Abeer Salman, Mitchell McCluskey, Ibrahim Dahman, , and CNN) report:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday rejected calls for Palestinian sovereignty following talks with US President Joe Biden about Gaza’s future, suggesting Israel’s security needs would be incompatible with Palestinian statehood.
“I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over all the territory west of Jordan - and this is contrary to a Palestinian state,” Netanyahu said in a post on X
The Israeli leader did not provide any other details in his one-line post in Hebrew. The territory west of Jordan encompasses Israel, the occupied West Bank, and Hamas-run Gaza, where Israel is battling the militant group following the October 7 attacks.
Meanwhile Mark Lowen (BBC NEWS) reports, "More than 25,000 people have now been killed in Gaza during Israel's offensive there, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. It said there had been 178 deaths in the last 24 hours, making it one of the deadliest days in the war so far." Grasp that these deaths have taken place in just a little over 100 days. That is a massive amount of deaths. When do world leaders start listening to the people they supposedly represent? When do we see a cease-fire? Najib Jobain and Samy Magdy (AP) explain, "The war’s deaths, destruction and displacement are without precedent in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war has divided Israelis while the offensive threatens to ignite a wider conflict involving Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen that support the Palestinians." Jason Burke (GUARDIAN) adds:
Most of the casualties were women and children, the ministry said, and thousands more bodies were likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.
Speaking at a global summit in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, denounced Israel’s three-month assault.
“Israel’s military operations have spread mass destruction and killed civilians on a scale unprecedented during my time as secretary general,” Guterres said at the opening of the G77+China, a coalition of 135 developing countries.
“This is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable. The Middle East is a tinderbox. We must do all we can to prevent conflict from igniting across the region.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories, has accused Israel of killing a greater share of the population in Gaza than the proportion of people killed in the wars in Ukraine and Iraq.
Israel’s military has killed 1.1 percent of Gaza’s population since Hamas’s October 7 attacks, compared with 0.2 percent and 0.8 percent of the population killed in the Ukraine and Iraq wars, respectively, Albanese said in a post on X, without citing a source.
“No war in this century comes even closer to [Israel’s] extermination campaign in Gaza,” Albanese said.
Most of the dead are women and children, as noted above. There are also occupations that have been targeted which include journalists and medical workers. In addition, ALJAZEERA notes that professors have been murdered:
Israel has killed 94 university professors, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students during its war in Gaza, a rights group has said.
The Israeli military has targeted academics and intellectuals “in deliberate and specific air raids” on their homes without prior warning, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a statement on Saturday.
These figures appear to have been targeted with “no justification or clear reason”, the monitor said.
“The targeted academics studied and taught across a variety of academic disciplines, and many of their ideas served as cornerstones of academic research in the Gaza Strip’s universities,” the Geneva, Switzerland-based group said.
In related news, Miriam Berger and Hazem Balousha (WASHINGTON POST) report:
The Israeli military says it is reviewing the decision to destroy the main building of Gaza’s Israa University in what appears to have been a planned explosion.
In a widely viewed video geolocated by The Washington Post, a camera apparently attached to a drone shows the sprawling building outside of Gaza City implode, demolishing the educational complex and engulfing the area in smoke.
The university shared news of the explosion of building, which housed its graduate and undergraduate studies, Wednesday.
Israa University Vice President Alaa Matar told The Washington Post that he could not confirm the date of the blast: Israeli forces, he said, had been occupying the campus for about 70 days, and Palestinians could not safely access the area. Matar spoke by phone from the southern city of Rafah, where more than half of Palestinians in Gaza have fled.
Satellite imagery of the area, assessed by The Post, showed the building intact on Jan. 13 and destroyed the next day. Most cellular and other communications had been unusable in the Gaza Strip for more than a week, from Jan. 12 until Friday evening.
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