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cease-fire
Hamas Halts Hostage Release, Citing Deadly Israeli Cease-Fire Violations
One group says that Israeli forces have killed at least 110 Palestinians since the cease-fire took effect last month. Among the victims are multiple children, including a 5-year-old girl.
Feb 10, 2025
Hamas on Monday announced the suspension of its next planned release of hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, accusing that country of violating the fragile cease-fire agreement it signed last month.
Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades—Hamas' armed wing— said in a statement that hostages will "remain in place until the occupying entity complies with past obligations and compensates retroactively."
"Over the past three weeks, the resistance leadership monitored the enemy's violations and their noncompliance with the terms of the agreement," Obeida explained. "These violations include delaying the return of displaced persons to northern Gaza, targeting them with shelling and gunfire in various areas of the Gaza Strip, and failing to allow the entry of relief materials in all forms as agreed upon. Meanwhile, the resistance has fulfilled all its obligations."
Since the cease-fire took effect on January 19, Israeli forces have bombed and shot civilians in Gaza, killing at least 110 Palestinians, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Palestinian civilians killed over the past few weeks reportedly include multiple children—one of them a 5-year-old girl—and an elderly woman.
"Israel continues to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip by denying Palestinians the basic necessities for survival and imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," the group alleged on Friday.
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor continued:
Since the cease-fire, only a handful of injured and ill Palestinians from Gaza have been permitted to travel abroad for treatment, leaving thousands at risk of death due to Israel's ongoing denial of their right to receive treatment. In addition to ensuring a severe shortage of specialized medical personnel, generators, fuel, and oxygen stations, Israel has obstructed the rehabilitation of destroyed hospitals and blocked the entry of medical supplies, medications, and equipment.
Further, in addition to blocking equipment needed for maintenance and restoration, the ongoing and illegal restrictions by Israel are preventing the entry of temporary shelters, tents, and basic supplies for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes it has destroyed...
Israel is deliberately obstructing the restoration of essential infrastructure, including water and sewage systems, endangering civilian lives and worsening environmental and health crises.
This, after over 15 months of Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and international humanitarian agencies.
U.S. President Donald Trump—whose proposal for an American takeover and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East" has sparked international condemnation—said Monday that the cease-fire should end, letting "all hell break loose," if all the remaining 40 or so Israeli and international hostages are not released by noon on Saturday.
The Qassam Brigades on Monday reaffirmed Hamas' "commitment to the terms of the agreement as long as the occupation adheres to them."
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Official Gaza Death Toll Soars to Nearly 62,000 as Thousands of Missing Now Presumed Dead
British lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn called for Israeli officials, and countries that have funded the bombardment of Gaza, to "face justice for every single life lost."
Feb 03, 2025
Authorities in Gaza and human rights advocates have warned for months that because of the decimation of the enclave's healthcare system and civil services, the official death toll was likely a significant undercount—and on Monday, officials said thousands more Palestinians had been confirmed killed by Israel's U.S.-backed onslaught since October 2023.
Salama Maarouf, head of Gaza's government media office, told the press gathered at the mostly destroyed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City that the death toll currently stands at 61,709, with thousands of Palestinians who had previously been listed as missing now presumed dead.
The death toll was previously reported to be 47,487 on Saturday. Journalist Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News said Monday that the number is rapidly going up as "people returning to their neighborhoods discover mass graves and people buried under the rubble or killed and their bodies left at the scene."
Maarouf said officials now believe the bodies of about 76% of those killed have been recovered, but noted that 14,222 people are still believed to be trapped under rubble or inaccessible to rescue and recovery crews.
Those confirmed to have been killed include 17,881 children, including 214 newborn babies. More than 200 journalists were also killed by Israeli forces before a cease-fire deal was reached in mid-January.
Days after the cease-fire agreement, journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo Newsnoted that the death toll was expected to explode due to the bodies "recovered."
"The horrors we are about to discover if a cease-fire actually holds will underscore why Israel didn't want international journalists inside—and why they kept targeting Palestinian journalists," said Thakker.
The updated death toll was publicized as mediators from the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt began talks on the second phase of the three-part cease-fire agreement. In the first phase, nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners are set to be freed from Israeli prisons by March, and 33 Israeli hostages are scheduled to be released by Hamas as Palestinians return to their neighborhoods—many of which have been reduced to rubble—and hundreds of aid trucks are allowed into the enclave.
The talks that began Monday aim to establish a permanent cease-fire, with Israeli forces making a complete exit from Gaza.
Fighting could begin again in March if a long-term deal isn't reached in the coming weeks.
British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn said that as the "true scale of Israel's atrocities" emerges, "officials must face justice for every single life lost."
"So should those who continued to send weapons," said Corbyn, "knowing full well they were enabling genocide."
As humanitarian and medical workers continued recovery missions in Gaza, the death toll in the West Bank on Monday rose to 70 since the beginning of 2025, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Israeli forces and settlers have waged attacks in several West Bank towns and refugee camps in recent weeks, and the Trump administration said late last month that it would continue providing military aid to Israel as it froze nearly all foreign assistance.
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Mass General Brigham and Lockheed Martin: The Tale of an Odd Couple
The CEO of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, serves on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious healthcare systems.
Jan 28, 2025
When I think of hospitals, what immediately comes to mind is clean, brightly lit, quiet, and orderly spaces. I think of human healing and of caring, skill, and dedication. I think of technology applied to the noblest purposes. I think of people—people of all ages and colors—healing and being healed, people sharing the same hope that their loved ones will leave the hospital and thrive because of the treatment they received there.
When I think of weapons manufacturers, different images crowd my mind. I think of war, chaos, and destruction. I see maimed and dying people and animals. I see destroyed landscapes. I hear explosions and screaming. I smell smoke, blood, and death.
These thoughts seem to be in profound opposition. So you can imagine my shock when I learned that a member of the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham (MGB), the giant medical system in Massachusetts with a national and global reach and reputation, is James D. Taiclet, the president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer.
MGB apparently has no trouble managing the contradiction of its mission and its friendship with one of the world’s top purveyors of death. How much, one wonders, does MGB accept in charitable donations from Lockheed Martin?
Did your mind recoil? Mine too, so I’ll repeat it: The CEO of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, serves on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious healthcare systems.
Leaving, for a moment, the no doubt highly polished board room of MGB, with all of its luxurious appointments, let’s travel 8,000 miles away to the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza. Though it is highly unlikely that James Taiclet has or ever will set foot here, there is evidence everywhere of his labors. This is because the company whose pinnacle he has reached is one of the largest weapons suppliers to Israel, both in the past, and during the current genocide in Gaza. Its technologies are integrated into Israel’s main weapons systems. Its weapons are frequently gifted to Israel through the U.S. government’s Foreign Military Financing program.
Despite the current, tenuous cease-fire, the Israeli-U.S. genocide in Gaza continues. Some of the weapons and weapons systems supplied by Lockheed Martin to Israel throughout the genocide include:
- F-16 and F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. These two types of Lockheed Martin aircraft comprise nearly 80% of Israel’s fighter-bomber force and are largely responsible for turning nearly 70% of Gaza into rubble, by United Nations estimates.
- C-130 Hercules transport planes, which supported the ground invasion of Gaza.
- M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) used to bomb Gaza.
- AGM-114 Hellfire missiles for Israel’s U.S.-supplied Apache helicopters, a primary weapon used in aerial attacks on Gaza.
- CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopters (manufactured by Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary), used to transport Israeli troops into and out of Gaza.
For 15 months, we witnessed, and those of us with a conscience were sickened by, the genocide in Gaza. We witnessed Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian “problem,” aided, abetted, and in partnership with the U.S. and other Western governments, and paid for by our taxes. Palestinian-British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah estimates that 300,000 Palestinians have been murdered in Gaza, up to 12% of the population. The daily toll on children, who account for half of the population, has been historic and horrific, with more child amputees in Gaza than any other place on Earth. It has been accurately pointed out that the greatest threat on Earth to children is Israel. Civilian suffering and death in Gaza have not been “collateral damage,” they have been driven by the deliberate, racist dehumanization of the Palestinian people undertaken by Israel and the West since the horrendous Nakba of 1948 and before.
Let’s pause for a moment to recall that much of this death and destruction has been made possible through the ingenuity of the people of Lockheed Martin, whose leader sits on the board of a massive HEALTHCARE system. Though the cognitive disconnect is severe, please stay with it, because this is the reality of the country and the world that we live in.
Stay with your cognitive discomfort, because the contradiction is even more profound. Not only is MGB’s board member directly responsible for enormous carnage throughout Gaza, his Israeli and U.S. clients have deliberately and systematically targeted the healthcare system of Gaza. Hospitals have been bombed at other times in history, but the extent of the military targeting and destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is unprecedented, breaking all humanitarian laws and norms including the famed Geneva Conventions. There are no fully functioning hospitals in Gaza. Over 1,000 healthcare providers have been targeted and murdered. Over 400 have been kidnapped and detained in torture camps. Hospitals, vaccination clinics, ambulances, and civil defense rescue squads have been bombed, sniped, and set on fire. Patients have been burned alive in their beds. Starving dogs and cats roam the hallways of tattered hospitals, feeding on the flesh of martyrs. Blockade and starvation have been used as deliberate weapons of annihilation. The four-month Israeli attack on the people and infrastructure of north Gaza was an extermination campaign the likes of which are unprecedented in living memory.
A little over one week into the cease-fire, the people of Gaza have been left to struggle for survival in a hellscape of inconceivable proportions. Israel’s systematic decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system, including its kidnapping and torture of renowned pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients during the Israeli siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital, has been undertaken to destroy the will and spirit of the people, deepen their suffering, and fuel their desire to leave their homeland.
Let’s repeat—James D. Taiclet, the CEO of a company that has made possible these unspeakable horrors, who was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal this month, sits on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham healthcare system.
MGB, with its annual funding of more than $2 billion, is the largest, hospital-based research enterprise in the United States. It employs 82,000 people and treats 1.5 million patients annually. Its 2022 revenue exceeded $18 billion. It prides itself not just on the services it provides across Massachusetts, but on its national and global reputation. Its website touts the fact that MGB is the top system for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the world. It boasts of 22 Nobel Laureates and 3,700 ongoing clinical trials designed to “accelerate bringing new treatments and therapies to our patients and the world.”
How does one square this shining vision of striving for optimal human health and performance with the depraved annihilation of the people of Gaza? MGB apparently has no trouble managing the contradiction of its mission and its friendship with one of the world’s top purveyors of death. How much, one wonders, does MGB accept in charitable donations from Lockheed Martin?
While it is crucial that we not lose our capacity for amazement at such a conjoining, let’s not be naïve. The bed-sharing of Lockheed Martin and Mass General Brigham is typical of the corrupt, profit-driven, military-worshipping system we inhabit. Look into who sits on the boards of your local hospitals, colleges, universities, and more. You will find the story repeated ad nauseam.
This story, this old, sickening, tired reality of our politics, our economy, our society, is overdue for radical overhaul. Doctors Against Genocide, a global coalition of healthcare providers and allies who vow to stop global genocides that governments fail or refuse to, has teamed up with River Valley for Gaza Healthcare in western Massachusetts in launching a petition demanding that MGB immediately remove James Taiclet from its board and renounce any association with Lockheed Martin.
C’mon, Mass General Brigham CEO Anne Klibanksi: Lockheed Martin is a criminal enterprise profiting from the wreaking of unimaginable havoc and suffering on humanity and the planet. It should be a global pariah, not have its boss man sitting on your board. Why has MGB failed to speak out publicly about the genocide in Gaza? Why has MGB failed to stand publicly with its healthcare colleagues in Gaza as they courageously struggle against tremendous odds? Your cozy relationship with Lockheed Martin’s CEO combined with your silence on Gaza make you a partner in its genocide and complicit in creating a world in which healthcare facilities and providers are fair game to warlords.
The sickness of U.S. society has deepened sharply with its partnership in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Let’s say no more to necropolitics. As Doctors Against Genocide member Rupa Marya wrote, it is long past time to move from colonial to liberation medicine. From racist colonialism to liberation in all aspects of our lives.
Free, free Palestine. For Palestine’s sake. And because freeing Palestine will free us all.
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