Israel launches major Gaza assault, shattering ceasefire
Israel has launched a major assault on Gaza, shattering the fragile two-month-old ceasefire between its forces and Hamas. Israeli air strikes across the territory early on Tuesday killed more than 200 Palestinians, Gaza’s Government Media Office said. The dead included at least 77 people in Khan Younis in southern Gaza and at least 20 people in Gaza City in the north, medical sources told Al Jazeera. Israel strikes also hit locations in central Deir el-Balah and Rafah in the south. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he ordered the military to take “strong action” against Hamas over its refusal to release captives taken from Israel or agree to offers to extend the ceasefire. “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement. The Israeli military said on Telegram that it was conducting “extensive strikes on terror targets” belonging to Hamas. Hamas, which governs Gaza, said it viewed Israel’s attacks as a unilateral cancellation of the ceasefire that began on January 19. Advertisement “Netanyahu and his extremist government are making a decision to overturn the ceasefire agreement, exposing prisoners in Gaza to an unknown fate,” the Palestinian group said in a statement. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) accused Israel of “deliberately sabotaging all efforts to reach a ceasefire”. “We affirm that what Netanyahu and his barbaric army failed to achieve in 15 months of crimes and bloodshed, they will not succeed in achieving again, thanks to the steadfastness of our oppressed people and the courage of our mujahideen in the fields of… resistance,” the group said, according to a statement shared with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Injured Palestinians are brought to the Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza on March 18, 2025 [Abdallah F.s. Alatta/Anadolu] Ahmed Abu Rizq, a teacher in Gaza, said he and his family woke up the sound of “Israeli strikes everywhere.” “We were frightened, our children were frightened. We had many calls from our relatives to check, to check [on] ourselves. And the ambulance started to run from one street to another,” Abu Rizq told Al Jazeera, adding that families started to arrive at the local hospital with the “remains of their children” in their hands. Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said that while Israel has accused Hamas of rejecting various proposals made by negotiators, talks had been stalled after Netanyahu refused to begin negotiations on phase two of the ceasefire deal on February 6. “Several Israeli analysts, several within the political opposition and several within Netanyahu’s own government said that this was the plan all along, a resumption of the fighting, to go back to full-scale war,” Salhut said. Advertisement “And in fact, there’s a new army chief of staff, one who said that 2025 is going to be a year of war – noting that Israel still has a lot of goals to accomplish when it comes to the Gaza Strip, meaning that they are in no way finished with their military action.” Hamas has released about three dozen captives in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners since the start of the ceasefire. Negotiations on the second phase of the deal, which would see the release of nearly 60 remaining captives and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire, had been at an impasse over Israel’s insistence that the first stage be extended until mid-April. Mouin Rabbani, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said it was unclear if the attacks marked a single offensive or “the beginning of a larger campaign”. “The most important element of which, from Israel’s perspective, was negotiations on the second phase leading to a durable ceasefire and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip,” Rabbani told Al Jazeera. “And that is something that the Israeli government has repeatedly said it would not do.” “In other words, [Israel] signed an agreement, knowing that it would refuse to implement it,” he said. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Israel had consulted with United States President Donald Trump about the strikes. “As President Trump has made clear, Hamas, the Houthis, Iran – all those who seek to terrorise not just Israel but the US – will see a price to pay, and all hell will break loose,” Leavitt told Fox News. Advertisement Adblock test (Why?)
Two people killed in Israeli air strike on Deraa in southern Syria
The Israeli army said it had targeted military sites in southern Syria that posed a ‘threat to the State of Israel’. At least two people were killed and 19 others wounded after an Israeli air strike on the outskirts of the southern Syrian province of Deraa, the Syrian state news agency, SANA, has reported. The Israeli military confirmed the strikes Monday night and said it was targeting military sites that contained weapons and vehicles that belonged to the forces of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Israeli army “is currently striking military targets in southern Syria, including command centres and military sites containing weapons and military vehicles belonging to the old Syrian regime,” an army statement said, adding that the “military assets” posed “a threat to the State of Israel”. The army said it “will not allow the presence of military threats in southern Syria and will operate against it”. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Israel targeted a military site previously used by al-Assad’s forces but now used by the army of Syria’s new government. However, this is not the first time Israel has targeted the southern Deraa province, near the Jordanian border. Earlier this month, it targeted several Syrian military assets in the same area. Advertisement The Israeli military said at the time that the military sites, which had included bases and radar systems, posed a threat that the strike was meant to “eliminate”. Reporting from Damascus, Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said four Israeli air strikes targeted Deraa on Monday night. “This is a strategy of Israel [to] really reduce the country’s military capacity, particularly its defence capacity, and now Israel is going further, saying well it doesn’t want any military presence in the south of Syria,” Serdar said. “Of course, for the government in Damascus [this] is a huge, huge challenge, so practically, that means they’re not in control of the southern cities of Syria,” he added. Since al-Assad was ousted, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Syria and deployed troops to a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights. While al-Assad was in power, Israel also routinely attacked Syria, bombing what it said were Iranian and Hezbollah targets. Adblock test (Why?)
Video: Thousands of Yemenis rally in Sanaa against deadly US strikes
[unable to retrieve full-text content] Thousands of Yemeni demonstrators marched in the streets of Sanaa to protest the deadly US military strikes.
Trump says he will release 80,000 pages of JFK files on Tuesday
US president says files contain ‘a lot of reading’ about assassination that has fuelled conspiracy theories for decades. United States President Donald Trump has said his administration will on Tuesday release approximately 80,000 pages of files about the assassination of John F Kennedy, whose killing has fuelled conspiracy theories for more than six decades. Speaking at the Kennedy Center on Monday, Trump said the release will contain “a lot of reading” about the assassination of the 35th US president, who was killed in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. “I don’t believe we are going to redact anything. I said, ‘just don’t redact, you can’t redact’,” Trump told reporters. “But we are going to be releasing the JFK files.” Asked if he had seen what was in the files, Trump said he was aware of their contents. “It’s going to be very interesting,” he said. Trump’s remarks follow a January executive order calling for the release of all remaining records on the JFK assassination, as well as files related to the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Under the order, Trump instructed the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to present a plan within 15 days for the “full and complete release” of files on the JFK assassination. Advertisement Last month, the FBI said that searches it had undertaken to comply with the order had turned up about 2,400 new files related to the assassination. The circumstances of JFK’s death have captivated US society for decades, with surveys showing a majority of Americans doubt official explanations of the case. In a 2023 Gallup poll, 65 percent of Americans said they did not accept the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, a US Marine veteran arrested over JFK’s death, acted alone in killing the president. Twenty percent of those surveyed said they believed Oswald conspired with the US government, while 16 percent said they thought that he worked with the CIA. During his first administration, Trump promised to disclose all outstanding records on the assassination but ultimately only released about 2,800 documents after the CIA and FBI requested that thousands of pages of material be withheld pending review. Former US President Joe Biden’s administration released about 17,000 more records, leaving fewer than 4,700 files withheld in part or in full. According to the National Archives, authorities have released more than 99 percent of the approximately 320,000 documents reviewed under the 1992 JFK Records Act. The law mandated the disclosure of all remaining files by October 26, 2017, unless the president determined their release would cause “identifiable harm” to national defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement or foreign relations of such gravity that it “outweighs the public interest in disclosure”. Advertisement Adblock test (Why?)
Israeli forces detain and strip-search children in the occupied West Bank
[unable to retrieve full-text content] Two Palestinian boys were left in underwear after hours of Israeli detention and interrogation in the occupied West Bank
Palestinians in Gaza suffer extreme hunger under Israeli blockade
[unable to retrieve full-text content] Millions of people in Gaza are facing severe food and water shortages as Israel continues to block aid.
No, ‘nerds’ and their technologies are not going to save the world
The United States is in the midst of a soft coup. The country is being reshaped and restructured under the second administration of Donald Trump. It is not Trump himself, but his billionaire special adviser, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, who is guiding this change. And in Musk’s America, there is one demographic that seems to have found itself at centre stage and rapidly gaining power: “nerds”. Indeed, Musk’s mendacious band of merry, young white and white-adjacent acolytes, including Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine, and Marko Elez, who has gained control over multitrillion-dollar government systems, easily fit the mold of nerd. The Information Age and the Internet Age that it spawned in the 1990s had already seen “nerds” – awkward, unattractive men with limited social skills but immense commitment to and enthusiasm for tech and STEM – become billionaires and gain widespread respect and admiration for delivering the world technologies that change lives. It was, we were repeatedly reminded, nerds who first gave us PCs and iMacs and then iPhones and Androids. Advertisement In numerous articles in tech magazines and in movies like Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Oppenheimer (2023), Steve Jobs (2015), and The Social Network (2010), creatives have portrayed nerds like nuclear weapons developer J Robert Oppenheimer, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg as underdogs. Popular media have long described such nerdy visionaries as complex people with a tremendous need to save the world and make it a better place. Three decades ago, the UK’s Channel 4 and the US’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired the three-part documentary titled Triumph of the Nerds. Referencing the computer revolution the nerd set launched between 1975 and 1995, longtime technology journalist Robert X Cringely said, “The most amazing thing of all is that it happened by accident because a bunch of disenfranchised nerds wanted to impress their friends.” This perception of billionaire nerds may by now be a deep-rooted part of our culture, but the idea that the robber barons of the late 20th century accumulated immense wealth, almost by accident, while trying to save the world is a ridiculous lie. Especially given the iron-fisted ways in which we know many “nerd billionaires” – and especially Jobs and Bill Gates – ran their capitalist ventures. In light of the heavy-handed censorship that billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have exercised with the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times in recent months, it is apparent that the tech-savvy billionaire class wants to control the flow of truth as well. Advertisement A much better description of the “nerds” who came to rule America under Trump was given in a single line in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), when Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), having extralegally entered the South African consulate, said to Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and his group of apartheid-loving white South African mercenaries, “Well, well … it’s the master race!” This quote is far more than just a reference to Musk’s dubious path to US citizenship through South Africa and Canada. It’s about the reality that, like the South African henchmen in Lethal Weapon 2, tech nerd billionaires such as Musk and the people he has employed at DOGE believe in apartheid, eugenics, and other racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic paradigms. Sure, many of the Musk fanboys are engineers, can write, and make contributions to Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink that lead to important and useful-to-humanity discoveries and inventions. Nevertheless, they also repost tweets on X and other social media platforms that refer to a woman as a “huzz” or declare “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask?”. They are not exactly great role models for a multicultural democracy or for any workforce. And, like white men in general, they don’t seem to be concerned about making the world a better place for anyone other than themselves. They would too readily agree with Zuckerberg’s ridiculous claim that the tech world needs more “masculine energy”, when, in fact, white men remain the dominant demographic leading this economic sector. Advertisement I was once a part of the computer-crazy nerd world in the 1980s and 1990s. I learned Basic in eighth grade, took Pascal in 11th grade, and spent my first three semesters at the University of Pittsburgh as a computer science major before changing my path to becoming a writer and academic historian. As a work-study student, I worked in Pitt’s computing labs for two years. I observed as my equally geeky co-workers made jokes about our “computer illiterate” classmates (including the regular use of the r-word). I watched my male counterparts rub up too closely to the women who needed their help troubleshooting computer issues. And in my last three months on staff, I experienced sexual and racial harassment from an older white woman, a co-worker who groped me twice while at work. Social awkwardness can easily be portrayed as innocent and endearing in a film. But it rarely if ever translates to “sweet” in a world that socially defaults to racist, misogynistic, queerphobic, and xenophobic behaviours. Nerds or not, all white men in a white male supremacist society hold a metric tonne of racial and gender privilege – a sense of entitlement that, when left unchecked, makes them no different from “cool” white guys. Booger asking Gilbert, “Why? Does she have a penis?” – a transphobic reference to his friend not getting laid in Revenge of the Nerds – isn’t much different than Musk declaring that he “lost” his “son” – his estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson – to “the woke mind virus”. Advertisement There’s also the embedded assumption that the technologies created by the elite nerd set have always been good for the world. Not when addiction to social media has led to millions of younger Americans becoming depressed, anxious, and isolated. Not with a new generation of American males doxxing and committing image-based sexual abuse against girls and women. Certainly not when the plagiarism machines of AI (which isn’t true
EU warns of threat to Syrian transition while pledging billions in aid
NewsFeed The EU has pledged $2.7 billion in aid to Syria to help the country rebuild after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The bloc made the pledge at a gathering of donor countries while warning that recent violence could threaten the progress made under the new leadership in Damascus. Published On 17 Mar 202517 Mar 2025 Adblock test (Why?)
Cyprus recovers at least seven bodies after refugee boat capsizes
The border protection agency Frontex says irregular crossings into the EU over the Mediterranean rose last year. The bodies of at least seven people have been recovered off Cyprus after authorities mounted a major search and rescue operation following the capsizing of a boat carrying refugees, Cyprus’s state broadcaster says. An unspecified number of people are believed to be missing while two people were rescued on Monday from international waters about 30 nautical miles (55.5km) southeast of the island, the broadcaster said. Cyprus’s search and rescue coordination centre said boats and aircraft were deployed as part of the rescue operation without mentioning casualties. In an official statement, it said a search and rescue operation was “ongoing to locate missing persons after a migrant boat capsized 30 nautical miles (55 kilometres) southeast of Cape Greco”, referring to the southeastern-most point of the Mediterranean island. Several naval helicopters and police patrol boats were involved in the search for survivors, the centre added. According to the Cyprus News Agency, one survivor told authorities that on board were roughly 20 Syrians who had departed from the port of Tartous, the scene of recent bloodshed in Syria. Advertisement The eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus is less than 200km (125 miles) from the Syrian and Lebanese coasts and has long been a route for refugees seeking a better life in Europe. According to United Nations figures, 125 refugees died in the eastern Mediterranean last year, but the actual figure is likely to be higher. The European Union border protection agency, Frontex, said irregular border crossings into the EU over the eastern Mediterranean rose last year despite a broader decline in the bloc. Nicosia said it has the highest number of new asylum seeker applications in the EU per capita but has managed to significantly reduce the figure. Last month, the Ministry of Interior said asylum applications dropped 69 per cent from 2022 to 2024 while irregular maritime arrivals had stopped since May due to tougher government policies. The overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December has prompted some Syrian refugees to return home. The Republic of Cyprus government reported that an average of 40 Syrians per day have requested to return home since then. The government also said more asylum seekers were leaving Cyprus than arriving for the first time in its independent history. Adblock test (Why?)
How Trump’s US aid freeze has stymied Colombia’s immigration system
Children like Samantha are the core group currently eligible for Colombia’s temporary protection permit (PPT), since eligibility for adults was restricted in 2023. Colombia established the PPT programme in 2021 to encourage Venezuelans to seek legal immigration status. It was hailed as a breakthrough in addressing the migration and refugee crisis: The permits are valid until 2031 and allow Venezuelans to access Colombia’s education system, employment and other services. Andrés Moya, a professor at the Universidad de Los Andes School of Economics, has studied the benefits of the PPT. He found that Venezuelans with regularised immigration status had higher monthly incomes, better health and higher consumer spending. And it costs the Colombian government less to support them, compared with migrants and refugees without documents. The upside is particularly evident with children, Moya added. “If we invest in these children, they’re going to be in a better position later on in life to contribute back, to work, to create their own businesses, to increase consumption,” he said. If not, Moya warned, families are “going to either keep migrating and increasing the crisis throughout the region, or they’re going to become a burden to the system”. But since USAID stopped distributing foreign assistance, the programme that processes the special permits — called the “Visibles” project — has sputtered. Some Visibles offices reopened on February 28 with a skeleton staff. The Colombian government has had to rehire employees with its own funds. There were originally 171 staff processing documents nationwide before the aid freeze, according to a spokesperson for Colombia’s migration agency. Now, the government hopes to keep 92. Adriana Llano Medina works as a volunteer to register Venezuelan children for their migration documents. Faces have been blurred for applicants’ privacy [Austin Landis/Al Jazeera] When the sites shut down around the country last month, Llano Medina said only a single person was left on the Medellín staff — a programme coordinator — to handle high-level complaints. She credited her informal link to that coordinator with helping to save an eight-month-old child’s life. When the Venezuelan infant contracted a high fever in late February, the coordinator managed to arrange an emergency PPT so the baby could receive hospital care. She worried other children without documents might not get the same help in an emergency. From 2021 until the funding freeze, Llano Medina estimated that she registered at least 1,500 kids for their PPTs. She showed Al Jazeera the three notebooks and two tablets where she writes out each child’s information and stores their pictures to fill out their paperwork. Now, she struggles to scrape together bus fare to get to the hospital for her volunteer shift. “It’s a commitment that I make from the heart. I like contributing because, honestly, there aren’t many people who do it for free,” she said. Llano Medina pointed to Samantha as one of the lucky ones. The five-year-old’s fever eventually broke, and within days, she felt well enough to go to school. But her mother, Loaiza, still worries about what may happen next time they face a medical emergency. She plans to restart the PPT registration process for both Samantha and Clarion once her local migration office can rehire staff. “What gives us hope is knowing that once the process opens up, we can finally get rid of this burden,” she said. “They’ll have health insurance… and we won’t be turned away.” Adblock test (Why?)