down on our heads. I thought I was dreaming, but when I opened my eyes it was all black and smoke. I was buried under the debris. Thirty minutes later, I was pulled out.”

Ahmed Barhoum, a Rafah resident, denounced the international community for allowing the carnage to continue. “This is an unjust world. This is a world deprived of all human values and morals. It only understands the language of power.”


UK official ‘appalled’ at Israeli attacks in Rafah

One of at least two air strikes overnight on southern Rafah killed 13 children and two women who were all from the same family, according to Gaza hospital records.

“Appalled by the Israeli strike on a residential apartment in the densely populated Rafah in Gaza, which resulted in more children being killed.  We must stop this fighting immediately and bring an end to this conflict,” the British secretary of state for the commonwealth, Tariq Ahmad, said in a post on X.

Ramallah residents condemned the killings of at least 14 people in three days of the Israeli army’s incursions into Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

Social media showed the Palestinian protest in a video verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad agency.

Nur Shams raid ‘worse’ than second Intifada attacks

Two days after being released, Israeli police has summoned Hebrew University professor Nadira Shalhoub-Kevorkian for another interrogation, according to her lawyer Alaa Mahajna. As we previously reported, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was released from custody after being arrested on April 18.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a vocal anti-Zionist, was arrested on suspicion of incitement after raising doubts about allegations of sexual assault during the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7 and for allegedly calling Israelis “criminals”.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian citizen of Israel. She is also a professor of law and an expert on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance and genocide studies.


_{Palestinian Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, centre, appears in a Jerusalem court on charges on incitement}

Israel claims killing suspect in Bekaa checkpoint stabbing attempt near Lebanon border

This is the thanks the USA gets for giving Israel another 27 Billion dollars

Israelis concerned by US sanctions on Netzah Yehuda military unit

US sanctions against Israeli army unit a ‘disappointing mistake’: Minister

Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari has claimed on X that the military is unaware of a decision by the United States to impose sanctions on the Netzah Yehuda battalion.

“If a decision is made on the matter, it will be examined,” and “the Israeli army is working and will continue to work to investigate every unusual incident based on fact and in accordance with the law”, he said in Hebrew.

Hagari said that “Netzah Yehuda soldiers are now participating in the war in the Gaza Strip with courage and professionalism, while maintaining the values and spirit of [the Israeli army] and the principles of international law”.

Israeli minister seeks sanctions against Palestinian Authority

Member of Knesset Ahmad Tibi, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – have said there is an urgent need for these visits in light of the “harsh and inhumane” conditions in which Israel is holding Palestinian prisoners.

In the past six months, at least 13 Palestinians in Israel Prison Service (IPS) facilities have died.

The petition seeks an immediate halt to a policy implemented by the National Security Minister, the far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the IPS, which has prevented Tibi from holding meetings with Palestinian prisoners for more than a year.

Tibi and Adalah are requesting a court order to allow him to visit prisoners, including Palestinian political leader and prisoner Marwan Barghouti, who has been subject to assaults by Israeli prison authorities, according to his family.

Netanyahu vows to increase ‘military pressure’ on Hamas

Rights group seeks probe into role of tech firms, media platforms in killings of Gaza civilians

Health Ministry identifies 2 teens killed by Israeli forces near Hebron

_{A covered body is pictured at the site of a reported attack at the Beit Einun junction}

The Netzah Yehuda, or “Judea Forever,” is a unit for ultra-Orthodox Jewish soldiers located in the occupied West Bank. In recent years, it has become a destination for radical right-wing settlers.

Settlers are Israeli citizens who live in illegal settlements on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In 2022, around the time the US opened its investigation into the unit over incidents of violence against Palestinian civilians, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article describing the batallion’s “long history of bad behaviour, driven by an ideology imbibed from the settler movement”.

An Israeli defence official who had spoken to Haaretz was quoted as saying that dissolving the Netzah Yehuda “would be a declaration of war for the settler leadership”, adding that “Their view on the ground is that this battalion belongs to them, that it’s a force that works for the settlement enterprise”.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, has articulated that there is a clear ideological link between the settler communities and the soldiers serving in the brigade. “As a settler, I’m telling you that the residents are happy every time that Netzah Yehuda is deployed in their sector,” Smotrich wrote on social media.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/3/19/how-israeli-settlers-are-expanding-illegal-outposts-amid-gaza-war

Tor Wennesland, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, has said he is “gravely concerned by heightened violence across the occupied West Bank”.

In a post on X, Wennesland called for avoiding “further escalation – attacks on civilians must stop, including settler violence.” “As the war in Gaza continues and regional instability mounts, West Bank stability is essential to keep alive prospects for peace,” he added.

The Israeli military has said its troops shot a Palestinian woman who attempted to stab soldiers at a checkpoint in the Jordan Valley.

It said none of its forces were hurt in the incident at the Hamra checkpoint, but the woman died after they stopped ambulances from reaching her, Palestinian medical sources said. The same source identified the woman as Manal Sawafta, 40, from Tubas, in the northeastern occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that seven civilians have been killed and others injured this evening in an Israeli air raid that targeted a house west of the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.

Wafa, citing local sources, said that Israeli warplanes had bombarded the house of the al-Nuwayri family in the camp.

Nuseirat refugee camp and the surrounding area have come under heavy bombardment in recent days.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Rafah in southern Gaza, says the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians seeking refuge in the area have witnessed an increase in Israeli military operations. In particular, military surveillance quadcopter drones have been active in the skies, he said, as the loud buzzing sound of one hovering overhead could be heard.

“We’ve been hearing this buzzing since the early hours of this morning,” he said, adding that this could indicate that Rafah could face a further “intensification” of Israeli military efforts.

He said the area has already experienced heavy bombardments, and that the increased surveillance could also signal “a potential military incursion” similar to the ground operations in Khan Younis, which is also located south of the enclave.

Israeli PM Netanyahu said on Sunday that his country’s military would increase the pressure on Hamas in the “coming days”.

Health officials in Gaza are now reporting that 22 people, including 18 children, were killed in the Israeli strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight. The first Israeli strike in Rafah killed a man, his wife and their 3-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies. The woman was pregnant, and the doctors saved the baby, the hospital said.

The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family. A relative, Umm Mohammad, told AP that the oldest killed, an 80-year-old aunt, was taken out “in pieces.” Small children were zipped into body bags.

Mohammed al-Beheiri said his daughter, Rasha, and her six children, the youngest 18 months old, were among those killed. A woman and three children were still under the rubble.

Israel has carried out near-daily air raids on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere. It has also vowed to expand its ground offensive to the city on the border with Egypt despite international calls for restraint, including from the US.


Baby girl delivered from womb of Palestinian woman killed by Israeli attack

The mother was killed along with her husband and another daughter by an Israeli attack in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Palestinian health officials have said.

The baby, weighing 1.4kg (3lb) and delivered in an emergency caesarean section, was stable and improving gradually, said Mohammed Salama, a doctor caring for her. Her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, had been 30 weeks pregnant.

The baby was placed in an incubator in a Rafah hospital alongside another infant, with the words “The baby of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani” written on tape across her chest.

The baby would stay in hospital for three to four weeks, said Salama, the doctor. “After that we will see about her leaving, and where this child will go, to the family, to the aunt or uncle or grandparents. Here is the biggest tragedy. Even if this child survives, she was born an orphan,” he said.

Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian chief, has shared images and testimonies from Palestinian photojournalists, showing what he described as “the utter devastation and heartbreak unleashed by the brutal war on Gaza”.

“We cannot stand idly by in the face of this horrific suffering,” he said in a social media post.

Over the past few months, the International Criminal Court (ICC), under the leadership of Prosecutor Karim Khan, has come under heavy criticism for not taking any concrete steps to prosecute the crime of genocide in Gaza.

In November, six of its state parties led by South Africa referred the situation in Palestine to the court and urged it to act. The same month, three Palestinian rights groups submitted a communication to the ICC, asking it to investigate the crimes of apartheid and genocide in Palestine.

In December, Khan visited Israel and made a short trip to Ramallah, where he briefly met with victims of Israeli crimes. He then issued a general statement about investigating “allegations of crimes” that did not in any way refer to the mounting evidence of genocide being perpetrated in Gaza.

More than a thousand protesters marched in Paris against racism, islamophobia and in support of the people of the besieged Gaza Strip. The 51 organisations dedicated the protest to the memory of all young “victims of police, judicial and prison crimes”, while also highlighting the plight of children in Gaza.

Palestinian health authorities say more than 34,000 people have been killed in Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, roughly half of whom are children, according to UNICEF.

The documentary Israelism examines the rift among Jews regarding Palestine, highlighting young people’s increasing criticism of Israel and Zionism. This divide is driven by firsthand accounts of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

As the film faces opposition from groups trying to cancel its screenings, its main protagonist, Simone Zimmerman, and its co-director and producer, Erin Axelman, talk to Al Jazeera.

Great interview, shows how divided the Jewish community is while slowly realizing that Israel's current and past governments do not represent Judaism and its values. Leading to the conclusion that instead of the claim that Israel is the only place safe for Jews, it's actually the most dangerous place for Jews to be nowadays. And the biggest threat to Israel is not Hamas, Iran, Islam etc, but younger generations not wanting to move to Israel anymore.


https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9636732/

The documentary was first released in February 2023. Filming started in 2016, all well before October 7th. Really shows that it's the Israeli side that's indoctrinating their kids, exactly what Israel is accusing UNWRA of doing. More projection.

William Schabas, a professor of international law at Middlesex University London, spoke to Al Jazeera about the legal implications of the mass graves found in the Nasser Medical Complex. He said mass graves have “always been an indication that war crimes have been committed, whether it was in the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine and now in Gaza”.

“There’s an obligation under international law to see that the dead are treated with respect and with dignity, that they’re buried according to rights, and that they can be identified by their next of kin. And none of that appears to be done. So Israel has a lot of explaining to do,” he said.

The fact that some of the bodies were apparently bound up or tied “points to summary execution” and calls for full-blown criminal investigation with a view to holding the perpetrators accountable, Schabas said.

The obvious institution to prosecute the perpetrators, he noted, is the International Criminal Court, which he said “jumped to attention” and immediately investigated the mass graves found outside Kyiv in 2022.

In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the US and plenty of Western countries expressed their outrage. In contrast, the lack of outrage expressed around the mass graves found in Gaza, Schabas says, points to “double standards” that have “always been a feature of the attitude towards Israel by its supporters, the various Western governments led by the United States”.

Majority don’t believe Israel is on verge of victory in Gaza: Poll

Rafah operation ‘inevitable and imminent’

Baby delivered from mother killed in Israeli strike is in ‘stable’ condition

_{A Palestinian baby girl, Sabreen Jouda, who was delivered prematurely after her mother was killed in an Israeli strike along with her husband and daughter, lies in an incubator in the al-Helal Hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, Sunday, April 21, 2024}

The baby, weighing 1.4kg (3lb), was delivered in an emergency caesarean section and is stable and improving gradually, according to Mohammed Salama, a doctor caring for her.

An Israeli attack in the southern Gaza city of Rafah killed the baby’s mother, father and sister.

Israeli settlers have attacked the village, east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and set a barn on fire, the official Wafa news agency reports.

The head of the village council, Sayel Kanaan, said that settlers attacked the village and tried to raid a house on the northern side, and other houses on the western side. Kanaan added that Israeli forces protecting the settlers fired sound bombs and tear gas towards residents.

That’s according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which said that the injuries were the result of live ammunition fired by Israeli forces and that two of those injured were in serious condition.

We reported earlier that a barn had been burned during an Israeli settler attack on Burqa, east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli military has said that a reservist officer critically wounded in a Hezbollah drone and missile attack on the northern border community of Arab al-Aramshe succumbed to his wounds.

Arab al-Aramshe is an Arab-majority village in northern Israel near the Lebanese border. The military identified the deputy company commander in the Etzioni Brigade as Dor Zimel, 27. Another 17 Israelis were wounded in the attack last week.

The Israeli military says that fighter jets have attacked a Hezbollah fighter who was operating a military structure in the area of Kfar Kila in southern Lebanon. Earlier, the Israeli forces reported that they had struck a number of Hezbollah targets overnight and during the day.

In recent months, the frequency and severity of the attacks have increased, leading to fears of a greater regional conflagration.

Israeli drone downed in southern Lebanon: Hezbollah