Author: admin

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has unveiled a plan to relocate all Palestinians in Gaza to a tightly controlled camp built on the ruins of Rafah, that could amount to crimes against humanity.

According to a report by Israeli publication Haaretz, Katz said he had instructed the Israeli military to prepare for what he called a “humanitarian city” in Rafah. Palestinians would be subjected to “security screening” before entry and barred from leaving the site, he said during a briefing with Israeli journalists.

Meanwhile, at least 35 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza since dawn, hospital sources told Al Jazeera Arabic on Thursday.

Most of the casualties were reportedly women and children, with the highest number of deaths occurring in central and southern parts of the besieged territory. At least 17 people were killed in the central city of Deir el-Balah.

Katz said the first phase would involve transferring 600,000 displaced Palestinians — mainly from al-Mawasi — to the site, with the ultimate aim of housing the entire population of Gaza there.

The perimeter of the camp would be secured by Israeli forces. Katz also reaffirmed Israel’s intent to implement “the emigration plan,” according to Haaretz.

“(Katz has) laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that. It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip,” said Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli human rights lawyer commenting on the matter. 

“When you drive someone out of their homeland that would be a war crime, in the context of a war,” said Sfard. “If it’s done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity.”

The plan appears to contradict earlier statements from Israel’s military chief, whose office claimed in a letter that Palestinians were being relocated inside Gaza purely for their own protection.

Read: Trump met with PM Netanyahu for ‘second time’ to discuss Gaza ceasefire deal

Meanwhile, Netanyahu is actively seeking third countries willing to “take in” Palestinians. Other senior Israeli officials, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have promoted the idea of building new Israeli settlements in Gaza, according to The Guardian.

Plans for so-called “humanitarian transit areas” to house Palestinians either inside or outside Gaza were reportedly shared with the Trump administration and discussed at the White House.

The $2 billion proposal was attributed to the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), though the group later denied involvement. “The slides are not a GHF document,” the foundation said.

Prof Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Katz’s plan amounted to ethnic cleansing. “The defence minister laid out clear plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza,” he said, describing it as “a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them”.

Premature babies, dialysis patients at risk

Meanwhile, officials have warned that more than 100 premature babies in Gaza face imminent danger as fuel shortages cripple hospitals amid Israel’s months-long siege.

Read more: US imposes sanctions on UN’s Francesca Albanese over Israel’s criticism

At al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, director Muhammad Abu Salmiyah issued a dire appeal, stating that oxygen supplies, dialysis machines, and blood banks were on the verge of shutting down. “The hospital will cease to be a place of healing and will become a graveyard for those inside,” he said.

Another 350 dialysis patients are also at risk as the blockade tightens and electricity sources dwindle. The fuel crisis threatens to collapse Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, already overstretched by relentless Israeli airstrikes and restricted humanitarian access.

In Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood, the humanitarian toll became painfully personal for Aayat al-Sardi, whose premature twin boys were born in April. After 40 days in neonatal intensive care, she lost one child, Ahmed, to malnutrition. His twin, Mazen, still clings to life.

“I could not even visit them in the hospital,” said the 25-year-old mother, describing the loss as unbearable. Her twins were conceived after years of failed pregnancies and medical treatments. “My heart died with him,” she added.

Ceasefire talks

Israel and Hamas may be able to reach a Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal within one or two weeks but such an agreement is not likely to be secured in just a day’s time, a senior Israeli official said.

Speaking during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, the official said that if the two sides agree to a proposed 60-day ceasefire, Israel would use that time to offer a permanent ceasefire that would require the Hamas to disarm.

If Hamas refuses, “we’ll proceed” with military operations in Gaza, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Moreover, Hamas has agreed to release 10 Israeli hostages as part of its “flexibility” to reach a Gaza ceasefire agreement.

Hamas “continues its intensive and responsible efforts to ensure the success of the ongoing round of negotiations, striving to reach a comprehensive agreement that ends the aggression against our people, secures the free and safe entry of humanitarian aid, and alleviates the worsening suffering in the Gaza Strip,” the group said in a statement.

“In its commitment to the success of the current efforts, the movement has shown the necessary flexibility and agreed to release 10 prisoners.”

Hamas said key issues including the flow of aid, withdrawal of Israeli forces from the enclave, and real guarantees for a lasting ceasefire, remain under discussion.

Israel’s war on Gaza

The Israeli army has launched a brutal offensive against Gaza since October 2023, killing at least 57,481 Palestinians, including 134,592 children. More than 111,588 people have been injured, and over 14,222 are missing and presumed dead.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave. The proposed deal includes a pause in hostilities, increased humanitarian aid, and negotiations on the release of captives.

Behind battle-ruined houses, the blue sky tumbles down. Useless stairs on the sides of buildings have led nowhere for 30 years now. On the road skirting the shores of Lake Perućac, on the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, all is quiet, apart from the birdsong. A few families picnic on the banks, grilling fish they have caught from the artificially created waters.

There were 238 bodies dumped in the lake on this former frontline; dredged up after the Srebrenica genocide. Softened by the gauze of net curtains, the panoramic view of Lake Perućac from Šehra’s living-room window appears like staged scenery. Tourists who once frequented the picturesque Drina national park no longer come. The restaurants and pontoons have rotted away. The only water-skiers to be seen are on the far, now foreign, shore.

For Šehra, 59, the vista and her memories are stark. Memories of evading death in the valleys in 1995, when she was 29. Šehra is among the few Bosnian Muslims who have returned to the Srebrenica area in the last 30 years. Reclaiming her bucolic home was in part a way for her to escape the haunting whispers of sexual violence that she says may explain, but not excuse, why her ex-husband turned his back on his two young daughters after the war. For many women, the talk and the trauma of rape continue to be felt as a dishonour long after the genocide. Some, like Šehra, feel they have been forsaken. “There are days I want to kill myself but I have my prayer. At least God helps me.”

Around the lake, a turning track lined with picket-fenced pastures leads up to the hamlet of Urisići. Scorched and emptied during the war, the 70 households now number no more than 11. As in other depopulated towns and villages of the Srebrenica municipality, abandoned houses are draped with ivy or lost to the trees, hiding stories of past lives.

With approximately 10,000 people killed and systematic ethnic cleansing hollowing out almost the entire municipality, most former inhabitants have remained abroad as refugees, or live in other regions of Bosnia to which they were displaced. Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), who made up three-quarters of the population before the war, are now the minority. Many of those who have come back feel unsafe, triggered by a pervasive climate of fear amid ever emboldened Slavic nationalism.

Her hair scraped into a bun, wearing a T-shirt with the word Angel spelled out in pink letters, Nizama looks up into a glaring sun and lets out a deep sigh. “What in God’s name did I do to be here?” Sitting on the veranda, the 18-year-old is surrounded by a collection of outbuildings, chicken coops and cowsheds. There’s a bright fur rocking horse and a plastic chainsaw for her nephew, Daoud, the only child to be born in Urisići since the war.

It has taken 30 years for the Šoljić family to resettle on their remote farmstead; a span of time that equates to a generation. Nizama’s father, Fahrudin, was himself 18 when he last set foot here. A wound sustained when he was captured runs down the length of one arm. “I survived the last war,” he says. “I survived a concentration camp and I survived genocide.” Having raised his two daughters, Nizama and Minela, in a rented flat near Sarajevo, the homecoming was, for Fahrudin, much longed for. “It’s my land. My house and my right to return.” The move has been tougher for his family. Minela says they are often referred to as refugees. Despite returning to their ancestral land, it is a slander that implies they will never properly belong.

With few opportunities, Nizama has enrolled at the nearest school, 25 miles away, to study hairdressing. “I wake up at 4am to get to Srebrenica [town]. From the bridge below it’s one hour by minibus, then I have to take another bus from the main road. When I get back in the afternoon, I have to help with the sheep, the cows and the chickens.”

Bouncing on a netted trampoline, Elmin, six, shrieks his way through a Sunday afternoon. Up on the balcony, Elmina leans on a washing line, ignoring the scraping feet of an unclothed doll dragged along by her little sister, Emina. From behind glass sliding doors, the three siblings are secretly watched over. Their parents, Elvir and Amina, exchange affectionate looks. Across Srebrenica, families with young children are few and scattered.

Endeavouring to find their footing in their riverside cottage in Milići after years spent sheltering in Kosovo, Elvir and Amina still feel utterly disconnected. “There has always been so much fear here but for the parents, it’s even worse.” The Bosnian Serb curriculum omits the genocide, and most schools in Srebrenica reflect a culture of denialism that has gone mainstream.

Leading the charge, the ultranationalist president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, proclaimed that not only had Srebrenica not been an act of genocide, but that the number of victims was greatly exaggerated. Revisionist histories, along with Dodik’s seccessionist aims, have further fuelled segregation. Elvir and Amina are reluctantly sending their oldest children across the inter-entity boundary line, 19 miles away, to an all-Muslim school. It is the safest option. Elvir often thinks back to his own boyhood and the education he missed out on, having been forcibly expelled from his village. He recalls the random shootings, having to hide in the forests, witnessing violent suicides and seeing arms tied together with wire, dismembered on the road. Memories that have evolved to become uneasy bedtime stories, passed on to his own children in the dark.

As the mists roll back at dawn, the glow of a neon heart reveals itself from within the forests above, marking the site of a massacre. Beneath the streetlights, a patrol car parks up at the gates of the cemetery in Potočari. On 11 July 1995, the village set the scene for what was to be the largest mass killing in Europe since the second world war. That afternoon, as nearby Srebrenica town – the world’s first UN-designated “safe area” – was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces, some 30,000 men, women and children fled the town. In fear of their lives, the Muslim population sought protection within the UN compound 7 miles north at Potočari. But abandoned by Dutch peacekeeping forces, their fate was sealed. The genocide played out over the next three days in locations close to Potočari, with many of the atrocities taking place on the road out of Srebrenica as a column of mostly men and boys tried to escape. Thirty years on, the open space of neat cut grass and wire fences at Potočari makes up the Srebrenica memorial centre.

At the hulking shell of a former battery factory that housed Dutch UN peacekeepers, time has seemingly stood still. Amid rusting machinery, Dutch graffiti still covers the walls. Signs for toilets, painted insignia and renderings of semi-naked women are interspersed with graffiti that speaks of a disdain for the people the soldiers were deployed to safeguard.

Renovated buildings now house a visitor centre and museum that exists as “a permanent reminder of the responsibility and failure of the United Nations and the international community to prevent genocide”. Inside one room, a group of four men in their early 50s, heads shaved and wearing beige fatigues, stand close-mouthed. They are veterans accompanied by a Dutch delegation. Arriving to take them on a tour, one of the bereaved Mothers of Srebrenica composes herself. Taking a deep breath before going inside, she tries to shrug off the inherent pangs of animosity felt towards her guests. “They have no shame!”

Across the road, in sloping fields, row upon row of simple white headstones marks the remains of some of the 8,372 largely men and boys who were massacred. By mid-morning, busloads of children arrive at the cemetery complex. Such school trips have become a near rite of passage for younger generations in Bosnia; an effort to reverse the ethnic cleansing to which the site bears witness.

Travelling in and out of Srebrenica, the aptly named road of death is lined with the sites of former graves and executions: hidden waymarks that, like mute buttons, pause conversations on bus and car journeys.

On the edge of the main market town of Bratunac, Tifa lives less than 200 metres from a mass grave. Taking a sip of homemade raspberry juice, she glances over. “My uncle is in there.” Bordering a small, grassy plot of land, the scene of her uncle’s murder at the onset of the war is marked with a modest raised plaque. A simple engraving reads “masovna grobnica” – mass grave. Like her own semi-urban home, it is overlooked by two- and three-storey red-brick houses. Most are empty now, left in haste or boarded up with sheets of plywood. Tifa points to one belonging to the convicted war criminal Momir Nikolić. A deputy commander for security and intelligence in the Bosnian Serb army, Nikolić was at the centre of the crimes that took place in 1992 and after the fall of Srebrenica.

Tifa knows all her neighbours. Few ever hid their complicity in crimes that included her own capture when, at 17, she was forcibly interned in a nearby football stadium. “They are really bothered that we came back. They don’t want us Muslims here. Some will say good morning, but we know who they are and what they did.” Separated from her family in the camp, Tifa went on to lose her fiancé, Vekaz, and her father, Mehmed, in the genocide. “Sometimes I want to forget but I can’t. I don’t imagine I ever will,” she says. “I have a fear of history repeating itself. If it does, I will never leave here. I love my house because my father built it, and importantly we need to reclaim what is ours. In a way, it’s a means to confront the Serbs and not let them win again. We need to end the era that began in 1992.”

This year, on 11 July – the anniversary of the genocide, designated by the UN as the international day of reflection and commemoration – Tifa will join tens of thousands of bereaved families at the cemetery in Potočari. During this annual act of remembrance and prayer, friends and relatives come together.

The very act of gathering to remember in Potočari does not come without risks. In the past, police have found bombs planted around the memorial centre and in March this year the centre was forced to temporarily close.

In coarse slipper socks and a buttoned-up wool waistcoat, Ajkuna, 84, sits neatly upright, her hands on her lap. The clothes that she knits herself and occasionally sells are, like the herbs she collects in the woods, a therapeutic distraction for her. Trays of daisies, mint, linden and chamomile are laid out in her kitchen beside a serving bowl packed full of medicines. There is little else to ease her mind.

There are many women who, too old, too sick or too anguished, will not make it to the memorial in Potočari this year. A cold dread has kept Ajkuna away for three decades. The jaunts taken with her daughter-in-law, Mejra, to go foraging are the only times she leaves her house these days. “When I see young people outside I start screaming because I don’t have my own. I don’t know how to go on living without the children I lost. It makes me want to die in a bad way.”

On 12 July 1995, Ajkuna’s five boys were murdered in Srebrenica, shot dead in the woods as they tried to run away. The body of her husband, Asim, was found in a mass grave. Still grieving their loss, Ajkuna relives the ordeal of her own escape from death every day.

“I remember the screaming of the children and the mothers trying to keep them calm while crying themselves. All day from early morning until night we were on those buses and every time we stopped, we thought that was the time when they would kill us. The Serbs would start shooting, shouting: ‘Fuck you all! Fuck all your Muslim mothers! We will kill all of you!’ The soldiers would reveal themselves, threatening rape … We saw men being led away with their hands tied behind their backs.

“In Kravica they stopped the bus and when we came out they took people, shooting, into the woods. At each checkpoint the separation of families would begin again and each time we thought our time had come.”

Ajkuna rarely sleeps. “At night I scream in bed and Mejra asks me if I need another pill.”

TIRABIN-AL-SANA, Israel: At the end of a dusty road in southern Israel, beyond a Bedouin village of unfinished houses and the shiny dome of a mosque, a field of solar panels gleams in the hot desert sun.

Tirabin Al-Sana in Israel’s Negev desert is the home of the Tirabin (also spelled Tarabin) Bedouin tribe, who signed a contract with an Israeli solar energy company to build the installation.

The deal has helped provide jobs for the community as well as promote cleaner, cheaper energy for the country, as the power produced is pumped into the national grid.

Earlier this month, the Al-Ghanami family in the town of Abu Krinat a little further south inaugurated a similar field of solar panels.

Bedouin families have for years tried and failed to hold on to their lands, coming up against right-wing groups and hard-line government officials.

Demolition orders issued by Israeli authorities plague Bedouin villages, threatening the traditionally semi-nomadic communities with forced eviction.

But Yosef Abramowitz, co-chair of the non-profit organization Shamsuna, said solar field projects help them to stake a more definitive claim.

“It secures their land rights forever,” he told AFP.

“It’s the only way to settle the Bedouin land issue and secure 100 percent renewable energy,” he added, calling it a “win, win.”

For the solar panels to be built, the land must be registered as part of the Bedouin village, strengthening their claim over it.

Rise in home demolitions

Roughly 300,000 Bedouins live in the Negev desert, half of them in places such as Tirabin Al-Sana, including some 110,000 who reside in villages not officially recognized by the government.

Villages that are not formally recognized are fighting the biggest battle to stay on the land.

Far-right groups, some backed by the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have stepped up efforts in the past two years to drive these families away.

A sharp increase in home demolitions has left the communities vulnerable and whole families without a roof over their heads.

“Since 2023, more than 8,500 buildings have been demolished in these unrecognized villages,” Marwan Abu Frieh, from the legal aid organization Adalah, told AFP at a recent protest in Beersheva, the largest city in the Negev.

“Within these villages, thousands of families are now living out in the open, an escalation the Negev has not witnessed in perhaps the last two decades.”

Tribes just want to “live in peace and dignity,” following their distinct customs and traditions, he said.

Gil Yasur, who also works with Shamsuna developing critical infrastructure in Bedouin villages, said land claims issues were common among Bedouins across the Negev.

Families who include a solar project on their land, however, stand a better chance of securing it, he added.

“Then everyone will benefit — the landowners, the country, the Negev,” he said. “This is the best way to move forward to a green economy.”

Fully solar-energized

In Um Batin, a recognized village, residents are using solar energy in a different way — to power a local kindergarten all year round.

Until last year, the village relied on power from a diesel generator that polluted the air and the ground where the children played.

Now, a hulking solar panel shields the children from the sun as its surface sucks up the powerful rays, keeping the kindergarten in full working order.

“It was not clean or comfortable here before,” said Nama Abu Kaf, who works in the kindergarten.

“Now we have air conditioning and a projector so the children can watch television.”

Hani Al-Hawashleh, who oversees the project on behalf of Shamsuna, said the solar energy initiative for schools and kindergartens was “very positive.”

“Without power you can’t use all kinds of equipment such as projectors, lights in the classrooms and, on the other hand, it saves costs and uses clean energy,” he said.

The projects are part of a pilot scheme run by Shamsuna.

Asked if there was interest in expanding to other educational institutions that rely on polluting generators, he said there were challenges and bureaucracy but he hoped to see more.