Category: News

The Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land won for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards. The film follows the struggles of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank community of Masafer Yatta to stay on their land amid home demolitions by the Israeli military and violent attacks by Jewish settlers aimed at expelling them. The film was made by a team of Palestinian-Israeli filmmakers, including the Palestinian journalist Basel Adra, who lives in Masafer Yatta, and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, both of whom are prominently featured in the film.

Watch their acceptance speeches here on Democracy Now!

Israel has cut off humanitarian supplies to Gaza in an effort to pressure Hamas into accepting a change in the ceasefire agreement to allow for the release of hostages without an Israeli troop withdrawal.

The office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday it was imposing a blockade on Gaza because Hamas would not accept a plan which it claimed had been put forward by the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to extend phase one of the ceasefire and continue to release hostages, and postpone phase two, which envisaged an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

 

“With the end of phase one of the hostage deal, and in light of Hamas’s refusal to accept the Witkoff outline for continuing talks – to which Israel agreed – Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease. Israel will not allow a ceasefire without the release of our hostages,” it said in a statement. “If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be further consequences.”

After the announcement, Netanyahu’s spokesperson, Omer Dostri, wrote in a social media post: “No trucks entered Gaza this morning, nor will they at this stage.”

The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, on Sunday called for Israel to end its suspension of humanitarian aid to Gaza “immediately.”

Read more on The Guardian

As Israel deploys tanks in the West Bank for the first time in 20 years, we reveal how two of the world’s biggest travel companies are helping settlers commercialise stolen land

The villa is stunning. The private swimming pool; the lush, landscaped terrace with firepit; the long dining table with its expansive balcony view; the pingpong table; the piano.

But the jewel in the crown, according to the Airbnb listing, is the experience of watching the sun rise over the nearby mountains from the luxury of the generous master bedroom.

Only a handful of Palestinians are allowed to enter this, and other, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, usually as labourers with special permits.

Exclusive analysis carried out by the Guardian found 760 rooms being advertised in hotels, apartments and other holiday rentals in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on two of the world’s most popular tourism websites.

Taken together, the listings that appear on either Airbnb or Booking.com could host more than 2,000 people as of August 2024. The villa was just one of them.

Read more on The Guardian

In interviews with the Guardian and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), eight of Gaza’s most senior doctors have given harrowing testimonies of the torture, beatings, starvation and humiliation they say they suffered during months of detention.

All of those interviewed say they were targeted because they were doctors. Most were arrested inside hospitals as they worked; others were taken from ambulances or detained at checkpoints after being identified as healthcare workers. All those doctors interviewed were detained under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which grants the Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza they say might pose a security threat.

“They stripped me naked, put a blindfold over my eyes and handcuffed my feet. The beatings started from this first moment”
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia

Some, including Abu Ajwa, believe they were singled out for extreme violence by prison guards and interrogators because they were doctors.

“One of the senior interrogators had given instructions that because I was a senior consultant surgeon they should work hard to make sure that I lost [the use of my hands] and became unable to perform surgery,” he says.

Read the full story on The Guardian

Waiting on a western judicial institution to cast judgment on a killing spree financed and endorsed by the west means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling. The narrative – as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other – demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the west is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.

Read the full article on The Guardian

Omar will be talking about his new book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This at Powell’s books this Tuesday, Feb 25th 2025.

We must raise our voices to stop Israel’s next assault on Gaza!

Send a letter to your reps today: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/86fcf9d51ce7f3d69c38b616a06d6032c3c8d585

Action sponsored by Jewish Palestinian Alliance of Oregon: https://www.jpao.org/

A combination of pro-Israel advocacy groups and political action committees, including right-wing Christian fundamentalists, neoconservative hawks, and weak-kneed liberals, have not only enabled Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians—they’ve done so much more. 

Read the full article at: https://www.aaiusa.org/library/us-blank-check-support-for-israel-not-only-enabled-genocide

Nearly 100 journalists and other members of civil society using WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Meta, were targeted by spyware owned by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli maker of hacking software, the company alleged today.

The journalists and other civil society members were being alerted of a possible breach of their devices, with WhatsApp telling the Guardian it had “high confidence” that the users in question had been targeted and “possibly compromised”.

Experts said the targeting was a “zero-click” attack, which means targets would not have had to click on any malicious links to be infected.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/31/whatsapp-israel-spyware

[Microsoft is totally complicit with Genocide, as these articles demonstrate. Shame, Shame on Microsoft!]

Microsoft is a major provider of cloud services and artificial intelligence for the Israeli military, according to internal documents related to the contracts between the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Microsoft Israel obtained by Drop Site News. The leaked documents show that Israel’s usage spiked dramatically in the months following October 7, 2023 when Israel was using AI and other technology to wage its brutal war on Gaza.

The trove of documents reveals that Microsoft’s ties to the Israeli military are deeper and more lucrative than previously known, exposing the tech giant’s role in supplying advanced cloud and AI services during the war that multiple international bodies, including the International Court of Justice, ruled may plausibly constitute a genocide. Drop Site shared the documents with independent Israeli-Palestinian investigative magazine +972, which previously exposed Israel’s use of AI in its bombing campaign, Local Call, and The Guardian, which also published stories Thursday.

Read more at: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-customer-ai-cloud

Reporting Highlights

• Empty Threats: Since Oct. 7, 2023, Biden has repeatedly issued threats that Israel ignored. U.S. officials tried to enforce consequences — but they couldn’t.
• Internal Dissent: The State Department disregarded its own experts and cracked down on leaks. Some human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of Israeli abuses.
• Costs of Inaction: Experts say Biden’s failure to follow through led to impunity for widespread human rights abuses, including blocking aid deliveries, even after explicit U.S. warnings.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

Read more at: https://www.propublica.org/article/biden-blinken-state-department-israel-gaza-human-rights-horrors