Jerusalem:

The Israeli government’s security cabinet has approved a plan to extend compulsory military service for men to 36 months from the current 32 months, Israel’s Ynet news outlet reported on Friday.

The 36-month rule will stay in force for the next eight years, Ynet reported, after a meeting of the security cabinet that took place late on Thursday.

The measure is likely to be submitted to a vote in a meeting of the full cabinet on Sunday, it said.

Israel’s military commanders have said they need to boost manpower so they can sustain the war with the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza and a confrontation with the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militia.

In a separate initiative, Israel is planning to send draft notices to thousands of ultra-Orthodox seminary students who were previously exempt from military service.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Hamas on Friday said it “considers positively” an Israeli roadmap towards a full Gaza ceasefire announced by U.S. President Joe Biden, who urged an end to the almost eight-month war.

But swiftly afterwards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu poured cold water on Mr. Biden’s talk of peace, insisting the army would continue fighting until it had “eliminated” Hamas’s capacity to rule Gaza and pose a military threat.

Mr. Biden’s intervention, which had been heavily trailed, came as Israeli troops pushed into central Rafah, escalating the war with Hamas despite international objections to any assault on the southern Gaza city.

In his first major address outlining how the Gaza war might end, Mr. Biden said Israel’s three-stage offer would begin with a six-week phase that would see Israeli forces withdraw from all populated areas of Gaza.

It would also see the “release of a number of hostages, including women, the elderly, the wounded, in exchange for (the) release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners”.

Israel and the Palestinians would then negotiate during those six weeks for a lasting ceasefire — but the truce would continue while the talks remained underway, Mr. Biden said.

The U.S. president urged Hamas to accept the Israeli offer. “It’s time for this war to end, for the day after to begin,” he said, in comments echoed by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

Hamas in a statement on Friday evening said it “considers positively” Mr. Biden’s speech regarding “a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, reconstruction and the exchange of prisoners”.

UN chief Antonio Guterres “strongly hopes” the latest development “will lead to an agreement by the parties for lasting peace”, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the The Israeli offer “provides a glimpse of hope and a possible path out of the war’s deadlock”.

Israel insists on war aims

But Netanyahu took issue with Mr. Biden’s presentation of what was on the table, insisting the transition from one stage to the next in the proposed roadmap was “conditional” and crafted to allow Israel to maintain its war aims.

“The prime minister authorised the negotiating team to present an outline for achieving (the return of hostages), while insisting that the war will not end until all of its goals are achieved,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Those aims include “the return of all our hostages and the elimination of Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities”, it added.

“The exact outline proposed by Israel, including the conditional transition from stage to stage, allows Israel to maintain these principles.”

Hamas has been careful about commenting on ceasefire proposals put to it by Egyptian, Qatari or US mediators. It accepted one earlier this year only for it to be disavowed by Israel.

Earlier on Friday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh accused Israel of “using negotiations as a cover to continue its aggression”, saying Hamas “refuses to be a part of these manoeuvres”.

Israel has repeatedly vowed to destroy Hamas since the Palestinian militant group attacked southern Israel on October 7.

Israel sent tanks and troops into Rafah in early May, ignoring concerns over the safety of displaced Palestinian civilians sheltering in the city on the Egyptian border.

On Friday, soldiers were operating in the city centre where they uncovered rocket launchers and tunnel shafts and dismantled a Hamas weapons storage facility, the army said.

Blinken says aid situation ‘dire’

A stream of civilians has flooded out of Rafah, taking their belongings on their shoulders, in cars or on donkey-drawn carts.

Before the Rafah offensive began, the United Nations said up to 1.4 million people were sheltering in the city.

Since then, one million have fled the area, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has said.

The Israeli seizure of the Rafah crossing has further slowed sporadic deliveries of aid for Gaza’s 2.4 million people and effectively shuttered the territory’s main exit point.

Israel said at the weekend that aid deliveries had been stepped up.

But US Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged on Friday that the humanitarian situation was “dire” despite US efforts to bring in more assistance.

The World Food Programme said daily life had become “apocalyptic” in parts of southern Gaza since Israel began its assault on Rafah in early May.

Jordan announced it will host a summit on June 11, jointly organised with Egypt and the United Nations, bringing together aid agency chiefs and heads of donor governments to discuss the humanitarian response.

‘Everything is ashes’

The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Militants also took 252 hostages, 121 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.

Hamas released a video on Telegram Friday featuring the audio of a woman’s voice, who they said was one of the hostages. The audio file could not immediately be verified.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 36,284 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

A medical official at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah said eight people, including two children, were killed in an air strike that hit a house in Al-Bureij refugee camp.

Another source at Nuseirat’s Al-Awda Hospital reported three deaths in a strike on a car.

In northern Gaza, witnesses said that after carrying out a three-week-long operation in the town of Jabalia and its neighbouring refugee camp, troops had ordered residents of nearby Beit Hanoun to evacuate ahead of an imminent assault.

The Israeli army said troops “completed their mission in eastern Jabalia and began preparation for continued operations in the Gaza Strip”.

Jabalia shopkeeper Belal al-Kahlot said there was nothing left of his store after the Israeli operation. “Everything is ashes.”

The Israeli military announced the deaths of two soldiers in Gaza, taking to 294 the number of Israeli troops killed since the start of ground operations in late October.

Former U.S. President Trump speaks to members of the media after a jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts in his criminal trial at New York State Supreme Court in New York.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

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High voltage campaign ends; final phase of polling on June 1

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Israel’s military said on Wednesday it had seized control of a strategic corridor that runs along the length of Gaza’s border with Egypt, an objective Israel had said was necessary in its bid to destroy Hamas as part of the ongoing war, now in its eighth month.

The capture of the area, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, gives Israel control over a strip of land it says is awash in smuggling tunnels that have funneled weapons and other goods for Hamas — even under a yearslong blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.

The move comes as Israel has deepened its incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people seeking shelter from fighting elsewhere had been displaced, and where intensifying violence in recent days has killed dozens of Palestinians.

The capture of the corridor could complicate Israel’s relations with Egypt, which has previously complained over Israel’s advance toward its border, including when Israel took over the Rafah border crossing, the only crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Egypt has said that any increase in troops in the strategic corridor would violate the countries’ 1979 peace accord.

An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations, said Israel had notified Egypt of the takeover. He said some 20 tunnels, including some that were previously unknown to Israel, had been found during the operation, as well as 82 access points to those tunnels.

“It means we can control and we have the ability to cut off the oxygen line that Hamas has used for replenishing and movement,” the official said.

Editorial | Punishing Hamas: On Israel and the ICJ ruling

The corridor is part of a larger demilitarized zone along both sides of the entire Israel-Egypt border. Under the peace accord, each is allowed to deploy only a tiny number of troops or border guards in the zone, though those numbers can be modified by mutual agreement. At the time of the accord, Israeli troops controlled Gaza, until Israel withdrew its forces and settlers in 2005.

Egypt’s state-run Al-Qahera News TV reported that there are “no communications with the Israeli side” on the allegations of finding tunnels on the borders. Egypt has repeatedly expressed concerns that the Israeli offensive could push Palestinian across the border — a scenario Egypt says is unacceptable.

The narrow corridor — about 100 meters (yards) wide in parts — runs the 14-kilometer (8.6-mile) length of the Gaza side of the border with Egypt and includes the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

Hamas has had free rein of the border since its 2007 takeover of Gaza.

Smuggling tunnels were dug under the Gaza-Egypt border to get around the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed after Hamas took over with the aim of preventing it from building up its military stockpile. Some of the tunnels were massive, large enough for vehicles. Hamas brought in weapons and supplies, and Gaza residents smuggled in commercial goods, from livestock to construction materials.

That changed over the past decade, as Egypt battled Islamic militants in Sinai. The Egyptian military cracked down on the tunnels and destroyed hundreds of them, saying they were being used to transfer weapons into the Sinai Peninsula.

The Israeli military official said Israel has also taken “tactical control” of Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood on Rafah’s northwest edge. But he said the incursion into the city remains a “limited scope and scale operation.”

The announcement on the taking of the border corridor came after a top Israeli official said Israel’s war with Hamas is likely to last through the end of the year — a grim prediction for a conflict that has killed tens of thousands, deepened Israel’s global isolation and brought the region repeatedly to the brink of a wider conflagration.

National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi’s told Kan public radio that he was “expecting another seven months of fighting” to destroy the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group.

“The army is achieving its objectives but (it) said from the first days it was presenting its plan to the Cabinet that the war will be long,” he said. “They have designated 2024 as a year of war.”

Hanegbi’s remarks raise questions about the future of Gaza and what kind of role Israel will play in it. The United States, Israel’s top ally, has already demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decide on a postwar vision for the Palestinian territory. Netanyahu’s defense minister and a top governing partner have warned that he must take steps to ensure that Israel isn’t bogged down in Gaza indefinitely.

The war has already devastated Gaza’s urban landscape, displaced most of its population and sparked a humanitarian catastrophe and widespread hunger. It has opened Israel up to international legal scrutiny, with world courts faulting it over its wartime conduct, sparked disagreements with the White House, and prompted three European nations to formally recognize a Palestinian state on Tuesday, against Israel’s wishes.

Israel says it must dismantle Hamas’ last remaining battalions in Rafah and has said it will seek indefinite security control over the Gaza Strip, even after the war ends. Still, it has yet to achieve its main goals of dismantling Hamas and returning scores of hostages captured in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.

Beyond Rafah, Israeli forces were still battling militants in parts of Gaza that the military said it wrested control of months ago — potential signs of a low-level insurgency that could keep Israeli troops engaged in the territory.

The fighting in Rafah has displaced 1 million people, the United Nations says, most of whom were already displaced from other parts of Gaza. Palestinians on Wednesday reported heavy fighting in different parts of the city.

Residents said fighting was underway in the city center and on the outskirts of Tel al-Sultan, the same neighborhood where an Israeli strike over the weekend ignited a fire that swept through an encampment for displaced people, killing dozens. The military says it’s investigating the strike and that the blaze may have been caused by a secondary explosion.

An expensive floating pier built by the U.S. to surge aid into the territory was meanwhile damaged in bad weather, another setback to efforts to bring food to starving Palestinians. Gaza’s land crossings are now entirely controlled by Israel.

The U.S. and other allies of Israel have warned against a full-fledged offensive in Rafah, with the Biden administration saying this would cross a “red line” and refusing to provide offensive arms for such an undertaking. But so far, it hasn’t tried to stop Israel’s advances through the city.

Last week, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its Rafah offensive as part of South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel vehemently denies.

The war began when Hamas and other militants burst into southern Israel in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking around 250 hostage. More than 100 were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Israel’s offensive in response to the attack has killed at least 36,096 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count. Israel says it has killed 15,000 militants.

Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller. File.
| Photo Credit: AP

Canada said on Monday it would grant temporary visas to 5,000 Gaza residents under a special program for Canadians’ relatives living in the war-torn enclave, a preparatory move in case they are able to leave in the future.

That figure is an increase from the 1,000 temporary resident visas allotted under a special program for Gaza announced in December, the immigration ministry said in a statement, adding that many people had expressed interest.

“While movement out of Gaza is not currently possible, the situation may change at any time. With this cap increase, we will be ready to help more people as the situation evolves,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said.

The minister has previously said leaving Gaza is extremely difficult and dependent on approval from Israel.

In one of its latest attacks, an Israeli airstrike triggered a massive blaze killing 45 people in a tent camp in the Gaza city of Rafah, officials said on Monday, prompting an outcry from global leaders.

Canada has been sharing the names of Gaza residents who have passed preliminary screening to local authorities to secure their exit, Miller said. Israel and Egypt are important to the program’s efforts toward reuniting families in Canada, the minister said.

A spokesperson for Miller said 448 Gazans had been issued a temporary visa, including 254 under a public policy, and 41 have arrived in Canada so far.

Nearly 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, and an estimated 1.7 million people, more than 75% of Gaza’s population, have been displaced, according to the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.

Israel launched its military campaign after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Rafah strike.

Rocket sirens sounded across central Israel, including in Tel Aviv, for the first time in months on May 26, as Hamas claimed to have fired a barrage of rockets from Gaza.

The militants have continued to fire projectiles at communities around Gaza more than seven months into the war but have not fired longer-range rockets in months. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the latest barrage.

Earlier on Sunday, aid trucks entered Gaza from southern Israel through a new agreement to bypass the Rafah crossing with Egypt after Israeli forces seized the Palestinian side of it earlier this month. But was unclear if humanitarian groups would be able to access the aid because of ongoing fighting in the area.

Egypt refuses to reopen its side of the Rafah crossing until control of the Gaza side is handed back to Palestinians. It agreed to temporarily divert traffic through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, Gaza’s main cargo terminal, after a call between US President Joe Biden and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

But that crossing has been largely inaccessible because of fighting linked to Israel’s offensive in the nearby city of Rafah. Israel says it has allowed hundreds of trucks to enter, but United Nations agencies say it is usually too dangerous to retrieve the aid on the other side.

The war between Israel and Hamas, now in its eighth month, has killed nearly 36,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. Around 80% of the population’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes, severe hunger is widespread and UN officials say parts of the territory are experiencing famine.

Hamas triggered the war with its Oct 7 attack into Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and seized some 250 hostages. Hamas is still holding some 100 hostages and the remains of around 30 others after most of the rest were released during a cease-fire last year.

Hamas claimed to have captured an Israeli soldier during fighting in northern Gaza and released video late Saturday showing a wounded man being dragged through a tunnel. The Israeli military denied any of its soldiers had been captured, and Hamas did not provide any other evidence to substantiate its claim.

In a separate development, the Israeli military said it had detained a suspect over a widely circulated video in which a man dressed as an Israeli soldier threatens mutiny. In the video, the man said tens of thousands of soldiers were ready to disobey Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over his suggestion that Palestinians should govern Gaza after the war and pledged loyalty to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone.

It was not clear if the man was on active duty, or when or where the video was made. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, had shared the video on social media, sparking criticism from political opponents. The prime minister’s office released a brief statement condemning all forms of military subordination.

Southern Gaza is largely cut off from aid

Egypt’s state-run Al-Qahera TV aired footage of what it said were trucks entering Gaza through Kerem Shalom. Khaled Zayed, head of the Egyptian Red Crescent in the Sinai Peninsula, which handles the delivery of aid from the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, told The Associated Press that 200 aid trucks and four fuel trucks are scheduled to be sent to Kerem Shalom on Sunday.

It was not immediately clear if the UN was able to retrieve the aid from the Gaza side.

Southern Gaza has been largely cut off from aid since Israel launched what it says is a limited incursion into Rafah on May 6. Since then, over 1 million Palestinians have fled the city, with most having already been displaced from other parts of the besieged territory.

Northern Gaza, which has been largely isolated by Israeli troops for months and where the UN’s World Food Programme says famine is already underway, is still receiving aid through two land routes that Israel opened in the face of worldwide outrage after Israeli strikes killed seven aid workers in April.

A few dozen trucks have also been entering Gaza daily through a US-built floating pier, but its capacity remains far below the 150 trucks a day that officials had hoped for. Aid groups say the territory needs a total of 600 trucks a day to meet colossal humanitarian needs.

Netanyahu resists pressure to end war

Mr. Netanyahu has said Israel must take over Rafah in order to eliminate Hamas’ last remaining battalions and achieve its goal of “total victory” over the militants, who have recently regrouped in other parts of Gaza where the military had already operated.

Mr. Netanyahu faces growing pressure from the Israeli public to make a deal with Hamas to free the remaining hostages, something Hamas has refused to do without guarantees for an end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have ruled that out.

Scuffles broke out between Israeli police and protesters in Tel Aviv on Saturday after thousands gathered to demonstrate against the government and demand the return of the hostages. The protesters called for Netanyahu’s resignation and demanded new elections.

International pressure is also growing, as the war leaves Israel increasingly isolated on the world stage.

Last week, three European countries announced they would recognize a Palestinian state, and the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.

On Friday, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to end its military offensive in Rafah. The top United Nations court also said Israel must give war crimes investigators access to Gaza.

Israel is unlikely to comply with the orders, and has sharply condemned the ICC’s move toward arrest warrants for its leaders. Israel says it makes every effort to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense, residential areas.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Sunday that the bodies of 81 people killed by Israeli strikes have been brought to local hospitals over the past 24 hours. That brings the overall Palestinian death toll from the war to at least 35,984. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its count.

The Israeli government has said that 14,000 militants and 16,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, without providing evidence.

A fence sits locked at the entrance to the Kerem Shalom border crossing in Israel, as military operations continued in Rafah on May 17, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Egypt and the United States agreed on May 24 to temporarily send humanitarian aid to the United Nations in Gaza via Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing until legal mechanisms are established to reopen the Rafah border crossing from the Palestinian side, the Egyptian presidency said.

The agreement resulted from “the difficult humanitarian situation of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the lack of means of life in the Strip, and the lack of fuel needed for hospitals and bakeries,” said the statement.

The agreement was reached in a phone call between U.S. President Joe Biden and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the statement said.

Egypt, on May 20, warned against Israel’s continued military operations in Rafah, which were preventing aid deliveries to the impoverished Strip.

Much of the aid delivered into Gaza since the conflict between Israel and Hamas began in October has come through Egypt, entering through the southern Gaza city of Rafah or the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing on Israel’s border with the Palestinian territory.

Since May 5, just before Israeli forces took control of the Rafah crossing from the Palestinian side, no trucks have crossed through Rafah and very few through Kerem Shalom, according to U.N. data.

Mr. Sisi and Mr. Biden also agreed to intensify international efforts to make Gaza ceasefire talks a success and end the “prolonged human tragedy experienced by the Palestinian people,” the statement added.

Khan Yunis:

Lying bedridden in her room at the recently reopened Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza, Alaa Abu Ahmed is relieved that she can finally restart her medical treatment.

Displacement because of fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in the Palestinian territory interrupted Abu Ahmed’s treatment for a chronic condition.

Over a week in February, the hospital was attacked when Khan Yunis was the focus of fighting and soldiers raided it, saying Hamas was holding Israeli hostages there.

Now hallways are filled with still-wrapped boxes of equipment, and some semblance of order is returning to the facility.

While air strikes, bombardment and fighting continue to rock other areas of Gaza, in Nasser the beds have been straightened, the debris cleared and white coats bearing Doctors Without Borders (MSF) logos mix with the blue uniforms of local medics.

The international NGO has just resumed work at the hospital, the most important in the southern Gaza Strip.

“Thank God MSF was able to start working again at Nasser Hospital and I returned for treatment,” Abu Ahmed said.

“My condition has improved, but I did spend some time afraid that what happened at Al-Shifa hospital would repeat itself,” she added of the territory’s largest hospital, in Gaza City.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Al-Shifa has been reduced to an “empty shell” by fighting.

Humanitarian catastrophe

Just 13 out of 36 hospitals in the territory are “partially” functional, according to WHO, after unrelenting Israeli bombardment began in October.

When Israel withdrew its troops from Khan Yunis in early April, after months of fierce battles with Hamas created a humanitarian catastrophe, MSF returned to Nasser and resumed operations in mid-May, focusing on orthopaedic surgery and the burns unit.

In one bed lay a girl with a burned face, in another a silent boy with a bandaged leg watched over by a relative. A girl wearing a red dress cried as a doctor examined her.

The repeated evacuation or closure of hospitals because of fighting or Israeli leaflets ordering Gazans to leave the area “greatly handicap the delivery of medical care to the Palestinian population”, said Aurelie Godard, who oversees MSF activities in Gaza.

Now MSF is preparing to reopen the Nasser’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units.

“Evacuating or reopening is difficult every time. Especially for the patients, because they have to know where to find us; they have to know what services and what care is available in what place,” Godard said.

“It’s difficult for us, because obviously there’s all the equipment, the medicines, the machines… to transport, to repair sometimes,” she added.

‘Living in a desert’

WHO said Friday it had received no medical equipment in Gaza since May 6, the eve of Israel’s offensive on Rafah city in Gaza’s far south which led to the closure of the main aid entry points into the territory.

Since then almost no aid has made it into Gaza, the UN and NGOs say.

The Israeli military cut off electricity to Gaza at the beginning of the war, triggered by an unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, and international organisations fear a total depletion of fuel to run generators.

More and more people are leaving Rafah, where the UN says Israel’s offensive has forced around 800,000 people to flee, hoping to find refuge in Khan Yunis.

Near Nasser hospital, plastic containers are piled up at water distribution points.

“People just appear to be alive on the outside,” said Mohammed Baroud, who was displaced from Rafah to Khan Yunis.

He said “everything is destroyed” in the area around Nasser Hospital.

“Water is not available. We search for even a few drops of water,” he said, adding that to get that they have to come a long way.

“Water is very scarce,” he said. “It’s like living in a desert.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A tiny contingent of Duke University graduates opposed pro-Israel comedian Jerry Seinfeld speaking at their commencement in North Carolina on May 12, with about 30 of the 7,000 students leaving their seats and chanting “free Palestine” amid a mix of boos and cheers.

Some waved the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag. Mr. Seinfeld, whose namesake sitcom was one of the most popular in U.S. television history, was there to receive an honorary doctorate from the university.

The stand-up comic turned actor, who stars in the new Netflix movie “Unfrosted,” has publicly supported Israel since it invaded Gaza to dismantle Hamas after the organization attacked the country and killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The ensuing war has killed nearly 35,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The small student protest on May 12 at Duke’s graduation in Durham, North Carolina, was emblematic of campus events across the U.S. after weeks of student protests resulted in nearly 2,900 arrests at 57 colleges and universities.

Students at campuses across the U.S. responded this spring by setting up encampments and calling for their schools to cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it. Students and others on campuses whom law enforcement authorities have identified as outside agitators have taken part in the protests from Columbia University in New York City to UCLA.

Police escorted graduates’ families past a few dozen pro-Palestinian protesters who tried to block access to May 12 evening’s commencement for Southern California’s Pomona College.

After demonstrators set up an encampment last week on the campus’ ceremony stage, the small liberal arts school moved the event 48 kilometers from Claremont to the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Tickets were required to attend the event, which the school said would include additional security measures.

In April, police wearing riot gear arrested 19 protesters who had occupied the president’s office at the college with about 1,700 undergraduates.

Demonstrator Anwar Mohmed, a 21-year-old Pomona senior, said the school has repeatedly ignored calls to consider divesting its endowment funds from corporations tied to Israel in the war in Gaza. , “We’ve been time and time again ignored by the institution,” Mr. Mohmed said outside the Shrine on May 12. “So today we have to say, it’s not business as usual.”

At the University of California, Berkeley, on May 11, a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators waved flags and chanted during commencement and were escorted to the back of the stadium, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. There were no major counterprotests, but some attendees voiced frustration.

“I feel like they’re ruining it for those of us who paid for tickets and came to show our pride for our graduates,” said Annie Ramos, whose daughter is a student. “There’s a time and a place, and this is not it.”

This weekend’s commencement events remained largely peaceful.

At Emerson College in Boston, some students took off their graduation robes and left them on stage. Others emblazoned “free Palestine” on their mortar boards. One woman, staring at a camera broadcasting a livestream to the public, unzipped her robe to show a kaffiyeh, the black and white checkered scarf commonly worn by Palestinians, and flashed a watermelon painted on her hand. Both are symbols of solidarity with those living in the occupied territories.

Others displayed messages for a camera situated on stage, but the livestream quickly shifted to a different view, preventing them from being seen for long. Chants during some of the speeches were difficult to decipher.

Protests at Columbia University, where student uprisings inspired others at campuses across the country, led the school to cancel its main graduation ceremony in favor of smaller gatherings.

The University of Southern California told its valedictorian, who publicly backed Palestinians, that she could not deliver her keynote speech at its graduation ceremony because of security concerns. It later canceled its main graduation ceremony.

At DePaul University in Chicago, graduation is more than a month away. But as the academic year closes, school leaders said they had reached an “impasse” with the school’s pro-Palestinian protesters, leaving the future of their encampment on the Chicago campus unclear.

The student-led DePaul Divestment Coalition, which is calling on the university to divest from economic interests tied to Israel, set up the encampment nearly two weeks ago. The group alleged university officials walked away from talks and tried to force students into signing an agreement, according to a student statement late on May 11.

Jerusalem:

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday Israel was prepared to “deepen” its Gaza operation if truce talks fail to secure the release of hostages Hamas holds in the Palestinian territory.

Israel is prepared to “make compromises” to get hostages out of Gaza, Gallant said after touring the Rafah area following an Israeli incursion at the Rafah border crossing in the territory’s south.

But “if that option is removed, we will go on and deepen the operation”, he warned in a statement.

Gallant’s comments came after Israeli negotiators arrived in Cairo for the latest effort towards a hostage release and ceasefire in the seven-month-old war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement he had instructed Israel’s delegation to “stand firm on the conditions necessary for the release” of hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack, and on “essential requirements for guaranteeing Israel’s security”.

The new talks come after Hamas announced late Monday it had accepted a ceasefire plan proposed by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, and said the ball was now in Israel’s court.

Despite months of shuttle diplomacy, mediators have so far failed to broker a new truce like the week-long ceasefire that saw 105 hostages released last November, the Israelis among them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Previous negotiation efforts had stalled in part because of Hamas’s demand for a lasting ceasefire and Netanyahu’s vows to crush its remaining fighters in Rafah.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said he had given the order late Monday to seize Rafah crossing, and that “within hours, our forces raised the Israeli flags at the Rafah crossing and took down the Hamas flags”.

“Seizing the passage in Rafah today is a very important step,” he said — “an important step on the way to destroying the remaining military capabilities of Hamas”.

Netanyahu maintained Tuesday that “this morning we denied Hamas a passage that was essential for establishing its reign of terror in the (Gaza) Strip”.

Gallant indicated that the limited Rafah incursion, launched after Israel ordered Palestinians in the east of the city to evacuate ahead of a long-threatened ground operation, could be lengthy.

“This operation will continue until we eliminate Hamas in the Rafah area and the entire Gaza Strip, or until the first hostage returns,” he said in his statement.

If hostages are not returned, Gallant said Israel would expand its operations “all over the Strip, in the south, in the centre and in the north”.

“Hamas only responds to force, so we will intensify our actions, and the military pressure will result in us crushing … Hamas.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)