Jeremy Scahill

@jeremyscahill.com

Journalist at @DropSiteNews.com. Author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars. Former twitter combatant. Proton: jeremy@dropsitenews.com

Throughout the weekend, as Palestinians in Gaza observed the Eid al-Fitr holiday that ends the holy month of Ramadan, Israeli forces pummeled areas across the Gaza Strip in what local journalists described as some of the heaviest bombing of the past seventeen months. An airstrike in Khan Younis on Monday left a massive crater where a building once stood. “The massive destruction,” said Abdullah Al Attar, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, was “caused by the occupation's missiles after targeting Al-Maqdad family's home, full of children and women.” Holding a fragment of a munition, he said in a video posted on social media, “[it] weighs more than 15 kilograms. These are the war missiles which the occupation uses against civilians.” A neighbor who witnessed the attack told Al Attar, “The children were happy for Eid and were sleeping. I didn't hear the strike, and woke up from my sleep to the sound of [the Maqdad] children screaming. I didn't know where I was, and I thought my children and husband were killed.”

At least fifty-three Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on Sunday alone. An Israeli airstrike on displaced people in Khan Younis killed sixteen people, including nine children and three women, according to local medical officials. “They died in their Eid outfits,” a female relative of the victims told Al Jazeera Arabic. “Why did they do this to us?” Among the sites hit were tents housing displaced people. Gruesome images, posted on social media by witnesses, depicted the bodies of bloodied children killed in the attack. They had to be lifted from the shredded ruins of tents and blankets.

In Shujaiya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, an airstrike on a family home killed several people, including at least one small child. “We are dying. This is the first day of Eid. This is a child, do you see him?” said a man as he carried the child’s blood-soaked body through the streets.

The suffocating siege has driven people to seek out other unconventional sources of food. After his home was destroyed in the war, Ali Musbah, a young man displaced to a tent near the coast west of Gaza City, recently came upon a sea turtle washed ashore by the waves. Desperation led him to slaughter and eat it.

"The turtle weighed about 50 kilograms," Musbah told Drop Site. "I managed to get around 5 to 6 kilograms of meat from it. My wife cooked it like shawarma, and we shared the food with five other starving displaced families."

Musbah used to work as a fisherman before the war. "We used to catch fresh fish, shrimp, and squid. Now, we only dream about them,” he said. “With fishing banned and the crossings closed, all we have left are canned foods filled with preservatives that have wrecked our health."

"I know the turtle might be an endangered species,” he added. “But hunger is crueler than guilt. I didn’t choose this path—it was forced on us."

Dear Dr. Armstrong:
March 13, 2025
Please consider this a formal response to the current situation on the campus of Columbia University and a follow up to our letter of March 7, 2025, informing you that the United States Government would be pausing or terminating federal funding. Since that date your counsel has asked to discuss “next steps.”
U.S. taxpayers invest enormously in U.S. colleges and universities, including Columbia University, and it is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that all recipients are responsible stewards of federal funds. Columbia University, however, has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pursuant to your request, this letter outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government. Please ensure and document compliance with the following no later than the close of business on Wednesday, March 20, 2025:
● Enforce existing disciplinary policies. The University must complete disciplinary proceedings for Hamilton Hall and encampments. Meaningful discipline means expulsion or multi-year suspension.
● Primacy of the president in disciplinary matters. Abolish the University Judicial Board (UJB) and centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President. And

The airstrikes last night killed more than 400 Palestinians, including 174 children, 89 women, and 32 elderly people.

We’re still in shock. My eight-year-old daughter can no longer sleep.

I tried to comfort her, to help her sleep, but she kept waking up crying. She told me, “Mama, every time I close my eyes, I feel like another bomb is falling on us.”

I lay beside her to soothe her. This morning, I discovered she had wet herself in fear.

My 12-year-old, Saida, keeps asking me, “Mama, will the planes come back again?” I have no answer for her.

How can I reassure her when I no longer believe I will wake up tomorrow?

I looked into my husband’s weary, burdened eyes and asked him, “When will this nightmare end?” He replied, “We are alone in this world. No one cares.”

The moment Kareemeh walked into what remained of her home in the eastern part of the camp, she stood petrified. The windows had all been shattered—likely due to the airstrikes and demolitions, which left nearby buildings completely destroyed—and glass was all over the floor. The furniture was ransacked, the kitchen wrecked, and clothes had been pulled from the closet and tossed across the floor.

With only minutes to finish the task and leave the camp, Kareemeh began collecting canned foods and putting them in plastic bags. But as she sifted through the debris, she quickly forgot what she was doing and became fixated on the carpets.

“Come here, you. Help me pull the carpets away from the windows so the rain doesn’t ruin them,” she told me. Distraught, she pulled at the carpets, glass cutting through her hands. It took a while to calm her and help her focus on gathering necessities so we could leave the camp quickly as the looming threat from Israeli snipers was growing.

In the end, she took a few papers, undershirts and headscarves, and managed to grab cans of beans and sardines. Her hand bleeding, she carried what she could. “Just let me lock my house door,” she said as she left—a final gesture to retain some semblance of a home where she hoped one day to return.

Trump's post reads: All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

As the soldiers searched the detainee, the other reservists stood around him to create a barrier between them and the other detainees in the facility. The indictment said that at that moment, two of the accused held the detainee up against the wall by his shackled hands, then dropped him to the ground.

“For 15 minutes, the accused kicked the detainee, stomped on him, stood on his body, hit him and pushed him all over his body, including with clubs, dragged his body along the ground, and used a taser gun on him, including on his head,” the indictment alleged.

During the assault, the blindfold came off the detainee, and moments later one of the soldiers “stabbed the detainee in his buttock with a sharp object” close to his anus, which caused an internal tear in his rectal wall.

The indictment said the detainee cried in pain during the assault.

The reservists then took the detainee back to his mattress, hiding his bleeding using his shirt. Only an hour later after the detainee complained about difficulty breathing and a headache, detention facility officials noticed that he was bleeding heavily, and he was taken to a hospital.

The detainee suffered multiple traumatic wounds as a result of the beating, including seven broken ribs, a punctured lung, a tear in his rectum, and injuries all over his body, the indictment said.

NYT: "The current standoff stems in part from Hamas’s accusation that Israel has failed to uphold its promises for the first phase of the cease-fire — a six-week period that started on Jan. 19. Under the terms of the deal, Israel was required to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, among other humanitarian supplies, a promise that Hamas says Israel has not kept.

"Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, three Israeli officials and two mediators said that Hamas’s claims were accurate."

This isn’t the first lawsuit Columbia has faced in relation to its handling of student actions over Israel’s war on Gaza. In January 2024 at a protest against the war, two counter protesters arrived and sprayed pro-Palestine protesters with what many described as a chemical agent. The two students, who had both served in the Israeli military, would later say the spray was a “gag” bought on Amazon.

Curran-Groome and Parisi were among those at the event who were sprayed. Many of those who attended, including Curran-Groome, reported and were treated for symptoms including nausea, burning eyes and headaches. Columbia suspended both of the pro-Israel students in May, but Curran-Groome said that this was only done after pressure from the students who were attacked. “It was actually students who combed through video footage, found evidence of these two guys spraying these canisters,” she said. “It was a fully student-led investigation that actually uncovered the perpetrators of the attack. And then Columbia offered us no support whatsoever.” Due to the interim suspension in April, Curran-Groome lost access to healthcare she had been utilizing specifically for medical symptoms from the January attack.

In the spring, one of the two pro-Israel students filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming that his disciplinary process was biased. He also stated that he used the spray “as a harmless expression of speech.” Columbia eventually settled with him this past fall, awarding him $395,000 and lifting his suspension.

“I think that was the strongest and, quite frankly, the first example in which it was so blatant that Columbia failed to protect us,” Parisi said. “And not only failed to protect us, but rewarded those who sent almost 15 people to the hospital.”

With no place to go and with the onset of winter cold and rain, displaced families are increasingly seeking refuge in severely damaged buildings and bombed out homes in a desperate bid for shelter, only for the structures to eventually collapse on them, turning homes into mass graves of concrete rubble.

The Abu al-Omrin family was just one stark example. “When the walls of the house collapsed on us, the sound of the children's screams haunted us,” said the 18-year-old survivor. “We couldn’t save anyone because everything was piled on top of us.” They chose to live under an unstable roof and cracked walls, he said, because there was no safer alternative.

This phenomenon has become so widespread, with the harsher winter weather causing more building collapses, that it recently prompted the Civil Defense authority to issue a statement warning people to stay away from unsafe structures.

A U.S. nonprofit has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for an Israeli sniper unit for the stated purpose of buying scopes, silencers, and other equipment. The unit, which is nicknamed Rephaim, or “Ghosts,” has since been implicated in possible war crimes and killing over 100 people in Gaza and has been tied to the killing of four unarmed Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

On October 9, 2023, the mother of unit member Daniel Raab—an Illinois native—posted on Facebook that the nonprofit, registered as “Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202,” was in need of “helmets, rain gear, barrels, vests, sniper stands, silencers, camouflage, and the list goes on.”

In its 990 filings, Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 is described as “an organization dedicated to catering to the additional requirements and the overall welfare of soldiers serving in a specific military unit.” The description continues to say that the primary focus of the nonprofit is, “to ensure that soldiers have access to the necessary resources, support systems, and amenities that can enhance their comfort, safety, and well-being while they are actively serving their duty.”

The charity has raised significant amounts of money for the sniper unit since its establishment last year. According to its tax filings, Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 raised over $304,000 in the year ending December 2023, of which it spent roughly $208,000 in grants—money which its promoters emphasize goes directly to soldiers in the unit.

Ukrainian intelligence sent about 20 experienced drone operators and about 150 first-person-view drones to the rebel headquarters in Idlib, Syria, four to five weeks ago to help Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group based there, the knowledgeable sources said.
The aid from Kyiv played only a modest role in overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Western intelligence sources believe. But it was notable as part of a broader Ukrainian effort to strike covertly at Russian operations in the Middle East, Africa and inside Russia itself.
Ukraine’s covert assistance program in Syria has been an open secret, though senior Biden administration officials said repeatedly in answer to my questions that they weren’t aware of it. Ukraine’s motivation is obvious: Facing a Russian onslaught inside their country, Ukrainian intelligence has looked for other fronts where it can bloody Russia’s nose and undermine its clients.

$But HTS, led by ABU MOHAMMED AL-GOLANI, is also a U.S.-designated terror organization. Al-Golani was linked with al Qaeda for years, but cut ties with al Qaeda and denounced the group in 2016. Since then, he’s been on a campaign to rebrand himself and HTS, the umbrella organization of formerly fractured militant groups, as a moderate force to oppose Assad. There’s a furious debate playing out in Washington over what to make of HTS, according to four current and former U.S. officials familiar with the discussions, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. “There is a huge scramble to see if, and how, and when we can delist HTS,” said one of the current officials.$