progressiveissuesblog

UNICEF

Updated 2024-08-29

2024-07-24 UN Convoy in Gaza Shot While Reuniting 5 Palestinian Children With Their Father   A  UN convoy in Gaza that was carrying a group of five Palestinian children, including a baby, to reunite them with their father was shot at at an Israeli military checkpoint on Tuesday, UNICEF reported.   No one was hurt, UNICEF said. One of the two cars in the convoy was hit with three bullets at a designated waiting point near the Wadi Gaza checkpoint, and the convoy was able to continue its journey to deliver the children.

These shots came despite the UN’s meticulous efforts to deconflict their convoys, meaning that they communicate with Israeli forces, sharing information like coordinates and route to ensure safe passage.   https://truthout.org/articles/un-convoy-in-gaza-shot-while-reuniting-5-palestinian-children-with-their-father/

2024-07-22 UNICEF Reports Israel Is Killing Kids at Shocking Rates Amid West Bank Assault    Three days after the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful, the United Nations children’s rights agency said that after decades of being “exposed to horrific violence,” the number of children who have been killed in the West Bank since last October has skyrocketed.

Since Israel began its bombardment of the Palestinian territories nearly 10 months ago — with Gaza the primary target of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacks, but with West Bank communities also subjected to raids and other violence — 143 Palestinian children have been killed in the West Bank, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The number represents a 250% increase compared to the nine months preceding the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, after which the IDF began retaliating in the occupied territories. https://truthout.org/articles/unicef-reports-israel-is-killing-kids-at-shocking-rates-amid-west-bank-assault/

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Torture (also see Israel Prisoners)

Updated 2024-08-29

2024-08-16 Why Israeli Soldiers Rape, Torture, and Massacre   Instilling fear in the Palestinian people is not a side effect of the IDF’s brutal violations of human rights. It is the strategy.      

On October 25, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News that “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore.”   It might sound odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s well-being if not its very survival.   In actuality, the fear element is directly linked to Israel’s behavior and fundamental to its political discourse. Historically, Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political strategy in mind: to instill the desired fear to drive Palestinians off their land. Deir Yassin, Tantara and the over 70 documented massacres during the Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe, are cases in point.  https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/idf-rape-torture

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Tech Industry

Updated 2024-8-29

2024-08-05 Investigation Exposes Big Tech Ties to Israeli Genocide in Gaza    “It’s more than complicity: It’s direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they’re using to kill Palestinians,” said one policy expert.  

The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for “direct participation and collaboration” in what many critics around the world call Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.

Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.

Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has “led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure.” The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS “is particularly close” and “even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/idf-aws

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Tantura Massacre (also see Israel Massacres)

Updated 2024-08-29

Tantura Massacre – Wikipedia   Took place on the night of 22–23 May 1948 during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Around 40–200 Palestinian Arab villagers from Tantura were massacred by Israel’s Haganah, namely the Alexandroni Brigade. The massacre occurred following Tantura’s surrender, a village of roughly 1,500 people in 1945 located near Haifa. The victims were buried in a mass grave, which today serves as a car park for the nearby Tel Dor beach.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantura_massacre

Tantura Documentary   https://www.amazon.com/Tantura-Teddy-Katz/dp/B0B8K2WY73  https://www.tantura-film.com/

Filmmaker Alon Schwarz challenges Israel’s narrative about the 1948 massacre of a Palestinian village.    In his quest to get to the bottom of what happened at Tantura in May 1948, the graduate student, Teddy Katz, interviewed around 135 people, both Palestinians and Israelis, collecting 140 hours of testimony for his thesis at the University of Haifa.   His subsequent dissertation detailed how the Alexandroni Brigade, one of a dozen brigades established by the Zionist paramilitary organisation known as the Haganah, had massacred up to 250 Palestinians after the village had fallen. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-tantura-massacre-documentary-foundational-myth-exposes-how

2023-05-22 Remembering the Tantura Massacre   A week after David Ben-Gurion, the executive head of the World Zionist Organisation, declared the establishment of the State of Israel, the small coastal village of Tantura became the scene of one of the worst massacres carried out by Zionist colonial forces against the indigenous Palestinian population. The massacre took place against the backdrop of what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe which saw 750,000 Palestinians, nearly three quarters of the population, being driven out of their homes by Zionist paramilitary groups. The catastrophe is now the longest running refugee crisis in the modern era.

By the beginning of May 1948, Tantura was one of the last remaining Palestinian villages on the stretch of the coastal plain south of Haifa to Tel Aviv. It had a population of 1,500 and like many Palestinian villages scattered along the cost thrived in an economy based around fishing and agriculture. The village was assigned to Israel under the controversial 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine. It was not until six months later that the full extent of the terrible fate inflicted on Tantura by the international community would be known.   https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230522-remembering-the-tantura-massacre/

2022-12-16  Director Alon Schwarz on Tantura documentary and Palestinian right of return       “I found seven Jewish people who said there was a massacre [at Tantura]. But later, they all fell into line and denied it.”   Filmmaker Alon Schwarz challenges Israel’s narrative about the 1948 massacre of a Palestinian village.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUUPc9gE4o8

2022-09-11 Tantura: New documentary sparks debate about Israel and the Palestinian Nakba      A new documentary, released earlier this year, is shining light on a violent and controversial episode in Israeli and Palestinian history.  Tantura tells the story of the Palestinian village and the immediate events following its capturing in 1948. It has reopened the wound of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) while sparking debate surrounding Israel’s role in the ongoing collective trauma of Palestinians.

The film begins with the story of Israeli researcher Teddy Katz. In 1998, Katz submitted his master’s thesis at Haifa University. It focused on an alleged massacre that soldiers of the Israeli Alexandroni Brigade carried out at the Palestinian seaside village of Tantura during the 1948 war  https://theconversation.com/tantura-new-documentary-sparks-debate-about-israel-and-the-palestinian-nakba-189101

2022-05-24 Executions and Mass Graves in Tantura May 22 1948     On the night of 22-23 May 1948, one week after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Palestinian fishing village of Tantura was attacked and occupied by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade, later made part of the Israeli army. Within hours of occupying the village, Israeli forces and intelligence units conducted a systematic massacre of disarmed Palestinian fighters and civilians.

Both the historical record and the testimonies of survivors captured by scholars and filmmakers reference the existence of several mass graves dug in Tantura on the 23rd of May 1948. These graves had been created to hold the bodies of Palestinian civilians and fighters killed during the battle for control of the village, as well as those executed after its occupation.

Commissioned by the Haifa-based legal centre Adalah, Forensic Architecture has spent the past year conducting a comprehensive analysis of the available cartographic, testimonial, and photographic evidence related to the Palestinian village of Tantura before and after the 1948 war, with the aim of:

• locating and outlining the original village cemeteries;
• identifying and measuring evidence of any additional mass graves [1] visible in the available aerial imagery of the site, dug after the occupation of the village by Israeli forces on 22-23 May 1948;
• assessing the possible explanations for the appearance of the additional mass grave(s); and
• determining whether there is visual evidence that any of the additional mass grave(s) were at any point in time unearthed and the bodies exhumed and removed.   

https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/executions-and-mass-graves-in-tantura-23-may-1948/

2021-04-00 The Tantura Massacre, 22-23 May 1948   On the night of 22-23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1,500) was attacked and occupied by units of the Israeli army’s Alexandroni Brigade. The village, south of Haifa, lay within the area assigned to the Jewish state by the UN General Assembly’s partition resolution. In its occupation, depopulation, subsequent destruction, and seizure of all its lands by Israel, the fate of Tantura was similar to that of more than 400 other Palestinian villages during the 1948 war. But it also shared with some two score of these villages the additional agony of a large-scale massacre of its inhabitants.

Word of the Tantura massacre was completely overshadowed at the time by the fighting between Israel and the regular armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, which had entered the country after the state had been proclaimed.   https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/41048

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Supreme Court

Updated 2024-08-29

2024-07-19 How We Fix The Corrupted Supreme Court with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse    It’s clear that there are issues with the U.S. Supreme Court. From justices accepting lavish gifts to the shadow docket to outrageous rulings, immense reform is needed to ensure that faith and trust are restored in the nation’s highest court. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse discusses the most pressing issues facing the Court and how we fix them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFLOh-A87Cs

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Shatila Refugee Camp

Updated 2024-08-29

2023-08-30 A Letter to IDF Soldiers    IN SEPTEMBER 2012, on the 30th anniversary of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, I wrote a letter to the Israeli soldiers who were on duty there <www.972mag.com/a-letter-to-the-idf-soldiers-at-sabra-and-shatila>.

This September 2023, on the 41st anniversary of that massacre, we mark another atrocity in a Palestinian refugee camp, this one in Jenin, in the Occupied Territories. I am again writing a letter but this time to those Israeli soldiers on active duty who were in Jenin. I wonder if the children of those soldiers who were in Beirut participated in the invasion and destruction of this West Bank city.    https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/a-letter-to-idf-soldiers.html

2001-04-00 The Champion Of Violence Takes Over     Many American Jews are responding to the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister of Israel with sadness, mourning and despair. When Ariel Sharon was forced to resign from his position as defense minister during the Lebanon war, most Israelis felt that they had finally rid themselves of a man whose record of violence could no longer be ignored. Though his troops didn’t personally do the brutal killings of the hundreds of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, but merely let the murderers in and provided flares through the night for them as the stabbings and rapes and murders proceeded by soldiers known to have participated in other attrocities against civilians, the Israeli public knew of his many other acts of terror (including massacres of civilian Bedouins in the Sinai). By standards now being applied in Kosovo and Serbia, Ariel Sharon would have been brought to trial for war crimes. Instead, he now has been elected prime minister.   https://www.wrmea.org/2001-april/the-champion-of-violence-takes-over.html

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Ritter, Scott – Journalist, UN Weapons Inspector

Updated 2024-08-29

Scott Ritter -Wikipedia     Ritter is a former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer, former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector, author, and commentator.[8][5]    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter

2024-08-12 Scott Ritter REVEALS: Iran Begins BRUTAL Revenge on Israel! Netanyahu’s SUICIDE Move, WWIII Fear!   Scott Ritter REVEALS: Iran Begins BRUTAL Revenge on Israel! Netanyahu’s SUICIDE Move, WWIII Fear!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U0X62ch0-4

2024-08-11 Scott Ritter EXPLAINS WHY: ‘Hezbollah’s Military Power Shocked The Israel – IDF Trembles with Fear!’    Scott Ritter EXPLAINS WHY: ‘Hezbollah’s Military Power Shocked The Israel – IDF Trembles with Fear!’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDsX_umQ0Y

2024-08-10 Scott Ritter: Why Israel Could Be Humiliated and Defeated by Iran or Hezbollah!     Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union, implementing arms control agreements, and on the staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, where he played a critical role in the hunt for Iraqi SCUD missiles. From 1991 until 1998, Mr. Ritter served as a Chief Inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, leading the search for Iraq’s proscribed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ritter was a vocal critic of the American decision to go to war with Iraq. His new book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union, is his ninth.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnOIBOlNcZs

2024-08-09 CN Condemns FBI Raid on CN Columnist’s Home    Consortium News strongly condemns the raid on the home of its columnist Scott Ritter by the F.B.l. on Thursday as a serious threat to press freedom. 

In a video posted to his Substack page, Ritter said that normally in alleged FARA violation cases the authorities send a letter to the subject of the inquiry informing them of the investigation. They do not send numerous F.B.I. agents to the door with a warrant to search and remove potential evidence.

The warrant, a copy of which Ritter posted, only called for electronic devices to be removed, but the agents, whom Ritter said acted professionally, also removed boxes of paper United Nations files from his days as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. As Ritter says in the video, U.N. documents are never classified and could have nothing to do with the alleged FARA case against him.

“So the idea that, this is normal procedure is absurd in the extreme. I’m not a foreign agent. What I am is a journalist. And this is how we need to couch this entire thing. What the F.B.I. did yesterday, what the United States government did yesterday, was a frontal assault not only on free speech, but a free press,” Ritter said in the video.

Ritter says he’s being targeted because of his freelance work for Russian media. In the wake of Russiagate, the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017 forced Russian-government financed media companies to register as foreign agents. But only the principal executives of RT and Sputnik need to register, not employees or freelancers such as Ritter.

“They are seeking to intimidate a journalist with a long record of journalism, to intimidate this journalist, me, from engaging in activities such as the research and publication of articles and materials critical of U.S. policy in Ukraine, supportive of Russian objectives,” he said.

“Just a quick reminder. The U.S. courts have determined that under FARA, coincidence of ideas between an individual such as myself and a foreign government, Russia, does not weigh in on FARA,” Ritter said.    https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/09/cn-condemns-fbi-raid-on-cn-columnists-home/

2024-06-20 Israel is Losing Big on All Fronts and It is just Getting Worse | Scott Ritter    Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union, implementing arms control agreements, and on the staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, where he played a critical role in the hunt for Iraqi SCUD missiles. From 1991 until 1998, Mr. Ritter served as a Chief Inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, leading the search for Iraq’s proscribed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ritter was a vocal critic of the American decision to go to war with Iraq. His new book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union, is his ninth.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBnX7-FTMF4  

2024-05-08 Scott Ritter: ‘Palestinians are being forced to pay in blood for a Palestinian State’    On May 8, 2024, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter spoke with Dimitri Lascaris about Israel’s looming military defeat. According to Ritter, the genocidal war that Israel launched in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks have exposed a range of Israeli vulnerabilities and the limits of Israel’s brutal military power. Israel, he believes, may be forced to seek a face-saving exit from the horrors it has perpetrated.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAYTN42vN2I

2023-11-03 Scott Ritter: Israel in BIG TROUBLE as Gaza War Inflames Regional Tensions    Friend of the show and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter reflects on Israel’s war on Gaza and whether regional forces such as Hezbollah will enter into the conflict in a major way.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-UTt6aJoOo&t=7s 2023-10-22 SCOTT RITTER on the Israel-Palestine Conflict and the US Leading us into WW3   Former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter joins us to talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, US weapons deliveries to Ukraine and Israel, recent attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, as well as the alleged attack on the USS Carney in the Gulf of Aden. Learn about the Iraqi Resistance, how they operate, what these attacks mean for the region and much more…   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg-UjNgn8tg&t=1s

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Quran

Updated 2024-08-29

2024-08-24 Hamas urges anger and condemnation over Quran burning by Israeli soldiers      Al Jazeera Arabic had aired footage, obtained from the cameras of Israeli soldiers, showing them ripping up pages from the Muslim holy book and burning them at the Bani Saleh Mosque in northern Gaza.

The channel also published a video from an Israeli drone showing the bombing of the historic Grand Mosque in Khan Younis.   According to the Gaza Government Media Office, Israel has completely destroyed 610 mosques and three churches over the past 10 months in Gaza.

On Saturday, Hamas called on “the free people of the world” to act to defend Muslim and Christian holy sites in Palestine and end “the war of extermination” against the Gaza Strip.  The Israeli offensive has killed more than 40,200 Palestinians and turned large parts of the besieged Palestinian territory into rubble.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a US advocacy group, said the desecration of Quran copies and targeting of mosques in Gaza prove that Israel’s “war on the Palestinian people in Gaza is also a war on Islam itself”. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hamas-urges-anger-and-condemnation-over-quran-burning-by-israeli-soldiers/ar-AA1pn5Cz?

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Project 2025 (see also Republicans)

Updated 2024-08-29

2024-08-22 Climate Crisis & Election Roundtable: From Tim Walz’s Record to Project 2025 to Israel    Climate activists disrupted a DNC-adjacent event sponsored by ExxonMobil on Wednesday, the same day that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz formally accepted his nomination as vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Walz has faced harsh criticism from Indigenous and environmental rights groups in Minnesota for his authorization of the Line 3 oil pipeline through Native treaty lands in the state. We host a roundtable discussion on the climate crisis and the Democratic Party’s response with Ojibwe lawyer and founder of the Giniw Collective Tara Houska; climate organizer Collin Rees, who was part of the ExxonMobil action at the DNC; and climate scientist Michael Mann.  Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHh_daM9cek&t=11s

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Philadelphi Corridor (also see Rafah)

Updated 2024-08-29

2024-08-25 Egypt demands that Israel give up control of Rafah crossing in first days of possible ceasefire – report      Egypt insists that Israel must relinquish control of the Rafah Border Crossing during the first days of a potential ceasefire, the Saudi-owned Al Hadath outlet reports, quoting unnamed sources.

As the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence agencies head to Cairo for talks, Egyptian mediators have been attempting to narrow the gaps between Israel and Hamas and to pressure Israel to phase out the IDF presence along the Philadelphi route. To persuade the terror group to come to an agreement, Egypt has told Hamas that it agrees with its position rejecting any permanent Israeli presence along the border corridor, Al Hadath adds.https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/egypt-demands-that-israel-give-up-control-of-rafah-crossing-in-first-days-of-possible-ceasefire-report/ar-AA1pofMQ?

2024-08-24 Netanyahu in dispute with Israeli negotiators over ceasefire conditions, source says    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has locked horns with Israeli ceasefire negotiators over his insistence that Israel will not pull out of the so-called Philadelphi Corridor in the south of the Gaza Strip, a person with knowledge of the talks said.

The Philadelphi Corridor, along the border with Egypt, and the Netzarim Corridor cutting across the middle of the Gaza Strip, have been two of the main sticking points in talks backed by Egypt, Qatar and the United States.https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/netanyahu-in-dispute-with-israeli-negotiators-over-ceasefire-conditions-source-says/ar-AA1pmmti?

2024-08-23 Israel offers new proposal for the Philadelphi corridor to Hamas   Egypt is set to deliver Israel’s latest Philadelphi corridor proposal to Hamas after Israel submitted a revised plan on Thursday as efforts to secure a ceasefire deal to halt the fighting in Gaza continue, a diplomat and an Israeli source familiar with the talks said.

The new Israeli proposal, which includes a map of where Israeli troops would be deployed, reduces the number of troops and military posts along the strategic corridor bordering Egypt from Israel’s previous position, the Israeli source said. Egyptian negotiators had rejected the previous Israeli map days earlier and declined to transfer it to Hamas, calling it a non-starter.

The Philadelphi corridor is a 14-kilometer (8.7-mile) strip of land in southern Gaza along the border with Egypt- that the IDF currently controls.

The deployment of Israeli troops along the Philadelphi corridor during the first phase of a ceasefire agreement has been a major point of contention between Israel and Hamas. Israel has demanded maintaining control of the border zone, whereas Hamas has said Israeli troops must withdraw from the area.  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/israel-offers-new-proposal-for-the-philadelphi-corridor-to-hamas/ar-AA1pk1oY?

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World