The congressmembers, including committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), were greeted by chants and boos from the protesters.

The congressmembers have been deeply critical of the way D.C. police and Mayor Muriel Bowser have handled the protest, calling it unlawful and antisemitic. They are calling on D.C. police to remove the demonstrators as the university requested last week.

“We’re hearing from Jewish students that they don’t feel safe,” Comer said. “We’re hearing from administrators that they don’t feel like they area equipped to handle these types of protests.”

“We bless Israel,” Boebert said, raising her voice as protesters chanted. “We bless Israel. Those who bless Israel shall be blessed. We stand with Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East. That is who we stand for.”   

Bowser called the visit “interesting.”

“The members have universities in their own districts, especially the member from North Carolina, and I was watching a lot of activity in North Carolina,” she said. “It would seem that her energy would be best placed there.”

There are still hundreds of protesters at University Yard and on H Street, and they say they have no plans to leave until their demands are met. They are asking the university to commit to protecting students who speak out in support of Gaza and also to divest financial support from Israel.

Bowser’s office issued a statement Tuesday.

GW encampment

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George Washington University (GW, GWU) Apr 30

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“We support peaceful protests, and I rely on the Metropolitan Police Department and their experience and expertise to decide what types of interventions are necessary,” the letter said in part. “[…] We will not tolerate violence of any kind; we will monitor and ensure access to streets, parks, and safe and sanitary conditions; and we will continue to be supportive of universities or other private entities who need help.”

The House Oversight Committee scheduled a hearing for next Wednesday on the matter, with Bowser and Police Chief Pamela Smith invited to testify. Bowser’s office didn’t say whether she will attend, but they will have some type of response.

D.C. police declined to comment on the House Republicans’ remarks. George Washington University has yet to respond to News4’s request for comment.

The proposal, which passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support, would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. It now goes to the Senate for a vote.

Action on the bill was just the latest reverberation in Congress from the protest movement that has swept university campuses. Republicans in Congress have denounced the protests and demanded action to stop them, thrusting university officials into the center of the charged political debate over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war was launched in October, after Hamas staged a deadly terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.

If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would broaden the legal definition of antisemitism to include the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” Critics say the move would have a chilling effect on free speech throughout college campuses.

“Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said during a hearing Tuesday. “By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”

Advocates of the proposal say it would provide a much-needed, consistent framework for the Department of Education to police and investigate the rising cases of discrimination and harassment targeted toward Jewish students.

“It is long past time that Congress act to protect Jewish Americans from the scourge of antisemitism on campuses around the country,” Rep. Russell Fry, R-S.C., said Tuesday.

The expanded definition of antisemitism was first adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group that includes the United States and European Union states, and has been embraced by the State Department under the past three presidential administrations, including Joe Biden’s.

Previous bipartisan efforts to codify it into law have failed. But the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas militants in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have reignited efforts to target incidents of antisemitism on college campuses.

Separately, Speaker Mike Johnson announced Tuesday that several House committees will be tasked with a wide probe that ultimately threatens to withhold federal research grants and other government support for universities, placing another pressure point on campus administrators who are struggling to manage pro-Palestinian encampments, allegations of discrimination against Jewish students and questions of how they are integrating free speech and campus safety.

The House investigation follows several high-profile hearings that helped precipitate the resignations of presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. And House Republicans promised more scrutiny, saying they were calling on the administrators of Yale, UCLA and the University of Michigan to testify next month.

The House Oversight Committee took it one step further Wednesday, sending a small delegation of Republican members to an encampment at nearby George Washington University in the District of Columbia. GOP lawmakers spent the short visit criticizing the protests and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s refusal to send in the Metropolitan Police Department to disperse the demonstrators.

Bowser on Monday confirmed that the city and the district’s police department had declined the university’s request to intervene. “We did not have any violence to interrupt on the GW campus,” Bowser said, adding that police chief Pamela Smith made the ultimate decision. “This is Washington, D.C., and we are, by design, a place where people come to address the government and their grievances with the government.”

It all comes at a time when college campuses and the federal government are struggling to define exactly where political speech crosses into antisemitism. Dozens of U.S. universities and schools face civil rights investigations by the Education Department over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Among the questions campus leaders have struggled to answer is whether phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” should be considered under the definition of antisemitism.

The proposed definition faced strong opposition from several Democratic lawmakers, Jewish organizations as well as free speech advocates.

Israel-Hamas War May 1

A look at the protests of the war in Gaza that have emerged at US colleges

Israel-Hamas War 24 hours ago

Violence, chaos erupts on campuses as protesters and counter-protesters clash over the war in Gaza

In a letter sent to lawmakers Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union urged members to vote against the legislation, saying federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment.

“H.R. 6090 is therefore not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism,” the letter stated.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the centrist pro-Israel group J Street, said his organization opposes the bipartisan proposal because he sees it as an “unserious” effort led by Republicans “to continually force votes that divide the Democratic caucus on an issue that shouldn’t be turned into a political football.”

___

Associated Press writers Ashraf Khalil, Collin Binkley and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

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A large crowd of students, alumni and neighbors gathered on campus steps outside the barricaded area of tents, sitting as they listened and applauded various speakers and joined in pro-Palestinian chants. Overheard television cameras showed students in the barricaded area passing out goggles and helmets, as well as setting up medical aid stations. A small group of students holding signs and wearing T-shirts in support of Israel and Jewish people gathered nearby.

The law enforcement presence and continued warnings stood in contrast to the scene that unfolded the night before, when counter-demonstrators attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment, throwing traffic cones, releasing pepper spray and tearing down barriers. Fighting continued for several hours before police stepped in, and no one was arrested. At least 15 protesters suffered injuries, and the tepid response by authorities drew criticism from political leaders as well as Muslim students and advocacy groups.

Ray Wiliani, who lives nearby, said he came to UCLA on Wednesday evening to support the pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Israel-Hamas War May 1

A look at the protests of the war in Gaza that have emerged at US colleges

Israel-Hamas War Apr 30

Around 100 arrested after Columbia University calls in police to end pro-Palestinian occupation

“We need to take a stand for it,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

Elsewhere, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, activists clashed with police officers who destroyed their tents early Wednesday, and police dismantled an encampment at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire just hours after pro-Palestinian demonstrators put up a handful of tents. Officers arrested multiple people, including at least one professor, according to local media reports.

The chaotic scenes unfolded early Wednesday after police burst into a building occupied by anti-war protesters at Columbia University on Tuesday night, breaking up a demonstration that had paralyzed the New York school.

An Associated Press tally counted at least 38 times since April 18 where arrests were made at campus protests across the U.S. More than 1,600 people have been arrested at 30 schools.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said in a statement that “a group of instigators” perpetrated the previous night’s attack, but he did not provide details about the crowd or why the administration and school police did not act sooner.

“However one feels about the encampment, this attack on our students, faculty and community members was utterly unacceptable,” he said. “It has shaken our campus to its core.”

Block promised a review of the night’s events after California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Los Angeles mayor denounced the delays.

“The community needs to feel the police are protecting them, not enabling others to harm them,” Rebecca Husaini, chief of staff for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said in a news conference on the Los Angeles campus later Wednesday, where some Muslim students detailed the overnight events.

Speakers disputed the university’s account that 15 people were injured and one hospitalized, saying the number of people taken to the hospital was higher. One student described needing to go to the hospital after being hit in the head by an object wielded by counter-protesters.

Several students who spoke during the news conference said they had to rely on each other, not the police, for support as they were attacked, and that many in the pro-Palestinian encampment remained peaceful and did not engage with counter-protesters. UCLA canceled classes Wednesday.

Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in a student movement unlike any other this century. The ensuing police crackdowns echoed actions decades ago against a much larger protest movement protesting the Vietnam War.

In Madison, a scrum broke out early Wednesday after police with shields removed all but one tent and shoved protesters. Four officers were injured, including a state trooper who was hit in the head with a skateboard, authorities said. Four were charged with battering law enforcement.

This is all playing out in an election year in the U.S., raising questions about whether young voters — who are critical for Democrats — will back President Joe Biden's reelection effort, given his staunch support of Israel.

In rare instances, university officials and protest leaders struck agreements to restrict the disruption to campus life and upcoming commencement ceremonies.

At Brown University in Rhode Island, administrators agreed to consider a vote to divest from Israel in October — apparently the first U.S. college to agree to such a demand.

The nationwide campus demonstrations began at Columbia on April 17 to protest Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry there.

Israel and its supporters have branded the university protests antisemitic, while Israel’s critics say it uses those allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.

Late Tuesday, New York City police officers entered Columbia's campus and cleared an encampment, along with Hamilton Hall, where a stream of officers used a ladder to climb through a second-floor window, and police said protesters inside presented no substantial resistance.

The demonstrators had seized the Ivy League school building about 20 hours earlier, ramping up their presence on the campus from a tent encampment that had been there for nearly two weeks.

They encountered police clearing tents early on, as well as more than 100 arrests and threats of suspension unless they abandoned the encampment Monday. Instead, protesters took over Hamilton Hall early Tuesday.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams blamed “outside agitators” on Wednesday for leading the demonstrations and repeatedly cited the presence of a woman on Columbia’s campus whose husband Adams said had been “convicted for terrorism." The woman, Nahla Al-Arian, wasn’t on Columbia’s campus this week and isn’t among the protesters who were arrested.

Al-Arian, a retired elementary school teacher, told The Associated Press that Adams misstated both her role in the protests and the facts about her husband, Sami Al-Arian, a prominent Palestinian activist. Nahla Al-Arian said she did go to Columbia for one day on April 25 to see the protest encampment there but left after she got tired.

Meanwhile, protest encampments elsewhere were cleared by the police, resulting in arrests, or closed up voluntarily at schools across the U.S., including The City College of New York, Fordham University in New York, Portland State in Oregon, Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona and Tulane University in New Orleans.

________

Offenhartz and Frederick reported from New York. Associated Press journalists around the country contributed to this report, including Christopher L. Keller, Lisa Baumann, Cedar Attanasio, Jonathan Mattise, Stefanie Dazio, Jae C. Hong, Colleen Long, Karen Matthews, Sarah Brumfield, Carolyn Thompson, Philip Marcelo, Corey Williams and Felicia Fonseca.

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The students are calling for universities to separate themselves from companies advancing Israel’s military efforts in Gaza and in some cases from Israel itself. Police have arrested hundreds nationwide since detainments at Columbia on April 18.

Officials are trying to resolve the protests as the academic year winds down, but students have dug in at several high-profile universities.

A look at protests on campuses:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Hundreds of New York City police officers began entering the campus of Columbia University on Tuesday night as dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrating against the Israel-Hamas war remained on campus.

Police wearing helmets and carrying zip ties and riot shields massed at the Ivy League university’s entrance. More than 12 hours earlier, demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall, an administration building on campus, spreading their reach from an encampment elsewhere on the grounds that’s been there for nearly two weeks.

More than a dozen officers entered Hamilton Hall via a second floor window, using a ramp on the back of a police vehicle to gain access. Officers took protesters into custody. The exact number wasn't immediately known. Less than two hours later, police said Hamilton Hall had been cleared of protesters.

A statement released by a Columbia spokesperson late Tuesday said officers arrived on campus after the university requested help. University officials also said they believed that the group that broke into and occupied the building was led by people who are not affiliated with the school.

Police first tried to clear the encampment of Pro-Palestinian student protesters on April 18, when they arrested more than 100. But the move motivated Columbia protesters to regroup.

The university said Monday that it was beginning to suspend student protesters who defied an ultimatum to leave the encampment by Monday afternoon.

Columbia said Tuesday that students occupying the building face expulsion, that those who did not abide by the deadline terms were being suspended and seniors will be ineligible to graduate on May 15.

CALIFORNIA STATE POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY, HUMBOLDT

A weeklong occupation of the administration building at the California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, ended about 3 a.m. Tuesday, when dozens of police officers wearing helmets and wielding batons cleared protesters from campus. The university said 25 people were arrested and taken to jail. A group of demonstrators showed up at the jail later Tuesday, waving Palestinian flags as they rallied for their release.

The university on the state’s rural north coast earlier announced a “hard closure,” meaning that people were not permitted to enter or be on the 8,000-student campus without authorization.

Arrest footage posted on the Lost Coast Outpost, a digital publication, showed about 100 police officers in riot gear arriving in vans and buses and then marching in with shields at the ready.

Some officers approached a group of protesters who were chanting “Viva, viva Palestina!” and sitting in a circle outside the administration building. Police picked them up one by one, tied their hands behind their back with zip ties and led them off campus.

Damage to the school since protests started on April 22 is estimated to be over $1 million, California state Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire, a Democrat whose district includes the campus, said Tuesday.

“Let’s be clear – it’s going to take time to heal, McGuire said. “Cal Poly Humboldt must be a campus where all faiths and students of all backgrounds feel safe, respected, and included. This has not been the case for Humboldt’s Jewish students and others over the past week.”

YALE UNIVERSITY

Yale authorities cleared a protesters’ encampment Tuesday morning after students heeded final warnings to leave, university officials said. Yale and New Haven, Connecticut, police officers were at the site, but no arrests were reported. Yale officials said they warned that students could be arrested and face discipline, including suspension, if they didn’t clear the grassy quad area.

Demonstrators moved their gathering to a public sidewalk area. It was the second encampment removed since last week. On April 22, police arrested nearly 50 people, including 44 students, and took down dozens of tents.

UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT

Police moved in on a campus encampment at the Storrs, Connecticut, school Tuesday morning and arrested 25 protesters after giving them several warnings to leave, UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz said.

Twenty-four of those arrested were students; one was a former student. They were charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct after university officials said they repeatedly ignored directives by campus police to remove tents and disperse from an encampment first set up on April 24.

Tuesday’s arrests came a day after protest leaders met with university officials

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

In a statement, protesters said the Cambridge, Massachusetts, school “has sought to shut off all outside access and visibility to the encampment."

"Meanwhile, the Harvard administration has initiated disciplinary action against nearly forty students and student workers,” the statement said.

Last week, Harvard limited access to its famous Harvard Yard to those with school identification after a camp was set up.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

The university's president, Chris Eisgruber, posted a statement on Instagram saying 13 protesters — 12 affiliated with the university — were arrested Monday night after briefly occupying Clio Hall, the campus graduate school building.

“All those arrested received summonses for trespassing and have been barred from campus,” Eisgruber said in the statement. “The students will also face University discipline, which may extend to suspension or expulsion.”

BROWN UNIVERSITY

Protesters at Brown University in Rhode Island agreed to dismantle their pro-Palestinian encampment Tuesday after school officials said five students will be invited to meet with five members of the Corporation of Brown University in May to present their arguments to divest Brown’s endowment from companies contributing to and profiting from the war in Gaza.

In addition, Brown President Christina Paxson will ask an advisory committee to make a recommendation on divestment by Sept. 30, which will be brought before the school’s governing corporation for a vote in October.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

The school in Evanston, Illinois, said Monday that it had reached an agreement with students and faculty who represent the majority of protesters on its campus since Thursday.

The university said in a statement that it agrees to answer questions within 30 days about specific holdings and investments. It also said it would reconvene an advisory committee to ensure “any vendor who profits from the Israeli occupation" will not provide services on campus. The statement said the university plans to further invest in supporting Muslim and Jewish life on campus.

Northwestern says it will permit peaceful demonstrations that comply with university policies through June 1, which is the end of spring quarter classes.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

In a confrontation between police and protesters at the Austin school late Monday, 79 people involved were jailed, according to the Travis County sheriff’s department. Most were charged with criminal trespass.

About 150 protesters sat on the ground as state troopers and police encircled them, with hundreds of others shouting when officers dragged someone away. After police cleared the original group of demonstrators, hundreds of students and protesters ran to block officers from leaving campus. Protesters pushed in on officers, creating a mass of shoving bodies before police used pepper spray and set off flash-bang devices to clear a path for a van to take those arrested off campus.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Encampment organizers met with university President Carol Folt for about 90 minutes Monday. Folt declined to discuss details of what was discussed but said the purpose of the meeting was to allow her to hear the concerns of protesters. Another meeting was scheduled for Tuesday.

The university has canceled its main graduation ceremony, set for May 10. It already canceled a commencement speech by the school’s pro-Palestinian valedictorian, citing safety concerns.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Security was tightened Tuesday at the campus a day after officials said there were “physical altercations” between dueling factions of protesters.

Mary Osako, vice chancellor for UCLA Strategic Communications, said in a Tuesday statement that anyone involved in blocking classroom access could face expulsion or suspension.

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Before dawn Monday, demonstrators at the school in Washington, D.C., tore down metal barricades confining them to University Yard and set up more than a dozen tents in the middle of a street.

Later in the day, there were no signs of conflict. The Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement that it will continue monitoring the situation and that the protest remained peaceful.

The university said it will move law school finals to a different building because of noise from the protests.

VIRGINIA TECH

A protest at the school in Blacksburg resulted in 82 arrests, including 53 students, a university spokesperson said Monday.

Protesters began occupying the lawn of the graduate life center Friday. After protesters took further steps to occupy the lawn and outdoor spaces Sunday, the university advised those gathered to disperse. Those who failed to comply were warned they would be charged with trespassing, the university said.

DEPAUL UNIVERSITY

Tents were erected Tuesday on the school's Chicago-area campus. The university said in a letter that tents and other structures without permits violate school policies. The school also warned that actions that interfere with operations, damage property or are disruptive will lead to disciplinary measures, including suspension, expulsion and criminal sanctions.

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

Dozens of students, faculty and staff camped out overnight at the Cleveland school hours after a similar encampment had been broken up and more than 20 people were detained but later released.

School officials initially had said protests would be limited to daylight hours but announced Monday night that students and others affiliated with the school would be allowed to stay at the makeshift encampment on the school’s public green.

Officials were checking the participants’ identification before they were given wristbands signifying they could remain at the site. Roughly 100 people camped out overnight without incident, officials said.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

About 30 people were detained by campus police Tuesday morning after the university said encampment protesters refused to leave. At 5:30 a.m., a university statement said protesters needed to remove tents and other items and leave the area by 6 a.m. or risk arrest.

Clearing out the encampment took approximately 45 minutes, according to the university. The university had not responded to a query about whether protesters were arrested and charged.

Tensions escalated Tuesday afternoon when protesters removed the American flag from a flagpole on campus central grounds and replaced it with a Palestinian flag, according to news outlets on the scene. Police then rehung the American flag as protesters and counter-protesters circled the area.

The university issued an alert that classes were canceled for the rest of Tuesday, the last day of scheduled classes.

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

Nine people, including six students, were arrested at the Gainesville university — where about 50 people began protesting last week — by campus police and state troopers Monday.

Steve Orlando, the school’s associate vice president of communications, said many of the protesters were “outside agitators” and they had been warned for many days that prohibited activities would result in a trespassing order, barring them from campus for three years. Individuals who didn’t comply were arrested after campus police gave them multiple warnings, he said.

Last week, university officials warned that students could face suspension and employees could be fired if they violated a series of rules.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

The Ann Arbor school told students, staff and faculty in a letter Friday that its upcoming commencement ceremonies likely will be the site of “various student expressions, including possible demonstrations.” Last week, a demonstration at the center of the campus had grown to nearly 40 tents.

The letter noted that school policies “make clear that interfering with speakers and events is not protected speech and is a violation of university policy.”

VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

At the Richmond, Virginia, campus, demonstrators protesting the Israel-Hamas war clashed with police Monday night after officers tried to remove a makeshift encampment.

Protesters put up tents and built a barricade with shipping pallets. Police, some wearing riot gear, charged the line of demonstrators to clear the crowd, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Some protesters were seen hurling water bottles and other objects at police.

VCU said in a statement Tuesday that 13 people, including six VCU students, were charged with unlawful assembly and trespassing. VCU said officers used pepper spray to disperse the crowd.

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

A small group of students at the downtown Portland, Oregon, school broke into its library late Monday. Students have been protesting in a park on campus and on the library steps since Thursday.

Campus was closed Tuesday as a result of the library occupation. District Attorney Mike Schmidt said the protesters’ actions had crossed into criminal behavior and those arrested would be prosecuted.

TULANE UNIVERSITY

Several dozen protesters camped in about a dozen small tents on a grassy area near an administration building Monday at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Tulane police “moved in immediately to attempt to stop the encampment," the administration said in a Tuesday afternoon news release. It added that university officials are “now focused on containing and ending the protest” at the direction of New Orleans police and Louisiana state police.

The university said six people were arrested and five students suspended after a Monday confrontation with police. The Students for a Democratic Society organization also was suspended.

About 2 p.m. Tuesday, university officials wheeled a portable electronic sign onto the lawn. “PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING,” it read. “Everyone must leave this area immediately.”

The university said some classes would be held remotely.

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

Police arrested protesters Monday who tried to set up an encampment at the university northeast of Atlanta. A spokesperson wouldn’t say how many people were arrested on the final day of classes before spring exams.

Athens-Clarke County jail records showed that University of Georgia police had booked 12 people into the jail by midafternoon on criminal trespassing charges. State troopers aided university police.

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Protesters erected an encampment at the Salt Lake City school Monday. About two dozen tents were set up on the lawn outside the university president’s office, and roughly 200 students held protest signs and Palestinian flags. Later Monday, dozens of officers in riot gear sought to break up the encampment.

Police dragged students off by their hands and feet, snapping the poles holding up tents and zip-tying those who refused to disperse. Twenty arrests were made. The university says it is against code to camp overnight on school property, and the students were given several warnings to disperse before police were called in.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

Student protest groups posted on social media Tuesday that their encampment of dozens of tents and hundreds of people was still standing, even after police ordered them to disperse Monday night. More than 10 university buildings, including a student union and large library, near the encampment remained closed in anticipation of continued protests.

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

In Albuquerque, police in tactical gear tore down tents and clashed briefly with protesters who occupied the University of New Mexico’s student union building for about seven hours Monday night into Tuesday morning.

University officials said 16 people were arrested, including five students and 11 people not affiliated with the school. They said the protesters vandalized the student union building and sprayed-painted graffiti across campus. They didn’t immediately provide a damage estimate.

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The scene unfolded shortly after 9 p.m. as police, wearing helmets and carrying zip ties and riot shields, massed at the college’s entrance. Scores of officers climbed through a window to enter the occupied building, streaming in over a ramp raised from the top of a police vehicle to get inside. Multiple protesters were taken into custody and taken away from campus on buses.

In all, nearly 100 people were arrested during Tuesday’s confrontation, with about 40 of them coming from inside the building, an NYPD spokesperson told NBC News. Hamilton Hall was cleared by police just before 11 p.m.

The confrontation occurred more than 12 hours after the demonstrators took over Hamilton Hall shortly after midnight Tuesday, spreading their reach from an encampment elsewhere on the grounds that’s been there for nearly two weeks to protest the Israel-Hamas war. The police action happened on the 56th anniversary of a similar police action to quash an occupation of Hamilton Hall by students protesting racism and the Vietnam War.

The university, in a statement issued after the police entered the campus, described its decision to seek NYPD aid as a last resort. The police department had previously said officers wouldn’t enter the grounds without the college administration’s request or an imminent emergency. Now, law enforcement will be there through May 17, the end of the university’s commencement events.

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“After the University learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice,” the school’s statement said, adding that school public safety personnel were forced out of the building and one facilities worker was “threatened.”

“The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing,” the statement said. “We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”

Columbia’s protests earlier this month kicked off demonstrations that now span from California to Massachusetts. As May commencement ceremonies near, administrators face added pressure to clear protesters.

More than 1,000 protesters have been arrested over the last two weeks on campuses in states including Texas, Utah, Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Connecticut, Louisiana, California and New Jersey, some after confrontations with police in riot gear.

Tuesday’s police action at Columbia comes exactly 56 years after officers swept into Hamilton Hall to arrest protesters occupying the building in 1968. The students taken into custody on that April 30 had taken over the hall and other campus buildings for a week to protest racism and the Vietnam War.

Former President Donald Trump called into Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News Channel to comment on Columbia’s turmoil as live footage of police clearing Hamilton Hall aired. Trump praised the officers.

“But it should never have gotten to this,” he told Hannity. “And they should have done it a lot sooner than before they took over the building because it would have been a lot easier if they were in tents rather than a building. And tremendous damage done, too.”

In a letter to senior NYPD officials, Columbia President Minouche Shafik said the administration was making the request that police remove protesters from the occupied building and a nearby tent encampment “with the utmost regret.”

Earlier in the day, New York City Mayor Eric Adams advised the protesters to leave before police arrived.

“Walk away from this situation now and continue your advocacy through other means,” he said. “This must end now.”

Before officers arrived, the White House condemned the standoffs at Columbia and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where protesters had occupied two buildings until officers with batons intervened overnight and arrested 25 people. Officials estimated the northern California campus’ total damage to be upwards of $1 million.

President Joe Biden believes students occupying an academic building is “absolutely the wrong approach,” and “not an example of peaceful protest,” said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.

Other colleges have sought to negotiate agreements with the demonstrators in the hopes of having peaceful commencement ceremonies. As cease-fire negotiations appeared to gain steam, it wasn’t clear whether those talks would inspire an easing of protests.

Northwestern University notched a rare win when officials said they reached a compromise with students and faculty who represent the majority of protesters on its campus near Chicago to allow peaceful demonstrations through the end of spring classes.

The nationwide campus protests began at Columbia in response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry.

Israel and its supporters have branded the university protests as antisemitic, while Israel’s critics say it uses those allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.

On Columbia’s campus, protesters first set up a tent encampment almost two weeks ago. The school sent in police to clear the tents the following day, arresting more than 100 people, only for the students to return – and inspire a wave of similar encampments at campuses across the country.

Negotiations between the protesters and the college came to a standstill in recent days, and the school set a deadline for the activists to abandon the tent encampment Monday afternoon or be suspended.

Instead, protestors defied the ultimatum and took over Hamilton Hall early Tuesday, carrying in furniture and metal barricades. The demonstrators dubbed the building Hind’s Hall, honoring a young girl who was killed in Gaza under Israeli fire, and issued demands for divestment, financial transparency and amnesty.

The Columbia University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors said faculty’s efforts to help defuse the situation have been repeatedly ignored by the university’s administration despite school statutes that require consultation.

Ilana Lewkovitch, a self-described “leftist Zionist” student at Columbia, said it’s been hard to concentrate on school for weeks, amid calls for Zionists to die or leave campus. Her exams have been punctuated with chants of “say it loud, say it clear, we want Zionists out of here” in the background, she said.

Lewkovitch, who identifies as Jewish and studied at Columbia’s Tel Aviv campus, said she wished the current pro-Palestinian protests were more open to people like her who criticize Israel’s war policies but believe there should be an Israeli state.

Adams claimed Tuesday that the Columbia protests have been “co-opted by professional outside agitators.” The mayor didn’t provide specific evidence to back up that contention, which was disputed by protest organizers and participants.

NYPD officials made similar claims about “outside agitators” during the huge, grassroots demonstrations against racial injustice that erupted across the city after the death of George Floyd in 2020. In some instances, top police officials falsely labeled peaceful marches organized by well-known neighborhood activists as the work of violent extremists.

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But any eventual aid distribution — which could start as soon as early May — will rely on a complicated logistical and security plan with many moving parts and details that are not yet finalized.

The relief is desperately needed, with the U.N. saying people in Gaza are on the brink of famine. But there are still widespread security concerns. And some aid groups say that with so much more needed, the focus should instead be on pushing Israel to ease obstacles to the delivery of aid on land routes.

Setting up the system is expected to cost at least $320 million, the Pentagon said Monday. Here’s how it will work:

It all starts in Cyprus

Humanitarian aid bound for Gaza through the maritime route will be delivered by air or sea to Cyprus, an island at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

Cyprus Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos has said the aid will undergo security checks at Larnaca port. Using that one departure point will address Israel’s security concerns that all cargo be inspected to ensure that nothing is loaded on ships that Hamas could use against Israeli troops.

The screening will be strict and comprehensive, including the use of mobile X-ray machines, according to a Cyprus government official who spoke on condition of anonymity to publicly disclose details about the security operation. The process will involve Cypriot customs, Israeli teams, the U.S. and the United Nations Office for Project Services.

An American military official said the U.S. has set up a coordination cell in Cyprus to work with the government there, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies and partners. The group will focus on coordinating the collection and inspection of the aid, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operation details.

Then to the floating platform

Once the pallets of aid are inspected, they will be loaded onto ships — mainly commercial vessels — and taken about 200 miles to the large floating pier being built by the U.S. military off the Gaza coast.

There, the pallets will be transferred onto trucks that in turn will be loaded onto two types of smaller Army boats — Logistic Support Vessels, or LSVs, and Landing Craft Utility boats, LCUs. The U.S. military official said the LSVs can hold 15 trucks each and the LCUs about five.

The Army boats will then shuttle the trucks from the pier to a floating causeway, which will be several miles away and anchored into the beach by Israeli Defense Forces.

Since Biden has made clear that no U.S. forces will step foot in Gaza, the troops doing the construction and driving and crewing the boats will be housed and fed on other ships offshore near the large floating pier.

The British Royal Navy support ship RFA Cardigan Bay will provide accommodations for hundreds of U.S. sailors and soldiers working to establish the pier. Another contracted ship will also be used for housing, but officials did not identify it.

Small boats to the causeway

The small Army boats will sail to the two-lane, 550-meter (1,800-foot) causeway.

The U.S. military official said an American Army engineering unit has teamed up with an Israeli engineering unit in recent weeks to practice the installation of the causeway, training on an Israeli beach just up the coast. The U.K. Hydrographic Office also has worked with the U.S. and the Israeli military to analyze the shoreline and prepare for the final installation.

U.S. vessels will push the floating causeway into place, shoving it into the shoreline, where the Israeli Defense Forces will be ready to secure it.

Trucks loaded with the pallets of aid will drive off the Army boats onto the causeway and down to a secure area on land where they will drop off the aid and immediately turn around and return to the boats. The trucks will repeat that loop over and over, and they will be confined to that limited route to maintain security.

They will be driven by personnel from another country, but U.S. officials have declined to say which one.

Distribution to aid agencies and civilians

Aid groups will collect the supplies for distribution on shore, at a port facility built by the Israelis just southwest of Gaza City. Officials say they expect about 90 truckloads of aid a day initially and that it will quickly grow to about 150 a day.

The U.N. is working with USAID to set up the logistics hub on the beach.

There will be three zones at the port: one controlled by the Israelis where aid from the pier will be dropped off, another where the aid will be transferred and a third where Palestinian drivers contracted by the U.N. will wait to pick up the aid before taking it to distribution points.

Aid agencies, however, say this maritime corridor isn’t enough to meet the needs in Gaza and must be just one part of a broader Israeli effort to improve sustainable, land-based deliveries of aid to avert famine.

The groups, the U.N., the U.S. and other governments have pointed to Israel’s aid restrictions and its failure to safeguard humanitarian workers as reasons for the reduction in food shipments through land crossings, although they credit Israel with making some improvements recently.

Security onshore and off

U.S. Gaza envoy David Satterfield said last week that only about 200 trucks a day were getting into Gaza, far short of the 500 that international aid organizations say are needed.

A key concern is security — both from militants and the Israeli military, which has been criticized for its killing of aid workers.

Sonali Korde, a USAID official, said key agreements for security and handling the aid deliveries are still being negotiated. Those include how Israeli forces will operate in Gaza to ensure that aid workers are not harmed.

Aid groups have been shaken by the Israeli airstrike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers on April 1 as they traveled in clearly marked vehicles on a delivery mission authorized by Israel.

And there has already been one mortar attack at the site by militants, reflecting the ongoing threats from Hamas, which has said it would reject the presence of any non-Palestinians in Gaza.

U.S. and Israeli officials have declined to provide specifics on the security. But the U.S. military official said it will be far more robust when deliveries begin than it is now. And there will be daily assessments of the force protection needs there.

The IDF will handle security on the shore, and the U.S. military will provide its own security for the Army and Navy forces offshore.

___

Associated Press reporters Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has written in general terms about ICC action against Israeli troops and officials, and Israel’s foreign ministry has said it is also tracking reports of pending action.

The ICC was established in 2002 as the permanent court of last resort to prosecute individuals responsible for the world’s most heinous atrocities – war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.

The Rome Statute creating the ICC was adopted in 1998 and entered into force when it got 60 ratifications on July 1, 2002. The U.N. General Assembly endorsed the ICC, but the court is independent.

Without a police force, the ICC relies on member states to arrest suspects, which has proven to be a major obstacle to prosecutions.

Netanyahu said Friday on the social platform X that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.”

“While the ICC will not affect Israel’s actions, it would set a dangerous precedent,” he wrote.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said late Sunday that it had informed missions abroad of “rumors” that the court could order the arrest of senior Israeli political and military officials. The ministry did not give a source for the rumors.

In a statement emailed to The Associated Press, the court’s prosecution office declined to comment in detail.

What is the ICC?

The ICC’s 124 member states have signed on to the Rome Statute. Dozens of countries did not sign and do not accept the court’s jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide and other crimes. They include Israel, the United States, Russia and China.

The ICC becomes involved when nations are unable or unwilling to prosecute crimes on their territory. Israel argues that it has a functioning court system, and disputes over a nation’s ability or willingness to prosecute have fueled past disputes between the court and individual countries.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump slapped economic and travel sanctionson the ICC prosecutor and another senior prosecution office staffer. The ICC staff were looking into U.S. and allies’ troops and intelligence officials for possible war crimes in Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden, whose administration has provided crucial military and political support for the Gaza offensive, lifted the sanctions in 2021.

The ICC has 17 ongoing investigations, has issued a total of 42 arrest warrants and taken 21 suspects into custody. Its judges have convicted 10 suspects and acquitted four.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 30

Police in riot gear enter Columbia University to clear out Pro-Palestinian protesters

Israel-Hamas War Apr 30

Ahead of visit to Israel, US's Blinken presses Hamas to accept new proposal for Gaza cease-fire

In its early years, the court was criticized for focusing on crimes in Africa — 10 of its investigations are in African nations — but now it has investigations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.

What is the ICC’s relationship to Israel and Palestinian territories?

The U.N. General Assembly raised the Palestinians’ status in 2012 from a U.N. observer to a non-member observer state. That opened the door for the Palestinian territories to join international organizations including the ICC.

The ICC accepted “The State of Palestine” as a member in 2015, a year after the Palestinians accepted the court’s jurisdiction.

The court’s chief prosecutor at the time announced in 2021 that she was opening an investigation into possible crimes on Palestinian territory. Israel often levies accusations of bias at U.N. and international bodies, and Netanyahu slammed the decision as hypocritical and antisemitic.

Current ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Ramallah and Israel in December, meeting Palestinian officials and families of Israelis killed or taken hostage by Hamas militants in the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the Israel-Hamas war.

Khan called Hamas’ actions “some of the most serious international crimes that shock the conscience of humanity, crimes which the ICC was established to address,” and called for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.

Khan said “international humanitarian law must still apply” in the Israel-Hamas war and “the Israeli military knows the law that must be applied.” After the visit, Khan said an ICC investigation into possible crimes by Hamas militants and Israeli forces “is a priority for my office.”

Who else has the ICC charged?

A year ago after the court issued a warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on charges of responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine. Russia responded by issuing its own arrest warrants for Khan and ICC judges.

Other high-profile leaders charged by the court include ousted Sudanese strongman Omar al-Bashir on allegations including genocide in his country’s Darfur region. Former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed by rebels shortly after the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest on charges linked to the brutal suppression of anti-government protests in 2011.

VCU said that the protesters were trespassing and refused orders to leave. Gov. Glenn Youngkin vowed to support law enforcement and university leadership to ensure campuses were safe as protests over the Israel-Hamas war rage at colleges nationwide.

Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Cabell Library to call for a cease-fire and demand the university divest itself from financial ties to Israel, according to WWBT. The encampment included tents and large signs with statements including “free Palestine,” “cease-fire now” and a list of demands, photos show.

VCU said the demonstrators violated several policies, including by erecting tents and structures, and disrupted campus on the week of final exams, according to a statement.

“VCU respectfully and repeatedly provided opportunities for those individuals involved – many of whom were not students — to collect their belongings and leave. Those who did not leave were subject to arrest for trespassing,” the statement said.

Police gave four mass warnings to the crowd, and Richmond police declared the protest an unlawful assembly, a VCU spokesperson said in a statement.

Video shows a line of demonstrators holding wooden pallets outside the library, facing a string of officers in helmets holding shields reading police. Police marched in unison toward the protesters, followed by a clash in which police and protesters pushed each other, video shows.

“Individuals who chose not to leave threw objects and used chemical spray on officers. Officers used pepper spray to disperse the crowd. VCU Police report that officers did not use other chemical agents, such as tear gas,” the VCU spokesperson said.

People ran away coughing after police used pepper spray, according to WWBT.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 28

12 arrested at University of Mary Washington during pro-Palestinian protest

Israel-Hamas War Apr 29

Israel-Hamas war protest at George Washington University grows to 200; university barriers dismantled

Thirteen people were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly and trespassing, according to VCU. The six students who were arrested “will proceed normally through the university’s student conduct process.”

Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears said late Monday that students and non-students were arrested, campus maintenance was dismantling tents and crowds were being dispersed.

Sears, in social media posts, went on to say that students and Richmond residents want answers.

“Once the dust settles, I think we will see this was not entirely a peaceful protest,” she said.

University and college officials across the country have been facing off with protesters calling for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza, and tensions are rising on many campuses.

Dozens of protesters at Columbia University took over Hamilton Hall early Tuesday, barricading the entrances and unfurling a Palestinian flag out of a window.

More than 80 people were arrested at Virginia Tech between Sunday and Monday as police tried to clear an encampment.

Virginia’s governor wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that his administration will “fully support campus, local and state law enforcement and university leadership to keep our campuses safe.”

He accused students and demonstrators who aren’t students of throwing things at law enforcement, disrupting student life and endangering public safety.

At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., protesters took down bike rack-style barriers and refused to leave an encampment. Six days into the demonstration, there are no signs that protesters plan to leave.

“Multiple times, the GWPD and the administration has attempted to sweep our campus and we’ve successfully managed to prevent that from happening because of our community mobilization,” one demonstrator said.

GW has made it clear that they want protesters to leave University Yard, but it’s unclear what will happen if demonstrators continue to refuse to leave.

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The scene unfolded shortly after 9 p.m. as police, wearing helmets and carrying zip ties and riot shields, massed at the Ivy League university’s entrance. The demonstrators had occupied Hamilton Hall, an administration building on campus, more than 12 hours earlier, spreading their reach from an encampment elsewhere on the grounds that’s been there for nearly two weeks.

Shortly before officers entered the campus, the New York Police Department received a notice from Columbia authorizing officers to take action, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Columbia’s protests earlier this month kicked off demonstrations that now span from California to Massachusetts. As May commencement ceremonies near, administrators face added pressure to clear protesters.

More than 1,000 protesters have been arrested over the last two weeks on campuses in states including Texas, Utah, Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Connecticut, Louisiana, California and New Jersey, some after violent clashes with police in riot gear.

“Walk away from this situation now and continue your advocacy through other means,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams advised the Columbia protesters on Tuesday afternoon. “This must end now.”

The White House earlier Tuesday condemned the standoffs at Columbia and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where protesters had occupied two buildings until officers with batons intervened overnight and arrested 25 people. Officials estimated the northern California campus’ total damage to be upwards of $1 million.

President Joe Biden believes students occupying an academic building is “absolutely the wrong approach,” and “not an example of peaceful protest,” said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.

Other colleges have sought to negotiate agreements with the demonstrators in the hopes of having peaceful commencement ceremonies. As cease-fire negotiations appeared to gain steam, it wasn’t clear whether those talks would inspire an easing of protests.

Northwestern University notched a rare win when officials said they reached a compromise with students and faculty who represent the majority of protesters on its campus near Chicago to allow peaceful demonstrations through the end of spring classes.

The nationwide campus protests began at Columbia in response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 30

Ahead of visit to Israel, US's Blinken presses Hamas to accept new proposal for Gaza cease-fire

Israel-Hamas War Apr 29

Israel-Hamas war protesters arrested in Texas, others defy Columbia University demand to leave camp

Israel and its supporters have branded the university protests as antisemitic, while Israel’s critics say it uses those allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.

On Columbia’s campus, protesters locked arms early Tuesday and carried furniture and metal barricades to Hamilton Hall, among several buildings that were occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protest. Demonstrators called the building Hind’s Hall, honoring a young girl who was killed in Gaza under Israeli fire.

The takeover came hours after protesters had shrugged off an earlier ultimatum to abandon a tent encampment Monday or be suspended — restricted from all academic and recreational spaces, allowed only to enter their residences, and, for seniors, ineligible to graduate.

Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator before talks with the administration broke down over the weekend, was among the suspended students. His suspension letter — which he shared with The Associated Press — said he had refused to leave the encampment after prior warnings, but Khalil said he had abided by the university’s demand to vacate the encampment on the campus lawn by the Monday afternoon deadline.

Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang said in a statement that anyone occupying Hamilton Hall risked being expelled from the university for escalating the protest “to an untenable situation — vandalizing property, breaking doors and windows, and blockading entrances.”

Occupying protesters have insisted they will remain in Hamilton Hall until the university agrees to three demands — divestment, financial transparency and amnesty.

Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang said in a statement that anyone occupying Hamilton Hall risked being expelled from the university for escalating the protest “to an untenable situation — vandalizing property, breaking doors and windows, and blockading entrances.”

Students had defiantly set up tents again after police cleared an encampment at the university on April 18 and arrested more than 100 people. The students had been protesting on the Manhattan campus since the previous day, opposing Israeli military action in Gaza and demanding the school divest from companies they claim are profiting from the conflict.

The Columbia University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors said faculty’s efforts to help defuse the situation have been repeatedly ignored by the university’s administration despite school statutes that require consultation. The group warned of potential conflict between police officers nearby and protesters on campus.

“We hold University leadership responsible for the disastrous lapses of judgment that have gotten us to this point,” the chapter said in a statement late Tuesday. “The University President, her senior staff, and the Board of Trustees will bear responsibility for any injuries that may occur during any police action on our campus.”

Ilana Lewkovitch, a self-described “leftist Zionist” student at Columbia, said it’s been hard to concentrate on school for weeks, amid calls for Zionists to die or leave campus. Her exams have been punctuated with chants of “say it loud, say it clear, we want Zionists out of here” in the background, she said.

Lewkovitch, who identifies as Jewish and studied at Columbia’s Tel Aviv campus, said she wished the current pro-Palestinian protests were more open to people like her who criticize Israel’s war policies but believe there should be an Israeli state.

Adams claimed Tuesday that the Columbia protests have been “co-opted by professional outside agitators.” The mayor didn’t provide specific evidence to back up that contention, which was disputed by protest organizers and participants.

NYPD officials made similar claims about “outside agitators” during the huge, grassroots demonstrations against racial injustice that erupted across the city after the death of George Floyd in 2020. In some instances, top police officials falsely labeled peaceful marches organized by well-known neighborhood activists as the work of violent extremists.

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, ahead of a visit to Israel this week, urged Hamas to accept the latest proposal, calling it “extraordinarily generous” on Israel’s part.

The terms were not made public. But according to an Egyptian official and Israeli media, Israel has softened its position, lowering the number of hostages it demands that Hamas free during the initial six-week phase of the cease-fire in return for the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons.

One question is whether that will be enough to overcome Hamas concerns over the cease-fire’s second phase.

Hamas has demanded assurances that an eventual release of all hostages will bring a complete end to Israel’s nearly seven-month assault in Gaza and a withdrawal of its troops from the devastated territory. Israel has offered only an extended pause, vowing to resume its offensive once it is over. The issue has repeatedly obstructed efforts by U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators during months of talks.

Some Israeli commentators depicted Israel as at a crossroads: Go for a deal with a potential end to the war, bringing benefits that could include normalization of ties with Saudi Arabia, or push ahead with plans including an attack on Rafah in the hope of crushing Hamas and risk international isolation.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 29

Israel-Hamas war protesters arrested in Texas, others defy Columbia University demand to leave camp

Israel-Hamas War Apr 29

Photos: Pro-Palestinian demonstrations on US college campuses

Israel’s closest ally, the United States, and others have repeatedly warned against an offensive on Rafah, saying it would bring a surge in casualties and worsen a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 1 million Palestinians have sought shelter in Rafah after fleeing fighting elsewhere.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people.

Overnight and Monday morning, Israeli strikes flattened at least three homes where extended families of Palestinians were gathered. The dead included nine women and six children, one them just five days old, according to hospital records and an Associated Press reporter.

“Everyone was sleeping in their beds,” said Mahmoud Abu Taha, whose cousin was killed with his wife and their year-old baby in a house where at least 10 died. “They have nothing to do with anything.”

Egypt has stepped up mediation efforts for a cease-fire deal in hopes of averting an assault on Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt.

An Egyptian official said Israel has lowered the number of hostages it wants freed in the first stage, down from earlier demands for 40. He did not specify the new number. Israeli media said it now seeks the release of 33 hostages in return for the release of some 900 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas is believed to hold around 100 Israelis in Gaza.

Israel has also shown flexibility on allowing residents to return to northern Gaza, the Egyptian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal talks.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas or Israeli officials.

Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected stopping the war in return for hostage releases and says an offensive on Rafah is crucial to destroying the militants after their Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that triggered the fighting. His government could be threatened if he agrees to a deal, since hardline Cabinet members demand an attack on Rafah.

At the same time, Netanyahu faces pressure to reach a deal from families of hostages.

On Monday, the families of two hostages — Keith Siegel and Omri Miran — urged both sides to reach an agreement, days after Hamas released a video showing the men.

“I appeal to Sinwar, please approve this deal. And to the members of the (Israeli) Cabinet, please approve any deal,” said Omri’s father, Dany Miran, referring to Yehiya Sinwar, the top Hamas official in Gaza. He spoke at a news conference in a Tel Aviv square where supporters of hostage families regularly hold rallies.

Israeli officials, meanwhile, appeared increasingly concerned that the International Criminal Court may issue arrest warrants against the country’s leaders.

It was not clear what sparked the concerns. The ICC launched a probe three years ago into possible war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militants going back to the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. The probe is also looking at Israel’s construction of settlements in occupied territory the Palestinians want for a future state.

There was no comment from the court on Monday, and it has given no indication warrants in the case are imminent.

But Israel’s Foreign Ministry said late Sunday that it had informed Israeli missions of “rumors” that warrants might be issued against senior political and military officials. Netanyahu said Friday that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.”

Neither Israel nor the United States accept the ICC’s jurisdiction, but any warrants could put Israeli officials at risk of arrest in other countries. They would also serve as a major rebuke of Israel’s actions at a time when pro-Palestinian protests have spread across U.S. college campuses.

The International Court of Justice, a separate body, is investigating whether Israel has committed acts of genocide in the ongoing war in Gaza, with any ruling expected to take years. Israel has rejected allegations of wrongdoing and accused both international courts of bias.

In the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, militants stormed through army bases and farming communities across southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostages. Israel’s air, sea and ground offensive in Gaza has killed at least 34,488 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its tally.

Israel blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas because the militants fight from dense, residential areas. The military says it has killed over 12,000 militants, without providing evidence.

The war has driven around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes and pushed northern Gaza to the brink of famine.

Associated Press writers Michael Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington; and Matthew Lee in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed.

___

From coast to coast, demonstrators are sparring over the Israel-Hamas war and its mounting death toll, and the number of arrests at campuses nationwide is approaching 1,000 as the final days of class wrap up. The outcry is forcing colleges to reckon with their financial ties to Israel, as well as their support for free speech.

The protests have even spread to Europe, with French police removing dozens of students from the Sorbonne university after pro-Palestinian protesters occupied the main courtyard. In Canada, student protest camps have popped up at the University of Ottawa, McGill University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, The Canadian Press reported.

White House Apr 27

Chants of ‘shame on you' greet guests at White House correspondents' dinner shadowed by war in Gaza

Israel-Hamas War Apr 27

Columbia University says it has banned student protester who said ‘Zionists don't deserve to live'

At the University of Texas at Austin, an attorney said at least 40 demonstrators had been arrested Monday, some of them by officers in riot gear who encircled about 100 sitting protesters, dragging or carrying them out one by one amid screams. Another group of demonstrators trapped police and a van full of arrestees between buildings, creating a mass of bodies pushing and shoving and prompting the officers to use pepper spray and flash-bang devices to clear the crowd.

The confrontation was an escalation on the 50,000-student campus in the state's capital. On social media, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott reposted video of state troopers arriving, saying “No encampments will be allowed." Just last week, hundreds of police pushed into protesters at the university, arresting more than 50 people.

The Texas protest and others grew out of Columbia's early demonstrations that have continued. On Monday, student activists at Columbia defied a 2 p.m. deadline to leave an encampment of around 120 tents on the school’s Manhattan campus. Instead, hundreds of protesters marched around the quad, clapping, chanting and weaving around piles of temporary flooring and green carpeting meant for graduation ceremonies that are supposed to begin next week.

A handful of counter-demonstrators waved Israeli flags, and one held a sign reading, “Where are the anti-Hamas chants?”

The university didn’t call police to roust the demonstrators. But three hours after the deadline passed, school spokesperson Ben Chang said Columbia had begun suspending students. He didn’t indicate how many students were involved. He also didn't say how the suspensions would be carried out or whether suspended students would be ejected from the campus.

Chang said that while the university appreciated the free speech rights of students, the encampment was a “noisy distraction” that was interfering with teaching and preparation for for final exams. The protests also made some Jewish students deeply uncomfortable, he said.

Protest organizers said they were not aware of any suspensions as of Monday evening.

The notice sent to protesters earlier Monday said if they left by the deadline and signed a form committing to abide by university policies through June 2025, they could finish the semester in good standing. If not, the letter said, they would be suspended, pending further investigation.

College classes are wrapping up for the semester, and campuses are preparing for graduation ceremonies, giving schools an extra incentive to clear encampments. The University of Southern California canceled its main graduation ceremony.

But students dug in their heels at other high-profile universities, with standoffs continuing at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and others.

Protesters at Yale set up a new camp with dozens of tents Sunday, nearly a week after police arrested nearly 50 and cleared a similar one nearby. They were notified by a Yale official that they could face discipline, including suspension, and possible arrest if they continued.

Yale said in a statement Monday that while it supports peaceful protests and freedom of speech, it does not tolerate policy violations such as the encampment. School officials said that the protest is near residential colleges where many students are studying for final exams, and that permission must be granted for groups to hold events and put up structures on campus.

In a rare case, Northwestern University said it reached an agreement with students and faculty who represent the majority of protesters on its campus near Chicago. It allows peaceful demonstrations through the June 1 end of spring classes, requires removal of all tents except one for aid, and restricts the demonstration area to allow only students, faculty and staff unless the university approves otherwise.

At Brown University in Rhode Island, school President Christina H. Paxton offered protest leaders the chance to meet with officials to discuss their arguments for divestment from Israel-linked companies in exchange for ending an encampment.

In the letter to student protesters at Columbia, school officials noted that exams are beginning and graduation is upcoming.

“We urge you to remove the encampment so that we do not deprive your fellow students, their families and friends of this momentous occasion,” the letter said.

The demonstrations have led Columbia to hold remote classes. The school said in an email to students that bringing back police “at this time” would be counterproductive. The university said it will offer an alternative venue for the protests after exams and graduation.

Columbia's handling of the protests has prompted federal complaints.

A class-action lawsuit on behalf of Jewish students alleges a breach of contract by Columbia, claiming the university failed to maintain a safe learning environment, despite policies and promises. It also challenges the move away from in-person classes and seeks quick court action requiring Columbia to provide security for the students.

Meanwhile, a legal group representing pro-Palestinian students is urging the U.S. Department of Education's civil rights office to investigate Columbia's compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for how they have been treated.

A university spokesperson declined to comment on the complaints.

The plight of students who have been arrested has become a central part of protests, with the students and a growing number of faculty demanding amnesty for protesters. At issue is whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students through their adult lives.

Demonstrators on other campuses, meanwhile, said they would stand firm. Jacob Ginn, a second-year University of North Carolina sociology graduate student, said he had been protesting at the encampment for four days, including negotiations with administrators Friday.

“We are prepared for everything and we will remain here until the university meets our demands and we will remain steadfast and strong in the face of any brutality and repression that they try to attack us with,” Ginn said in reference to a potential police sweep of the encampment.

___

Mattise reported from Nashville, Tennessee. Associated Press journalists around the country contributed to this report, including Sarah Brumfield in Silver Spring, Maryland; Margery Beck in Omaha, Nebraska; Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York; and David Collins in Hartford, Connecticut.

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The deaths in Rafah included nine women and five children, one of whom was just 5 days old, according to the records and an Associated Press reporter. Israel is planning an invasion of the city — though its closest ally, the United States, and others have repeatedly warned against it, saying an offensive would spell catastrophe for the more than a million Palestinians sheltering there.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials have referred in recent days to an ICC probe launched three years ago into possible war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militants going back to the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. The probe is also looking at Israel’s construction of settlements in occupied territory the Palestinians want for a future state.

There was no comment from the court on Monday, and it has given no indication warrants in the case are imminent.

But Israel’s Foreign Ministry said late Sunday that it had informed Israeli missions of “rumors” that warrants might be issued against senior political and military officials. Foreign Minister Israel Katz said any such warrants would “provide a morale boost” to Hamas and other militant groups.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.”

“The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it,” he posted on the social media platform X.

US & World

news Apr 29

Only the U.S. has the ability to break the cycle of violence in Gaza, Egyptian foreign minister says

White House Apr 27

Chants of ‘shame on you' greet guests at White House correspondents' dinner shadowed by war in Gaza

Israel-Hamas War Apr 27

Hamas is reviewing an Israeli proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza, as possible Rafah offensive looms

It was not clear what sparked the Israeli concerns. A series of Israeli announcements in recent days about allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza appears to be aimed in part at heading off possible ICC action.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said during a visit to the region in December that the investigation is “moving forward at pace, with rigor, with determination and with an insistence that we act not on emotion but on solid evidence.”

Neither Israel nor the United States accept the ICC’s jurisdiction, but any warrants could put Israeli officials at risk of arrest in other countries. They would also serve as a major rebuke of Israel’s actions at a time when pro-Palestinian protests have spread across U.S. college campuses.

The International Court of Justice, a separate body, is investigating whether Israel has committed acts of genocide in the ongoing war in Gaza, with any ruling expected to take years. Israel has rejected allegations of wrongdoing and accused both international courts of bias.

Israel has instead accused Hamas of genocide over its Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. Militants stormed through army bases and farming communities across southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostages.

In response, Israel launched a massive air, sea and ground offensive that has killed at least 34,488 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its tally.

Israel blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas because the militants fight in dense, residential areas. The military says it has killed over 12,000 militants, without providing evidence.

In the News

Israel-Hamas War Apr 25

USC cancels graduation ceremony and dozens are arrested on other campuses as anti-war protests grow

Israel-Hamas War Apr 8

Top UN court opens hearings in case accusing Germany of facilitating Israel's Gaza conflict

The war has driven around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes, caused vast destruction in several towns and cities, and pushed northern Gaza to the brink of famine.

Israel has vowed to expand its ground offensive to Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought shelter from fighting elsewhere. Israel says Rafah is the last Hamas stronghold, with thousands of fighters embedded there.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, which has provided crucial military and political support for the offensive, has urged Israel not to invade Rafah over fears it could cause a humanitarian catastrophe — concerns he reiterated in a phone call with Netanyahu on Sunday.

The Biden administration faces a May 8 deadline to report to Congress on whether Israel is abiding by international law in its use of American military aid, including by allowing the entry of humanitarian assistance.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to visit Israel on his latest trip to the region that began in Saudi Arabia on Monday. He said Israel needs to do more to allow aid to enter Gaza, but that the best way to alleviate the humanitarian crisis is for the two sides to agree to a cease-fire.

The U.S., Egypt and Qatar are pushing Israel and Hamas to accept an agreement they drafted that would free some of the hostages and bring about at least a temporary truce. Hamas is still believed to be holding around 100 hostages and the remains of some 30 others after most of the rest were freed in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners last year.

Hamas has said it will not release the remaining hostages without an agreement to end the war. Netanyahu has rejected that demand, saying Israel will continue its offensive until Hamas is destroyed and all the hostages are returned.

At an event in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, Blinken called on Hamas to accept what he said was an “extraordinarily generous” offer from Israel. “In this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and cease-fire is Hamas,” he said.

___

Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Michael Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington and Matthew Lee in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed.

More than 200 people, including “professional organizers, activists, and university students,” have joined the demonstration, the university said Monday, as protests continue on college campuses across the country.

Video shared on social media shows a rush of demonstrators breaking through the bike rack-style barricades set up near the encampment. A drum is beating, there is chanting, and some protesters kick or jump on barriers. Police attempt to push back or hold on as the barriers are moved. Someone can be heard saying, “Whoa, whoa, hey.”

“Yesterday, the crowd rallied, and we, the crowd was like, we need real liberation, and we dismantled the barriers. They were gone,” sophomore Selina Al-Shihabi said. “And just the feeling, you know, the energy of finally feeling free. I mean, it’s a fraction of what the people of Gaza are going through.”

One person was escorted away by campus police, but they were not arrested, according to the university. The barriers were placed as a way to limit access to University Park instead of resorting to forcible relocation, the university said.

By Monday morning, the barricades were in a jumbled pile at the center of the encampment.

“This is an egregious violation of community trust and goes far beyond the boundaries of free expression and the right to protest,” the university’s update said in part.

Dozens of students set up tents on Thursday in University Yard — which is bordered by GW’s law school and other GW buildings — to call on the university to divest itself from financial ties with Israel, according to student newspaper The GW Hatchet.

Five days later, on the final day of classes for the spring semester, the number of people participating in the encampment swelled, and a second encampment had cropped up on H Street, on D.C. property, according to the university. 

Over the weekend, the university reduced the space in University Park to allow for 20 people to remain and “to minimize further disruption to university activities.” They were allowing demonstrators to access food and water and shared how to find medical assistance, GW President Ellen M. Granberg said in a Sunday message to the campus.

“GW continues to offer Anniversary Park as an alternate demonstration site and implores demonstrators to vacate University Yard immediately,” Granberg wrote in part.

When access was limited to University Park Friday evening, protesters set up a new encampment of about 20 tents on H Street.

Al-Shihabi thinks students standing in solidarity with Gaza is making a difference.

“I definitely think it’s helping raise awareness. I mean, we’ve been getting messages from the people of Gaza — voice notes, photos — just telling us how much we appreciate them, which is so ironic because we draw so much of our inspiration from them,” Al-Shihabi said.

‘Liberation Camp’

Students celebrated the first 24 hours of the “Liberation Camp” protest on Friday.

Protesters say that their solidarity is with the Palestinian people, not with Hamas. While any protest movement has extreme elements that diverge from the core cause, most of the protesters at GW say they want to keep the focus on why they’re in the encampment — killings and what they’re calling a genocide in Gaza.

“We’ve been very clear with our demands and we’ve been very clear that we are here in solidarity with Gaza,” said one young woman protesting on Thursday, who did not want to be identified. “We are here in solidarity with Palestine.”

GW said it decided to request D.C. police assistance after multiple instructions from university police officers to relocate to another site on campus went unheeded.

The university also issued a statement saying protesters are trespassing and “any student who remains in University Yard may be placed on temporary suspension and administratively barred from campus.”

Several students told News4 Friday they were prepared to get arrested in order to stand up for what they believe in, and others said if they are removed, that would only embolden them in their protests.

“Missing class, it’s nothing compared to what the people in Gaza are going through right now,” said the anonymous protester. “It’s not about us, it’s not about our so-called sacrifice.”

Counterprotester Eric Hirshfield said he tried to enter the encampment “just to see what’s going on and make sure they’re not disenfranchising the rights of others.”

Leaders of the Jewish Student Association said they feel uncomfortable walking by the pro-Palestinian protests.

“A lot of people have family in Israel, and when there are slogans used that call for the destruction of where people live, it’s very intimidating,” Co-President Alana Mondschein said.

“The campus climate, the protests, are just unproductive,” Co-President Jacob Wise said. “There’s no effort to speak to other students who might disagree.”

Last fall they had to help replace posters of Israeli hostages at the Hillel building after someone tore them down. GW said it suspended the student involved.

 This is a developing story. Stay with News4 for updates.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 22

Pro-Palestinian protests sweep US college campuses following mass arrests at Columbia

Israel-Hamas War Apr 23

‘We chose to be loud': Pro-Palestinian students demonstrate at American U, UMD

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The protestors created the encampment Friday in Jefferson Square in support of Gaza, continuing for several hours until “an invitation extended the encampment to the public to stay on campus, additional safety and security concerns emerged,” University of Mary Washington President Troy D. Paino said in part.

According to the letter, the university asked the organizers to take the tents down by 8:30 p.m. and they complied.

“Emergency: UMW has banned the Palestine encampment at Jefferson Squad [sic] only 12 hours and demanded we leave by 8:30 despite approving it before so we need all hands on deck if you can get to Jefferson square now. into Saturday,” @YDSAUMW tweeted Friday. 

Videos shared on social media by Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) at UMV show protestors peacefully singing, dancing and chanting overnight Friday into Saturday.

On Saturday afternoon, the tents were put back up against guidelines, the university said. Later in the evening, the protestors were told again to leave the area but 12 people remained and were arrested for trespassing, according to the university. 

“During the day on Saturday, health and safety concerns began to emerge from the event as well as increased concerns for campus community members, as outside influence was further invited to campus to grow the encampment,” Paino said in part. 

“We continue to call on @umwsga to represent the student body and their right to protest by releasing a statement demanding the lifting of the encampment ban as well as urging the administration not to implement disciplinary measures,” YDSA wrote on Instagram. 

One of the arrested protestors, a member of the YDSA at UMW, took to social media after being released from Rappahannock Regional Jail. 

“I was arrested for trespassing; standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine at universities across the county,” he said in the video.

He added that the university permitted them to protest in Jefferson Square and then revoked permission. 

The school is in the middle of reading days and is a week out from exams, according to the university.

This is a developing story. Stay with NBC Washington for more updates.

White House Apr 27

Chants of ‘shame on you' greet guests at White House correspondents' dinner shadowed by war in Gaza

Israel-Hamas War Apr 25

‘No peace on stolen lands': Pro-Palestinian students still at GW encampment after deadline to move

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An evening normally devoted to presidents, journalists and comedians taking outrageous pokes at political scandals and each other often seemed this year to illustrate the difficulty of putting aside the coming presidential election and the troubles in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Biden opened his roast with a direct but joking focus on Trump, calling him “sleepy Don,” in reference to a nickname Trump had given the president previously.

Despite being similar in age, Biden said, the two presidential hopefuls have little else in common. “My vice president actually endorses me,” Biden said. Former Trump Vice President Mike Pence has refused to endorse Trump’s reelection bid.

But the president quickly segued to a grim speech about what he believes is at stake this election, saying that another Trump administration would be even more harmful to America than his first term.

“We have to take this serious — eight years ago we could have written it off as ‘Trump talk’ but not after January 6,” Biden told the audience, referring to the supporters of Trump who stormed the Capitol after Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election.

Trump did not attend Saturday’s dinner and never attended the annual banquet as president. In 2011, he sat in the audience, and glowered through a roasting by then-President Barack Obama of Trump’s reality-television celebrity status. Obama’s sarcasm then was so scalding that many political watchers linked it to Trump’s subsequent decision to run for president in 2016.

Biden’s speech, which lasted around 10 minutes, made no mention of the ongoing war or the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

One of the few mentions came from Kelly O’Donnell, president of the correspondents’ association, who briefly noted some 100 journalists killed in Israel’s 6-month-old war against Hamas in Gaza. In an evening dedicated in large part to journalism, O’Donnell cited journalists who have been detained across the world, including Americans Evan Gershkovich in Russia and Austin Tice, who is believed to be held in Syria. Families of both men were in attendance as they have been at previous dinners.

To get inside Saturday’s dinner, some guests had to hurry through hundreds of protesters outraged over the mounting humanitarian disaster for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They condemned Biden for his support of Israel’s military campaign and Western news outlets for what they said was undercoverage and misrepresentation of the conflict.

“Shame on you!” protesters draped in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh cloth shouted, running after men in tuxedos and suits and women in long dresses holding clutch purses as guests hurried inside for the dinner.

“Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide,” crowds chanted at one point.

Other protesters lay sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of flak vests with “press” insignia.

Ralliers cried “Free, free Palestine.” They cheered when at one point someone inside the Washington Hilton — where the dinner has been held for decades — unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.

Criticism of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza has spread through American college campuses, with students pitching encampments and withstanding police sweeps in an effort to force their universities to divest from Israel. Counterprotests back Israel’s offensive and complain of antisemitism.

Biden’s motorcade Saturday took an alternate route from the White House to the Washington Hilton than in previous years, largely avoiding the crowds of demonstrators.

Saturday’s event drew nearly 3,000 people. Celebrities included Academy Award winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Scarlett Johansson, Jon Hamm and Chris Pine.

Both the president and comedian Colin Jost, who spoke after Biden, made jabs at the age of both the candidates for president. “I’m not saying both candidates are old. But you know Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, ‘maybe I can win this thing,’” Jost said. “He’s only 99.”

Law enforcement, including the Secret Service, instituted extra street closures and other measures to ensure what Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said would be the “highest levels of safety and security for attendees.”

Protest organizers said they aimed to bring attention to the high numbers of Palestinian and other Arab journalists killed by Israel’s military since the war began in October.

More than two dozen journalists in Gaza wrote a letter last week calling on their colleagues in Washington to boycott the dinner altogether.

“The toll exacted on us for merely fulfilling our journalistic duties is staggering,” the letter stated. “We are subjected to detentions, interrogations, and torture by the Israeli military, all for the ‘crime’ of journalistic integrity.”

One organizer complained that the White House Correspondents’ Association — which represents the hundreds of journalists who cover the president — largely has been silent since the first weeks of the war about the killings of Palestinian journalists. WHCA did not respond to a request for comment.

According to a preliminary investigation released Friday by the Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly 100 journalists have been killed covering the war in Gaza. Israel has defended its actions, saying it has been targeting militants.

“Since the Israel-Gaza war began, journalists have been paying the highest price — their lives — to defend our right to the truth. Each time a journalist dies or is injured, we lose a fragment of that truth,” CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in a statement.

Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a U.S.-based Palestinian advocacy group that helped organize the letter from journalists in Gaza, said “it is shameful for the media to dine and laugh with President Biden while he enables the Israeli devastation and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.”

In addition, Adalah Justice Project started an email campaign targeting 12 media executives at various news outlets — including The Associated Press — expected to attend the dinner who previously signed onto a letter calling for the protection of journalists in Gaza.

“How can you still go when your colleagues in Gaza asked you not to?” a demonstrator asked guests heading in. “You are complicit.”

In the video, Siegel, 64, and Miran, 47, spoke about not being able to celebrate Passover with their loved ones because they are in Hamas captivity.

This is the second video of Israeli hostages Hamas has shared this week, having released a video of Israeli American Hersh Goldberg-Polin on Wednesday. NBC News has not been able to independently verify when or where the video was filmed, and it’s not clear if Siegal or Miran are still alive.

Siegel, who is a U.S. citizen, spoke directly to his family, letting them know that he is doing OK. His wife, Aviva, was held captive by Hamas for 51 days before she was released, according to a statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. In an interview with NBC News in February, Aviva Siegel, 62, said she believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prioritizing his own political survival and his bid to crush Hamas over efforts to return the hostages. 

“I think that Bibi Netanyahu is thinking about himself more than thinking about us,” she said.

In a video statement shared by the Hostages Forum after Hamas released the video, Aviva Siegel and the couple’s two daughters, Ilan and Shir, shared a message. The women are seen holding hands and wearing shirts with Keith Siegel’s picture and the caption, “BRING KEITH HOME NOW.”

“Seeing my father today only emphasizes to all of us how much we must reach a deal as soon as possible and bring everyone home,” Ilan Siegel said. “I demand that the leaders of this country watch this video and see their own father crying out for help.”

Aviva Siegel directed her message at her husband, saying that she loves him.

“We will fight until you return,” she said.

In the Al-Qassam video, Keith Siegel and Miran both encouraged people advocating for the return of all Israeli hostages to continue protesting until a deal is reached.

“If you watched the video, you saw that my father knows we are all coming to the rally every week and fighting for him and all the captives,” Shir Siegel said in the family’s statement. “Thank you for being with us. We will not stop fighting together.”

In a statement, the Hostages Forum said the “proof of life” from Siegel and Miran “is the clearest evidence that the Israeli government must do everything to approve a deal for the return of all the hostages before Independence Day.” Independence Day in Israel is commemorated on May 14, and marks the day the Jewish state declared itself a country in the Middle East.

“Now is the time for the government and its leader to prove through actions their commitment to the citizens of Israel who await the return of the hostages,” the organization said.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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A university spokesperson said the student, Khymani James, has been “banned from campus.” The university did not provide any further details on the circumstances surrounding the ban or offer any information on disciplinary proceedings.

In a statement Friday night about the ongoing protests, Columbia officials said a person whose “vile videos” had recently surfaced has been banned.

“Chants, signs, taunts, and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to ‘kill’ Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable,” the statement said.

James, a junior and member of the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, and a self-identified spokesperson for the student encampment at Columbia, is seen making the comments in a clip of the video verified by NBC News.

“Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone, Zionists don’t deserve to live,” James said in the video, which has been circulating on social media.

“The same way we’re very comfortable accepting that Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world,” James added.

The resurfaced video comes amid a wave of pro-Palestinian encampments and protests against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza that have been established on college campuses across the United States. The demonstrations have, at times, resulted in arrests and some pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters have clashed. Jewish students have also reported instances of antisemitism.

Talks between protesters and administrators about dismantling the encampment at Columbia, which has been in place since April 17, are ongoing, the university has said. Protesters there and on other campuses have called on schools to divest from companies that do business with Israel.

James, who uses he/she/they pronouns, said in a statement posted to X on Friday that their comments were “wrong” and that they “regret” them, adding “every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.”

James added that they wish they had said instead that, “Zionism is an ideology that necessitates the genocide of Palestinian people. I oppose that in the strongest terms.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.”

It does not necessarily refer to Jewish people as a whole, as Jews do not have to be Zionists.

James said in the statement that the comments were made before they were involved with CUAD and that both it and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment “have made clear” that their comments on the video “are not in line with the CUAD community guidelines.”

“Those words do not represent CUAD,” James said. “They also do not represent me.”

It’s unclear whether James is still serving as a spokesperson. James did not appear to be at the protests Friday.

CUAD said in an Instagram post earlier Friday that James’ “words in January do not reflect his views, our values, nor the encampment’s community agreements” and that the group remains “committed to our peaceful protest and will continue to call for the University to divest from Israel’s brutal genocide against Palestinians.”

NBC News has not confirmed the circumstances around why the video was made, but The New York Times and the university’s student publication, the Columbia Spectator, reported James made the comments while in a meeting with Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention in January. James recorded and broadcast the meeting on Instagram Live.

The January meeting was called in reference to an earlier comment James made on social media regarding fighting Zionists in which James said: “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,” according to the Times and the Spectator.

Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention did not immediately reply to a request for comment and more information.

In a longer version of the video edited and posted by The Daily Wire on Thursday evening, James said they didn’t understand why their comments were problematic, compared Zionists to white supremacists and Nazis, and said they feel comfortable calling for Zionists to die.

James also said administrators should be grateful that James wasn’t acting on their words.

In the Friday statement, James said the comments were edited without context and that at the time they made the statements, “I had been feeling unusually upset after an online mob targeted me because I am visibly queer and Black.”

James did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday on X. Other contact information could not immediately be found.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said that President Joe Biden has been clear that “violent rhetoric, hate speech, and Antisemitic remarks have no place in America whatsoever.”

“These dangerous, appalling statements turn the stomach and should serve as a wakeup call,” Bates said. “It is hideous to advocate for the murder of Jews.”

TJ Swigart, Jean Lee, Megan Lebowitz, Mary Pflum, Antonia Hylton, Janhvi Bhojwani and Jasmine Cui contributed.

Senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya said the Palestinian militant group was evaluating Israel’s proposal, and “upon completion of its study, it will submit its response.”

He gave no details of Israel’s offer but said it was in response to a proposal from Hamas two weeks ago. Negotiations earlier this month centered on a six-week cease-fire proposal and the release of 40 civilian and sick hostages in exchange for freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Hamas’ statement came hours after a high-level Egyptian delegation wrapped up a visit to Israel where it discussed a “new vision” for a prolonged cease-fire in Gaza, according to an Egyptian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the developments.

It was not immediately clear whether Israel’s latest response to Hamas on a cease-fire was directly related to Friday’s visit to Tel Aviv by Egyptian mediators.

The discussions between Egyptian and Israeli officials focused on the first stage of a multi-phase plan that would include a limited exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners, and the return of a significant number of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza “with minimum restrictions,” the Egyptian official said.

The mediators are working on a compromise that will answer most of both parties’ main demands, which could pave the way to continued negotiations with the goal of a larger deal to end the war, the official said.

As the war drags on and casualties mount, there has been growing international pressure for Hamas and Israel to reach an agreement on a cease-fire and avert a possible Israeli attack on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have sought refuge after fleeing fighting elsewhere in the territory.

Israel has been insisting for months it plans a ground offensive into Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where it says many remaining Hamas militants are holed up, despite calls for restraint from the international community including Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 26

Egypt sends delegation to Israel, its latest effort to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas

Israel-Hamas War Apr 25

College protesters are demanding schools ‘divest' from companies with ties to Israel. Here's what that means.

Egypt has cautioned an offensive into Rafah could have “catastrophic consequences” on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, as well as on regional peace and security.

The Israeli military has massed dozens of tanks and armored vehicles in southern Israel close to Rafah and hit targets in the city in near-daily airstrikes.

Early Saturday, an Israeli airstrike hit a house in Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighborhood, killing six people, including four children, according to officials at a local hospital.

The strike killed a man, his wife and their three sons, aged 12, 10 and 8, according to records of the Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital’s morgue. A neighbor’s four-month-old girl was also killed, the records showed.

Hamas said Friday it is open to any “ideas or suggestions” that take into consideration the needs of the Palestinian people such as an end to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the return of displaced people to their homes and an Israeli withdrawal.

The Palestinian group has said it will not back down from its demands for a permanent cease-fire and full withdrawal of Israeli troops, both of which Israel has rejected.

Israel says it will continue military operations until Hamas is defeated and that it will retain a security presence in Gaza afterward.

Hamas sparked the war with its attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7, in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took some 250 people as hostages. Israel says the militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

Since then, 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and ground offensive, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, around two-thirds of them children and women.

Israel has reported at least 260 of its soldiers killed since the start of ground operations in Gaza.

The announcement after two days of exhaustive negotiations came as Columbia’s president faced harsh criticism from faculty. The development puts more pressure on university officials to find a resolution ahead of planned graduation ceremonies next month — a problem that campuses from California to Massachusetts are facing.

As the death toll mounts in the war in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis worsens, protesters at universities across the country are demanding schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

The clock is ticking as May commencement ceremonies near, putting added pressure on schools to clear demonstrations. At Columbia, protesters defiantly erected a tent encampment where many are set to graduate in front of families in just a few weeks.

Student negotiators representing the Columbia encampment said that after meetings Thursday and Friday, the university hadn’t met their primary demand for divestment, although they had made progress on a push for more transparent financial disclosures.

“We will not rest until Columbia divests,” said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a fourth-year doctoral student.

Columbia officials had earlier said that negotiations were showing progress, although a heavy police and security presence remained around the campus.

“We have our demands; they have theirs,” said Ben Chang, a spokesperson for Columbia University, adding that if the talks fail the university will have to consider other options.

Meanwhile, Columbia's president, Minouche Shafik, faced a significant — but largely symbolic — rebuke from faculty Friday but retained the support of trustees, who have the power to hire or fire the president.

A report by the university senate’s executive committee, which represents faculty, found Shafik and her administration had “taken many actions and decisions that have harmed Columbia University.” Those included calling in police and allowing students to be arrested without consulting faculty, failing to defend the institution in the face of external pressures, misrepresenting and suspending student protest groups, and hiring private investigators.

“The faculty have completely lost confidence in President Shafik’s ability to lead this organization,” said Ege Yumusak, a philosophy lecturer at Columbia who is part of a faculty team protecting the encampment.

Also Friday, one of the Columbia student protesters walked back comments he’d made in an online video in January that recently received new attention. Khymani James said in the video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and people should be grateful he wasn’t killing them.

In a statement, he said he regretted his earlier comments. “What I said was wrong,” he said. "Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.” Protest organizers said the comments didn’t reflect their values. They declined to describe James’ level of involvement with the protest.

Police had clashed with protesters Thursday at Indiana University, Bloomington, were 34 were arrested; Ohio State University, where about 36 were arrested; and at the University of Connecticut, were one person was arrested.

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, has been negotiating with students who have been barricaded inside a campus building since Monday, rebuffing an attempt by the police to clear them out. The campus remains shut down at least through the weekend.

On the other end of the state, the University of Southern California canceled the school's May 10 graduation ceremony. The announcement was made a day after more than 90 protesters were arrested on campus. The university said it will still host dozens of commencement events, including all the traditional individual school commencement ceremonies.

Elsewhere in New York, about a dozen protesters spent the night in tents and sleeping bags inside a building at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The institute's museum, which is in the building where the demonstrators set up camp, was closed Friday.

Protesters also stayed overnight at the encampment at George Washington University.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 25

USC cancels graduation ceremony and dozens are arrested on other campuses as anti-war protests grow

Israel-Hamas War Apr 24

Police tangle with students in Texas and California as wave of campus protest against Gaza war grows

The university said in a statement Friday that those who remain are trespassing on private property and officials will pursue disciplinary actions against students involved in the unauthorized demonstrations.

Emory University President Gregory Fenves said in an email Friday that some of the videos of a clash between police and people on the campus “are shocking” and that he is “horrified that members of our community had to experience and witness such interactions.”

Fenves blamed the unrest at the Atlanta campus on “highly organized, outside protesters” who he said arrived in vans, put up tents and overtook the quad.

But in an earlier statement, school officials had said that 20 of the 28 people arrested were members of the university community.

Video circulated widely on social media shows two women who identified themselves as professors being detained, with one of them slammed to the ground by an officer as a second officer pushes her chest and face onto a concrete sidewalk.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, the U.S. Education Department has launched civil rights investigations into dozens of universities and schools in response to complaints of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Among those under investigation are many colleges facing protests, including Harvard University and Columbia.

Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists in various locations including Aaron Morrison, Stefanie Dazio, Kathy McCormack, Jim Vertuno, Acacia Coronado, Sudhin Thanawala, Jeff Amy, Mike Stewart, Collin Binkley, Carolyn Thompson, Jake Offenhartz and Sophia Tareen.

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Egypt’s top intelligence official, Abbas Kamel, is leading the delegation and plans to discuss with Israel a “new vision” for a prolonged cease-fire in Gaza, an Egyptian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the mission freely.

As the war drags on and casualties mount, there has been growing international pressure for Hamas and Israel to reach an agreement on a cease fire.

Friday’s talks will focus at first on a limited exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners, and the return of a significant number of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza “with minimum restrictions,” the Egyptian official said.

The hope is that negotiations will then continue, with the goal of a larger deal to end the war, he said.

The official said mediators are working on a compromise that will answer most of both parties’ main demands.

Hamas has said it will not back down from its demands for a permanent cease-fire and full withdrawal of Israeli troops, both of which Israel has rejected. Israel says it will continue military operations until Hamas is defeated and that it will retain a security presence in Gaza afterwards.

Ahead of the talks, senior Hamas official Basem Naim told The Associated Press “there is nothing new from our side,” when asked about the negotiations.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 25

USC cancels graduation ceremony and dozens are arrested on other campuses as anti-war protests grow

Israel-Hamas War Apr 24

Hamas releases video of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin

Overnight, Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group fired anti-tank missiles and artillery shells at an Israeli military convoy in a disputed border area, killing an Israeli civilian.

Hezbollah said its fighters ambushed the convoy shortly before midnight Thursday, destroying two vehicles. The Israeli military said the ambush wounded an Israeli civilian doing infrastructure work, and that he later died of his wounds.

Low-intensity fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border has repeatedly threatened to boil over as Israel has targeted senior Hezbollah militants in recent months.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides of the border. On the Israeli side, the cross-border fighting has killed 10 civilians and 12 soldiers, while in Lebanon, more than 350 people have been killed, including 50 civilians and 271 Hezbollah members.

Meantime, Israel has been conducting near-daily raids on Rafah, a city in which more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have sought refuge.

The Israeli military has massed dozens of tanks and armored vehicles in an area of southern Israel that is close to Rafah, in apparent preparations for an invasion of the city.

Rafah also abuts the Gaza-Egypt border. While in Israel, Kamel, who heads Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, plans to make clear that Egypt “will not tolerate” Israel’s deployments of troops along that border, the Egyptian official said.

The official said Egypt shared intelligence with the United States and European countries showing that a Rafah offensive would inflame the entire region.

A Western diplomat in Cairo also said that Egypt has intensified its efforts in recent days to reach a compromise and establish a short cease-fire in Gaza that will help negotiate a longer truce and avert a Rafah offensive.

The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the developments.

On Wednesday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi cautioned that an Israeli attack on Rafah would have “catastrophic consequences on the humanitarian situation in the strip, as well as the regional peace and security.”

El-Sissi’s comments came in a phone call with Prime Minister Mark Rutte of The Netherlands, the Egyptian leader’s office said.

Egypt has also said an attack on Rafah would violate the decades-old peace deal between Egypt and Israel.

The Israel-Hamas war was sparked by the Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel, in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took some 250 people as hostages. Israel says the militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to local health officials, around two-thirds of them children and women.

Speaking at Washington National Cathedral, Andrés said there was no excuse for the killings and he called for an investigation into the deaths. He appeared to struggle at times to maintain his composure, his words focused on the lives and contributions of the aid workers as he pleaded for greater compassion.

“The seven souls we mourn today were there so that hungry people could eat,” said Andrés, reading aloud their names. “Their examples should inspire us to do better, to be better.”

The workers were killed April 1 when munitions fired from Israeli armed drones ripped through vehicles in their convoy as they left one of World Central Kitchen’s warehouses: Palestinian Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha; Britons John Chapman, James Kirby and James Henderson; dual U.S.-Canadian citizen Jacob Flickinger; Australian Lalzawmi Frankcom; and Polish citizen Damiam Sobol.

Hanging on the altar behind Andrés were flags of the slain humanitarian workers’ home countries, alongside the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag. More than 500 mourners sat in pews below the cathedral’s soaring stained glass windows.

Andrés spoke in depth about each one and their contributions to the work of feeding people suffering through disaster and deprivation — human-made and natural — around the world.

He said Chapman was “brave, selfless and strong” and had the ability to make people around him feel “loved and protected.”

Andrés said Flickinger was a problem-solver, “exactly what you need” in the chaos of a disaster zone and Frankcom gave “joy to others even more than she gave food.”

He talked of how Henderson had taught first aid in Ukraine and was an avid rugby player. He said Kirby, known to friends as “Kirbs,” was driven to help people in need. And he said a town in Turkey had named a street after Sobol, in honor of his work there after an earthquake.

Andrés noted that Abutaha’s family was unable to attend the memorial, and he read from a message sent by the 25-year-old’s brother that called the aid workers “heroes” and urged World Central Kitchen to continue its work in Gaza and across the globe, “carrying on the spirit of the fallen, and the resilience of the Palestinian people.”

At times, Andrés spoke emotionally about the organization’s mission and why aid workers do what they do.

“We stand next to communities as they feed themselves, nourish themselves, heal themselves. People don’t want our pity. They want our respect. Our only way to show respect is facing the mayhem alongside them,” he said. “We remind them by showing up that they are not alone in the darkness.”

After an unusually swift Israeli investigation, Israel said the military officials involved in the attack had violated policy by acting based on a single grainy photo that one officer had contended — incorrectly — showed one of the seven workers was armed. The Israeli military dismissed two officers and reprimanded three others.

“I know we all have many unanswered questions about what happened and why. There is no excuse for these killings,” Andrés told mourners, demanding an investigation. “The official explanation is not good enough.”

The aid workers, whose trip had been coordinated with Israeli officials, are among more than 220 humanitarian workers killed in the Israel-Hamas war that began Oct. 7, according to the United Nations. That includes at least 30 killed in the line of duty.

The international prominence and popularity of Andrés and his nonprofit work galvanized widespread outrage over the killings of the group’s workers. The deaths intensified demands from the administration and others that Israel’s military change how it operates in Hamas-controlled Gaza to spare aid workers and Palestinian civilians in the territory who are facing a humanitarian crisis and desperately need aid from relief organizations as the U.N. warns of looming famine.

World Central Kitchen, along with several other humanitarian aid agencies, temporarily suspended work in the territory after the attack. “We haven’t given up,” World Central Kitchen spokesperson Linda Roth said last week. “We are in funeral mode right now.”

Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, and Kurt Campbell, the deputy secretary of state, were among those at the event, joined by diplomats from more than 30 countries, along with representatives from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, one of the most active lawmakers pushing President Joe Biden to condition military aid on improved Israeli treatment of aid workers and Palestinian civilians, joined the mourners as a lone bagpiper played.

Biden sent a letter that was read privately to the families before the service, the White House said.

___

Associated Press writer Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus, contributed to this report.

College officials across the U.S. are worried the ongoing protests could disrupt plans for commencement ceremonies next month. Some universities have called in police to break up the demonstrations, resulting in ugly scuffles and hundreds of arrests, while others appeared content to wait out student protests as the final days of the semester ticked down.

Schools such as Columbia University in New York continued to negotiate with protesters who first set up an encampment last week. At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, faculty members met with students who have barricaded themselves inside a campus building since Monday, trying to negotiate a solution. The campus was shut down earlier this week with classes moved online.

Other universities are rewriting their rules to ban encampments and moving final exams to new locations.

But encampments and protests continued to spring up Thursday. At Indiana University Bloomington, a tent encampment popped up before police with shields and batons shoved into a line of protesters, arresting 33 people.

At the City College of New York, hundreds of students who were gathered on the lawn beneath the Harlem campus’ famed gothic buildings erupted in cheers after a small contingent of police officers retreated from the scene. In one corner of the quad, a “security training” was held among students.

Police arrested one protester and tore down tents at the University of Connecticut Thursday, while demonstrators at Stanford University rallied on a day when newly admitted students visited the campus.

Students protesting the war are demanding schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

USC announced the cancellation of the May 10 graduation ceremony a day after more than 90 protesters were arrested on campus. The university said it will still host dozens of commencement events, including all the traditional individual school commencement ceremonies.

Tensions were already high after USC canceled a planned commencement speech by the school’s pro-Palestinian valedictorian, citing safety concerns.

“We understand that this is disappointing; however, we are adding many new activities and celebrations to make this commencement academically meaningful, memorable, and uniquely USC,” the university said in a statement Thursday.

The Los Angeles Police Department said 93 people were arrested Wednesday night during a campus protest for allegedly trespassing. One person was arrested on allegations of assault with a deadly weapon.

At Emerson College in Boston, 108 people were arrested overnight at an alleyway encampment. Video shows police first warning students in the alleyway to leave. Students linked arms to resist officers, who moved forcefully through the crowd and threw some protesters to the ground.

“As the night progressed, it got tenser and tenser. There were just more cops on all sides. It felt like we were being slowly pushed in and crushed,” said Ocean Muir, a sophomore.

Muir said police lifted her by her arms and legs and carried her away. Along with other students, Muir was charged Thursday with trespassing and disorderly conduct.

Emerson College leaders had warned students that the alley was a public right-of-way and city authorities had threatened to take action if the protesters didn’t leave. Emerson canceled classes Thursday, and Boston police said four officers suffered injuries that were not life-threatening during the confrontation.

The University of Texas at Austin campus was much calmer Thursday after 57 people were jailed and charged with criminal trespass a day earlier. University officials pulled back barricades and allowed demonstrators onto the main square beneath the school’s iconic clock tower.

Thursday’s gathering of students and some faculty protested both the war and Wednesday’s arrests, when state troopers in riot gear and on horseback bulldozed into protesters, forcing hundreds of students off the school’s main lawn.

At Emory University in Atlanta, local and state police swept in to dismantle a camp. Some officers carried semiautomatic weapons, and video shows officers using a stun gun on one protester whom they had pinned to the ground. The university said late Thursday in a statement that objects were thrown at officers and they deployed “chemical irritants” as a crowd control measure.

Jail records showed 22 people arrested by Emory police were charged with disorderly conduct. Emory said it had been notified that 28 people were arrested, including 20 members of the university community, and some had been released as of nighttime.

Protesters at Emory chanted slogans supporting Palestinians and opposing a public safety training center being built in Atlanta. The two movements are closely entwined in Atlanta, where there have been years of “Stop Cop City” activism against the center.

Protesters at Emory chanted slogans supporting Palestinians and opposing a public safety training center being built in Atlanta. The two movements are closely entwined in Atlanta, where there have been years of “Stop Cop City” activism against the center.

George Washington University said it would move its law school finals from a building next to the protest encampment to a new location because of the noise.

The current wave of protests was inspired by events at Columbia University, where police cleared an encampment and arrested more than 100 people last week, only for students to defiantly put up tents again, in an area where many are set to graduate in front of families in a few weeks.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the ability to embrace student voices and different perspectives was a hallmark of the nation’s growth but warned authorities wouldn’t tolerate hate, discrimination or threats of violence.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, the U.S. Education Department has launched civil rights investigations into dozens of universities and schools in response to complaints of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Among those under investigation are many colleges facing protests, including Harvard and Columbia.

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Divestment usually refers to selling shares in companies doing business with a given country. Divestment has long been a goal of a movement that seeks to limit what it considers hostile operations by Israel and an end to expanding what the United Nations has ruled are illegal settlements.

Now, college protesters are hoping to force their universities to divest to put financial pressure on companies doing business in Israel to meet those two objectives.

“The university should do something about what we’re asking for, about the genocide that’s happening in Gaza,” said Columbia University student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who is Palestinian, and noted that students have been pushing for Columbia to divest from Israel since 2002. “They should stop investing in this genocide.”

Israel launched its Gaza campaign soon after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror group that left 1,200 Israelis dead, according to officials, with an estimated 250 people taken hostage. The subsequent military response by Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Like many universities, Columbia owns shares of various companies as part of its financial operations and endowment. However, information on Columbia’s exact holdings was not immediately available, and it was not clear whether investment information published by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group leading the protests at the school, was accurate.

Whatever the case, while some of the shares Columbia owns may be directly held stock investments, other assets are likely held indirectly through investment instruments like mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that are designed to expose investors to a variety of firms.

And as students at Brown University acknowledged in a separate proposal targeting their school’s alleged Israel-tied investments, excluding specific investments from these indirect stock holding products “would be logistically challenging.”

In fact, they concluded that none of their school’s current direct investments appeared to be in individual companies violating its anti-Israel screening criteria.

Meanwhile, mutual fund and ETF holdings are constantly changing, the Brown students said.

The actual mechanics of divestment thus make it a more difficult undertaking than it may first appear, said Alison Taylor, clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“You get into questions of, ‘What percentage of a company’s business is actually tied to the activities in question?’” Taylor said.

Columbia’s Investment Management Company, which oversees the school’s market assets, does have an advisory committee on socially responsible investing.

This committee has pledged that it will screen against investing in firms that operate private prisons; derive significant revenues from thermal coal; and engage in tobacco manufacturing. It also has had a policy against investing in companies doing business in Sudan. 

So there is precedent for Columbia to limit its financial exposure to socially irresponsible firms, CUAD says. At present, Columbia’s investment in the companies that CUAD accuses of having ties to Israel makes it “complicit in genocide,” CUAD says. 

“By withdrawing from holdings that profit off of Israeli human rights violations, Columbia can invest in other, more worthwhile companies,” CUAD says in a December proposal submitted to the socially responsible investing committee calling for divestment.

A representative for Columbia’s responsible investment committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Columbia President Minouche Shafik has not specifically addressed the divestment calls in her statements on the campus turmoil. Her predecessor, Lee Bollinger, rejected calls for divestment in 2020, saying that a vote by students calling for one merely represented “particular views about a complex policy issue” and that there was “no consensus across the University community about” the issue.

Sylvia Burwell, the president of American University in Washington, D.C., said a student vote calling for divestment did not represent the school and would not be recognized.

“It is AU’s longstanding position to oppose boycotts, divestment from Israel, and other related actions known as BDS,” she said in a statement last week, referring to a Palestinian-led movement called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

“Such actions threaten academic freedom, the respectful free expression of ideas and views, and the values of inclusion and belonging that are central to our community.”

There is debate about the efficacy of divestment. Some evidence suggests that the buyers of shares being sold off as part of a divestment campaign can sometimes turn out to be worse actors than their original holders, NYU’s Taylor said.

She gave the example of Myanmar, where energy giant Chevron ending up selling off an asset to an entity that human rights groups said was even less accountable.

Divestment supporters often cite the successful campaign to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid regime as an example of what can be accomplished.

More:

Israel-Hamas War Apr 24

Police tangle with students in Texas and California as wave of campus protest against Gaza war grows

Israel-Hamas War Apr 23

Arrests follow barricades and encampments as college students nationwide protest Gaza war

But Taylor and others have said the groundswell of international and civil-society support that was needed to end apartheid has not materialized in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“It required everyone to be at the table,” she said. “South Africa is a  good story, but I don’t know whether we’re there yet.”

In a 2021 study of the impact of divestment, business school professors at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University found the practice had little impact.

Instead, they said, activists seeking to change a company’s behavior should instead hold on to their investments and exercise any rights of control they may have to change corporate policy.

The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that seeks to counter antisemitism, likewise concluded that shareholder resolutions have proven effective at changing corporate behavior, even as it criticized such efforts as “simplistic” and not constructive.

“Organizations file resolutions repeatedly until they get the change they want, often garnering more votes each year,” the ADL said in a 2022 article on its website. “Even if a proposal fails, sometimes just the fact that it is filed may be enough to make a company wary of doing business with Israel.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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• How the Columbia University protests sparked campus demonstrations across the country
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Dozens of students set up tents in University Yard — bordered on two sides by GW’s law school and by other GW buildings on the rest — to call on the university to divest financial ties with Israel, according to student newspaper The GW Hatchet.

“We’ve been very clear with our demands, and we’ve been very clear that we are here in solidarity with Gaza,” said one young woman protesting, who did not want to be identified. “We are here in solidarity with Palestine.”

She, and other protesters, say that solidarity is with the Palestinian people, not with Hamas. While any protest movement has extreme elements that diverge from the core cause, most of the protesters at GW say they want to keep the focus on why they’re in the encampment — the killings, and what they’re calling a genocide in Gaza.

“We buy into this university, we pay money into this university and we’re asking that the university take honest true stance in acknowledging their role in the ongoing genocide,” GW junior Mahmoud Beydoun said.

GW said it decided to request D.C. police assistance after multiple instructions from university police officers to relocate to another site on campus went unheeded.

The university also issued a statement saying protesters are trespassing and “any student who remains in University Yard may be placed on temporary suspension and administratively barred from campus.”

Protesters said they plan to keep going. Several students told News4 they were prepared to get arrested in order to stand up for what they believe in, and others said if they are removed, that would only embolden them in their protests.

D.C. police were present early Friday morning but have not attempted to clear the encampment, and the site was calm. Barricades have gone up around the encampment, and a contingent of police officers remain nearby.

Students celebrated the first 24 hours of the “Liberation Camp” protest.

“Missing class, it’s nothing compared to what the people in Gaza are going through right now,” said the anonymous protester. “It’s not about us, it’s not about our so-called sacrifice.”

On Thursday, hundreds attended a rally at University Yard, essentially the Foggy Bottom campus’ main quad, a mostly grassy area crisscrossed by walkways. Protesters were wearing keffiyehs, banging on drums and chanting, “Israel is a racist state” and “GW, you will see; Palestine will be free.” Some students sat between green and gray tents. Others stood along the sidewalk, chanting and holding signs.

“Everyone should be divesting from complicity in state crimes that are happening, that our taxes are paying for,” Georgetown University professor Mark Lance told News4.

Counterprotester Eric Hirshfield said he tried to enter the encampment “just to see what’s going on and make sure they’re not disenfranchising the rights of others.”

Leaders of the Jewish Student Association said they feel uncomfortable walking by the pro-Palestinian protests.

“A lot of people have family in Israel, and when there are slogans used that call for the destruction of where people live, it’s very intimidating,” co-President Alana Mondschein said.

“The campus climate, the protests, are just unproductive,” co-President Jacob Wise said. “There’s no effort to speak to other students who might disagree.”

Last fall they had to help replace posters of Israeli hostages at the Hillel building after someone tore them down. GW said it suspended the student involved.

The protest came just two days after students at American University held a walkout, protesting against the war in Gaza, and University of Maryland students staged a sit-in on the College Park campus.

Across the country, pro-Palestinian students are protesting over Israel’s war with Hamas as tensions increase with university officials. At Columbia University, students also encamped, while students at California State Polytechnic University barricaded inside two buildings.

At GW, video showed the words "Liberation Camp" written in chalk on the quad's brick sidewalk. Behind the encampment entrance, a sign on a tent reads, "No justice, no peace!"

A social media post showed what appeared to be a George Washington statue blindfolded and holding a Palestine flag.

The university sent an advisory to students about the First Amendment activity on the campus.

"The GW demonstration remains peaceful; however, there also are non-GW individuals on public property and the university is coordinating with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department," the advisory reads in part.

The advisory went on to say protestors may demonstrate until 7 p.m. Thursday. GW officials had asked them to move their tents to Anniversary Park due to another reservation in University Yard and final exams at the adjacent GW law school.

 This is a developing story. Stay with News4 for updates.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 22

Pro-Palestinian protests sweep US college campuses following mass arrests at Columbia

Israel-Hamas War Apr 23

‘We chose to be loud': Pro-Palestinian students demonstrate at American U, UMD

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Speaking to the camera in Hebrew, the 23-year-old, whose left arm is severed below his elbow, angrily asks the Israeli government to bring home the hostages, as the war in Gaza entered its 200th day Tuesday.

It was unclear when the video was recorded or the conditions under which he spoke, given that he is a Hamas captive. It is likewise not clear if he is still alive.

In a separate video shot Oct. 7, Goldberg-Polin was seen injured by a grenade blast before being loaded into a truck during the chaotic violence at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel near kibbutz Re’im.

He was among 250 people taken captive that day, according to Israeli officials, who said 1,200 people were killed as Hamas launched multipronged attacks on the country, sparking the war in the Gaza Strip. More than 34,000 people, including some 13,000 children, have been killed since Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza, according to the Palestinian enclave’s Health Ministry.

Wearing a dark red shirt and sitting on a gray plastic chair, he references his 200 days in captivity and a holiday. Although he does not specifically reference which holiday, Jewish people celebrated Passover on Monday night. He also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for having yet to strike a deal for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza.

Al-Qassam Brigades released the video amid months of sputtering negotiations between Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire and hostage release deal.

Goldberg-Polin said that the government should think of the hostages whom he described as living underground and in need of medical attention.

He added that 70 detainees had been killed in Israeli airstrikes.

NBC News could not independently verify this claim and Israeli officials have previously said about 130 people remain in captivity in Gaza, with 30 of them believed to be dead. As many as six of the hostages still in Gaza are U.S. citizens.

At the end of the 2-minute, 43-second video, Goldberg-Polin told his parents that he loved them and missed them. “I expect and hope to see you very soon after all this tragedy is over,” he said.

Israel has criticized videos like this as psychological warfare.

In a statement in response to the video, the Goldberg-Polin family said “Hersh’s cry is the collective cry of all the hostages — their time is rapidly running out. With each passing day, the fear of losing more innocent lives grows stronger.”

“This distressing video serves as an urgent call to take swift and decisive action to resolve this horrific humanitarian crisis and ensure the safe return of our loved ones,” the statement said.

A U.S. official confirmed that the administration received the video Monday and was in touch with Goldberg-Polin’s family. The FBI’s Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell is examining the video for any information about his captivity.

In an interview with NBC News earlier this month, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who has become a vocal advocate in the effort to free the remaining hostages in Gaza, talked about the uncertainty and the unbearable wait that families like hers have had to endure.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin said that her son had hidden in a roadside bomb shelter with 27 other people, but militants threw hand grenades and sprayed gunfire into the bunker, killing many and injuring others, including her son. Survivors and video from the Hamas GoPro camera that was shared with the family revealed that Goldberg-Polin had half of his left arm blown off before he was taken to Gaza. 

His last text messages to his parents after the attack started and before he was taken hostage were: “I love you” and “I’m sorry.”

Rachel Goldberg-Polin said she believed that Netanyahu’s government should compromise in order to stop the suffering in both Israel and Gaza, and sees her son and other hostages’ suffering, along with the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, as innocent people paying the price on both sides.

“I’m happy that I’m upset when I see that the other side is also in pain, that I’m not celebrating their pain because that would mean that I’m not human anymore,” she said. 

She added that she hoped there is a mother like her in Gaza who may be trying to help her son. 

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While tensions rose between police and student protesters at the University of Southern California earlier in the day, in the evening demonstrators started being detained without incident as helicopters buzzed overhead.

Police officers encircled the dwindling group, which sat in defiance of an earlier warning to disperse or be arrested. Beyond the police line, hundreds of onlookers watched as helicopters buzzed overhead. The school closed the campus as arrests began.

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While universities struggling to defuse unrest have quickly turned to law enforcement, the arrests in California were in sharp contrast to the chaos that ensued just hours earlier at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hundreds of local and state police — including some on horseback and holding batons — bulldozed into protesters, at one point sending some tumbling into the street. Officers pushed their way into the crowd and made 34 arrests at the behest of the university and Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

A photographer covering the demonstration for Fox 7 Austin was in the push-and-pull when an officer yanked him backward to the ground, video shows. The station confirmed that the photographer was arrested. A longtime Texas journalist was knocked down in the mayhem and could be seen bleeding before police helped him to emergency medical staff.

Dane Urquhart, a third-year Texas student, called the police presence and arrests an “overreaction,” adding that the protest “would have stayed peaceful” if the officers had not turned out in force.

“Because of all the arrests, I think a lot more (demonstrations) are going to happen,” Urquhart said.

Police left after hours of efforts to control the crowd, and about 300 demonstrators moved back in to sit on the grass and chant under the school’s iconic clock tower.

North of the University of Southern California, students at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, were barricaded inside a building for a third day, and the school shut down campus through the weekend and made classes virtual.

Harvard University in Massachusetts had sought to stay ahead of protests this week by limiting access to Harvard Yard and requiring permission for tents and tables. That didn’t stop protesters from setting up a camp with 14 tents Wednesday following a rally against the university’s suspension of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.

Students protesting the Israel-Hamas war are demanding schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies enabling its monthslong conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus, partly prompting a heavier hand from universities.

At New York University this week, police said 133 protesters were taken into custody, while over 40 protesters were arrested Monday at an encampment at Yale University.

Columbia University averted another confrontation between students and police earlier Wednesday. University President Minouche Shafik had set on Tuesday a midnight deadline to reach an agreement on clearing an encampment, but the school extended negotiations, saying it would continue talks with protesters for another 48 hours.

On a visit to campus, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, called on Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign “if she cannot bring order to this chaos.”

“If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard,” he said.

On Wednesday evening, a Columbia spokesperson said rumors that the university had threatened to bring in the National Guard were unfounded. “Our focus is to restore order, and if we can get there through dialogue, we will,” said Ben Chang, Columbia’s vice president for communications.

Columbia graduate student Omer Lubaton Granot, who put up pictures of Israeli hostages near the encampment, said he wanted to remind people that there were more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas.

“I see all the people behind me advocating for human rights,” he said. “I don’t think they have one word to say about the fact that people their age, that were kidnapped from their homes or from a music festival in Israel, are held by a terror organization.”

Harvard law student Tala Alfoqaha, who is Palestinian, said she and other protesters want more transparency from the university.

“My hope is that the Harvard administration listens to what its students have been asking for all year, which is divestment, disclosure and dropping any sort of charges against students,” she said.

Police first tried to clear the encampment at Columbia last week, when they arrested more than 100 protesters. The move backfired, acting as an inspiration for other students across the country to set up similar encampments and motivating protesters at Columbia to regroup.

On Wednesday about 60 tents remained at the Columbia encampment, which appeared calm. Security remained tight around campus, with identification required and police setting up metal barricades.

Columbia said it had agreed with protest representatives that only students would remain at the encampment and they would make it welcoming, banning discriminatory or harassing language.

On the University of Minnesota campus, a few dozen students rallied a day after nine protesters were arrested when police took down an encampment in front of the library. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was among the demonstrators arrested at Columbia last week, attended a protest later in the day.

A group of more than 80 professors and assistant professors signed a letter Wednesday calling on the university’s president and other administrators to drop any charges and to allow future encampments without what they described as police retaliation.

They wrote that they were “horrified that the administration would permit such a clear violation of our students’ rights to freely speak out against genocide and ongoing occupation of Palestine.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on U.S. college campuses in a video statement released Wednesday, saying the response of several university presidents has been “shameful” and calling on state, local and federal officials to intervene.

___

Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists in various locations including Joey Cappelletti, Will Weissert, Larry Lage, Steve LeBlanc, Dave Collins, Jim Salter, Haven Daley, Jesse Bedayn, John Antczak, Julie Walker and Joseph Krauss.

Earlier Tuesday, students at American University participated in a walkout, protesting against the war in Gaza. At the University of Maryland, students staged a sit-in on campus. They were making their voices heard — and drawing controversy as university leaders struggle to draw the line between students’ First Amendment rights and making sure everyone on campus feels safe.

Some students say they felt intimidated but still participated.

“I don’t have a lot to lose,” American University senior Qudsia Saeed said. “People’s lives are being lost. And in comparison, this is nothing. I don’t think that I want that fear to get the best of me right now.”

AU students were also demonstrating against the university’s response to a student government resolution demanding the university divest from Israel. AU’s president said the resolution will not be implemented.

Students have also been banned from indoor demonstrations on campus.

“When we’re accepted into universities, such as American University, they want leaders on its campus,” said Arusa Islam, junior vice president for AU’s student government. “And when we as leaders protest and do acts like this, they can’t stand it. They can’t stand to see ourselves stand up for all the things happening in the world and in our country.”

At the University of Maryland, pro-Palestinian students staged a sit-in on campus. They’re also calling for their university to divest from Israel and said they plan to continue their demonstrations until their demands are met.

Hershel Barnstein, president of Jewish Voice for Peace, said he’s concerned about “how the claim of antisemitism is being weaponized to shut down conversation about Israel and to silence all criticism of Israel.”

Student Omar Sabra, with Students for Justice in Palestine, says he’s from Lebanon and wants to stand with others against the war.

“It really hurts just seeing the world silent, so we chose to be loud and outspoken and stand for what’s right,” Sabra said.

Tents are being set up at UMD for Saturday’s Maryland Day, and demonstrators plan to be there for that event as well.

Both are part of intensifying demonstrations over Israel’s war with Hamas by university students across the country demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies that are enabling its months long conflict. Dozens have been arrested on charges of trespassing or disorderly conduct.

Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik in a statement Tuesday set a midnight deadline to reach an agreement with students to clear the encampment, or “we will have to consider alternative options.”

That deadline passed without news of an agreement. Videos show some protesters taking down their tents while others doubled down in speeches. Rumors spread online that the deadline had been pushed to the morning, but the university declined to comment on whether that was true. The heightened tension arrived the night before U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s trip to Columbia to visit with Jewish students and address antisemitism on college campuses.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 22

Pro-Palestinian protests sweep US college campuses following mass arrests at Columbia

Israel-Hamas War Apr 22

Columbia to hold classes virtually as Jewish leaders warn of safety amid tensions over pro-Palestinian protests

Across the country, protesters at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, some 300 miles (480 kilometers) north of San Francisco, started using furniture, tents, chains and zip ties to block the building’s entrances Monday evening.

“We are not afraid of you!” the protesters chanted before officers in riot gear pushed into them at the building’s entrance, video shows. Student Peyton McKinzie said she was walking on campus Monday when she saw police grabbing one woman by the hair, and another student having their head bandaged for an injury.

“I think a lot of students are in shock about it,” she told The Associated Press.

Three students have been arrested, according to a statement from Cal Poly Humboldt, which shutdown the campus until Wednesday. An unknown number of students had occupied a second campus building Tuesday.

The upwelling of demonstrations has left universities struggling to balance campus safety with free speech rights. Many long tolerated the protests, which largely demanded that schools condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza and divest from companies that sell weapons to Israel.

Now, universities are doling out more heavy-handed discipline, citing safety concerns as some Jewish students say criticism of Israel has veered into antisemitism.

Protests had been bubbling for months but kicked into a higher gear after more than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had camped out on Columbia’s upper Manhattan campus were arrested Thursday.

By late Monday at New York University, police said 133 protesters were taken into custody and all had been released with summonses to appear in court on disorderly conduct charges.

In Connecticut, police arrested 60 protesters — including 47 students — at Yale, after they refused to leave an encampment on a plaza at the center of campus.

Yale President Peter Salovey said protesters had declined an offer to end the demonstration and meet with trustees. After several warnings, school officials determined “the situation was no longer safe,” so police cleared the encampment and made arrests.

In the Midwest on Tuesday, a demonstration at the center of the University of Michigan campus had grown to nearly 40 tents, and nine anti-war protesters at the University of Minnesota were arrested after police took down an encampment in front of the library. Hundreds rallied to the Minnesota campus in the afternoon to demand their release.

Harvard University in Massachusetts has tried to stay a step ahead of protests by locking most gates into its famed Harvard Yard and limiting access to those with school identification. The school has also posted signs that warn against setting up tents or tables on campus without permission.

Literature Ph.D. student Christian Deleon said he understood why the Harvard administration may be trying to avoid protests but said there still has to be a place for students to express what they think.

“We should all be able to use these kinds of spaces to protest, to make our voices heard,” he said.

Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said college leaders face extremely tough decisions because they have a responsibility to ensure people can express their views, even when others find them offensive, while protecting students from threats and intimidation.

The New York Civil Liberties Union cautioned universities against being too quick to call in law enforcement in a statement Tuesday.

“Officials should not conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism or use hate incidents as a pretext to silence political views they oppose,” said Donna Lieberman, the group’s executive director.

Leo Auerbach, a student at the University of Michigan, said the differing stances on the war hadn’t led to his feeling unsafe on campus but he has been fearful of the “hateful rhetoric and antisemitic sentiment being echoed.”

“If we’re trying to create an inclusive community on campus, there needs to be constructive dialogue between groups,” Auerbach said. “And right now, there’s no dialogue that is occurring.”

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, physics senior Hannah Didehbani said protesters were inspired by those at Columbia.

“Right now there are several professors on campus who are getting direct research funding from Israel’s ministry of defense,” she said. “We’ve been calling for MIT to cut those research ties.”

Protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, which had an encampment of about 30 tents Tuesday, were also inspired by Columbia’s demonstrators, “who we consider to be the heart of the student movement,” said law student Malak Afaneh.

Campus protests began after Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel, when militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. During the ensuing war, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and noncombatants but says at least two-thirds of the dead are children and women.

Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire. Associated Press writers Will Weissert in Triangle, Virginia; Larry Lage in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

The various actions followed the arrest last week of more than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had camped out on Columbia’s green, as schools struggle with where to draw the line between allowing free expression while maintaining a safe and inclusive campus.

In addition to the demonstrations at the Ivy League schools, pro-Palestinian encampments have sprouted up on other campuses, including at the University of Michigan, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a statement on Instagram on Monday, New York University officials warned protesters to clear the plaza by 4 p.m. or face consequences. Mass arrests began around 8:30 p.m.

The protests have pitted students against one another, with pro-Palestinian students demanding that their schools condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza and divest from companies that sell weapons to Israel. Some Jewish students, meanwhile, say much of the criticism of Israel has veered into antisemitism and made them feel unsafe, and they point out that Hamas is still holding hostages taken during the group’s Oct. 7 invasion.

Tensions remained high Monday at Columbia in New York City, where the campus gates were locked to anyone without a school ID and where protests broke out both on campus and outside.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina who was visiting Columbia with three other Jewish members of Congress, told reporters after meeting with students from the Jewish Law Students Association that there was “an enormous encampment of people” who had taken up about a third of the green.

“We saw signs indicating that Israel should be destroyed,” she said after leaving the Morningside Heights campus.

A woman inside the campus gates led about two dozen protesters on the street outside in a chant of, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” — a charged phrase that can mean vastly different things to different groups. Meanwhile, a small group of pro-Israel counter demonstrators protested nearby.

University President Minouche Shafik said in a message to the school community Monday that she was “deeply saddened” by what was happening on campus.

“To deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps, I am announcing that all classes will be held virtually on Monday,” Shafik wrote, noting that students who don’t live on campus should stay away.

Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots football team and funded the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life across from Columbia’s campus, said he was suspending donations to the university.

“I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken,” he said in a statement.

Protests have roiled many college campuses since Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel, when militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. During the ensuing war, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and non-combatants but says at least two-thirds of the dead are children and women.

Prahlad Iyengar, an MIT graduate student studying electrical engineering, was among about two dozen students who set up a tent encampment on the school’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus Sunday evening. They are calling for a cease-fire and are protesting what they describe as MIT’s “complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he said.

“MIT has not even called for a cease-fire, and that’s a demand we have for sure,” Iyengar said.

He also said MIT has been sending out confusing rules about protests.

“We’re out here to demonstrate that we reserve the right to protest. It’s an essential part of living on a college campus,” Iyengar said.

On Sunday, Elie Buechler, a rabbi for the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative at Columbia, sent a WhatsApp message to nearly 300 Jewish students recommending they go home until it’s safer for them on campus.

The latest developments came ahead of the Monday evening start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Nicholas Baum, a 19-year-old Jewish freshman who lives in a Jewish theological seminary building two blocks from Columbia’s campus, said protesters over the weekend were “calling for Hamas to blow away Tel Aviv and Israel.” He said some of the protesters shouting antisemitic slurs were not students.

Israel-Hamas War

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“Jews are scared at Columbia. It’s as simple as that. There’s been so much vilification of Zionism, and it has spilled over into the vilification of Judaism,” he said.

The protest encampment sprung up at Columbia on Wednesday, the same day that Shafik faced bruising criticism at a congressional hearing from Republicans who said she hadn’t done enough to fight antisemitism. Two other Ivy League presidents resigned months ago following widely criticized testimony they gave to the same committee.

In her statement Monday, Shafik said the Middle East conflict is terrible and that she understands that many are experiencing deep moral distress.

“But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view,” Shafik wrote.

Over the coming days, a working group of deans, school administrators and faculty will try to find a resolution to the university crisis, noted Shafik, who didn’t say when in-person classes would resume.

U.S. House Republicans from New York urged Shafik to resign, saying in a letter Monday that she had failed to provide a safe learning environment in recent days as “anarchy has engulfed the campus.”

In Massachusetts, a sign said Harvard Yard was closed to the public Monday. It said structures, including tents and tables, were only allowed into the yard with prior permission. “Students violating these policies are subject to disciplinary action,” the sign said. Security guards were checking people for school IDs.

At Yale, police officers arrested about 45 protesters and charged them with misdemeanor trespassing, said Officer Christian Bruckhart, a New Haven police spokesperson. All were being released on promises to appear in court later, he said.

Protesters set up tents on Beinecke Plaza on Friday and demonstrated over the weekend, calling on Yale to end any investments in defense companies that do business with Israel.

Nadine Cubeisy, a Yale student and one of the protest’s organizers, said it was disturbing that “this university that I’m going to, that I contribute to and that my friends give money to is using that money to fund violence.”

In a statement to the campus community on Sunday, Yale President Peter Salovey said university officials had spoken to the student protesters multiple times about the school’s policies and guidelines, including those regarding speech and allowing access to campus spaces.

School officials said they spoke with protesters over several hours and gave them until the end of the weekend to leave Beinecke Plaza. The said they again warned protesters Monday morning and told them that they could face arrest and discipline, including suspension, before police moved in.

A large group of demonstrators regathered after Monday’s arrests at Yale and blocked a street near campus, said Bruckhart.

Monday’s events led to the arrest of 60 people who refused to leave Yale’s campus, 47 of whom were Yale students, police said. Those arrested have been charged with criminal trespass in the first degree, which is a misdemeanor.

There were no reports of any violence or injuries.

Last week, the University of Southern California took the unusual step of canceling a planned commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, who had publicly supported Palestinians. The university cited security concerns in a decision that was praised by some pro-Israel groups but criticized by free-speech advocates.

Several students at Columbia and its sister school, Barnard College, said they were suspended for taking part in last week’s protests, including Barnard student Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva’s resignation could set the stage for more fallout from Israel’s top security brass over Hamas’ attack, when militants blasted through Israel’s border defenses, rampaged through Israeli communities unchallenged for hours and killed 1,200 people, most civilians, while taking roughly 250 hostages into Gaza. That attack set off the war against Hamas in Gaza, now in its seventh month.

“The intelligence directorate under my command did not live up to the task we were entrusted with. I carry that black day with me ever since, day after day, night after night. I will carry the horrible pain of the war with me forever,” Haliva wrote in his resignation letter, which was provided by the military.

Shortly after the war, Haliva had publicly said that he shouldered blame for not preventing the assault as the head of the military department responsible for providing the government and the military with intelligence warnings and daily alerts.

The military said in the statement that the military chief of staff accepted Haliva’s request to resign and thanked him for his 38 years of service.

Haliva, as well as other military and security leaders, were widely expected to resign in response to the glaring failures that led up to Oct. 7 and the scale of its ferocity.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 21

A Palestinian baby in Gaza is born an orphan in an urgent cesarean section after an Israeli strike

Israel-Hamas War Apr 19

Soldiers who lost limbs in Gaza fighting are finding healing on Israel's amputee soccer team

But the timing of the resignations has been unclear because Israel is still fighting Hamas in Gaza and battling the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the north. Tensions with Iran are also at a high following attacks between the two enemies. Some military experts have said resignations at a time when Israel is engaged on multiple fronts is irresponsible and could be interpreted as a sign of weakness.

While Haliva and others have accepted blame for failing to stop the attack, others have stopped short, most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said he will answer tough questions about his role but has not outright acknowledged direct responsibility for allowing the attack to unfold. He has also not indicated that he will step down, although a growing protest movement is demanding elections be held soon.

The Hamas attack, which came on a Jewish holiday, caught Israel and its vaunted security establishment entirely off guard. Israelis’ sense of faith in their military — seen by most Jews as one of the country’s most trustworthy institutions — was shattered in the face of Hamas’ onslaught. The resignation could help restore some of that trust.

The attack set off the devastating war that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local health officials, at least two-thirds of them children and women. It has devastated Gaza’s two largest cities, and driven 80% of the territory’s population to flee to other parts of the besieged coastal enclave. The war has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe that has drawn warnings of imminent famine.

The attack also sent shock waves through the region. Tensions have rocked the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as cities and towns within Israel itself.

On Monday, Israeli police said that a car had slammed into pedestrians in Jerusalem, wounding three lightly, and security camera video showed two men exiting the car with a rifle before the fleeing the scene. Police later said they arrested the two men.

The protest and encampment on campus has drawn attention to the right of free speech and the rights of students to feel safe from violence, with a campus rabbi recommending Jewish students return home for their own safety, according to NBC News.

Early Monday, Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik said classes would be held virtually Monday, and said school leaders would be coming together to discuss a way to bring an end to “this crisis.”

In a statement to the university community, Shafik said she was “saddened” by the events on campus, and denounced antisemitic language, and intimidating and harassing behavior.

“The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days. These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas,” she said. “We need a reset.”

Shafik’s announcement followed mounting calls for action.

In a letter shared on social media Sunday, Chabad at Columbia said students have had offensive rhetoric hurled at them, including being told to “go back to Poland” and “stop killing children.” 

White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement Sunday that protesters in and around Columbia cross the line if they say violence should befall Jewish students. 

“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous — they have absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States of America,” he said. 

“Echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable,” Bates continued, referring to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, where 1,200 were killed.

Protesters have decried Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has displaced over 75% of the estimated 2.3 million people in the enclave and killed over 34,000 people there, according to Gaza health officials. They have also called on Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel.

Sunday night, one of the groups at the center of campus protests, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, released a statement on social media platform X seeking to distance its participants from unlawful agitators and imagery that would cast the movement to end attacks on civilians in Gaza as one of violence.

The group called some of those getting attention for threats and aggression “inflammatory individuals who do not represent us,” and said its members “have been misidentified by a politically motivated mob.”

“We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry,” the statement said.

Safety concerns

In a letter to Jewish students earlier Sunday, rabbi Elie Buechler of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, recommended they return home and stay there, saying it was clear the university and city police “cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.” Buechler declined requests for an interview. 

The Columbia Jewish Alumni Association on Sunday sent a letter to Shafik noting the rabbi’s concerns and claiming that the environment on campus has been hostile for Jewish students, including those it claims have been “openly threatened and harassed.”

Alleging lax enforcement, the group urged Columbia to “enforce the university rules with regard to protests and harassment and restore order and safety on campus.”

Student Nicholas Baum, a freshman, said he’s weighing the rabbi’s invitation to leave.

“I feel disturbed but I feel it is completely indicative of the horrible disturbances that Jews on campus have been feeling,” he said. “As a Jew, I no longer feel welcome on campus. I no longer feel safe on campus.”

At the same time, he joined a counterargument gaining volume: Staying put is a statement of strength. “It would only appease campus protesters who call supporters of Israel Zionists who are not welcome at Columbia,” Baum said.

Columbia senior Sonya Pozansky said protests on campus have been transformed from political statements to “incitement to violence and Jew hatred.”

Columbia/Barnard Hillel said in a post on social media platform X that it doesn’t believe Jewish students should have to leave, but the university and city should do more to protect students.

It said in a letter Sunday night, it said Columbia “must put an end to the on-campus protests that violate the University’s events policies. Off-campus protests need to be moved if the protestors will not end their harassment of students.” 

Columbia on Sunday responded to concerns with a plan to beef-up security. It includes the hiring of 111 additional security personnel, improved ID checks, extra security during Passover, which begins Monday, and heightened security around the perimeter of campus, the university’s office of the chief operating officer said in a letter to the campus community.

Columbia said through a spokesperson earlier Sunday that students have a right to protest “but they are not allowed to disrupt campus life or harass and intimidate fellow students and members of our community.”

“We are acting on concerns we are hearing from our Jewish students and are providing additional support and resources to ensure that our community remains safe,” the spokesperson said. 

Arrests on campus

On Thursday, 113 people were arrested after Shafik sent a letter to New York police requesting its help to break up the encampment that had been set up on campus in support of Gaza. 

Shafik said in the letter to police that the group was violating university rules and that the encampment “and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” In a news conference about the arrests, police described those arrested as peaceful, and said they offered no resistance. 

Columbia student Maryam Alwan, who helped organize the pro-Palestinian protest and was suspended and arrested, told MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin, “It feels like it’s part of a repressive campaign against pro-Palestine advocacy that has been going on for months now.” 

She added, “We are being criminalized on our own campus.”

Also arrested was Isra Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who said she was suspended from Barnard College. Hirsi said the encampment has been community-centered, with students taking meals and praying together.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who grilled Shafik at a congressional hearing last week over antisemitism on campus, said Sunday that Shafik’s response to the rhetoric has been ineffective, and called on the university president to resign.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who has been unwaveringly pro-Israel, slammed the protests on Columbia’s campus and said he agreed with the White House, calling the protests “antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous.” He also called on Shafik to “do your job or resign.” 

Video shared on social media captured a protester Saturday holding a sign that said “Al-Qassam’s next targets,” referring to Hamas’ military wing. An arrow on the sign pointed up to counter-protesters waving Israeli flags. New York Mayor Eric Adams described the sign in a statement Sunday and said the display, which he characterized as antisemitic, had him “horrified and disgusted.” He also described chants of “we don’t want no zionists here” as “hate speech.” 

Adams said police would enforce the law where it could, but in many cases law enforcement is limited because Columbia exists on private property.

“Hate has no place in our city, and I have instructed the NYPD to investigate any violation of law that is reported,” Adams said in a statement Sunday. “Rest assured, the NYPD will not hesitate to arrest anyone who is found to be breaking the law.”

Universities protest in solidarity

Columbia is one of a growing number of American universities to erupt in discord amid the Israel-Hamas war.

A protest encampment has cropped up at the New School in Manhattan in solidarity with pro-Palestinian voices at Columbia. The institution on Sunday called the encampment “unauthorized,” but said it was planning on meeting with students to “resolve the situation.”

Following a week of protests at Yale, some of its students established a 24-tent encampment in New Haven, Connecticut, in solidarity with Columbia’s protesters over the weekend.

The Yale protesters want the private university to divest from criminal defense contractors as a way of reducing warfare against people in Gaza.

Boston-area universities Tufts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Emerson hosted protest encampments over the weekend in solidarity with Columbia protesters, organizers said.

The University of Southern California in Los Angeles was criticized last week after it canceled the speech of a valedictorian whose social media account had a link to a document expressing support for Palestinians in Gaza. USC said it made the decision based on concerns over security and possible disruption.

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Their home was hit by an Israeli airstrike shortly before midnight Saturday. Until that moment, the family was like so many other Palestinians trying to shelter from the war in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah.

Sabreen’s father was killed. Her 4-year-old sister was killed. Her mother was killed.

But emergency responders learned that her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, was 30 weeks pregnant. In a rush at the Kuwaiti hospital where the bodies were taken, medical workers performed an emergency cesarean section.

Little Sabreen was near death herself, fighting to breathe. Her tiny body lay in the recovery position on a small piece of carpet as medical workers gently pumped air into her open mouth. A gloved hand tapped at her chest.

She survived.

On Sunday, in the hours after the airstrike, she whimpered and wriggled inside an incubator at the nearby Emirati hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. She wore a diaper too big for her and her identity was scrawled in pen on a piece of tape around her chest: “The martyr Sabreen al-Sakani’s baby.”

“We can say there is some progress in her health condition, but the situation is still at risk,” said Dr. Mohammad Salameh, head of the unit. “This child should have been in the mother’s womb at this time, but she was deprived of this right.”

He described her as a premature orphan girl.

But she is not alone.

“Welcome to her. She is the daughter of my dear son. I will take care of her. She is my love, my soul. She is a memory of her father. I will take care of her,” said Ahalam al-Kurdi, her paternal grandmother. She clutched her chest and rocked with grief.

At least two-thirds of the more than 34,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since this war began have been children and women, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Colleges & Universities Apr 19

USC cancels commencement speakers amid criticism over decision to stop valedictorian's speech

The other Israeli airstrike in Rafah overnight killed 17 children and two women from an extended family.

Not everyone is immediately recovered after such attacks.

“My son was also with them. My son became body parts and they have not found him yet. They do not recognize him,” said Mirvat al-Sakani, Sabreen’s maternal grandmother. “They have nothing to do with anything. Why are they targeting them? We don’t know why, how? We do not know.”

On Sunday, the survivors buried the dead. Children in bloodied wraps were placed in body bags and into the dusty ground as families wailed.

Little boys watched and tried to keep their footing at the edge of a grave.

“When I woke up,” the 29-year-old said, “I felt I was going to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair.”

Then Binyamin learned about a chance to be “normal” again: Israel’s national amputee soccer team.

The team, which includes two Israeli soldiers who lost limbs fighting in the war with Hamas, has offered all three a chance to heal from life-altering wounds suffered during the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza. It heads to France in June for the European Amputee Football Championships. Some 16 teams, mostly from Europe, will compete.

“It’s the best thing in my life,” said 1st Sgt. Omer Glikstal of the team’s twice-weekly practices at a stadium in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. The 20-year-old soldier from Haifa regularly played soccer until his life was turned upside-down when a rocket-propelled grenade shattered his left foot during a battle in Gaza in November.

“It’s a very different game than I used to play, but in the end, it’s the same,” he said.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 7

Half a year into the war in Gaza, here's a look at the conflict by the numbers

Dozens of Israelis lost limbs during the Hamas attacks that killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and the war that followed. Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, home to a major rehabilitation center, says it alone has treated about 60 amputees.

Israel’s Defense Ministry says 1,573 soldiers have been wounded since Israel began its ground offensive in late October, in which troops have engaged in close combat with Hamas militants. The military did not have specific statistics on amputees but said some 320 soldiers were critically wounded.

The Israeli athletes and others who lost limbs have benefited from a world-class medical system that has decades of experience treating young people injured in wars and conflict.

In Gaza, unknown numbers of Palestinians have also lost limbs in a war that has claimed nearly 34,000 lives, according to Gaza health officials. Gaza’s health system has been overwhelmed by the war, and doctors and patients say they often need to choose between amputation or death. Before the war, Gaza also had a fledgling team of amputee soccer players wounded in previous conflicts with Israel.

Shaked Bitton, an Israeli army division commander, lost his right leg when he was shot by a Hamas sniper with a .50-caliber round — the type that can blast through concrete — near the Jabaliya refugee camp in late October. “I heard two shots. I fell down. I looked back,” the 21-year-old soldier said, “and I saw my leg.”

Bitton thought his life was over — he had never even met an amputee before — until he was visited in the hospital by others who had lost limbs and successfully resumed their lives.

Among them was Zach Shichrur, founder of Israel’s national amputee soccer team. Severely injured when a bus ran over his foot at age 8, he knew what these men were going through, and he offered them hope.

“There is nothing greater than to go out and compete at the international level when you have the Israeli flag on your chest. Most of us, if not all, could not have even imagined something like this,” said Shichrur, 36, an attorney and the team’s captain.

Since its founding five years ago, the Israeli team has met with growing success, placing third in the Nations League in Belgium in October. That qualified it to compete in the European championship in June.

Amputee soccer teams have six fielder players who are missing lower limbs; they play on crutches and without prosthetics. Each team has a goalkeeper with a missing upper extremity. The pitch is smaller than standard.

At team practices, the Israeli players are undeterred by the absence of an arm or a leg — whether from an accident, a war injury or a birth defect.

“We all have something in common. We’ve been through a lot of hard and difficult times. It unites us,” said Aviran Ohana, a cybersecurity expert whose right leg is shorter than his left due to a birth defect, and who has played with the team for two years.

On a recent April evening, the team started its warm-up with sprints around the pitch, the men speeding forward propelled by one leg, steadied by their crutches.

A game against able-bodied teenagers followed. Benyamin, dripping with sweat, kicked the ball with his left leg as the coach shouted from the sidelines: “Forward! Forward!” Every goal was celebrated.

Sir Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish neurologist who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in Britain, is credited with pioneering competitive sports as a form of rehabilitation. Guttmann, who organized the first competition for wheelchair athletes on the opening day of the 1948 London Olympic Games, is considered the father of the Paralympic Games, and his legacy has enhanced the lives of thousands of handicapped athletes.

In Israel today, the amputee soccer team offers the players the excitement of competition — and the healing powers of sport, said Michal Nechama, the team’s physical therapist.

“They need it for their soul,” she said. “It gives them joy, pride. That extra thing that you can’t give in a hospital.”

Dan Oxenburg’s Israeli flag and American flag were removed from his home in the Mount High neighborhood of Woodbridge about 5 a.m. Saturday.

Security video shows a person in a hooded sweatshirt pulling the large flag with determination, finally yanking it free from the pole. The flags and poles were found not far away, the flags torn and the poles broken.

Oxenburg’s first Israeli flag was stolen Dec. 25. Security video showed two people involved.

“I have an Israeli friend,” Oxenburg said. “He’s a best friend from high school, so it’s in support of him, his community. I know the family very well. It’s in support of him. Also, other people that I know as well. Family members. Things like that.”

Oxenburg called police after the first theft.

“First time we reported it, they said. ‘Oh, they said what on the video? Oh, we’re going to send the officer out and make it a hate crime,’” he said.

Oxenburg, a businessman and former member of the U.S. military, said the time he’s spent in countries with less freedom makes him want to ask the vandals if they fully comprehend the message sent by their crime. It also makes him determined.

“Look, if I had a Palestinian flag up there and somebody ripped it down, I’d be having the same conversation, because nobody’s going to shut me down just because they don’t like what I put up.”

Prince William County police say the second incident is an active investigation.

The Israeli strike was limited and officials were assessing the effectiveness and the damage caused, a source familiar with the situation told NBC News.

“A lot will depend on how much damage was done inside of Iran,” former CIA Director John Brennan said on MSNBC.

“What CIA is doing right now is trying to determine exactly what that damage is, and trying to then see how the Iranians are going to react,” Brennan added.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces declined to comment on the reported strike.

Iranian state media and officials described a small number of explosions, which they said resulted from Iran’s air defenses firing at suspicious objects over the city of Isfahan.

“Important facilities in the Isfahan province, especially nuclear facilities, are completely safe and no accidents have been reported,” Press TV said, citing officials.

The Tasnim News Agency, which is associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, showed video from Isfahan where cars were driving around and people were getting coffee, NBC News reported.

“Everything is safe and sound. Nothing is going on,” he said.

In down playing the attack, Iran appears to indicate it has no plans for retaliation – a response that appeared gauged towards averting region-wide war.

Israel vowed to respond to Iran’s unprecedented weekend attack, leaving the region bracing for further escalation after months of fighting in Gaza. Allies have urged Israel to hold back on any response to the attack that could spiral.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for “maximum restraint” to prevent wider war. He condemned Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel with around 300 drones and missiles and said it was a “serious escalation.”

“One miscalculation, one miscommunication, one mistake could lead to the unthinkable: a full-scale regional conflict that would be devastating for all involved and for the rest of the world,” Guterres said yesterday.

Israeli officials had notified U.S. officials on Thursday that a response was coming. However, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to NBC News that the U.S. was not involved in the Israeli strike on Iran Friday.

The U.S. embassy in Israel said in an “abundance of caution” it was restricting personal travel of its employees and their families a few hours after the strike reportedly took place. The restrictions are on personal travel outside the areas of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Be’er Sheva, NBC News reported.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that there is no damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities after the Israeli strike on the country.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the agency, “continues to call for extreme restraint from everybody,” the IAEA said on social media platform X.

“IAEA is monitoring the situation very closely,” the agency said. Iranian state media also reported no damage to nuclear facilities in Isfahan and said they were “in complete safety.”

Before Israel struck, Iran’s foreign minister warned Israel that any use of force in response to his country’s recent drone and missile attacks will be “decisive” and “make the regime regret its actions.”

This is a developing story

The uncertainty has caused anguish among the families of those held in Gaza and undermined international efforts to negotiate a cease-fire deal and the release of at least some of the hostages, the officials told NBC News.

A proposed cease-fire formula calls for Hamas to free 40 hostages who are women, children or sick and elderly men, and in return, Israel would release possibly hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. But Hamas so far has been unable to confirm it has identified 40 hostages who meet those criteria, and that has bogged down the negotiations, U.S., Israeli and Western officials said.

In November, more than 100 hostages were released as part of a four-day pause in the fighting in Gaza. Israel says more than 130 hostages remain, and about a quarter of those are believed dead.

Far fewer hostages may be alive than is publicly known, but it is difficult to say for certain, given there has been limited visibility into the locations and conditions of some of the hostages, U.S. officials said. 

Asked whether there was a firm estimate of how many hostages remained alive, a former senior Israeli official said: “Not at all. No one reliable has this information. It’s all speculation.”

U.S. officials accused Hamas of making demands that it knows are unobtainable.

“Hamas’ refusal to accept a hostage-cease-fire deal shows their disregard for the lives of the Palestinian people,” a senior Biden administration official said Wednesday. “They started this war and seem to be perfectly fine with this conflict continuing.”

Israel-Hamas War Apr 7

Half a year into the war in Gaza, here's a look at the conflict by the numbers

Israel-Hamas War Apr 8

Top UN court opens hearings in case accusing Germany of facilitating Israel's Gaza conflict

An Israeli official said, “Hamas is dragging its feet, is not interested in a deal and continues to hope for a regional escalation, which is why the negotiations remain stalled.”

Hamas said in a statement Saturday it was prepared to sign on to a “serious and true” deal but renewed its demand for a permanent cease-fire and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops.

According to Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, whose country has acted as an intermediary for the hostage-cease-fire talks along with Egypt and the U.S., the talks have hit a “stumbling block.”

“We are passing through a delicate phase with some stumbling,” he said at a news conference Wednesday, without elaborating. “We are trying as much as possible to address this stumbling block and to move forward.”

Last week, a Hamas official, Basem Naim, said in an interview that a ceasefire is essential to identifying the number of hostages.

“Part of negotiations is to reach a ceasefire agreement to have enough time and safety to collect final and more precise data about the captured Israelis, because they are in different palaces by different groups, some of them are under the rubble killed with our own people, and we negotiate to get heavy equipments for this purpose,” Naim said.

A relative of one of the several Americans believed to be held in Gaza said families are in the dark about the fates of their loved ones: “For 185 days, we have received no verification of life of any of these hostages — absent a limited number of videos released early on by the Hamas terrorists.”

The family member, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their loved one’s fate at risk, said that Israeli security has shown Americans who have traveled to Israel and met with Israel’s security forces that they know where many of the hostages are but that the captives are constantly being moved. 

“Every day they are there, we also know that they could die of starvation, illness, injury or murder,” the relative said.

The Biden administration is working under the assumption that five U.S. hostages are still alive and unaccounted for, a U.S. official said. But Washington has better visibility into the locations and conditions of some hostages than others, making it difficult to say with any certainty that all five remain alive. 

Beyond the five, the U.S. believes Hamas is holding several more bodies of Americans believed to have been taken into Gaza after they were killed in the militants’ Oct. 7 assault on Israel or shortly thereafter.

Israeli troops have searched hospitals, tunnels and even graveyards in Gaza for hostages or their remains. In February, an Israeli raid in Rafah in southern Gaza rescued two hostages.

Aviva Siegel, who spent 51 days as a hostage in Gaza until she was released as part of the November deal, said her experience in captivity was a terrifying nightmare.

“I was treated like I’m nothing. I didn’t have any human rights. We weren’t allowed to talk. We weren’t allowed to even stand,” Siegel told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell last week.

“They used to starve us and eat in front of us. They used to drink water, and we begged them for water. They used to sometimes bring us just a little bit of water and say that’s the water until tomorrow at 5 o’clock. So we used to have one sip every couple of hours, each of us.”

Her husband, Keith, of North Carolina, remains captive.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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The Vatican released photos of the encounter, showing relatives of several of the hostages sitting in a semicircle in front of Francis in his private library in the Apostolic Palace. Each one held a poster with a photo and the name of a loved one.

It was the second time Francis has met with relatives of the hostages. On Nov. 22, he met with a delegation of Israelis, and then separately a delegation of Palestinians whose relatives had been harmed during the long Mideast conflict.

Francis has called for the immediate release of the hostages and a cease-fire in Gaza, and for humanitarian aid to urgently reach desperate Palestinians.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 8

Top UN court opens hearings in case accusing Germany of facilitating Israel's Gaza conflict

Israel-Hamas War Apr 5

Israel fires 2 senior officers over strike on aid convoy, says charity workers misidentified as militants

Ashley Waxman Bakshi, relative of hostages Agah and Li-Yah Berger, said the audience was “very powerful” for the families.

“He was very clear about his solidarity for the release of the hostages,” Waxman Bakshi told reporters afterward.

Nicaragua argues that by giving Israel political, financial and military support and by defunding the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, “Germany is facilitating the commission of genocide and, in any case has failed in its obligation to do everything possible to prevent the commission of genocide.”

Opening Nicaragua’s case at the International Court of Justice, the country’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Carlos Jose Arguello Gomez, told the 16-judge panel that “Germany is failing to honor its own obligation to prevent genocide or to ensure respect of international humanitarian law.”

While the case brought by Nicaragua centers on Germany, it indirectly takes aim at Israel’s military campaign in Gaza following the deadly Oct. 7 attacks when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Its toll doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, but it has said women and children make up the majority of the dead.

Israel strongly denies that its assault amounts to genocidal acts, saying it is acting in self defense. Israeli legal adviser Tal Becker told judges at the court earlier this year that the country is fighting a “war it did not start and did not want.”

Israel-Hamas War Apr 7

Israel is pulling some troops from southern Gaza. Now the plan is to clear Hamas from Rafah

Germany rejects the case brought by Nicaragua.

“Germany has breached neither the Genocide Convention nor international humanitarian law, and we will set this out in detail before the International Court of Justice,” German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sebastian Fischer told reporters in Berlin on Friday.

Nicaragua has asked the court to hand down preliminary orders known as provisional measures, including that Germany “immediately suspend its aid to Israel, in particular its military assistance including military equipment in so far as this aid may be used in the violation of the Genocide Convention” and international law.

The court will likely take weeks to deliver its preliminary decision, and Nicaragua’s case will probably drag on for years.

Monday’s hearing at the world court comes amid growing calls for allies to stop supplying arms to Israel as its six-month campaign continues to lay waste to Gaza.

The offensive has displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s population. Food is scarce, the U.N. says famine is approaching and few Palestinians have been able to leave the besieged territory.

The case “will likely further galvanize opposition to any support for Israel,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law and international peace studies at the University of Notre Dame.

On Friday, the U.N.’s top human rights body called on countries to stop selling or shipping weapons to Israel. The United States and Germany opposed the resolution.

Also, hundreds of British jurists, including three retired Supreme Court judges, have called on their government to suspend arms sales to Israel after three U.K. citizens were among seven aid workers from the charity World Central Kitchen killed in Israeli strikes. Israel said the attack on the aid workers was a mistake caused by “misidentification.”

Germany has for decades been a staunch supporter of Israel. Days after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Chancellor Olaf Scholz explained why: “Our own history, our responsibility arising from the Holocaust, makes it a perpetual task for us to stand up for the security of the state of Israel,” he told lawmakers.

Berlin, however, has gradually shifted its tone as civilian casualties in Gaza have soared, becoming increasingly critical of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and speaking out against a ground offensive in Rafah.

Nicaragua’s government, which has historical links with Palestinian organizations dating back to their support for the 1979 Sandinista revolution, was itself accused earlier this year by U.N.-backed human rights experts of systematic human rights abuses “tantamount to crimes against humanity.” The government of President Daniel Ortega fiercely rejected the allegations.

In January, the ICJ imposed provisional measures ordering Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and acts of genocide in Gaza. The orders came in a case filed by South Africa accusing Israel of breaching the Genocide Convention.

The court last week ordered Israel to take measures to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including opening more land crossings to allow food, water, fuel and other supplies into the war-ravaged enclave.

___

Associated Press writer Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

But defense officials said troops were merely regrouping as the army prepares to move into Hamas’ last stronghold, Rafah. “The war in Gaza continues, and we are far from stopping,” said the military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi.

Local broadcaster Channel 13 TV reported that Israel was preparing to begin evacuating Rafah within one week and the process could take several months.

Still, the withdrawal was a milestone as Israel and Hamas marked six months of fighting. Military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity under army policy, said a “significant force” remained in Gaza with “freedom of action” to continue targeted operations including in Khan Younis, a Hamas stronghold and hometown of the group’s leader, Yehya Sinwar.

AP video in Khan Younis on Sunday showed some people returning to a landscape marked by shattered multistory buildings and climbing over debris to explore crumbled, dusty remains. Cars were overturned and charred.

US & World

Israel-Hamas War Apr 7

Half a year into the war in Gaza, here's a look at the conflict by the numbers

Israel-Hamas War Apr 5

Israel fires 2 senior officers over strike on aid convoy, says charity workers misidentified as militants

Israel for weeks has vowed a ground offensive in nearby Rafah. But the city shelters some 1.4 million people — more than half of Gaza’s population. The prospect of an offensive has raised global alarm, including from Israel’s top ally, the U.S., which has demanded to see a credible plan to protect civilians. Allowing people to return to nearby Khan Younis could relieve some pressure on Rafah.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby repeated the U.S. opposition to a Rafah offensive and told ABC the U.S. believes that the partial Israeli withdrawal “is really just about rest and refit for these troops that have been on the ground for four months and not necessarily, that we can tell, indicative of some coming new operation for these troops.

Israel’s military quietly drew down troops in devastated northern Gaza earlier in the war. But it has continued to carry out airstrikes and raids in areas where it says Hamas has resurfaced, including Gaza’s largest hospital, Shifa, leaving what the head of the World Health Organization called “an empty shell.”

The six-month mark has been met with growing frustration in Israel, where anti-government protests have swelled and anger is mounting over what some see as government inaction to help free about 130 remaining hostages, about a quarter of whom Israel says are dead. Hamas-led militants took about 250 captives when they crossed from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Several thousand protesters called for a “hostage deal now” at a rally outside the Knesset in Jerusalem, organized by hostages’ families. In southern Israel, weeping relatives gathered at the site of a music festival where more than 300 people were killed on Oct. 7.

Negotiations in pursuit of a cease-fire in exchange for the hostages’ release were expected to resume in Cairo on Sunday. An Israeli delegation led by the head of the Mossad intelligence agency was going to Cairo, according to an Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.

“Israel is prepared for a deal; Israel is not prepared to surrender,” Netanyahu said, and asserted that international pressure on Israel “is only causing Hamas to harden its positions.”

Pressure rose for action now.

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“This doesn’t seem a war against terror. This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel. This really, at this point, seems it’s a war against humanity itself,” Chef Jose Andres told ABC, days after an Israeli airstrike killed seven of his World Central Kitchen colleagues in Gaza. Aid deliveries on a crucial new sea route to the territory were suspended.

“Humanity has been all but abandoned” in Gaza, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement marking six months of war.

The U.N. and partners now warn of “imminent famine” for more than 1 million people in Gaza as humanitarian workers urge Israel to loosen restrictions on the delivery of aid overland, the only way to meet soaring needs as some Palestinians forage for weeds to eat. Thousands of aid trucks have been waiting to enter Gaza.

“It’s a slow-motion massacre of people to subject them to the kind of deprivation of food and water that they have been subjected to for the last six months,” Doctors Without Borders USA executive director Avril Benoit told CBS.

Mothers who have given birth in Gaza since the war began are especially vulnerable.

The Health Ministry in Gaza said the bodies of 38 people killed in Israel’s bombardment had been brought to the territory’s remaining functional hospitals in the past 24 hours. It said 33,175 have been killed since the war began. It doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants but says two-thirds of the dead are children and women.

Israel’s military continued to suffer losses, including in Khan Younis, where the military said four soldiers were killed. Over 600 Israeli soldiers have been killed since Oct. 7, including 260 in the Gaza ground operation, according to Israel’s government.

Concerns about a wider regional conflict continued as a top Iranian military adviser warned Israel that none of its embassies were safe following last week’s strike in Damascus — blamed on Israel — that killed two elite Iranian generals and flattened an Iranian consular building.

“None of the embassies of the (Israeli) regime are safe anymore,” Gen. Rahim Safavi, a military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim agency.

Israel has not directly acknowledged its involvement. Netanyahu said Israel was prepared for any response. “Whoever harms us or plans to harm us, we will harm them,” he said.

Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.

Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 cross-border attack, Israel has pummeled the Gaza Strip, displacing the vast majority of the population and causing many to flee to Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah. Food is scarce, the U.N. says famine is approaching and few Palestinians have been able to leave the besieged territory.

Meanwhile, Hamas continues to fire rockets into Israel from Gaza, and Hezbollah and other militant groups do so from southern Lebanon, prompting tit-for-tat fighting that has displaced thousands of civilians on both sides of Israel’s borders. Hamas is still holding hostages taken during the Oct. 7 raid, as well as the bodies of some who died in captivity. And cease-fire talks stretch on with no end in sight.

Here’s a look at the conflict by the numbers, which mainly come from the Israeli military and prime minister’s office, the Gaza health ministry, the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Associated Press reporting.

TOTAL DEATHS

Palestinians killed in Gaza: 33,137

Children killed in Gaza: more than 13,000

People killed in Israel: about 1,200

Palestinians killed in the West Bank: 456

People killed in Lebanon: at least 343

CIVILIANS

Civilians killed in Gaza: Gaza’s health ministry doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count, but it says women and children have made up around two-thirds of those killed.

Civilians and foreigners killed in Israel on Oct. 7: 780

First responders killed in Israel on Oct. 7: 62

Civilians killed since Oct. 7 in Israel along its northern border: 9

Civilians killed in Lebanon: At least 50

Aid workers killed in Gaza: 224, including at least 30 killed in the line of duty

Health workers killed in Gaza: 484

Journalists killed in Gaza: At least 95

SOLDIERS/MILITANTS

Militants killed by Israel in Gaza: more than 13,000, according to the Israeli military

Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza ground offensive: 256

Israeli soldiers killed on Oct. 7: 314

Israeli soldiers killed along Israel’s northern front since Oct. 7: 11

Militants killed in Lebanon: About 280, mostly from Hezbollah

DESTRUCTION/HUMANITARIAN SITUATION IN GAZA

Percentage of buildings likely damaged/destroyed: 55.9%

Percentage of homes likely damaged: more than 60%

Percentage of school buildings damaged: 90%

Hospitals that are functioning: 10/36

Palestinian civilians facing “catastrophic” food insecurity, according to the U.N.: 1.1 million

Percentage of northern Gaza children under age 2 who are acutely malnourished: 31%

Percentage of students out of school: 100%

Mosques damaged: 227

Churches damaged: 3

INJURIES

Palestinians injured in Gaza since Oct. 7: 75,815

Palestinians injured in the West Bank since Oct. 7: 4,750

Israeli soldiers injured since the beginning of the ground offensive: 1,549

Israeli civilians injured on Oct. 7: 4,834

DISPLACEMENT

Palestinians currently displaced in Gaza: 1.7 million (70% of the population)

Israelis currently displaced from border communities: 90,000 (under 1% of the population)

HOSTAGES/PRISONERS

Hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7: 253

Hostages freed: 123

Hostages who are alive or haven’t been confirmed dead: 98, including two who were taken before Oct. 7

Hostages confirmed to have died in Hamas captivity: 36, including two taken before Oct. 7

Palestinian prisoners freed during a weeklong pause in fighting: 240

The findings of a retired general’s investigation into the Monday killings marked an embarrassing admission by Israel, which faces growing accusations from key allies, including the U.S., of not doing enough to protect Gaza’s civilians from its war with Hamas.

The findings are likely to renew skepticism over the Israeli military’s decision-making. Palestinians, aid groups and human rights organizations have repeatedly accused Israeli forces of firing recklessly at civilians throughout the conflict — a charge Israel denies.

“It’s a tragedy,” the military’s spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told reporters. “It’s a serious event that we are responsible for and it shouldn’t have happened and we will make sure that it won’t happen again.”

With pressure mounting on Israel to hold itself accountable, Hagari and other officials late Thursday shared with reporters the results of the military’s uncommonly speedy and detailed investigation.

It was unclear whether the punishments and the apology would calm an international outcry over the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers or reassure international aid groups that it was safe to resume operations in Gaza, where nearly a third of the population is on the brink of starvation.

The food charity called the investigation and disciplinary actions “important steps forward” — but noted the probe itself found that the army didn’t follow its own protocols.

“Without systemic change, there will be more military failures, more apologies and more grieving families,” the statement read, repeating a call for an independent investigation.

According to what spokespeople said were the Israeli army’s rules, targets must be visually identified as threats for multiple reasons before they can be hit. But the investigation determined that a colonel had authorized the series of deadly drone strikes on the convoy based on one major’s observation — from grainy drone-camera footage — that someone in the convoy was armed. That observation turned out to be untrue, military officials said.

The army said the colonel and the major were dismissed, while three other officers were reprimanded. It said the results of its investigation were turned over to the military’s advocate general, who will decide whether the officers or anyone else involved in the killings should receive further punishment or be prosecuted.

“The strike on the aid vehicles is a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification, errors in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the Standard Operating Procedures,” the army send in a statement when it released the findings.

The killings were condemned by Israel’s closest allies and renewed criticism of Israel’s conduct in the nearly 6-month-old war with Hamas.

In an interview Friday morning on NBC’s “TODAY” show, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Israel has to be “more precise” and “careful” in how it uses the weapons provided by the U.S.

“If we don’t see meaningful changes in their policy, we will have to make meaningful changes in our policy,” Kirby said, adding that Washington would continue to support Israel generally, especially in light of the threat from Iran.

The aid workers were three British citizens, a Polish citizen, an Australian and a Canadian American dual citizen, all of whom worked for World Central Kitchen, the international charity founded by celebrity chef José Andrés. Their Palestinian driver also was killed.

The investigation found two major areas of wrongdoing.

It faulted officers for failing to read messages alerting troops that cars, not aid trucks, would carry workers from the charity away from the warehouse where aid was distributed. As a result, the cars that were targeted were misidentified as transporting militants.

The army also faulted a major who identified the strike target and a colonel who approved the strike for acting with insufficient information.

The army said the order was given after one of the passengers inside a car was identified as a gunman. It said troops became suspicious because a gunman had been seen on the roof of one of the delivery trucks on the way to the warehouse. The army showed reporters footage of the gunman firing his weapon while riding atop one of the trucks.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 4

Chef José Andrés says Israel targeted World Central Kitchen aid convoy ‘systematically, car by car'

Israel-Hamas War Apr 3

World Central Kitchen identifies the 7 aid workers killed by Israeli airstrike in Gaza

The army showed reporters footage of the gunman firing his weapon while riding atop one of the trucks — video that The Associated Press could not independently verify.

After the aid was dropped off at a warehouse, an officer believed he had spotted a gunman in one of the cars. The passenger, it turned out, was not carrying a weapon — the military said it’s possible he was just carrying a bag.

The army said it initially hit one car. As people scrambled away into a second car, it hit that vehicle as well. It did the same thing when survivors scrambled into a third car. Army officials claimed that drone operators could not see that the cars were marked with the words “World Central Kitchen” because it was nighttime.

The army could not say exactly where the communication about the convoy’s plans had broken down.

The army declined to answer questions about whether similar violations of rules of engagement have taken place during the war — in which Palestinians, aid workers and international rights groups have repeatedly accused the army of recklessly striking civilians.

The investigation was headed by Yoav Har-Even, a retired general.

The seven who were killed were distributing food that had been brought into Gaza through a newly established maritime corridor. World Central Kitchen said it had coordinated its movements with the military, and that the vehicles were marked with the organization’s logo.

“It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by” the Israeli military, Andrés said on Wednesday.

More than 220 humanitarian workers have been killed in the conflict, according to the U.N.

“Let’s be very clear. This is tragic, but it is not an anomaly,” Scott Paul, of the humanitarian group Oxfam, said Thursday in a briefing with other relief organizations before the results of Israel’s investigation were released. “The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”

The 47-member-country Human Rights Council voted 28-6 in favor of the resolution, with 13 abstentions.

The sweeping measure, which takes aim at an array of Israeli actions such as impeding access to water and limiting shipments of humanitarian aid into Palestinian areas, also calls on U.N.-backed independent investigators to report on shipments of weapons, munitions and “dual use” items — for both civilian and military purposes — that could be used by Israel against Palestinians. It is not binding.

Western countries were divided, with the U.S., Germany and others opposing the resolution, several abstaining and some European countries voting in favor.

Israel — at times joined by the United States — has regularly and roundly criticized the council for its alleged anti-Israel bias. The council has approved far more resolutions against Israel for its actions toward Palestinians over the years than against any other country.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 4

Chef José Andrés says Israel targeted World Central Kitchen aid convoy ‘systematically, car by car'

news Apr 4

Former Trump national security advisor John Bolton says Gaza war is still ‘in the very early stages'

The council is wrapping up its first session of the year, which began on Feb. 26, with action on more than 40 resolutions on subjects as diverse as the rights of the child; the environment and human rights; genocide prevention; and rights situations in countries like Sudan, Belarus and North Korea.

The resolution comes amid a growing focus on weapons shipments to Israel — notably by its strongest backer, the United States — as Israel continues its military campaign in Gaza that has led to the killings of nearly 33,000 Palestinians that began in response to the attacks in Israel by armed militants on Oct. 7.

In a sign of Washington’s growing impatience with Israel’s handling of the military campaign, U.S. President Joe Biden issued a stark warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that future U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza war depends on the swift implementation of new steps to protect civilians and aid workers.

That was the first time that Biden has threatened to rethink his backing if Israel doesn’t change its tactics and allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Biden and Netanyahu’s roughly 30-minute call just days after Israeli airstrikes killed seven food aid workers in Gaza added a new layer of complication to the leaders’ increasingly strained relationship. Biden’s message marks a sharp change in his administration’s steadfast support for Israel’s war efforts, with the U.S. leader for the first time threatening to rethink his backing if Israel doesn’t change its tactics and allow much more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The White House would not specify what could change about U.S. policy, but it could include altering military sales to Israel and America’s diplomatic backup on the world stage. Administration officials said they expected the Israelis to make announcements on next steps within hours or days and that the U.S. would then assess whether the Israeli moves go far enough.

Netanyahu’s office said early Friday that his Security Cabinet has approved a series of “immediate steps” to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, including the reopening of a key crossing that was destroyed in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

Administration officials had said before that announcement that the U.S. would assess whether the Israeli moves go far enough.

Biden “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers,” the White House said in a statement following the leaders’ call. “He made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”

Biden also told Netanyahu that reaching an “immediate cease-fire” in exchange for the estimated 100 hostages that are still being held in Gaza was “essential” and urged Israel to reach such an accord “without delay,” according to the White House. Administration officials described the conversation as “direct” and “honest.”

Netanyahu’s office said the Erez crossing, which for years served as the only passenger terminal for people to move in and out of Gaza, would be temporarily reopened. It also said Israel would allow its Ashdod port to be used to process aid shipments bound for Gaza and allow increased Jordanian aid shipments through another land crossing. The announcement did not elaborate on quantities or types of items to be let in.

White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson welcomed the moves by Netanyahu, adding that the plan “must now be fully and rapidly implemented.”

“As the President said today on the call, U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these and other steps, including steps to protect innocent civilians and the safety of aid workers,” Watson said.

The leaders’ conversation comes as the World Central Kitchen, founded by restauranteur José Andrés to provide immediate food relief to disaster-stricken areas, called for an independent investigation into the Israeli strikes that killed seven of the group’s staff members, including an American citizen. The White House has said the U.S. has no plans to conduct its own investigation.

Separately, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Brussels that U.S. support would be curtailed if Israel doesn’t make significant adjustments to how it’s carrying out the war. “If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there will be changes in our policy,” he said.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby echoed the call for “tangible” and “concrete” changes to be taken by the Israelis beyond reiterating long stated calls for allowing additional aid to get into Gaza.

“If there’s no changes to their policy in their approaches, then there’s going to have to be changes to ours,” Kirby said. “There are things that need to be done. There are too many civilians being killed.”

The demands for Israel to bring the conflict to a swift close were increasing across the political spectrum, with former President Donald Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive nominee to face Biden this fall, saying Thursday that Israel was “absolutely losing the PR war” and calling for a resolution to the bloodshed.

More:

Israel-Hamas War Apr 4

Chef José Andrés says Israel targeted World Central Kitchen aid convoy ‘systematically, car by car'

Israel-Hamas War Apr 3

World Central Kitchen identifies the 7 aid workers killed by Israeli airstrike in Gaza

Israel-Hamas War Apr 2

What World Central Kitchen does and why the attack that killed 7 volunteers in Gaza matters

“Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people. And that’s a very simple statement,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “They have to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to — you have to get back to normalcy and peace.”

Biden and Netanyahu also discussed Iranian threats against Israel, Kirby said. Earlier this week, Iranian leaders vowed to hit back after an airstrike widely blamed on Israel destroyed Iran’s Consulate in Syria, killing 12 people, including two elite Iranian generals. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi said Wednesday the attack “will not remain without answer.”

Biden also renewed his concerns about Netanyahu’s plan to carry out an operation in the southern city of Rafah, where about 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, as Israel looks to eliminate Hamas following the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7 attack. Vice President Kamala Harris, Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan also joined the call.

Still, the Biden administration has proceeded apace with arms transfers and deliveries to Israel, many of which were approved years ago but had only been partially or not at all fulfilled. Just this week, on Monday, the Democratic administration’s “Daily List” of munitions transfers included the sale to Israel of more than 1,000 500-pound (225-kilograms) bombs and more than 1,000 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) bombs.

Officials said those transfers had been approved before the publication of the list on Monday — the day Israeli airstrikes hit the World Central Kitchen aid convoy — and that they fell below the threshold for new congressional notification. Also, they noted that the bombs are not for delivery to Israel until 2025.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon on Thursday said plans to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to help boost the flow of aid into the territory continue to move forward. Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said the pier will be on line by the end of the month or early May. Biden announced plans to build the floating pier during his State of the Union address last month.

Ryder said Israel has agreed to provide security on the shore as aid is transferred and distributed, but details are still being worked out.

Israel has acknowledged responsibility for the strikes on the World Central Kitchen workers but said the convoy was not targeted and their deaths were not intentional. The country continues to investigate the circumstances surrounding the killings.

Andrés harshly criticized the Israeli military for the strike, and his organization has paused its work in Gaza.

“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon,” he wrote on X. “No more innocent lives lost.”

The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 people hostage.

The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, is among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. Within two months, researchers say, the offensive already has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.

AP writers Matthew Lee in Brussels, Jill Colvin in New York and Lolita C. Baldor, Colleen Long and Chris Megerian contributed.

In a statement issued Thursday, the international food charity says it has asked Australia, Canada, Poland, the United States and the United Kingdom, whose citizens were killed, to join them in demanding “an independent, third-party investigation into these attacks.”

“We asked the Israeli government to immediately preserve all documents, communications, video and/or audio recordings, and any other materials potentially relevant to the April 1 strikes,” the statement said.

Israel says it carried out the strikes by mistake and that it has launched its own investigation into the attack.

The military carried out multiple strikes on a convoy of three cars, at least one of which was clearly marked with the charity’s logo. World Central Kitchen says it coordinated the team’s movements with the army, which was “aware of their itinerary, route and humanitarian mission.”

WCK founder and celebrity chef Jose Andrés accused Israel of deliberately attacking the aid convoy.

“They were targeted systematically, car by car,” he said in a video interview with Reuters Wednesday.

Israel-Hamas War Apr 3

World Central Kitchen identifies the 7 aid workers killed by Israeli airstrike in Gaza

Israel-Hamas War Apr 2

What World Central Kitchen does and why the attack that killed 7 volunteers in Gaza matters

Andrés, who at times appeared emotional discussing the loss of his friends, said after the first car was stuck, the aid team tried to escape to the second car. When that car was struck, the workers fled to the third which was also then hit with a strike.

“This was over a 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful logo that we are obviously very proud of,” he said. “It’s very clear who we are and what we do.”

The workers were delivering aid that had arrived by sea in a recently opened maritime corridor aimed at getting food to hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians in northern Gaza, which has been largely isolated by Israeli forces for months.

The attack interrupted those efforts, as World Central Kitchen and other charities suspended operations over the deteriorating security situation. The ships returned to Cyprus with an estimated 240 tons of undelivered humanitarian aid.

Wednesday night, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told his Israeli counterpart that the strikes strengthened U.S. concerns about Israel’s plans to expand its ground offensive and said that Israel must do more to protect the lives of civilians and aid workers in Gaza.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed nearly 33,000 Palestinians, the territory’s Health Ministry says. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its tally, but says women and children make up two-thirds of the dead. The United Nations says much of the population in northern Gaza is on the brink of starvation.

The war began on Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 people hostage.

Killed were three British nationals, an Australian, a Polish national, an American-Canadian dual citizen and a Palestinian. Some had traveled the world, participating in aid efforts in the aftermath of wars, earthquakes and wildfires.

“These are the heroes of World Central Kitchen,” WCK CEO Erin Gore wrote in a statement posted to the charity’s website. “These 7 beautiful souls were killed by the IDF in a strike as they were returning from a full day’s mission. Their smiles, laughter, and voices are forever embedded in our memories. And we have countless memories of them giving their best selves to the world. We are reeling from our loss. The world’s loss.”

Here’s some information on those who have been identified.

Jacob Flickinger, US-Canada

Jacob Flickinger, 33, was a 33-year-old dual citizen of the United States and Canada who worked with the World Central Kitchen’s relief team.

Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly condemned the IDF strikes on humanitarian personnel as “absolutely unacceptable” in a post on X, formerly Twitter, and said those responsible for Flinkinger’s and his colleague’s deaths must be held accountable.

Saif Issam Abu Taha, Palestinian

Saif Issam Abu Taha, 27, had worked for World Central Kitchen as a driver and translator since the beginning of the year, relatives said.

His brothers described him as a dedicated young man eager to help fellow Palestinians.

He’d also been a successful businessman who conducted trade with Ukraine, Egypt, China and others, brother Abdul Razzaq Abu Taha said. His work made him known on the Israeli side, his brother added, which helped in coordination and approval to assist the World Central Kitchen team in unloading the ship.

Saif had hoped to get married. “My mother was looking for a wife for him,” Abdul Razzaq Abu Taha said. “He was supposed to get married if the war didn’t happen.”

Saif and other workers were excited about unloading the food aid, desperately needed in Gaza. The last time Saif and his brother spoke, he said, they’d finished the job and he was heading home.

After hearing about the airstrikes, Abdul Razzaq Abu Taha said he tried to call to see whether Saif was OK.

After many attempts, he said, a stranger answered and told him, “I found this phone about 200 meters away from the car. All of the people inside are killed.”

Israel-Hamas War Apr 1

World Central Kitchen halts Gaza operations after 7 aid workers killed in Israeli airstrike

Israel-Hamas War Apr 2

What World Central Kitchen does and why the attack that killed 7 volunteers in Gaza matters

Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, Australia

Friends and family remembered Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, 43, as a brave, selfless woman whose care for others drew her across the globe. For the last five years, she’d worked for Washington-based World Central Kitchen, taking her to the U.S., Thailand and her native Australia.

“We mourn this fine Australian who has a record of helping out her fellow citizens, whether it be internationally or whether it be through the support that she gave during the bushfires that occurred during that Black Summer,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “She is someone who clearly was concerned about her fellow humanity.”

In a statement, relatives described Frankcom as an “outstanding human being” who was “killed doing the work she loves delivering food to the people of Gaza.”

She was born in Melbourne and earned a bachelor’s from the Swinburne University of Technology. For eight years, she worked for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the nation’s largest bank.

Frankcom’s social media highlighted visits to help those in need in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Romania and Haiti.

World Central Kitchen colleague Dora Weekley, who met Frankcom responding to Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas in 2019, described Frankcom as “larger than life.”

She recalled when Frankcom was invited to walk a Hollywood red carpet, for a documentary about World Central Kitchen that was nominated for an Emmy.

“I remember getting a picture of her in a dress, saying, ‘Hold onto this forever,’” Weekley told ABC. “Because usually I’m in sweats and runners, and I’m in Pakistan or Afghanistan or, you know, she could be anywhere, and never with her hair done or makeup done.

“She worked all hours, she gave everything, and she believed in helping people who were less fortunate.”

Damian Soból, Poland

Damian Soból, 36, was known as a cheerful, friendly and resourceful manager who quickly rose in World Central Kitchen’s ranks.

Hailing from the southeastern Polish city of Przemyśl and studying hospitality there, Soból had been on aid missions in Ukraine, Morocco, Turkey and, for the past six months, Gaza.

”He was a really extraordinary guy,” said Marta Wilczynska, of the Free Place Foundation, which cooperates with World Central Kitchen. “We were very proud of him.”

Wilczynska met Soból on the Polish side of the border with Ukraine, a few days after Russia’s February 2022 invasion. He spoke English well and was a translator, and as a skilled manager, he could organize work in any condition, she said.

“Always smiling, always so helpful, he loved this job. I felt I had a brother in him,” Wilczynska said.

Free Place Foundation President Mikolaj Rykowski said Soból was “the man for every task — he could overcome every difficulty.”

Posting on Facebook, Przemyśl Mayor Wojciech Bakun said of Soból’s death that there are “no words to describe how people who knew this fantastic young man feel now.”

John Champan, James Kirby and James Henderson, UK

The three British victims were military veterans providing security for the World Central Kitchen aid mission.

British media reported that Chapman, 57, and Kirby, 47, were former Royal Marines, while 33-year-old Henderson, known as Jim, was a British Army veteran.

The deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers threatened to set back efforts by the U.S. and other countries to open a maritime corridor for aid from Cyprus to help ease the desperate conditions in northern Gaza.

President Joe Biden issued an unusually blunt criticism of Israel by its closest ally, suggesting that the incident demonstrated that Israel was not doing enough to protect civilians.

“Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians,” he said, adding he was “outraged and heartbroken” by their killings.

“Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen,” he added. “The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties.”

Ships still laden with some 240 tons of aid from the charitable group turned back from Gaza just a day after arriving, according to Cyprus. Other humanitarian aid organizations also suspended operations in Gaza, saying it was too dangerous to offer help. Israel has allowed only a trickle of food and supplies into Gaza’s devastated north, where experts say famine is imminent.

The dead from Monday night’s strikes included three British citizens, Polish and Australia nationals, a Canadian-American dual national and a Palestinian. Those countries have been key backers of Israel’s nearly 6-month-old offensive in Gaza, and several of them denounced the killings.

Israel already faces growing isolation as international criticism of the Gaza assault has mounted. On the same day as the deadly airstrikes, Israel stirred more fears by apparently striking Iran’s consulate in Damascus and killing two Iranian generals. The government also moved to shut down a foreign media outlet — Qatari-owned Al Jazeera television.

The hit on the charity’s convoy also highlighted what critics have called Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and lack of regard for civilian casualties in Gaza.

Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, announced the results of a preliminary investigation early Wednesday.

“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification – at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” he said. He gave no further details. He said an independent body would conduct a “thorough investigation” that would be completed in the coming days.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier acknowledged the “unintended strike … on innocent people” and said officials would work to ensure it does not happen again.

World Central Kitchen said it had coordinated with the Israeli military over the movement of its cars. Three vehicles moving at large distances apart were hit in succession. They were left incinerated and mangled, indicating multiple targeted strikes.

At least one of the vehicles had the charity’s logo printed across its roof to make it identifiable from the air, and the ordnance punched a large hole through the roof. Footage showed the bodies at a hospital in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, several of them wearing protective gear with the charity’s logo.

Israeli TV said the initial military investigation found that the army identified the cars carrying World Central Kitchen’s workers arriving at its warehouse in Deir al-Balah and observed suspected militants nearby. Half an hour later, the vehicles were struck by the air force as they headed south. The reports said it was not clear who ordered the strikes or why.

Throughout the war, Israel has said it seeks to avoid civilian casualties and uses sophisticated intelligence to target Hamas and other militants. Israeli authorities blame them for civilian deaths because they operate in populated areas.

At the same time, Israel has also insisted that no target is off-limits. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck ambulances and vehicles carrying aid, as well as relief organization offices and U.N. shelters, claiming that armed fighters were in them.

Israeli forces have also shown a readiness to inflict widespread destruction on suspicion of a militant presence or out of tactical need. Homes with Palestinian families sheltering inside are leveled by strikes almost daily with no explanation of the intended target. Videos of strikes released by the military often show them hitting individuals without visible weapons, while identifying them as militants.

More than 32,900 Palestinians have been killed in the war, around two-thirds of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.

Celebrity chef José Andrés, who founded the World Central Kitchen charity, said he was “heartbroken” by the deaths of the staffers.

“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The U.S., Britain, Poland, Australia and Canada all called on Israel to give answers on the deaths. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant launched an investigation and ordered the opening of a joint situation room enabling coordination between the military and aid groups.

But anger among its allies could put new pressure on Israel.

The British government summoned Israel’s ambassador for a rebuke and called for an immediate humanitarian pause to allow more aid in and the release of hostages.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told Netanyahu that he was “appalled” by the workers’ deaths and described the situation in Gaza as “increasingly intolerable.”

A senior Canadian government official said there will be a joint formal diplomatic rebuke at the foreign ministry in Israel on Wednesday. The official also said a top official with Canada’s Global Affairs department made a formal representation to Israel ambassador’s to Canada on Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The deaths sent a further chill through U.N. agencies and other aid groups that have said for months that sending truck convoys around Gaza — particularly in the north — has been extremely difficult because of the military’s failure to either grant permission or ensure safe passage. Israel has barred UNRWA, the main U.N. agency in Gaza, from making deliveries to the north.

The U.S. and other countries have been working to set up the sea passage from Cyprus to get around the difficulties.

World Central Kitchen was key to the new route. It and the United Arab Emirates sent a pilot shipment last month. Their second delivery of around 400 tons of food and supplies arrived in three ships to Gaza hours before the strikes on the convoy.

Around 100 tons were unloaded before the charity suspended operations, and the rest was being taken back to Cyprus, Cypriot Foreign Ministry spokesman Theodoros Gotsis said.

Still, Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides said Tuesday that ship deliveries would continue.

Anera, a Washington-based aid group that has been operating in the Palestinian territories for decades, said that in the wake of the strikes it was taking the “unprecedented” step of pausing its own operations in Gaza, where it had been helping to provide around 150,000 meals daily.

“The escalating risks associated with aid delivery leave us with no choice,” it said in a statement.

Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said the strikes were “not an isolated incident.” The U.N. says more than 180 humanitarian workers have been killed in the war.

“This is nearly three times the death toll recorded in any single conflict in a year,” he said.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostage. Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive offensives in recent history.

Two other Israeli strikes late Monday killed at least 16 Palestinians, including eight children, in Rafah, where Israel has vowed to expand its ground operation. The city on the Egyptian border is now home to some 1.4 million Palestinians, most of whom have sought refuge from fighting elsewhere.

One strike hit a family home, killing 10 people, including five children, according to hospital records. Another hit a gathering near a mosque, killing at least six people, including three children.

___

Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland; Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia; Rob Gillies in Toronto; and Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus, contributed to this report.

Bryan Weaver, Adams Morgan-based activist and former advisory neighborhood commissioner, spoke with News4 about his friend Zomi Frankcom, one of the workers who died.

“Heartbroken about my dear friend, Zomi Frankcom, who was killed tonight in Palestine in an IDF bombing. Her selfless dedication to aiding civilians showcased her true compassion and activism,” Weaver wrote in a social media post. “I mourn the loss of a warrior for humanity. But I will raise her standard.”

Frankcom was an Australian citizen, born in Melbourne. But according to Weaver, she made and kept friends around the world.

“[She] was a pretty amazing person,” Weaver said. “And if you see any of the photos of her, she’s full of life. And that’s the thing. I think being surrounded by so much disaster and pain and grief, to have somebody that still looked at the world in positive aspect and thought that they could make a difference is, you know, a rare commodity.”

Weaver, an interim manager at Potter’s House, a nonprofit café and bookstore in Adams Morgan, met Frankcom several years ago during a mission in Guatemala.

“It’s just… I’m going to miss my phone calls, or text exchanges with her, or photos of her from wherever she’s ended up in the world at that moment,” Weaver said.

The death of Frankcom and six other workers for the U.S.-based World Central Kitchen sparked outrage from D.C. to Gaza and beyond. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged that Israeli forces are to blame and says the strike was unintentional.

World Central Kitchen says the group struck in the airstrike was traveling in a deconflicted zone, and they had coordinated their movements with the Israeli army.

The group was traveling in two armored cars bearing the World Central Kitchen logo and a third “soft-skin” vehicle, essentially meaning a vehicle without armor, according to the organization.

The convoy was hit by the Israeli air strike as it was leaving a warehouse, where the team had unloaded over 100 tons of humanitarian food aid.

World Central Kitchen founder and D.C. celebrity Chef Jose Andres issued a statement on social media.

“These are people… angels… I served alongside in Ukraine, Gaza, Turkey, Morocco, Bahamas, Indonesia,” the statmeent reads in part. “They are not faceless… they are not nameless. The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon.”

World Central Kitchen says, for now, they are pausing their work in the region. The Israeli army says they will perform a thorough review at the highest levels to understand how the deadly strike happened.

For now, friends and loved ones of the seven aid workers killed are left with questions and in mourning.

“It’s, you know, it’s a huge loss personally for me, but it’s a greater one, I think, for humanity,” Weaver said.

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An international relief organization that provides sustenance to both victims and first responders at humanitarian disasters around the world, the group was thrust unwillingly into a tragic spotlight Monday when seven of its aid workers operating in Gaza were killed by an Israeli airstrike.

The victims included a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, as well as team members from Poland, Britain and Australia, and a Palestinian driver.

Calling the victims “angels,” Spanish American celebrity chef and WCK founder José Andrés called on the Israeli government to “stop this indiscriminate killing.”

In the wake of the deadly attack, WCK suspended operations at the 68 “community kitchens” it had been operating in Gaza for the last six months. The group says it has provided more than 43 million meals to Palestinians during that time.

Prior to the deadly attack, WCK was one of the chief suppliers of food to embattled Gaza.

In a March 29 update, the U.S.-based nonprofit group said that it had dispatched 1,700 trucks packed with food and cooking equipment to its community kitchens and that more trucks laden with badly needed supplies were trickling into Gaza through the Rafah Crossing.

WCK said it had also enlisted the help of the Jordanian air force to drop food into Gaza, especially the remoter areas that the truck convoys cannot reach.

And just last month, WCK took the audacious step of building a jetty out of rubble to enable supply ships to deliver aid to Gaza from Cyprus.

The New York Times reported that the WCK did so after getting the OK from the Israeli military.

“WCK is not pushing a political agenda and we are not replacing any of the other organizations in Gaza, despite reporting and claims suggesting otherwise,” the organization insisted.

Monday was not the first time WCK workers have come under fire. Last year, four staffers were wounded when the kitchen they set up in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was hit by a Russian missile.

Founded in 2010, the charity’s credo is spelled out on its website:

“Food is essential to life every single day, all over the world — and it is more important than ever in a crisis. Not only is a thoughtful, freshly prepared meal one less thing someone has to worry about in the wake of a disaster, it is a reminder that you are not alone.”

Andrés and his wife, Patricia, put those words into action for the first time in 2010, in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Haiti that left thousands dead and tens of thousands more starving.

Working with local chefs and food providers, Andrés’ team set up kitchens across the ravaged country where they prepared and served Haitian “comfort food,” like black beans in a creamy sauce.

Since then, WCK has organized food relief operations in the wake of disasters — both human-made and natural — in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Zambia, Peru, Cuba, Uganda, the Bahamas, Cambodia as well as Ukraine.

WCK made its U.S. debut in August 2017 by working with the American Red Cross to provide thousands of meals to survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

The next month, WCK led some of the disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. And later that year, WCK was in Southern California providing food to firefighters and families displaced by the massive Thomas Fire.

During the pandemic, WCK also set up soup kitchens in New York City, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. 

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The deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers threatened to set back efforts by the U.S. and other countries to open a maritime corridor for aid from Cyprus to help ease the desperate conditions in northern Gaza.

Ships still laden with some 240 tons of aid from the charitable group turned back from Gaza just a day after arriving, according to Cyprus. Other humanitarian aid organizations also suspended operations in Gaza, saying it was too dangerous to offer help. Israel has allowed only a trickle of food and supplies into Gaza’s devastated north, where experts say famine is imminent.

The dead from Monday night’s strikes included three British citizens, Polish and Australia nationals, a Canadian-American dual national and a Palestinian. Those countries have been key backers of Israel’s nearly 6-month-old offensive in Gaza, and several of them denounced the killings.

Israel already faces growing isolation as international criticism of the Gaza assault has mounted. On the same day as the deadly airstrikes, Israel stirred more fears by apparently striking Iran’s consulate in Damascus and killing two Iranian generals. The government also moved to shut down a foreign media outlet — Qatari-owned Al Jazeera television.

The hit on the charity’s convoy also highlighted what critics have called Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and lack of regard for civilian casualties in Gaza.

Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, announced the results of a preliminary investigation early Wednesday.

“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification – at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” he said. He gave no further details. He said an independent body would conduct a “thorough investigation” that would be completed in the coming days.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier acknowledged the “unintended strike … on innocent people” and said officials would work to ensure it does not happen again.

World Central Kitchen said it had coordinated with the Israeli military over the movement of its cars. Three vehicles moving at large distances apart were hit in succession. They were left incinerated and mangled, indicating multiple targeted strikes.

At least one of the vehicles had the charity’s logo printed across its roof to make it identifiable from the air, and the ordnance punched a large hole through the roof. Footage showed the bodies at a hospital in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, several of them wearing protective gear with the charity’s logo.

Israeli TV said the initial military investigation found that the army identified the cars carrying World Central Kitchen’s workers arriving at its warehouse in Deir al-Balah and observed suspected militants nearby. Half an hour later, the vehicles were struck by the air force as they headed south. The reports said it was not clear who ordered the strikes or why.

Throughout the war, Israel has said it seeks to avoid civilian casualties and uses sophisticated intelligence to target Hamas and other militants. Israeli authorities blame them for civilian deaths because they operate in populated areas.

At the same time, Israel has also insisted that no target is off-limits. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck ambulances and vehicles carrying aid, as well as relief organization offices and U.N. shelters, claiming that armed fighters were in them.

Israeli forces have also shown a readiness to inflict widespread destruction on suspicion of a militant presence or out of tactical need. Homes with Palestinian families sheltering inside are leveled by strikes almost daily with no explanation of the intended target. Videos of strikes released by the military often show them hitting individuals without visible weapons, while identifying them as militants.

More than 32,900 Palestinians have been killed in the war, around two-thirds of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.

Celebrity chef José Andrés, who founded the World Central Kitchen charity, said he was “heartbroken” by the deaths of the staffers.

“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The U.S., Britain, Poland, Australia and Canada all called on Israel to give answers on the deaths. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant launched an investigation and ordered the opening of a joint situation room enabling coordination between the military and aid groups.

But anger among its allies could put new pressure on Israel.

The British government summoned Israel’s ambassador for a rebuke and called for an immediate humanitarian pause to allow more aid in and the release of hostages.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told Netanyahu that he was “appalled” by the workers’ deaths and described the situation in Gaza as “increasingly intolerable.”

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. was “outraged” to hear of the strikes. He said the Israeli military “must do much more” to avoid conflict and ensure the safety of aid convoys.

The deaths sent a further chill through U.N. agencies and other aid groups that have said for months that sending truck convoys around Gaza — particularly in the north — has been extremely difficult because of the military’s failure to either grant permission or ensure safe passage. Israel has barred UNRWA, the main U.N. agency in Gaza, from making deliveries to the north.

The U.S. and other countries have been working to set up the sea passage from Cyprus to get around the difficulties.

World Central Kitchen was key to the new route. It and the United Arab Emirates sent a pilot shipment last month. Their second delivery of around 400 tons of food and supplies arrived in three ships to Gaza hours before the strikes on the convoy.

Around 100 tons were unloaded before the charity suspended operations, and the rest was being taken back to Cyprus, Cypriot Foreign Ministry spokesman Theodoros Gotsis said.

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Still, Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides said Tuesday that ship deliveries would continue.

Anera, a Washington-based aid group that has been operating in the Palestinian territories for decades, said that in the wake of the strikes it was taking the “unprecedented” step of pausing its own operations in Gaza, where it had been helping to provide around 150,000 meals daily.

“The escalating risks associated with aid delivery leave us with no choice,” it said in a statement.

Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said the strikes were “not an isolated incident.” The U.N. says more than 180 humanitarian workers have been killed in the war.

“This is nearly three times the death toll recorded in any single conflict in a year,” he said.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostage. Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive offensives in recent history.

Two other Israeli strikes late Monday killed at least 16 Palestinians, including eight children, in Rafah, where Israel has vowed to expand its ground operation despite the presence of some 1.4 million Palestinians, most of whom have sought refuge from fighting elsewhere.

One strike hit a family home, killing 10 people, including five children, according to hospital records. Another hit a gathering near a mosque, killing at least six people, including three children.

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Since the war in Gaza began nearly six months ago, clashes have increased between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants based in Lebanon. Hamas, which rules Gaza and attacked Israel on Oct. 7, is also backed by Iran.

Israel, which rarely acknowledges strikes against Iranian targets, said it had no comment on the latest attack in Syria, although a military spokesman blamed Iran for a drone attack early Monday against a naval base in southern Israel.

Israel has grown increasingly impatient with the daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah, which have escalated in recent days, and warned of the possibility of a full-fledged war. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have also been launching long-range missiles toward Israel, including on Monday.

The airstrike in Syria killed Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who led the elite Quds Force in Lebanon and Syria until 2016, according to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It also killed Zahedi’s deputy, Gen Mohammad Hadi Hajriahimi, and five other officers.

A member of Hezbollah, Hussein Youssef, also was killed in the attack, a spokesperson for the militant group told The Associated Press. The spokesperson spoke on condition of anonymity in line with group’s rules; Hezbollah has not publicly announced the death.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, said two Syrians were killed in that attack.

Two police officers who guarded the consulate were among those wounded, and first responders were still searching for bodies under the rubble.

While Iran’s consular building was leveled in the attack, according to Syria’s state news agency, its main embassy building remained intact. Still, the Iranian ambassador’s residence was inside the consular building.

Iran’s ambassador, Hossein Akbari, vowed revenge for the strike “at the same magnitude and harshness.”

Hamas and Islamic Jihad — another Palestinian militant group backed by Iran — accused Israel of seeking to widen the conflict in Gaza.

Experts said there was no doubt that Iran would retaliate. The strike in Syria was a “major escalation,” Charles Lister, a Syria expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said on the social media platform X.

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Nasser Kanaani, called on other countries to condemn the strike.

Israel has carried out scores of Iranian-linked targets in Syria over the years, many of them believed to be aimed at disrupting arms transfers and other cooperation with Hezbollah. which has sent thousands of fighters to support Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces.

An Israeli airstrike in a Damascus neighborhood in December killed a longtime Iranian Revolutionary Guard adviser to Syria, Seyed Razi Mousavi.

A similar strike on a building in Damascus in January killed at least five Iranian advisers. Last week, an Iranian adviser was killed in airstrikes over the eastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour, near the Iraqi border.

The chief spokesman for Israel’s army, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said a Monday drone attack on a naval base in southern Israel was “directed by Iran” and caused no injuries.

Early on Tuesday, the Israeli military said some kind of weapon fired from Syria toward Israel crashed before reaching its intended target.