Palestine

from #AssociatedPress #AP #APNews Updated 9:21 PM EDT, May 9, 2025

NEW YORK (AP) — #ColumbiaUniversity has suspended dozens of students and barred alums and others who participated in a pro-#Palestinian demonstration inside the school’s main library earlier this week, a school spokesperson said Friday.

The Ivy League institution in Manhattan placed more than 65 students on interim suspension and barred 33 others, including those from affiliated institutions such as Barnard College, from setting foot on campus.

In a post remembering the Holocaust, Gil Kopatz called for the extermination of Palestinians and described the war on Gaza as an essential ‘pesticide’

Bernie Sanders May 08, 2025

[based on speech given to US Senate]

"Thursday marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks, Israel has blocked all supplies: no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel.

Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities.

... Defense Minister Israel Katz said, “Israel’s policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.” "

Brett Wilkins
May 08, 2025

"Israeli occupation forces enforced a ban on the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees on Thursday by storming three schools in East Jerusalem, terrorizing children and staff as they shuttered the facilities and drawing condemnation from human rights defenders.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, heavily armed Israeli security forces raided the schools in the Shu'fat refugee camp in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, detaining one UNRWA employee and forcing around 550 children out of their classrooms as the invaders closed the facilities."

Bethan McKernan in Jerusalem and Malak A Tantesh in Gaza Tue 6 May 2025 06.48 EDT

“No food or medical supplies have entered Gaza for nine weeks, and Israeli forces have now seized about 70% of the territory as military buffer or civilian no-go zones, pushing 2.3 million people and aid operations into ever-smaller areas – which are no longer designated as “humanitarian zones”.”

Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters.

However, inside Harvard’s campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom.

To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus safety, in which speaking up against Israeli state violence towards Palestinians is considered threatening. As a result, university administrators rush to address anti-Semitism on campus, as they should, but they also censor and eliminate speech and scholarship which is critical of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are less than an afterthought. University administrators remain silent as students, faculty and staff experience doxxing, harassment and death threats for speaking up about Palestinian human rights. They have shared international students’ information with the Department of Homeland Security, as students on nearby campuses have been abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s international law violations.

Beyond turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the university’s leaders also routinely take action to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.

Robert Mackey (now); Lucy Campbell, Marina Dunbar and Tom Ambrose (earlier) Wed 7 May 2025 20.23 EDT

20.16 EDT #Columbia student protesters arrested and led away in handcuffs by police

A graduate student at Columbia Journalism School reports on Twitter/X that at least 50 people have been arrested for taking part in the brief occupation of Butler library on campus.

Five minutes ago, another student at the journalism school, Somaiyah Hafeez, shared video of more than a dozen protesters, handcuffed with zip ties, being led away by police officers to an #NYPD bus. Most were wearing keffiyehs – the traditional black and white scarf that has long been a symbol of #Palestinian identity.

Lauren Gambino Wed 7 May 2025 19.41 EDT

“#ColumbiaUniversity asked the New York police department to help clear pro-Palestinian activists after dozens of protesters occupied parts of the main campus library on Wednesday.”

"In a statement posted on X, protesters confirmed that they had refused to show their IDs and that some had sustained injuries in the skirmish with the public safety officers.

“We will not be useless intellectuals,” protesters said in a statement. “#Palestine is our compass, and we stand strong in the face of violent oppression.”"

Sam Levine and agencies Wed 7 May 2025 12.35 EDT

"A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted a judge’s order to bring a Turkish Tufts University student from a Louisiana immigration detention center back to New England for hearings to determine whether her rights were violated.

A judicial panel of the New York-based US second circuit court of appeals ruled in the case of Rümeysa Öztürk after lawyers representing her and the US justice department presented arguments at a hearing on Tuesday."

cross-posted from: https://freefree.ps/users/faab64/statuses/114460587509811152

On Sunday, the #UN agency for Palestinian refugees ( #UNRWA) warned that the humanitarian situation across the #Gaza Strip is beyond imagination, calling on the international community to take serious action to stop this #catastrophe from reaching unseen levels. #Starvation #Genocide #Israel
#FoodAsWeapon #Horror @palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

Researchers say Israel’s worst wildfires were exacerbated by non-native tree species that Israel has been planting for decades to cover dispossessed Palestinian villages with forests.

Edward Helmore
Tue 6 May 2025 09.32 EDT

"More than two dozen pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on Monday night at the University of Washington in Seattle after they occupied an engineering building and set dumpsters on fire.

The protest group, called Super UW, occupied the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building to demand that the university sever its ties with Boeing, as the aerospace company has military contracts which the students say “are used by Israel in their US-funded genocide of Palestinian people”."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34012029

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THE TIMES OF ISRAEL — ISRAEL AT WAR — DAY 578

FROM THE LIVEBLOG OF TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2025

Smotrich: Gaza will be ‘totally destroyed’ within months, population ‘concentrated’ in narrow border area

By JEREMY SHARON Today, 6:00 pm

Image: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at a Religious Zionism party faction meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, May 5, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

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THE TIMES OF ISRAEL — ISRAEL AT WAR — DAY 578

“Within a few months we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich says at the “Settlements Conference” in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, organized by the Makor Rishon newspaper.

“In another six months Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity... The population of Gaza will be concentrated from the Morag Corridor southwards. The rest of the Strip will be empty.”

Adds the finance minister: “The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”