A flotilla of ships set to depart for the Gaza Strip on Friday to bring aid to Palestinians has been stranded in Turkey due to administrative roadblocks, as organisers say Israel has been exerting political pressure to impede the voyage.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said Israel was pressuring the Republic of Guinea-Bissau to withdraw its flag from its lead ship, the Akdeniz, which triggered a request for an additional inspection by the flag state.

Ann Wright, a retired US Army colonel and State Department official and one of the organisers of the mission, said the ship had passed all inspections in Turkey and was ready to set sail.

She said the further checks demanded by Guinea Bissau were “a political play on the part of Israel” to stall the departure of the three-ship convoy carrying 5,000 tonnes of aid and more than 500 participants from 40 countries on board.



Israel will no doubt be putting up more red tape and delays.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech in Istanbul to the League of Parliamentarians for al-Quds (Jerusalem) in which he said the Palestinians, “whose lands are being gradually occupied, are subjected to one of the most brutal oppressions in history”.

“From here, I once again send my greetings to the Palestinian heroes who, through their struggle, uphold the honour of Jerusalem and all humanity,” he said.

He added that anyone looking for “modern pharaohs need not look far; just look at those who have mercilessly killed 35,000 Palestinians in the last 203 days,” referring to Israel’s months-long offensive on the Gaza Strip.

“Netanyahu, like villains before him, has etched his name in history with shame as the butcher of Gaza,” Erdogan added. As the war on Gaza continues, “no one can expect us to remain silent in the face of the genocide,” he declared.

Erdogan reiterated that Turkey will continue its efforts for the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The vehicle was attacked in the West Bekaa District, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency. Two people were killed, the NNA said.

Video verified by Al Jazeera shows the car in flames in the middle of the road after the attack.

Not only across the country have other schools followed the example of Columbia University and continue to, but here in New York City as well.

At least four college campuses now have encampments or demonstrations of some sort. There’s NYU [New York University] and Columbia, but now the Fashion Institute of Technology in downtown Manhattan saw a large group of students storm one of their main buildings and set up an encampment there, which is ongoing this morning.

The City University of New York as well, a very different school than Columbia. Columbia is considered an elite Ivy League institution with a lot of history, but City University has a lot of students who maybe wouldn’t have been able to afford a private university.

Global attention has turned to universities across the United States, where students have erected encampments to demand action to end Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. The growing protests have taken root on the campuses of some of the country’s top academic institutions, including Columbia and Harvard.

And over the past weeks, they have spurred heated debates around freedom of speech, Palestinian solidarity activism in the US, and the use of force to disperse student protesters, among other issues.

But the students at the heart of the movement say the reason they began their demonstrations – the pressing need to end Israel’s deadly bombardment of Gaza – risks being lost amid a cacophony of voices and distractions.

“Gaza is why we’re here. Gaza is why we’re doing this,” said Rue, a student at The New School in New York City who asked to only be identified by her first name due to a fear of reprisals.

Here at the protest at George Washington University, there is a great deal of outrage, not just at what is happening in Gaza, but at the reaction from university authorities.

We’ve just got another note from George Washington University, which says that the individuals who remain in the university yard in any attempt to protest are trespassing on private property – that GW will pursue disciplinary actions against students involved in these unauthorised demonstrations that continue to disrupt university operations.

But there’s no real disruption going on. This is a very clearly demarcated area away from the main thoroughfare. Everyone’s walking around. Traffic is moving freely. And yet this is how it’s being characterised by the management.

The letter to university administration comes after 48 protesters were arrested earlier this week. That came after administrators called in the local police.

In the letter, the faculty said the decision “contradicts the institution’s commitment to uphold free assembly, speech and expression”. They also noted that protests on other subjects have been tolerated in the past.

“We demand that the University administration call to drop all charges against the 48 protesters, that no further disciplinary action be taken against those who were arrested, and implore Yale to never again facilitate the arrest of protesters for acts of peaceable speech and assembly on campus,” they wrote.

Muhammad al-Mughir, a director of Gaza’s Civil Defence, says it has finished exhuming bodies from Nasser Medical Complex. He said the search and recovery of bodies from the mass graves took a week, in part because of the limited resources available.

What we know about the mass graves:

More than 300 bodies were found at the Nasser Medical Complex including some with their hands tied, stripped of their clothes, and shot in the head.

The Palestinian Civil Defence says there is clear evidence that the Israeli army committed crimes against humanity by carrying out summary executions.

The UN and EU have called for urgent investigations, but Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, said that while the organisation is collecting information on the mass graves at Nasser Hospital, a mandate is required from a UN legislative body in order to take custody of any evidence.

Mass graves were also uncovered at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, the enclave’s largest health facility, which the UN Human Rights Council said was “an empty shell” after a two-week Israeli siege ended there on April 1.

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The report by Devex comes after the White House issued a national security memo that told US Secretary of State Blinken to “obtain credible and reliable written assurance” that governments that receive weapons from Washington will abide by international humanitarian law.

But in a paper delivered to Blinken, the US aid agency said Israel is not demonstrating “necessary compliance” with the directive. Specifically, they point to the requirement that Israel fosters, and does not hamper “the transport of delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”, according to Devex.

In the coming weeks, Blinken is required to certify to Congress compliance with the White House directive.

Devex also cited a separate memo to Blinken from experts at USAID and the Department of State, which assessed international observers will declare “ongoing famine” in Gaza at the beginning of next month.

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Students from universities in Australia are joining their American peers in pro-Palestine protests that call for their educational institutions to cut ties with Israel.

It is day 10 of this demonstration, and it’s a beautiful Friday afternoon here in New York.

The students are praying on campus now. There is a Muslim evening prayer happening right now, and in a couple of hours, there will also be a Shabbat Jewish dinner, this evening.

The students say there is growing camaraderie among the group, and it’s very welcoming, not hostile, not anti-Semitic. They’re trying very hard to fight these accusations, and they say that anyone who makes that accusation should come and see what’s happening here.

But getting to those all-important negotiations, the students told me that they spent 11 hours with the administration yesterday and another hour here this morning.

There’s some possibility that those discussions will continue over the weekend. They have not been given a deadline to leave or face eviction. However, they haven’t been promised that that won’t happen either.

The university made some offers to the students, saying that they would agree to look at divestments and start the process of reviewing them and talking about them with the students.

But the students said that’s not good enough. They want a commitment to divest from Israel.

The University of Texas at Austin has been a main flash point of protest across US college campuses, with the public institution’s president Jay Hartzell facing calls to resign following a police crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.

The president initially supported the police action, which saw several violent arrests, but has since said he supports the right to protest on the campus.

But faculty member Pavithra Vasudevan, an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, said outrage remains over how the president has responded to “protests that have been nothing but peaceful”.

“They have been nothing but a spontaneous and organised expression of people’s feelings about what’s happening,” she told Al Jazeera from the university’s campus.

The protests arose, she added “at a time when the university is fully repressing any conversation about Palestine, faculty are scared to mention the word Palestine in their classes. People don’t want to talk about the genocide. There has been strong indication from the university since October 7 that this is not our topic of conversation.”

As Palestinians are following the protests at American universities, they have also been subjected to bombardment in the past couple of hours. Israeli fighter jets targeted a residential house in the northern part of Rafah district, with no casualties reported.

Just a half hour ago, an Israeli fighter jet targeted another house on the vicinity of Rafah crossing, in the southern part of Rafah district, with at least two Palestinians injured.

Meanwhile, at least three Palestinians have been killed in the vicinity of a school in the southern part of Khan Younis city.

For a very long time, many in the Western world have not engaged at all with the issues stemming from the occupation of Palestine. The occupation was in the news, every year or so, for a day or two, and then it would go again.

It was too “complicated”, those who knew about the context – on either side – were too passionate. So many opted to remain neutral. Many more believed the smears against the Palestinian people.

However, the scale and severity of brutality that has defined the past six months of conflict has put an end to the widespread apathy towards the suffering of the Palestinian people.

The wall-to-wall media coverage, thanks to fearless reporting from organisations like Al Jazeera and Palestinian journalists on the ground, has opened people’s eyes to the reality people in Gaza, and the rest of Palestine, have had to endure for generations.

Generation gap: What student protests say about US politics, Israel support

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/26/generation-gap-what-student-protests-say-about-us-politics-israel-support

Israeli military attacks have wrecked 70 percent of the water wells and 50 percent of the sewage pumps in northern Gaza, according to Beit Lahiya mayor Alaa al-Attar, worsening sanitary conditions.

At the same time, Israeli attacks have destroyed “all agricultural crops in the town [Beit Lahiya] which is considered the primary food basket for the Strip,” said al-Attar in comments carried by the Anadolu news agency.

Aid groups say the lack of clean water, nutrition, sanitation and reliable healthcare throughout Gaza is causing infectious diseases, including hepatitis A, to spread in the enclave.

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Israeli gunboats have fired heavy machine guns towards a fisherman’s port in Gaza City, as well as towards the Shati camp in northern Gaza, our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are reporting.

It comes after Israeli forces shot at fishermen working off the coast of Gaza’s Rafah yesterday, killing one and injuring another.

It was a bloody night in the Gaza Strip, specifically in the southern part here.

As we have been reporting, fighter jets targeted a house in Rafah’s Saudi neighbourhood. At least six Palestinians have now been reported killed, including four children. In Nuseirat camp, at last eight Palestinians were killed and 30 others wounded from an air strike targeting a house. According to witnesses, that attack also damaged seven neighbouring houses.

Within the last hour, there have been more air strikes targeting a residential building in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Ambulances have rushed to the scene to recover people who have been injured.

Across the territory, Palestinians are following all the latest political developments regarding regional mediators’ efforts to get Israel and Hamas to get to a swap deal and ceasefire agreement.

Palestinians believe that if these negotiations collapse, there’s going to be an expansion of the fighting to reach Rafah, where people have nowhere else left to go. They believe that if the Israeli military starts a ground invasion here, it will bring unspeakable humanitarian catastrophe.

The death toll from overnight Israeli air strikes on Rafah and Nuseirat camp has now risen to 15, with eight killed in Rafah and seven killed in Nuseirat, according to a report by our colleagues on the ground.

Most of those killed were children.

The killings of the eight children add to a toll of more than 14,500 children killed by Israel during its war on Gaza, representing some 42 percent of all deaths.

Dr Junaid Sultan, a vascular surgeon who recently returned from a two-week mission at the European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza, has described to Al Jazeera the severe injuries he treated at the strained health facility.

Most patients rushed to the hospital after Israeli military attacks suffered from four types of injuries: gunshots, blast wounds, shrapnel or burns, said Sultan.

• Gunshot wounds, he said, usually hit major blood vessels in the victim’s knees, arms, shoulders, neck or spine, often leading to crippling disabilities if the patient survives.
• Blast injuries are “notorious” for completely fracturing major bones, Sultan said. He often saw blast victims entering the facility with “dangling limbs”, forcing them to undergo amputations.
• Shrapnel injuries, Sultan said, can penetrate “any part of the body”, and were often lodged in the victim’s thighs, abdomen, chest or neck.

Treating these injuries is complicated by the severe lack of medical supplies and medication at the hospital, Sultan said, which other smaller field hospitals also rely on for supplies

On top of gunshot, blast and shrapnel wounds, Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from severe malnutrition that makes it more difficult for their wounds to heal, Dr Sultan told Al Jazeera. “I have seen patients who are emaciated because of a lack of nutrition and proper food, said Sultan, adding that some were “hardly having a meal once a week”.

“This is another factor contributing to the high risk of complications in these patients. They have wounds which are not healing due to a lack of antibodies and a lack of nutrition.

“It’s at a massive scale,” he said.

Israeli strikes have hit a group of people in the Wadi Gaza area, north of Nuseirat camp, killing at least three of them, report our colleagues on the ground.


_{An aerial view of destruction after Israeli army’s attacks on Nuseirat Refugee Camp in Deir Al Balah, Saturday}

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