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jabalia
20+ Children Among Scores Killed by IDF Strikes in Gaza and Lebanon
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump "see eye to eye" on the Iranian "threat."
Nov 11, 2024
Israeli airstrikes killed scores of Palestinians and Lebanese—including dozens of women and children—over the weekend as right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he and Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump "see eye to eye" on perceived threats posed by Iran.
A Sunday morning Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strike on the home of the Alloush family in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed at least 33 Palestinians including at least 13 children and nine women, according to health and civil defense officials in the embattled coastal enclave.
Some sources said more than 40 people were killed in the attack. According to Gaza officials, more than 50 people—many of them forcibly displaced by Israel's 13-month onslaught—were sheltering in the Alloush home when it was bombed.
Witnesses to the strike's aftermath described a horrific scene of dozens of victims blown to bits.
"There was a very huge explosion," relative Abdullah al-Najjar toldAgence France-Presse. "When we arrived here, all the bodies were torn apart."
The IDF claimed the strike targeted unspecified "terrorist infrastructure" that "posed a threat" to its troops, and that "numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians."
Israeli forces have killed or wounded hundreds of Palestinians in a monthlong operation in northern Gaza during which residents have been forcibly expelled, possibly permanently.
IDF troops have destroyed much of the Jabalia camp and cut its residents off from humanitarian aid. As the IDF forces people to flee from Jabalia, its drones and snipers have targeted Palestinian civilians without regard for age or gender. Survivors have reported Israeli soldiers shooting people holding white flags, first responders, and journalists trying to document what many experts say is a genocide backed by U.S. military aid and diplomatic support.
Another Sunday morning IDF strike that targeted the al-Khour family home in Sabra, south of Gaza City, killed numerous Palestinians including Wael al-Khour, the director of the Palestinian Authority's Welfare Ministry in Gaza, his wife, three of their children, and three grandchildren, according toReuters.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 23 people including seven children were killed in a Sunday IDF airstrike on the village of Almat north of the capital Beirut.
"Under the rubble, there are only children, elderly men and women," said Raed Berro, a lawmaker from the political and paramilitary group Hezbollah who represents the district in the Lebanese Parliament.
Lebanese officials also said that more than a dozen paramedics and civil defense volunteers were killed by IDF strikes in the Tyre district of southern Lebanon on Saturday.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 3,186 people have been killed and over 14,000 others wounded by Israeli attacks on the country since October 2023. That's when Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israel in solidarity with Gaza after the Hamas-led attack and kidnappings prompted Israel's retaliatory assault that has left more than 156,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing.
The latest IDF strikes came amid a looming deadline this week imposed last month by the Biden administration for Israel to take "urgent and sustained" action to improve the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza, where United Nations officials last week warned of imminent famine.
However, with the end of the Biden administration fast approaching, Netanyahu said Sunday that he has spoken three times with Trump and that he and the U.S. president-elect "see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components," including Hamas and Hezbollah, which are backed by Tehran.
On Monday, Trump confirmed that he has tapped Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, last week called Stefanik a "strident genocide supporter," as she has advocated sending Israel as many U.S. weapons as it needs, without conditions, to ensure "total victory" in Gaza.
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Israel Reportedly Massacres Family of Virginia Man in Gaza, Including US Permanent Resident
"This is a documented Israeli war crime of the execution of a U.S. resident and her extended family in Gaza," said one campaigner, urging the Biden administration to "stop supplying Israel with American weapons."
Oct 15, 2024
The Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations on Tuesday led condemnation of Israeli airstrikes on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza that killed at least 14 Palestinians—including the mother of an American citizen who was a permanent U.S. resident—and demanded that the Biden administration stop supplying Israel with arms.
In a statement Tuesday, CAIR "called on the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department, and elected officials in Virginia to demand that the Israeli government cease its attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after the mother of an American citizen, a U.S. resident, and other family members were reportedly executed in a repeat Israeli attack on their family residence, despite the family's pleas to Israeli authorities to stop the bombing and allow the evacuation of surviving family members."
This, after "an American citizen and Virginia man of Palestinian descent informed CAIR that his family home in Gaza was bombed in an Israeli attack on the Jabalia refugee camp."
"There were reportedly 15 people in the house, seven of them children, including the man's mother, a lawful permanent resident of the United States," said CAIR, which did not identify any of the individuals described.
CAIR continued:
After the initial Israeli military strike on the family residence, the U.S. resident mother and an unknown number of relatives were reportedly injured but alive, trapped under the rubble. In an effort to rescue the survivors, the family contacted Israeli authorities, providing them with the residential address and GPS coordinates of their home to arrange for the safe passage of an ambulance. However, the Israeli military apparently used that information to bomb the house a second time and then targeted the ambulance as it attempted to rescue the survivors, killing the doctor and several children. Only a 7-year-old boy survived the incident.
The attacks came amid intensified Israeli bombardment of Jabalia and other parts of Gaza that killed 50 Palestinians on Tuesday, according toReuters. Israel—which receives tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid and diplomatic support including vetoes of multiple United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions—is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health and international agencies, Israel's 375-day assault on Gaza has killed or wounded more than 150,000 Palestinians, including at least 10,000 people who are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Millions more Palestinians have been forced from their homes—often several times—starved, and sickened.
"This is a documented Israeli war crime of the execution of a U.S. resident and her extended family in Gaza," CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement. "The only option the Biden administration has is to stop supplying Israel with American weapons, funded by our nation's taxpayers, which are being used to kill our citizens, legal permanent residents, and their families."
"The Biden administration has shown little concern for the mass killing of Palestinians, but perhaps it can be moved to recover the body of a U.S. resident who is also the mother of an American citizen," Awad added. "There must be an immediate cease-fire to end Israel's genocide."
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee—have repeatedly affirmed their unwavering support for Israel, multiple media outlets reported Tuesday that the Biden administration recently threatened to cut off U.S. arms shipments if the Israeli government does not take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.
"No need to wait 30 days," CAIR said in a separate statement earlier Tuesday.
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'Jabalia Is Being Wiped Out': Gaza Pleads for Help as Israel Intensifies Assault
One Palestinian journalist said that "the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous" and implored people to "please share what's happening."
Oct 08, 2024
Israel's latest dayslong assault on besieged northern Gaza intensified Tuesday as the nation's tanks advanced deeper into the Jabalia refugee camp, where terrified residents reported being fired on by the Israeli military as they tried to flee.
Citing eyewitness accounts, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other news outlets reported that Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately at people in Jabalia, who are under Israeli evacuation orders. Residents are being told to move to Al-Mawasi, a badly overcrowded so-called "humanitarian zone" in southern Gaza that Israel's military has attacked repeatedly.
"Drones were firing at everyone passing by on the road," 28-year-old Mohammad Sultan, whose family fled their home in Jabalia, toldCNN on Tuesday. Sultan said he and other civilians came under Israeli fire when he returned to grab food, water, and blankets.
"Three people were shot right in front of me," he said. "My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured."
Reutersreported that the warning "Jabalia is being wiped out" was "repeated in many messages posted on social media by residents of Gaza" as Israeli forces assailed the refugee camp and nearby areas, killing dozens of people over the past several days.
"Jabalia is being bombed as if the war has just begun and the world is blind about it," a 60-year-old father of five told Reuters.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that "the threat of yet another massacre in northern Gaza is very real."
" Israel must be ordered to stop assaulting the Palestinians trapped there and withdraw immediately from the occupied Palestinian territory, as already decided by the [International Court of Justice]," she added.
Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist reporting from northern Gaza, wrote on social media Tuesday that "the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous; there are currently hundreds of thousands trapped, and the shelling is nonstop."
"Please share what's happening in the north," he added.
The northern part of Gaza has been utterly devastated by the Israeli military's yearlong assault, carried out with the support of the United States and other world powers. The United Kingdom-based humanitarian group Christian Aid said Monday that mothers in northern Gaza have reported "losing up to 30kg of weight" as the region faces famine conditions fueled by Israel's suffocating blockade and relentless airstrikes.
"We often survive on one meal a day if we can find one," one mother told Christian Aid's partners in Gaza. "My children cry and fall asleep hungry, and I spend nights crying because I am helpless and heartwrenched as their tears of hunger feel like a knife cutting through me, even though I always prioritized them over myself."
Al Jazeerareported Tuesday that at least 56 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past 24 hours, while noting that "the number of deaths reported by sources vary" given the difficulties of counting casualties under Israeli bombardment.
Al Jazeera's Abu Azzoum said the Israeli army is "systematically working to empty northern Gaza."
Such an effort would be consistent with reported Israeli proposals to "liquidate northern Gaza." As +972 Magazinereported last month, prominent Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have "called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza."
"For some, it might be easy to write off Israeli proposals to 'finish the job' in northern Gaza as genocidal bombast, unlikely to be carried out," the magazine added. "Regardless of what happens over the coming months, the very fact that open proposals to starve and exterminate hundreds of thousands of people are up for debate demonstrates precisely where Israeli society stands today."
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