Tag: War in gaza

U.S. colleges invite discussion on investments as they strike deals to end campus protests over Palestine

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Anti-war demonstrations ceased this week at a small number of U.S. universities after school leaders struck deals with pro-Palestinian protesters, fending off possible disruptions of final exams and graduation ceremonies.

The agreements at schools including Brown, Northwestern and Rutgers stand out amidst the chaotic scenes and 2,400-plus arrests on 46 campuses nationwide since April 17. Tent encampments and building takeovers have disrupted classes at some schools, including Columbia and UCLA.

Deals included commitments by universities to review their investments in Israel or hear calls to stop doing business with the longtime U.S. ally. Many protester demands have zeroed in on links to the Israeli military as the war grinds on in Gaza.

The agreements to even discuss divestment mark a major shift on an issue that has been controversial for years, with opponents of a long-running campaign to boycott Israel saying it veers into antisemitism. But while the colleges have made concessions around amnesty for protesters and funding for Middle Eastern studies, they have made no promises about changing their investments.

“I think for some universities, it might be just a delaying tactic to diffuse the protests,” said Ralph Young, a history professor who studies American dissent at Temple University in Philadelphia. “The end of the semester is happening now. And maybe by the time the next semester begins, there is a cease-fire in Gaza.”

Some university boards may never even vote on divesting from Israel, which can be a complicated process, Mr. Young said. And some state schools have said they lack the authority to do so.

But Mr. Young said dialogue is a better tactic than arrests, which can inflame protesters.

Talking “at least gives the protesters the feeling that they’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Whether they are getting somewhere or not is another question.”

Also Read | Campus protests over Gaza war hit Australia

Israel has called the protests antisemitic; its critics say the country uses such allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters were caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, protest organisers — some of whom are Jewish — have called it a peaceful movement to defend Palestinian rights and protest the war.

Administrators at the University of California, Riverside, announced an agreement Friday with protesters to close their campus encampment. The deal included the formation of a task force to explore removing Riverside’s endowment from the broader UC system’s management and investing those funds “in a manner that will be financially and ethically sound for the university with consideration to the companies involved in arms manufacturing and delivery.”

The announcement marked an apparent split with the policy of the 10-campus UC system, which last week said it opposes “calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel.”

“While the University affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses,” the system said in a statement. “UC tuition and fees are the primary funding sources for the University’s core operations. None of these funds are used for investment purposes.”

Also Read | Paris police remove pro-Palestinian students occupying Sciences Po university

Demonstrators at Rutgers University — where finals were paused due to the protests on its New Brunswick campus — similarly packed up their tents Thursday afternoon. The state university agreed to establish an Arab Cultural Centre and to not retaliate against any students involved in the camp.

In a statement, Chancellor Francine Conway noted protesters’ request for divestment from companies doing business with Israel and for Rutgers to cut ties with Tel Aviv University. She said the the request is under review, but “such decisions fall outside of our administrative scope.”

Protesters at Brown University in Rhode Island agreed to dismantle their encampment Tuesday. School officials said students could present arguments for divesting Brown’s endowment from companies contributing to and profiting from the war in Gaza.

In addition, Brown President Christina Paxson will ask an advisory committee to make a recommendation on divestment by Sept. 30, which will be put before the school’s governing corporation for a vote in October.

Northwestern’s Deering Meadow in suburban Chicago also fell silent after an agreement Monday. The deal curbed protest activity in return for the reestablishment of an advisory committee on university investments and other commitments.

The arrangement drew dissent from both sides. Some pro-Palestinian protesters condemned it as a failure to stick to their original demands, while some supporters of Israel said it represented “cowardly” capitulation.

Seven of 18 members subsequently resigned from a university committee that advises the administration on addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia and expressions of hatred on campus, saying they couldn’t continue to serve “with antisemitism so present at Northwestern in public view for the past week.”

Michael Simon, the executive director of an organisation for Jewish students, Northwestern Hillel, said he resigned after concluding that the committee could not achieve its goals.

Faculty at Pomona College in California voted in favour of divesting from companies they said are funding Israel’s war in Gaza, a group of faculty and students said Friday.

The vote Thursday is not binding on the liberal arts school of nearly 1,800 students east of Los Angeles. But supporters said they hope it would encourage the board to stop investing in these companies and start disclosing where it makes its investments.

“This nonbinding faculty statement does not represent any official position of Pomona College,” the school said in a statement. “We will continue to encourage further dialogue within in our community, including consideration of counterarguments.” Meanwhile, arrests of demonstrators continued elsewhere.

About a dozen protesters who refused police orders to leave an encampment at New York University were arrested early Friday, and about 30 more left voluntarily, NYU spokesperson John Beckman said. The school asked city police to intervene, he added.

NYPD officers also cleared an encampment at The New School in Greenwich Village on the request of school administrators. No arrests were announced.

Another 132 protesters were arrested when police broke up an encampment at the State University of New York at New Paltz starting late Thursday, authorities said.

And nine were arrested at the University of Tennessee, including seven students who Chancellor Donde Plowman said would also be sanctioned under the school’s code of conduct.

The movement began April 17 at Columbia, where student protesters built an encampment to call for an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

More than 100 people were arrested late Tuesday when police broke up the Columbia encampment. One officer accidentally discharged his gun inside Hamilton Hall during that operation, but no one was injured, the NYPD said late Thursday.

Over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry there. Israel launched its offensive after Oct. 7, when Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages in an attack on southern Israel. (AP) GRS GRS

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Palestinians are dying in hospitals as estimated 60,000 wounded overwhelm remaining doctors: U.N.

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Palestinians are dying every day in Gaza’s overwhelmed remaining hospitals which can’t deal with the tens of thousands people hurt in Israeli’s military offensive, a U.N. health emergency expert said Wednesday, while a doctor with the International Rescue Committee called the situation in Gaza’s hospitals the most extreme she had ever seen.

The two health professionals, who recently left Gaza after weeks working in hospitals there, described overwhelmed doctors trying to save the lives of thousands of wounded people amid collapsing hospitals that have turned into impromptu refugee camps.

The World Health Organization’s Sean Casey, who left Gaza recently after five weeks of trying to get more staff and supplies to the territory’s 16 partially functioning hospitals, told a U.N. news conference that he saw “a really horrifying situation in the hospitals” as the health system collapsed day by day.

Al-Shifa Hospital, once Gaza’s leading hospital with 700 beds, has been reduced to treating only emergency trauma victims, and is filled with thousands of people who have fled their homes and are now living in operating rooms, corridors and stairs, he said.

“Literally five or six doctors or nurses” are seeing hundreds of patients a day, Casey said, most with life-threatening injuries, and there were “so many patients on the floor you could barely move without stepping on somebody’s hands or feet.”

The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza estimates that 60,000 people have been wounded, with hundreds more wounded per day.

Since Israel declared war against Hamas following its surprise attacks into the country’s south on Oct. 7, it has repeatedly accused the Islamic militant group of using Gaza’s hospitals as cover for military activities. It singled out Al-Shifa in Gaza City, saying Hamas had hidden command centers and bunkers underneath the hospital’s sprawling grounds. In late November, the Israeli military unveiled what it claimed was a Hamas military facility under the hospital.

Casey said he was able to reach Al-Shifa three times with deliveries of medical supplies, fuel and food, but once it took 12 days because of Israeli refusals, mainly for security or operational reasons.

At Al-Ahli Hospital, also in Gaza City, the situation was also dire, he said.

“I saw patients who were lying on church pews, basically waiting to die in a hospital that had no fuel, no power, no water, very little in the way of medical supplies and only a handful of staff remaining to take care of them,” he said.

Last week, Casey said, he visited the Nasser medical complex, the main hospital in Khan Younis, which is at 200% of its bed capacity with only 30% of its staff, so “patients are everywhere, in the corridors, on the floor.”

“I went to the burn unit where there was one physician caring for 100 burn patients,” he said.

Even in Rafah in the south near the Egyptian border, where Israel has urged Gazans to move, Casey said the population has skyrocketed from 270,000 a few weeks ago to almost a million, and the city doesn’t have the health facilities to deal with the massive influx of displaced people.

Gaza historically had a strong health system with 36 hospitals, 25,000 health workers and many specialists, he said, but 85% of the territory’s 2.3 million people are now displaced, and that includes health workers, doctors, nurses, surgeons and administrative staff.

Casey said many of these medical professionals are in shelters, under plastic sheeting on streets in Rafah, and not in hospitals. One hospital director told him his plastic surgeon couldn’t do surgery because he was out collecting sticks to burn as firewood to cook food for his family.

What’s needed first and foremost to help the tens of thousands of injured Gazans and people with health issues is a ceasefire and the safety and security that would bring, Casey said, but that’s not enough.

“It’s really the overall package,” he said, saying medical supplies first need to overcome obstacles and inspections and get into Gaza, and then they need to get to the hospitals where they’re needed.

But without health workers, medical supplies, and fuel to run the generators at hospitals and health facilities, “you can’t do the surgeries, you can’t provide the postoperative care,” he said.

Casey said the World Health Organization is trying to mobilize international emergency medical teams to support Gaza’s hospitals and provide care. It has also supported the establishment of several field hospitals over the last six weeks or so, he said.

“The numbers of medical evacuations going outside of the Gaza Strip is very limited,” he said. “We know that there are thousands of people who would benefit from higher-level care that can no longer be provided within the Gaza Strip,” including cancer patients and people with complex injuries.

“People are dying every day,” Casey said. “I’ve seen children full of shrapnel dying on the floor because there are not the supplies in the emergency department, and the health care workers … to care for them.”

Speaking at another press briefing, Dr. Seema Jilani, a pediatrician and the International Rescue Committee’s senior technical advisor for emergency health, said she just went to Gaza for two weeks in collaboration with Medical Aid for Palestinians and what she saw was “harrowing, and scenes out of nightmares.”

Jilani, who previously worked in hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, said “In my experience of working in conflict zones around the world, this is the most extreme situation I have seen in terms of scale, severity of injuries, number of children that have suffered that have nothing to do with any of this.”

Jilani worked in the emergency room at Al-Aksa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, the only hospital in the middle area of Gaza. On her first day, she said, she tried to save an approximately 1-year-old boy whose right arm and right leg had been blown off, without any of the necessary medication. Next to him was a dying man with “flies … already feasting on him,” she said.

Jilani said she treated children with injuries from traumatic amputations to extreme burns, sometimes seeing the smoke from nearby Israeli bombings. “And one day a bullet did indeed go through the intensive care unit.”

After she left, Jilani said, the hospital ran out of fuel and the lights went out. She doesn’t know how the babies she treated are doing, or whether they were evacuated.

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Palestinians crowd into ever-shrinking areas in Gaza as Israel’s war against Hamas enters 3rd month

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Desperate Palestinians fleeing Israel’s expanding ground offensive crowded into an ever-shrinking area of the Gaza Strip as the Israel-Hamas war entered its third month on Friday. The United Nations warned that its aid operation is “in tatters” because no place in the besieged enclave is safe.

The Israeli Army said that over the past day, its forces had struck about 450 targets in the tiny, densely populated Gaza Strip, signalling the continued intensity of a campaign that has already led to widespread civilian casualties and mass displacements.

Israel also dropped leaflets over parts of Gaza with a biblical warning to Hamas leaders that it would take “a life for a life, an eye for an eye.” A day after troops rounded up hundreds of Palestinians for questioning about suspected ties to Hamas, an Israeli government spokesman suggested that practice would continue.

The first images of such roundups emerged on Thursday from the northern town of Beit Lahiya, showing dozens of men kneeling or sitting in the streets, stripped down to their underwear, their hands bound behind their backs and some with their heads bowed.

Israel has vowed to crush the military capabilities of Hamas, which rules Gaza, and remove it from power following the group’s October 7 attack that sparked the war.

Israel’s air and ground campaign initially focused on the northern half of Gaza, leading hundreds of thousands of residents to flee south. Intense battles continued in parts of the north in recent days.

“Airstrikes and random artillery shelling have continued intensely since last night until this morning,” said Hassan Al Najjar, a journalist speaking by phone from northern Gaza.

UN monitors said Israeli troops reportedly detained men and boys from the age of 15 in a school-turned-shelter in the town of Beit Lahiya, in the north.

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, said on Friday that authorities were questioning the detainees — who he said were picked up in Hamas strongholds — to determine whether they were members of the militant group.

Those detained were “military-aged men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago,” Levy said, indicating there would be more such sweeps going forward as troops move from north to south.

In central Gaza, leaflets were dropped on the refugee camps of Nuseirat and Maghazi with a message for Hamas officials.

“To Hamas leaders: A life for a life, an eye for an eye and whoever started is to blame. If you punish, then punish with the like of that wherewith you were afflicted,” the leaflet read, using verses from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, that are similar to a warning in the Old Testament.

There has also been a dramatic surge in deadly military raids and an increase on restrictions on Palestinian residents in the occupied West Bank since the start of the war.

Israeli forces stormed into a refugee camp in the West Bank on Friday to arrest suspected Palestinian militants, unleashing fighting with local gunmen in which six Palestinians were killed, health officials said. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the operation.

Earlier this week, U.N Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used a rarely exercised power to warn the Security Council of an impending “humanitarian catastrophe,” and Arab and predominantly Muslim nations have called for a vote Friday on a Council resolution to demand an immediate cease-fire.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, appears likely to block any U.N. effort to halt the fighting, which was triggered by the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel. Still, U.S. concern over the devastation is growing. U.S. officials told Israel ahead of the expansion of its ground offensive to southern Gaza several days ago that it must limit civilian deaths and displacement, saying too many Palestinians were killed when it obliterated much of Gaza City and surrounding areas in the north.

Over the past week, Israeli forces expanded their ground offensive into southern Gaza, with a focus on Khan Younis, the territory’s second largest city.

On Friday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said Israel’s air force attacked a home facing the society’s office in Khan Younis. It did not give details about casualties.

Medhat Abbas, a spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, reported a strike in the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, saying it killed and wounded a number of people but gave no exact numbers.

The military says it makes every effort to spare civilians and accuses Hamas of using them as human shields as the militants fight in dense residential areas.

With the entire Gaza Strip under military assault, tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting have packed into the border city of Rafah, in the far south of the Gaza Strip, and Muwasi, a nearby patch of barren coastline that Israel has declared a safe zone.

With shelters significantly beyond capacity, many people pitched tents along the side of the road leading from Rafah to Muwasi.

“We do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name anymore,” the U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, warned Thursday. The pace of Israel’s military assault “has made no place safe for civilians in southern Gaza, which had been a cornerstone of the humanitarian plan to protect civilians and thus to provide aid to them. But without places of safety, that plan is in tatters.”

Israel has designated Muwasi on the territory’s Mediterranean coast as a safe zone. But the U.N. and relief agencies have called that a poorly planned solution.

Israel’s campaign has killed more than 17,100 people in Gaza — 70% of them women and children — and wounded more than 46,000, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which says many others are trapped under rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.

Hamas and other militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack and took more than 240 hostages. More than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, mostly soldiers and civilian men, after more than 100 were freed, most during a cease-fire last month.

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