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According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed 2,100 Palestinian babies under the age of two since October, out of a total of 17,000 children killed.

This is a rate of about 210 babies per month, or 7 babies a day, killed by Israel’s extermination campaign, and Euro-Med reports that infant deaths are being reported every day in Gaza due to Israel’s starvation campaign, bombings and destruction of the medical system.

Most of the infant deaths to starvation and thirst are not included in the official death count from the Palestinian health ministry, which surpassed 40,000 on Thursday, due to vast difficulties in counting such deaths; the death toll is likely far higher than the official death count, experts have said. Many pregnancies have also been forcibly ended due to Israel’s assault on hospitals, the group notes.

Health officials in Gaza said Thursday that the official death toll from Israel’s 10-month war has topped 40,000, though that is believed to be a vast undercount of the true figure.

The grim milestone was reached just days after the Biden administration greenlit $20 billion in additional weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, tank ammunition, mortar rounds, tactical vehicles and advanced air-to-air missiles. The U.S. approved the sales despite growing calls for an arms embargo on Israel.

“This is just a continuation of a policy that has been going on now for 10 months of the U.S. providing to Israel all the arms that it requests,” says Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who worked on arms deals and resigned in protest over Gaza policy in October. “It is a dark day for American foreign policy.” We also speak with Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who says it’s “incomprehensible” that the U.S. keeps supplying Israel with weapons. “There should be no more arms going into that place before there is a ceasefire.”

Nearly 20 years after the Second Intifada ended, the Israeli military has fully resumed its use of air power in the West Bank, particularly in the northern part of the occupied territory. Since October 7, it has launched more than 46 drone attacks and airstrikes in the area — the latter of which killed 77 Palestinians, including 14 children, by the end of June.

Jenin has been a particular target of this campaign. Despite scores of military incursions, a dozen airstrikes, and extensive operations since October 7, Israel has been unable to quell Palestinian armed resistance in the city and its refugee camp — primarily led by the Jenin Brigade, an umbrella group made up of various factional militias.

Jenin refugee camp holds significant symbolic value for Palestinians, with a legacy of defiance dating back to the Second Intifada and “Operation Defensive Shield,” the notoriously brutal campaign led by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002. This history reinforces the determination of many local fighters and civilians to resist the Israeli military. It also inspires solidarity and support from across the Palestinian territories, turning the camp into a focal point of the broader struggle against the occupation.

Israel’s dozens of operations since October — which deploy artillery, ground forces, drones, and other advanced technologies — have devastated the refugee camp. D9 bulldozers frequently rampage through the narrow alleys, with soldiers opening fire, breaking into and searching homes, while aircrafts launch missiles into the camp.

According to Harb, the political analyst, the PA’s challenge is to navigate this precarious situation, balancing its security responsibilities while addressing the legitimate grievances of its population. “The public image of Abu Shuja over people’s shoulders symbolizes defiance against the PA,” he said. “The PA is trying to shield itself from the rising opposition that supports the image of militants and armed resistance.”

Just hours after the Biden administration Friday announced approval of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and shipments for new weaponry, an Israeli bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza has killed 100 people or more, including scores of civilian men, women, and children in what was described as a “bloody massacre” that struck during morning prayers, leaving body parts scattered “in pieces” and healthcare workers overwhelmed with the dead and wounded.

Just hours before the bombing, the U.S. State Department announcement that a $3.5 billion tranche of funds — part of a larger $14.1 billion in overseas military aid approved by Congress earlier this year — would be released to the Israeli government for weapons procurement.

As CNN reported, while some of those weapons purchases made possible by the fund may take years, the “supplemental funding also allocated billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the Pentagon can draw from its own stockpiles to send directly to Israel on a much faster timeline.”

Referencing a separate decision by the State Department to suspend an investigation into documented abuse violations by the “notorious” Netzah Yehuda Unit within the IDF, Jarrar said the “decisions of sending weapons to Israel and not sanctioning Israeli human rights abusers are not just corrupt policy decisions, they are criminal acts.”

At around 4:30am during dawn prayer on Saturday, a mosque inside Al Tabaeen School was struck by the IDF “at least three times”, the UN rights office, OHCHR, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory said in a statement, adding that the attacks were “conducted with apparent disregard for the high rate of civilian fatalities”.

An initial report showed the strikes killed at least 93 Palestinians, including 11 children and six women.

This is at least the 21st strike on a school, each serving as a shelter, that the UN Human Rights Office has recorded since 4 July. These strikes have resulted in at least 274 fatalities, including women and children.

“For many, schools are the last resort to find some shelter and possible access to food and water,” according to the UN agency.

“Israel, as the occupying power, is obliged to provide the population it has forcibly displaced with basic humanitarian needs, including safe shelter,” the UN rights office said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants a war with Iran, as he clearly laid out in his address to the U.S. Congress last month. He returned to Israel emboldened to carry out that goal, seemingly certain of U.S. support—ordering the killing of a top Hamas official on Iranian soil just seven days later.

Experts inside the State Department have been warning the administration for months that unconditional support for Israel was both a morally bankrupt decision and one that directly contradicted U.S. interests in the region. Yet we and our colleagues were sidelined and silenced, and now the United States is on the brink of being drawn into a wider war that does not serve the interests of American people.

To prevent further escalation and make the prospect for diplomacy and peace a reality, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris needs to seek an end to the carnage and send a clear signal that the United States will not give unconditional support to an Israeli war against Hezbollah and Iran. She must insist on diplomacy and in her current role as vice president pressure the administration to avoid regional war. There may not be anything left of Gaza to save in six months’ time, and that is what Netanyahu is betting on.

Harris can correct course by insisting on the application of U.S. laws consistently and fairly when it comes to arms transfers. Applying U.S. laws and regulations (which the administration is currently in violation of) would prompt a conditioning of U.S. military aid to Israel in line with the Leahy laws, the Arms Export Control Act, and the Foreign Assistance Act. Based on its repeated, systematic, documented gross human rights violations and obstruction of U.S. humanitarian assistance, Israel is no longer eligible to receive U.S. security assistance.

Thousands filled the streets across the United Kingdom this week in massive rallies against racism and Islamophobia, a show of unity to counter a recent surge in far-right violence.

British police have arrested hundreds of right-wing rioters for carrying out a string of attacks in England and Northern Ireland targeting Muslims and migrants.

While the wave of violence was partly spurred by misinformation about the identity of a suspect in a deadly stabbing spree, academic Faiza Shaheen says mainstream public figures and the media establishment are also to blame for “drip-feeding poison into the ears of the public” about immigrants over many years.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has published a major new report documenting how the Israeli prison system has become “a network of torture camps,” where physical, psychological and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is normalized and routine.

The report, titled “Welcome to Hell,” collects the testimony of 55 Palestinians who were detained by Israeli authorities since October 7 and later released, almost all without charges. This comes as a group of U.N. experts condemned the widespread torture of Palestinians and as Israel’s Channel 12 News aired shocking footage of Israeli soldiers sexually abusing a prisoner at the Sde Teiman army base, where thousands of detainees from Gaza are held.

Sarit Michaeli, the international advocacy lead for B’Tselem, says the abuse in Israeli prisons is “systemic, ongoing and state-sanctioned,” reflecting the cruelty and thirst for revenge among a growing number of Israelis. “They would like to have a completely open field in terms of what they can do to Palestinians,” says Michaeli.

You can find the full report of testimonies here

The letter called for Israel to open up channels for humanitarian workers to communicate with Israeli officials about ensuring their operations are safe from the Israeli military, a process known as deconfliction, the letter reportedly said. The talks between UN and Israeli officials are ongoing, and no final decision has been made.

The UN has already reported having to suspend its operations through the U.S. military’s pier in Gaza due to allegations that Israeli forces used the area around the pier in a brutal military operation in which they massacred nearly 300 Palestinians, raising safety concerns for workers.

Though the UN is calling for better deconfliction, groups have emphasized that even deconflicted operations have been targeted by Israeli forces.

If the UN were to suspend its operations in Gaza, it would likely be seen as a win for Israel, which has spent years targeting humanitarian workers and groups across Palestine. Its unfounded accusations against the UNRWA in January — which caused many countries to suspend funding — were just one incident among many in which Israeli officials have tried to attack and delegitimize UNRWA over the years.

Today, after four months of collaborative work, we are together publishing “The Gaza Project.” Below is one of two articles from the project that +972 is co-publishing with Forbidden Stories (read the other here). For the full list of articles comprising “The Gaza Project” and more information about the collaboration, click here.

A report by The Guardian released Monday reveals that the same group behind a covert Israeli social media campaign to influence U.S. politicians has also spent months coordinating with dark money groups, Israel advocacy organizations and lawmakers to spread pro-Israel sentiment between 80 different ongoing programs. The campaign is organized under Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, headed by Minister Amichai Chikli.

Between October and May, the investigation found, officials have spent the equivalent of $8.6 million on the campaign, which includes a program known as Voices of Israel, which officials are resurfacing specifically to spread propaganda attempting to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In the U.S., the campaign has influenced political discourse about college protests and has even seemingly had a role in passing pro-Israel bills at the state and federal level.

Voices of Israel has existed since at least 2017, first conceived under the name “Concert,” the report found. Former minister of strategic affairs Gilad Erdan, under whom the campaign was born, aimed for the campaign to be a “PR commando unit” for Israel’s reputation abroad; previous iterations have worked on issues like the passage of bills in the U.S. that ban participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Historically, it has funded American Zionist organizations like Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and the Israel Allies Foundation.

There are over 20,000 children in Gaza who are missing, Save the Children estimates, in addition to the over 15,000 children who have been killed amid Israel’s genocide and campaign of extermination.

In February, UNICEF estimated that at least 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied or separated from their families, or about 1 percent of the 1.7 million Palestinians who Israel has forced out of their homes. Many children have been separated from their families in recent weeks amid Israel’s bloody assault on Rafah, Save the Children says.

Based on the UN’s May estimate that 10,000 people are buried under the rubble in Gaza, Save the Children calculated that 4,000 of these people are children. This means that an estimated 21,000 children are missing, based on estimates by humanitarian groups, with many likely dead.

The number of children missing may be far higher. Save the Children notes that there is an unknown number of children buried in mass graves, and the UN has reported that children have been found in mass graves with signs of torture and executions in recent months. Additionally, many children have been “disappeared” by Israeli forces — kidnapped and sent to torture camps in undisclosed locations, where many have reported being subject to assault and horrific conditions by Israeli guards.

Indeed, on top of the mass killing of children and their families, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said on Monday that Israel has been escalating arrests of children in the West Bank, with seven children arrested in the past 24 hours and an estimated 240 children still imprisoned by Israeli forces.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, children are facing death around every corner due to Israel’s all-out assault. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) reported last week that there are at least 50,000 children who require medical treatment for malnutrition due to Israel’s starvation campaign.