Peace and Justice Post

Staff Writer With AFP Follow on X April 14, 2025

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A senior Hamas official said on Monday that the Palestinian group is prepared to release all Israeli hostages in exchange for a “serious prisoner swap” and guarantees that Israel will end the war in Gaza.

Hamas is engaged in negotiations in Cairo with mediators from Egypt and Qatar — two nations working alongside the United States to broker a ceasefire in the besieged territory.

“We are ready to release all Israeli captives in exchange for a serious prisoner swap deal, an end to the war, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the entry of humanitarian aid,” Taher al-Nunu, a senior Hamas official, told AFP.

However, he accused Israel of obstructing progress towards a ceasefire.

“The issue is not the number of captives,” Nunu said, “but rather that the occupation is reneging on its commitments, blocking the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and continuing the war.”

“Hamas has therefore stressed the need for guarantees to compel the occupation (Israel) to uphold the agreement,” he added.

Israeli news website Ynet reported on Monday that a new proposal had been put to Hamas.

Under the deal, the group would release 10 living hostages in exchange for US guarantees that Israel would enter negotiations for a second phase of the ceasefire.

The first phase of the ceasefire, which began on January 19 and included multiple hostage-prisoner exchanges, lasted two months before disintegrating.

Efforts towards a new truce have stalled, reportedly over disputes regarding the number of hostages to be released by Hamas.

Meanwhile, Nunu said that Hamas would not disarm, a key condition that Israel has set for ending the war.

“The weapons of the resistance are not up for negotiation,” Nunu said.

The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Militants also took 251 hostages, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that at least 1,574 Palestinians had been killed since March 18, when the ceasefire collapsed, taking the overall death toll since the war began to 50,944.

ceasefire Conflict Egypt Gaza Gaza Strip Gaza war Hamas hostage rescue Israel Palestine Qatar United States

Daniel Warner, Counterpunch, April 11, 2025

Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY 4.0

The Israeli killing of medical workers in Gaza is further proof of a lack of any restraint on the part of Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF). They have been accused of executing 15 handcuffed medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza. As Middle East Eye reported on the medics: “They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them.” According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza; “At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless,” he added.

Here are some of the reactions to the execution:

The top United Nations interim official for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jonathan Whittall, told journalists: “What is happening here defies decency, it defies humanity, it defies the law. It really is a war without limits. It’s an endless loop of blood, pain, and death.”

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was “outraged.” IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain stated: “Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected.”

“Preliminary analysis suggests they were executed, not from a distant range,” a forensic consultant who examined the exhumed bodies told The Guardian, “since the locations of the bullet wounds were specific and intentional,” he said. “One observation is that the bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”

What was Israel’s explanation? “When Hamas terrorists operate in active combat zones — while using humanitarian vehicles as cover, launching rockets from hospitals and stealing aid — Israel will do whatever it takes to protect its soldiers and citizens,” justified Jonathan Harounoff, a spokesman for Israel’s mission to the U.N.

The New York Times contradicted Israel’s version of what happened: “The video obtained by the Timesshows that the approaching ambulances and fire truck were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.” The video was discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics.

After watching the video, Farnaz Fassihi and Christoph Koettl described what they saw and heard in the Times. It is worth repeating the gruesome details:

“Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side. Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out. A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy. The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.

The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the ‘shahada,’ or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. ’There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,’ the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.

‘Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,’ he said.’”

After reports on the video went public, Israeli officials modified their initial justifications. “The Israeli military on Saturday [April 5] acknowledged that the initial accounts from troops involved in the killing last month of 15 people in southern Gaza — who the United Nations said were paramedics and rescue workers — had been partially ‘mistaken,’” journalist Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Israel now says the episode was “under thorough examination.” (The Times has interviewed several witnesses to the shootings Eyewitnesses Recount Deadly Israeli Attack on Medics in Gaza – The New York Times)

The outright assassination of medical workers is a new and different form of Israeli violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in its continuing refusal to respect international norms. Over 50,000 people, including women, the elderly and children, have died in Gaza. An entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Millions have been displaced. IHL in all its complexities is only effective if it is respected by all parties to a conflict. Israel signed the Geneva Conventions on Dec. 8, 1949, and ratified them on July 6, 1951.

What happens if a party to a conflict like Israel continues to violate IHL in the most egregious manner? So far, very little. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits Hungary and the United States as if they were normal diplomatic trips, ignoring the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued search warrants for his arrest. (The U.S. and has no obligation to arrest Netanyahu since is not party to the Rome Treaty.)

For years, my dear friend Eugene Schulman often wore a keffiyeh to honor the Palestinian people. He would regularly unfurl a Palestinian flag on his Geneva balcony in support of a Palestinian state. A non-practicing Jew, Gene was constantly outraged at how Palestinians were treated by Israel. Gene died five years ago next month – Matthew Stevenson movingly described him in CounterPunch (Our Friend Eugene Schulman – CounterPunch.org.). Gene would be beyond outrage today at what is happening to Palestinians.

Hunters have seasons to shoot. Their prey have respites. The IDF and Israeli military have shown it is an open season in Gaza. Nothing is out of bounds. There is no respite for anyone, including humanitarian workers and medics. Even the erudite Gene Schulman would not find words to describe what is taking place. He would be, as we all should be, beyond outrage.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.

Palestinians ethnically cleansed from Rafah in southern Gaza carry their belongings as they flee in search of safety on March 31, 2025.

(Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The entire city of Rafah is being swallowed up,” warned one Israeli human rights group. “The massive death zone… continues to grow by the day.”

Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, Apr 09, 2025

The Israel Defense Forces is preparing to permanently seize the largely depopulated Palestinian city of Rafah—comprising about 20% of Gaza’s land area—and incorporate what was once the embattled enclave’s third-largest city into a borderland buffer that IDF troops have described as a “kill zone” rife with alleged war crimes.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported Wednesday that “defense sources” said an area from the so-called Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt and the Morag corridor—the name of a Jewish colony that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis—will be incorporated into the buffer zone that runs along the entire length of the Israeli border.

The affected area includes the entire city of Rafah—which is thousands of years old—and surrounding neighborhoods, which were home to more than 250,000 people before Israeli launched what United Nations experts have called a genocidal assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.

As Haaretz‘s Yaniv Kubovitch reported:

Expanding the buffer zone to this extent carries significant implications. Not only does it cover a vast area—approximately 75 square kilometers (about 29 square miles), or roughly one-fifth of the Gaza Strip—but severing it would effectively turn Gaza into an enclave within Israeli-controlled territory, cutting it off from the Egyptian border. According to defense sources, this consideration played a central role in the decision to focus on Rafah…

It has yet to be decided whether the entire area will simply be designated a buffer zone that is off-limits to civilians—as has been done in other parts of the border area—or whether the area will be fully cleared and all buildings demolished, effectively wiping out the city of Rafah.

In recent weeks and for the second time during the war, IDF troops forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands residents from Rafah and other areas of southern Gaza in an ethnic cleansing campaign reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, through which the modern state of Israel was founded. Most Gaza residents today are Nakba survivors or descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from other parts of Palestine in 1948.

Earlier this month, Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to seize “large areas” of southern Gaza to be added to what Katz called “security zones” and “settlements.”

Jewish recolonization of Gaza is a major objective of many right-wing Israelis. Last month, Katz announced the creation of a new IDF directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing northern Gaza, which Israeli leaders euphemistically call “voluntary emigration.” Katz said the agency would be run “in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump,” who in February said that the United States would “take over” Gaza after emptying the strip of its over 2 million Palestinians, and then transform the enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump subsequently attempted to walk back some of his comments.

Earlier this week, the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence published testimonies of IDF officers, soldiers, and veterans who took part in the creation of the buffer zone. Soldiers recounted orders to “deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions.”

Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. One officer featured in the report toldThe Guardian: “We’re killing [men], we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”

Most of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents have been forcibly displaced at least once since Israel launched the war, which has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Widespread starvation and disease have been fueled by a “complete siege” which, among other Israeli policies and actions, has been cited in the ongoing South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

An Unconstitutional Rampage

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In an anonymous article for Haaretz, a senior Israeli officer writes that the army has ‘a sub-army of Palestinian slaves’

An Israeli soldier takes aim outside the Tubas Turkish Governmental Hospital in Tubas in the occupied West Bank on 3 December 2024 (AFP)

By MEE staff

Published date: 1 April 2025 17:59 BST | Last update:1 day 3 hours ago

The use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been an Israeli army policy during its war on Gaza, according to the testimony of a senior officer in a non-reservist brigade.

“In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day,” the officer, who says he served with the Israeli army for nine months, wrote anonymously for Haaretz on Sunday.

According to the article, Israeli soldiers routinely force Palestinian civilians to enter Gaza homes ahead of military operations to ensure that no explosives or combatants are there.

This procedure is known with the codename “mosquito protocol”, which the officer first came across in December 2023, two months after Israel launched its devastating onslaught on Gaza.

The Israeli army normally uses dogs for these missions, the officer wrote, and there had not been a shortage of dogs at the time the use of Palestinian human shields first became known to the officer. 

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The officer added that the lack of dogs was the “unofficial excuse” for the procedure. 

The use of Palestinian human shields has become systematically used, and the individuals used in these procedures are referred to internally as “shawish”, the officer said.

“Today, almost every platoon keeps a ‘shawish,’ and no infantry force enters a house before a ‘shawish’ clears it,” he wrote. “This means there are four ‘shawishes’ in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”

‘I thought I was hallucinating’

The use of civilians as human shields is strictly prohibited under international humaitarian law and constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. 

The Israeli army last month launched six investigations into widely reported allegations that its soldiers use Palestinians as human shields. 

The officer downplayed the seriousness of the Israeli investigation, saying that a serious effort would include “far more than a thousand investigations”.

He said that he attended a meeting where a brigade commander presented the use of human shields as a “necessary operational achievement to accomplish the mission”.

‘I don’t know which is worse: that they don’t know what’s going on in the army they command, or that they do know and continue regardless’

– Israeli officer

“It was so normalised that I thought I was hallucinating,” he wrote.

He referred to statements by a senior source to Haaretz in August 2024 that Israeli military commanders were aware of the procedure. 

“I don’t know which is worse: that they don’t know what’s going on in the army they command, or that they do know and continue regardless.”

Despite multiple reports by Haaretz, the use of human shields has become increasingly “widespread and normalised”, he added.

Instead of stopping the procedure, a high-ranking member of the Israeli armed forces continued to condone the use of human shields and even present it as “an operational necessity”, he said.

Yet, the officer wrote that it was not necessary to use human shields while entering houses in Gaza. Instead, the army could’ve used robots, drones or dogs to achieve the same objective. 

“In other words, we forced Palestinians to act as human shields not because it was safer for IDF troops, but because it was faster,” he said, using the acronym for the military.

Investigation reveals details of killing of elderly Palestinian couple used as human shields

Read More »

“That’s why we risked the lives of Palestinians who were suspected of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Some soldiers, incuding the writer, resisted the procedure, he said.

“That’s what happens when you’re in an unending war that fails to bring the hostages back alive month after month. You lose moral judgment.”

The officer concluded by saying that he has no hope that the army would investigate itself the use of human shields.

“Only an independent State Commission of Inquiry could get to the bottom of this,” he wrote.

“Until then, we have every reason to worry about international courts in the Hague, because this procedure is a crime – a crime even the army now admits. It happens daily and is much more common than the public is being told.”

Nearly 18,000 children have been killed by Israel in Gaza since the start of the US-sponsored genocide of Palestinians in October 2023

News Desk

MAR 25, 2025

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

At least 270 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military restarted its ethnic cleansing campaign in the besieged enclave one week ago, according to Save the Children.

“Children are being killed in their sleep in tents; they are being starved and attacked. The only way to ensure children and families are protected is through a definitive ceasefire,” the US-based NGO said in a report on 25 March.

The past week marked “the deadliest days for children since the war began,” Save the Children says, revealing that since the start of the war on 7 October 2023, “over 17,800 children have been killed, with thousands more estimated to be missing, presumed dead under the rubble.”

On Monday, Gaza’s Health Ministry listed the names of over 50,000 Palestinians confirmed killed by Israel in Gaza since 7 October 2023. The 1,516-page document includes 474 pages listing the names of more than 15,600 children.

According to a UN report from November last year, nearly 70 percent of the confirmed number of murdered Palestinians at the time were women and children.

“They should be executed even if they are 16 years old,” Israel’s ambassador to Austria, David Roet, said during a closed-door meeting with the local Jewish community in Innsbruck last week. “If you believe that there are no uninvolved [people] in Gaza … you’re believing that Israel is targeting babies intentionally, which is not correct.”

Israel renewed its bombing campaign of Gaza on 18 March, unilaterally putting an end to a US-brokered ceasefire deal authorities in Tel Aviv had repeatedly violated.

Between Monday and Tuesday, the Israeli onslaught killed at least 62 Palestinians, including seven children.

Ceasefire talks in the Egyptian capital fell apart after an Israeli delegation rejected a new Egyptian proposal and left Cairo on Monday, according to sources cited by Al-Araby al-Jadeed. 

“Israel rejected all proposals despite Hamas’s positive response to a humanitarian ceasefire proposal,” the sources said, adding that Tel Aviv is “coordinating with regional parties to exert maximum pressure on Hamas ahead of any new negotiations.”

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Protest demanding the release of all hostages, in Tel Aviv, last week.Credit: Amir Cohen/Reuters

Haaretz

Mar 19, 2025 2:15 am IST

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid the asking price for Itamar Ben-Gvir’s return to the government in advance. Not out of his own pocket, of course, but with the blood of the 59 hostages whose fate could be sealed by the resumption of the war, which has already sealed the fate of hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children.

On Tuesday, Eliya Cohen, who was freed from Hamas captivity, called the renewed warfare a “death sentence” for the hostages. But that interests the prime minister less than his reward in the form of the homecoming of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party.

According to the statement released by Netanyahu’s office, the decision to strike Gaza was made with Defense Minister Israel Katz after “Hamas’ repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all the proposals it has received from U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and from the mediators.”

But it must be said, loudly and clearly, that this is a lie. It was Israel, not Hamas, that violated the agreement. On its 16th day, the parties were supposed to begin discussing the second phase, which was supposed to end with the release of all the remaining hostages. Israel refused.

• Two months ago we had hope. Then Trump let Netanyahu destroy the hostage negotiations
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Israel also broke its promise to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor between the 42nd and the 50th day of the cease-fire. Moreover, Israel announced that it was halting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and closing the border crossings. This decision, like the energy minister’s decision to halt the limited amount of electricity Israel provides to Gaza, explicitly violates Israel’s commitment in the agreement that aid will continue entering as long as talks on the second stage are ongoing.

All the proposals that Hamas received from Witkoff stem from Israel’s refusal to uphold its part of the deal. Consequently, the attempt to portray Hamas’ rejection of Witkoff’s proposals as a reason to resume the fighting is nothing but a dishonest manipulation.

Israel – not Hamas – is the one preventing the deal’s implementation and the hostages’ return. The statement issued by Netanyahu’s office also said that the goal of the renewed attack on Gaza is “to achieve the objectives of the war as they have been determined by the political echelon, including the release of all of our hostages, the living and the deceased.”

That’s another lie. Military pressure endangers the hostages, and of course also the lives of Israeli soldiers and Gaza residents, while also destroying what remains of the territory.

Netanyahu abandoned the hostages to save his government. The outcry from the hostages’ families and hostages who have returned interests neither him nor the members of his governing coalition. For them, the main thing is the approval of the state budget. Or as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Ayala Metzger, whose father-in-law Yoram Metzger was abducted on October 7, 2023 and killed in Hamas captivity, “We heard you. Now get out. Thank you very much.”

A demonstration by most of the anti-government protest organizations is planned to take place in Jerusalem on Wednesday. The public must join the hostages’ families and demand a resumption of the cease-fire and the signing and implementation of the second stage of the deal. The hostages’ lives are in growing danger. We must save them.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.