CrossFireArabia
Nearly 600 Portuguese political, academic, and military figures, along with journalists, petitioned the government and UN to reject Trump’s plan to take over Gaza and show solidarity with Palestine. They urged Portugal and the EU to oppose forced displacement and support Palestinian self-determination.
CrossFireArabia
By Nurah Tape – The Palestine Chronicle
“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.”
On Day 3 of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, intellectual and writer Professor Refaat Alareer said in a live interview from the besieged enclave “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade … I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”
Nearly three months later, on 6 December, 2023, Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in northern Gaza. The activist’s sister, Asmaa, along with three of her children, and his brother Salah, with his son Mohammed, were among those also killed in the attack.
As a professor, poet and writer, Alareer’s pen was his weapon. And it continues to defend and tell the story of his people.
His poem, If I Must Die, written in 2011 and shared on X a month before his death, has become an iconic reminder of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation and oppression.
“If I must die, you must live, to tell my story, to sell my things, to buy a piece of cloth and some strings…If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale” the actor Brian Cox delivered a passionate rendition of the poem published by the Palestine Festival of Literature.
On December 4, two days before his death, Alareer wrote in a post on X: “I wish I were a freedom fighter so I die fighting back those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs invading my neighborhood and city.”
“The building is shaking,” he added. “The debris and shrapnel are hitting the walls and flying in the streets. Israel has not stopped bombing, shelling, and shooting. Pray for us. Pray for Gaza.”
Over a year later, his words echo as the bombing, shelling, and shooting continue unabated.
To date, a total of 44,612 Palestinians have been killed, and 105,834 wounded, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
As the beloved professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and co-founder of the We Are Not Numbers project, Alareer inspired a myriad of young people in the enclave to own their narrative and tell the story of Palestine based on their experiences.
In a TED talk delivered in 2015, Alareer impressed upon preserving oral history and how “stories make us.”
“I realize I am the person I am today because of the stories” told to him by his mother and grandmother, he said, “because my mum was teaching me values, etiquette, to love people, to love my life, to love my country at the same time.”
“Stories are also important in our lives as Palestinians, as people under occupation, as native peoples on this land, not only because they make us, they shape us, they make us the people we are but also because they connect us with our past, they connect us with our present, and they prepare us to the future,” shared Alareer.
He said his grandmother “told us stories (about) when she was a kid, when she was a newly married wife who would spend months plowing her land, harvesting the crops, the land that now we don’t own because it was occupied.
“Although the land is physically occupied, it still lives in our memories, still lives in our hearts, because we can easily visualize this.”
Concluding his talk, Alareer encouraged the audience to “beg” their parents and grandparents to “tell us stories” and share them with “our kids.”
“Because if we don’t do that, if the story stops there, we’re betraying ourselves, we’re betraying the story, we’re betraying our parents and grandparents, and we’re betraying our homeland,” he emphasized.
Born on September 23, 1979, in Shejaiya in Gaza City, Alareer said in a media interview that “every move I took and every decision I made were influenced (usually negatively) by the Israeli occupation”.
“As a kid, I grew up throwing stones at Israeli military Jeeps, flying kites, and reading,” he also said.
Alareer edited several books, including ‘Gaza Writes Back’ and ‘Gaza Unsilenced’, which according to Palestine Chronicle editor, Ramzy Baroud, “allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.”
“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story,” he wrote in ‘Gaza Writes Back’.
The Geneva-based group, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said Alareer’s killing was “apparently deliberate” and called for an investigation into his death.
“The apartment where Refaat and his family were sheltering was surgically bombed out of the entire building where it’s located, according to corroborated eyewitness and family accounts,” the organization said in a statement.
This came after weeks of death threats that Refaat received “online and by phone from Israeli accounts.”
Husband to Nusayba, Alareer was also a father of six, who had their home bombed previously by Israel in 2014, killing over 30 of his and his wife’s family members, according to Euro-Med Monitor.
Not long after her father’s death, Alareer’s eldest daughter, Shaymaa, gave birth to her first child.
She wrote a note to her deceased father, as conveyed by the Resistance News Network through their Telegram channel:
“I have wonderful news for you, and I wished I could convey it to you face-to-face, handing your first grandson to you… This is your grandson Abdul Rahman, whom I have always imagined you holding. But I never thought that I might lose you too soon, even before you could meet him.”
In April, Shaymaa was killed in an airstrike on her family’s apartment in Gaza City along with her husband and infant son.
As with many Palestinians who fought and died fighting for a liberated Palestine in which ever manner they could, Alareer’s contribution to that struggle lives on.
In honor of his memory, and to mark the first anniversary of Alareer’s killing, Shahd Ahmad Alnaami, a contributor to We Are Not Numbers writes:
So many of us still
hold our phones, read
your poems — not
losing hope, but
we’re tired of sleeping
in fear, tired
of being displaced,
living in tents,
haunted by horrors
that linger in our minds.
A missile pierced the silence,
burning all the tents —
including you. I have
not forgotten. Nights
become nightmares, children
cry from the cold,
their laughter, once bright,
now a distant echo.
We yearn to return,
free from fear. When
will these bloody nights end?
When will this tragedy stop?
When will our normal lives return,
and our distant dreams come true?
We keep asking, “Will this pass?”
And remember how you
used to say, “It shall pass…
I keep hoping it shall pass…”
Still, we wait for the day
peace will dawn,
and a new chapter
open its bleary eyes.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Nurah Tape is a South Africa-based journalist. She is an editor with The Palestine Chronicle.
CrossFireArabia
The UN must declare northern Gaza a disaster zone requiring immediate intervention and compel Israel to halt the genocide being carried out by its army through systematic and widespread mass and individual killings, deliberate starvation, mass forced displacement, and the complete destruction of the remaining essentials for life. The international community’s silence and inaction render it complicit in this brutal genocide.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s field team has documented heinous crimes against civilians in Beit Lahia, the Jabalia Refugee Camp, and across the northern Gaza Strip as the Israeli occupation army escalates its attacks, bombing several homes and killing over 80 Palestinians in Beit Lahia overnight. The previous night, the Israeli military bombed homes belonging to the Al-Hawajri, Nassar, and Abu Al-Aish families in the Tel Al-Zaatar area of Jabalia Camp, killing 33 Palestinians and injuring over 70 others.
An undetermined number of Palestinians are still missing, likely trapped beneath the rubble. Since the last attack on the northern Gaza Strip, 500 people have been confirmed dead, and thousands more have sustained injuries. Many remain unaccounted for, either in the streets or buried under the debris.
With no justification other than to kill the remaining residents and force any survivors to flee, Israeli occupation forces used multiple missiles to bomb the residential blocks, destroying them while hundreds of civilians were inside.
On Saturday, 19 October, at dawn, Israeli army forces surrounded the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia. They fired two artillery shells at the hospital, cut off its electricity, and targeted anyone moving in the area. One of the hospital’s walls was also demolished by Israeli bulldozers.
Dr Munir al-Barash, Director-General of the Ministry of Health, reported that Israeli forces shelled the upper floors of the Indonesian Hospital, where more than 40 patients and wounded persons were located, dozens of whom were in critical condition, along with the medical staff.
He stated that the Israeli army also targeted a group of displaced people at the hospital gate. At the same time, the hospital’s electricity was completely cut off, and patients and medical staff were in a state of extreme panic as a result of the army’s heavy and continuous shooting directed at and around the hospital.
According to information obtained by Euro-Med Monitor, the Israeli occupation army is besieging four shelter centres near the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza.
On Saturday morning, Israeli warplanes bombed the yard of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Beit Lahia Project during funeral ceremonies for victims of the previous day’s attack, killing at least two people. Dr Bilal Abdel Aal, a doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital, was also killed, along with several members of his family, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the Al-Ilmi neighbourhood in Jabalia Camp.
In recent days, the Israeli occupation army has targeted and destroyed the remaining water wells and bombed communications and internet exchanges, severing all connections in the area. The army is now systematically dismantling the already limited healthcare system by actively targeting medical crews and further worsening the crisis.
Israeli forces have blocked the entry of humanitarian aid since the beginning of the month, and since 5 October they have continued their invasion of northern Gaza, putting over 400,000 Palestinians in the northern Gaza Valley at risk of bombing or starvation.
With Israeli forces enforcing a fire ban on the movement of ambulances and civil defence teams in most parts of Jabalia and its camp, many victims and the injured remain in the streets or in their homes, unable to be transported to hospitals. Euro-Med Monitor’s field team has documented hundreds of Israeli airstrikes and bombing operations that have destroyed homes, shelters, and streets across northern Gaza for the last 15 consecutive days.
The international community must recognise the situation in northern Gaza and declare it a disaster zone that requires immediate action. Israel must be pressed to cease its attacks on civilians, allow the provision of life-saving emergency aid, and end its violent genocidal campaign.
The United Nations, alongside individual and collective states, must intervene immediately to save the hundreds of thousands of people living in northern Gaza, prevent Israel from committing genocide for the second consecutive year, impose a comprehensive arms embargo on it, hold it accountable for all its crimes, and take all necessary steps to protect Palestinian civilians.
CrossFireArabia
Israel has escalated its systematic policy of targeting—without warning—schools functioning as shelters for forcibly displaced civilians in the Gaza Strip, killing and wounding hundreds of them. This policy is part of the ongoing genocide that Israel has been waging against Palestinians in the Strip since 7 October 2023.
The Israeli military targeted the Halima al-Sadia School, which provides shelter to hundreds of internally displaced people in Jabalia al-Nazla, in the north of the Gaza Strip, at midnight on Saturday 7 September 2024. The school was bombed by Israeli aircraft, according to the Euro-Med Monitor field team. Four people were killed and several others were injured in the attack.
On Saturday afternoon, Israeli planes then bombed the Amr Ibn al-Aas School, north of Gaza City, which was also housing displaced people. Four Palestinians, including a child, were killed, and several others were injured.
Since the beginning of August, the Israeli occupation army has bombed 16 schools being used as shelters in the Gaza Strip, 15 of them located north of Gaza Valley. Two hundred and seventeen Palestinians have been killed in the reported attacks, while hundreds more have been injured, a large number of casualties being women and children.
In the past week, the Israeli army has increased its targeting of civilians in the Gaza City and North Gaza governorates by bombing residential buildings, civilian gatherings, and commercial stalls there, in addition to shelter centres and their surrounding areas.
There is no legitimate reason to target schools above the heads of displaced individuals, and this act is a blatant violation of the principles of distinction, military necessity, proportionality, and the obligation to exercise appropriate caution. Every time it launches an attack, the Israeli army attempts to justify its actions by claiming that it is attacking military targets, but it never offers any proof to support these assertions.
By killing and forcibly displacing as many Palestinians as possible from their land, these attacks are a part of the genocide being carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
According to preliminary investigations conducted by the Euro-Med Monitor field team, the Israeli army has deliberately destroyed all of the remaining shelters in the north of the Gaza Strip, including schools and public facilities. This destruction has been committed with the goal of establishing a coercive environment, in order to compel the civilian population to leave their neighbourhoods and evacuate to the central and southern sections of the Strip.
Additional evidence of Israel’s clear intention to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip is the plan leaked by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, which published an article claiming that the Israeli army is currently researching options to drive out and displace the remaining Palestinians in the northern Gaza Valley under what is known as the “Generals’ Plan”.
Yedioth Ahronoth pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conversation with the army about launching a fourth phase of his bloody war, centred on driving out residents of the northern Gaza Strip. This suggests that the plan for forced displacement, which has been in place since the beginning of this genocide—now in its 11th consecutive month—is still in effect, in the absence of any strong international opposition to Israel’s attempt to annihilate the Palestinian people.
The United States and numerous European nations’ complicity in Israel’s horrific crimes against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip, coupled with the international community’s near silence and lack of action to halt the genocide there, is enabling Israel to finalise its plan to exterminate the Palestinian people in large numbers, through forced displacement and direct and indirect killing.
Israel’s bombing strategy reveals a deliberate policy to target Palestinians civilians everywhere in the Gaza Strip; spread fear among them; deny them stability or shelter, even for brief periods of time; force them to evacuate repeatedly; subject them to life-threatening conditions; and ultimately destroy them. The bombing continues throughout the entire Strip, with Israel targeting places designated as humanitarian areas, mainly shelter centres, including those set up in UNRWA-run schools.
As of the time of publication, the Israeli military has been attacking the Gaza Strip for 11 months. During this time, Israel has been carrying out military operations against civilian targets, killing large numbers of civilians in the process. These attacks have also targeting refugee centres, the majority of which were housed in UN buildings, and have killed large numbers of people there, all of which constitutes crimes against humanity, full-fledged war crimes, and genocide.
As part of their international obligations, all nations must put an end to Israel’s crimes of genocide and other serious offenses in the Gaza Strip; safeguard civilians there; ensure Israel abides by international law and the rulings of the International Court of Justice; and impose effective sanctions on Israel by halting all forms of military, financial, and political cooperation and support. This includes an immediate stop to all arms sales, exports, and transfers to Israel, including export licenses and military aid.
All nations that cooperate with Israel in committing crimes must be held accountable, especially those that provide Israel with any kind of direct support or assistance. This includes giving aid and engaging in contractual agreements with Israel relating to the military, intelligence, politics, law, finance, and the media, among other domains that might help its crimes continue.
At the international, regional, and local levels, all possible avenues for accountability must be explored with urgency. This includes serious joint work to activate the path of universal jurisdiction, in order to hold accountable perpetrators of crimes against Palestinian civilians before the national courts of countries where such jurisdiction exists.
The International Criminal Court must act quickly to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant; broaden the scope of its investigation into individual criminal responsibility for crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, to include everyone involved; issue warrants for their arrest; hold them accountable; and categorically declare Israel’s ongoing crimes to be genocide.
CrossFireArabia
To compel Israel to stop the slow and deliberate killing of Palestinian MP Khalida Jarrar, who has been in Israeli solitary confinement for 17 days, the Working Group on arbitrary detention and UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Al-Salem, must take effective and immediate action. They must demand her immediate release and an end to Israel’s use of arbitrary detention, including administrative detention, against Palestinians.
In an urgent letter to the Working Group on arbitrary detention and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has detailed the conditions of Jarrar’s arbitrary detention and cruel solitary confinement in an Israeli prison intended for female criminal detainees. The letter also includes a complaint received by Euro-Med Monitor from Jarrar’s husband, Ghassan Jarrar.
In the complaint that he sent to the Euro-Med Monitor team, Ghassan Jarrar said that the Israeli Prison Service has been isolating his wife in solitary confinement in Neve Terzia Prison for 17 days in harsh conditions. According to the complaint, the human rights activist, who has been in administrative detention for over eight months, was placed in isolation for unknown reasons, as there was no legal basis for her to be removed from the prison where she was being held. Additionally, Israeli authorities did not notify her when she was being moved to the new prison; it became evident to her, however, that she was placed in solitary confinement in a prison meant for female offenders, Neve Terzia.
Ghassan Jarrar clarified that his wife is being held in a 2.5 by 1.5-metre cell, with only a concrete bench to sleep on and an open toilet without a curtain. He said that the Israeli prison authorities have cut off the water to the toilet and are delaying the delivery of food to his wife, even though she needs to eat on a regular basis as she takes five different types of medication for blood pressure, diabetes, and cholesterol.
He emphasised that the most serious problems facing his wife are the actual lack of oxygen in the cell; that she is not even allowed to go outside for “recreation”; that the water to the toilet is cut off; that the temperatures are abnormally high; and that the purposeful delay of food are all “conditions of killing, not isolation”. “Do they want to kill Khalida this way?” Jarrar questioned. Despite her critical health condition, no one answers her calls when she urgently needs anything, with “four hours [going] by before anyone answers”.
Jarrar cited his wife’s words to her attorney, summarising her suffering as follows:
“I die every day. The cell looks like a tiny, airtight box. The cell is equipped with a toilet and a small window above it, which was closed a day after I was moved to it. They did not leave me any space to breathe. Even the so-called porthole in the cell door was closed. I spend most of my time sitting next to a tiny opening that allows me to breathe. I wait for the hours to pass while I suffocate in my cell in hopes of finding oxygen molecules to breathe and survive.”
She added: “The high temperatures make my isolation even more tragic. Put simply, I am inside a very hot oven. The heat has made it impossible for me to sleep. Not only did they put me in this situation alone, but they also purposefully turned off the water in the cell. It [initially] took them at least four hours to bring me a bottle of water. After eight days of confinement, I was allowed to leave the cell once, to go to the prison yard. Additionally, they purposely postpone the awful dinner for hours.”
Israeli army forces arrested Khalida Jarrar on 26 December 2023 from her home in Ramallah, in the central occupied West Bank, and placed her in administrative detention. Since then, she had been detained in Damon Prison with other female inmates without being charged or given a chance to defend herself, until she was recently moved to solitary confinement.
Khalid Jarrar is an ex-prisoner who served five years in Israeli jails. She is a human rights and feminist activist and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
More than 9,000 Palestinian detainees are currently suffering from arbitrary arrests, harsh and degrading detention conditions, brutal torture, and punitive and retaliatory measures, including starvation and solitary confinement—violations which have seriously intensified since the start of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023.
About 260 Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been killed in Israeli prisons and detention facilities since 1967. This figure does not include the dozens of Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip who have been killed since last October. The exact numbers and identities of most of these individuals remain unknown.
One of the primary methods employed by Israel to maintain its apartheid regime against the Palestinian people is administrative detention. This is done in order to subject the Palestinian people to oppression and destruction, destroying their families and communities, and depriving them of their fundamental rights,, which include the freedom of speech and assembly, immunity from arbitrary detention, the right to a fair trial, and protection from torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
The infliction of intentional harm and severe psychological suffering resulting from prolonged solitary confinement constitutes a form of torture that is absolutely prohibited by international law. Indefinite solitary confinement and prolonged solitary confinement, i.e. confinement lasting longer than 15 consecutive days, are prohibited by the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), which classify prolonged solitary confinement as torture and ill-treatment.
Israel bears complete responsibility for Khalida Jarrar’s life and well-being, and must end her solitary confinement and immediately release her. The international community must assume its legal responsibilities and act swiftly and forcefully to compel Israel to immediately cease its use of arbitrary detentions, including administrative detentions, against Palestinians. This will help put an end to Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people, guarantee the full realisation of their right to self-determination, and ensure that Israel is held accountable for its crimes against them.
