The IDF releases footage of the Hamas rocket attack from the Rafah area in southern Gaza earlier today, which led to the injury of at least 10 people.

The rocket fire, according to the IDF, was carried out from an area close to the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, some 350 meters from a civilian shelter.

The military says the attack is “another clear example of the systematic exploitation that the Hamas terror organization makes of humanitarian facilities and spaces for terror needs, while using the civilian population as a human shield.”

Some 10 rockets and mortars were launched in the attack.

The IDF says fighter jets struck the launcher, as well as an adjacent building used by Hamas.

How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation?

This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history.

The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.)

Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy.

And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization.

The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.

At Columbia University, in the weeks and months before police took down encampments at the New York City campus and removed demonstrators occupying an academic building, student organizers began consulting with groups such as the National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests and former Black Panthers.

--snip--

In March, there was a “Resistance 101” training scheduled at Columbia with guest speakers including longtime activists with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The administration twice barred the event, citing some of the organizers’ known support of terrorism and promotion of violence. Columbia students hosted the event virtually nonetheless, which prompted Columbia President Minouche Shafik to suspend several of them. During the session, which lasted nearly two hours, Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates encouraged students “to build an international popular cradle of the resistance,” according to a recording posted on YouTube.

“There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”

A recent study conducted by the organization CyberWell found that, on average, only 9% of Arabic posts with Holocaust-related hate speech were removed by social media platforms, compared to 35% of similar posts made in English.

The study, conducted from April 2023 until April 2024, collected data from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X, formerly Twitter.

The removal rate for posts made in Arabic was lower across all five platforms.

While 11% in 2023 and 17% in 2024 of English posts denying or distorting the Holocaust were removed on Facebook, 4% in 2023 and less than 1% in 2024 of similar posts in Arabic were removed on that same platform.

Similarly, while X removed 34% in 2023 and 42% in 2024, Holocaust distortion posts made in Arabic were only removed 8% of the time in 2023 and 3% in 2024.

MAARAB, Lebanon (AP) — The leader of a main Christian political party in Lebanon blasted the Shiite militant group Hezbollah for opening a front with Israel to back up its ally Hamas, saying it has harmed Lebanon without making a dent in Israel’s crushing offensive in the Gaza Strip.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday night, Samir Geagea of the Lebanese Forces Party said Hezbollah should withdraw from areas along the border with Israel and the Lebanese army should deploy in all points where militants of the Iran-backed group have taken positions.

His comments came as Western diplomats try to broker a de-escalation in the border conflict amid fears of a wider war.

Hezbollah began launching rockets toward Israeli military posts on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack that sparked the crushing war in Gaza.

Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours.

But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The students' plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty demanding their amnesty. At issue is whether universities and law enforcement will clear the charges and withhold other consequences, or whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students into their adult lives.

Terms of the suspensions vary from campus to campus. At Columbia and its affiliated Barnard College for women, Alwan and dozens more were arrested April 18 and promptly barred from campus and classes, unable to attend in-person or virtually, and banned from dining halls.

The Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday rejected Hamas’s allegation as “baseless.” It said forces searching for Israeli hostages had examined bodies previously buried by Palestinians near Nasser Hospital and had returned the bodies to where they were buried after they were examined.

It has been documented that Palestinians buried their dead at the hospital grounds both before and while Israeli troops operated in the area. Hamas officials in Gaza claimed on Saturday to discover a mass grave with more than 200 bodies at a hospital in Khan Younis that was recently the target of a military raid.

--snip-

It has been documented that Palestinians buried their dead at the hospital grounds both before and while Israeli troops operated in the area. The location of that burial site was geo-located by experts to the same location where Hamas officials claimed to have discovered the new mass grave.

Columbia University has banned one of the students leading the university’s pro-Palestinian protests, a university spokesperson told CNN on Friday.

Khymani James, a student spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, acknowledged in a post on X that he said, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” saying it was from an Instagram Live video taken in January.

“I misspoke in the heat of the moment, for which I apologize," James wrote.

“I want to make clear that calls of violence and statements targeted at individuals based on their religious, ethnic or national identity are unacceptable and violate university policy,” the university spokesperson said.

Former International Court of Justice President Joan Donoghue told BBC's HARDtalk on Thursday that there had been a general misunderstanding of the meaning of the ICJ's ruling on the case.

Donoghue served as the ICJ's president from 2021 until 2024 and served on the court from 2010. She presided over South Africa's case against Israel, representing the court.

When she was asked about the court's ruling on the case, she clarified a general misunderstanding of its meaning.

The court decided that "the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide" and that "South Africa had a right to present that in the court."

"It did not decide, and this is something where I'm correcting something that's often said in the media. It did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible." Clarifying further, she said that the order emphasized there was a risk to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. "The shorthand that often appears, which is that there's a plausible case of genocide, isn't what the court decided."

IDF says terrorists fired mortar shells at under-construction US-led Gaza aid pier as UN officials toured site

Members of a terror group in the Gaza Strip launched mortars at an under-construction pier for a US-led project to bring aid into the Palestinian enclave yesterday, the military says.

The mortar attack occurred as United Nations officials were touring the site with Israeli troops on the coast of central Gaza, the IDF says in response to a query on the incident.

The IDF says the UN officials were rushed to a shelter by troops amid the attack. UN officials also confirmed the mortar attack to the Associated Press, saying there were no injuries.

“The terrorist organizations continue to systematically harm humanitarian efforts while risking the lives of UN workers, while Israel allows the supply of aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip,” the IDF adds.