Youth bring in change: Haya

Despite the announcement of a ceasefire deal, Israel has intensified its airstrikes and artillery shelling on Gaza, especially its residential buildings, killing more than 100 Palestinians.

Gaza’s civil defense said on Friday at least 101 Palestinians, including 27 children and 31 women, have been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza since the ceasefire announcement on Wednesday.

The attacks have also left more than 264 injured, according to the rescue agency.

Most of the killings came in Gaza City.

The report comes as Israeli attacks have shown no sign of slowing on the ground, with dozens of strikes reported on Friday.

In northern Gaza’s Jabalia, nine members of a Palestinian journalist’s family, including women and children, were killed.

Two more Palestinians were killed in a separate Israel airstrike in the Jabalia al-Balad area, in the north of Gaza. 

Jabalia has come under fierce attack since the Gaza ceasefire announcement this week. On Thursday, at least 20 were killed in one attack in the area.

At least five others were also killed in another attack that targeted a home, east of Khan Younis City, in Southern Gaza on Friday.

To the west of Khan Younis, three people were killed in attacks on tents housing displaced people.

Another tent was targeted in Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, killing one person.

That's while Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would convene his cabinet later on Friday to approve the long-awaited ceasefire.

Israel launched a genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 46,788 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured more than 110,453 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

The ceasefire, announced on Wednesday, consists of three phases and would come into effect on Sunday over 42 days.

The truce deal stipulates that a large-scale prisoner exchange will occur, including the release of 1,000 prisoners from Gaza and hundreds of detainees serving lengthy sentences.

The first stage involves the release of 33 captives, including "children, women, female soldiers, men above 50, and the wounded and sick," as well as a gradual, partial withdrawal of invading Israeli units.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have begun returning to the northern part of the war-wracked Gaza Strip after a deal was reached between Hamas and Israel over exchange of Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners.

It was announced that Hamas has agreed to release female Israeli captive Arbel Yehud and two others by Friday and provided information on the conditions of those set to be freed in the first phase of the ceasefire deal.

Gazans describe the return as historic, saying this is a victorious day.

The displaced Palestinians had been stranded behind Israeli military barriers despite the ceasefire.

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was reached after 15 months of the regime's genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

The implementation of the first phase of the deal began on January 19 and is expected to witness release of more than 1,890 Palestinians for 33 Zionists, who are among the 240 that Gaza’s resistance groups captured in October 2023.

The captives were ensnared during the historical Operation al-Aqsa Flood that served as an instance of retaliation against the regime’s decades-long campaign of Western-backed occupation and aggression against Palestinians.

The subsequent war claimed the lives of at least 47,306 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

The regime approved of the ceasefire after falling short of realizing any of its wartime objectives, including enabling the return of the captives, “eliminating” the Gazan resistance, and causing forced displacement of Gaza’s entire population to neighboring Egypt.

On Sunday, Hamas lambasted the regime for delaying the implementation of the ceasefire deal after Israeli forces killed and injured the Palestinians trying to return to the north.

Earlier, however, the regime said Palestinians could begin returning to the north on Monday after Gaza’s Islamic Jihad resistance movement confirmed that Israeli captive Arbel Yehud would be released before the next scheduled captive/prisoner swap.

Qatar, which had mediated ceasefire talks between Tel Aviv and Hamas alongside Egypt, had also announced that Hamas had agreed to release Yehud and two others by Friday and provided information on the conditions of those set to be freed in the first phase of implementation of the ceasefire deal.

Hamas calls it a victory

The movement, itself, issued a statement, describing the return of the displaced people as “a victory” for Palestinians and a defeat for the Israelis.

It said the scenes of the return of Palestinians to the areas from which they had been displaced, confirmed their connection to their land and once again proved “the failure of the occupation to achieve the aggressive goals of displacing people and breaking their steadfast will.”

The Islamic Jihad also described the return as a response to all those, who used to harbor the dream of enabling forced exodus of Palestinians.

“In an epic scene, hundreds of thousands of our displaced people are returning to northern Gaza, an area, which had been turned into a heap of rubble as a result of Zionists’ atrocities,” the group said.

It also described the Israeli regime’s conditioning the return of the displaced to Yehud’s release as an international move on the part of Tel Aviv to “destroy our people’s happiness in Gaza.”

“On this occasion, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement asserts that our people’s steadfastness would destroy whatever Zionist dream there is of stealing happiness from our hearts, and break the chains of the prison guards and occupiers.”

Former Israeli minister furious 

The Israeli regime’s former minister of so-called “national security,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, however, decried the return as a victory for Hamas.

“The opening of the Netzarim highway this morning and the entry of tens of thousands of Gazans into the northern Gaza Strip are images of Hamas’ victory and another humiliating part of the reckless deal. This is not what ‘complete victory’ looks like – this is what complete surrender looks like,” he wrote on X, former Twitter.

The Israeli soldiers did not fight and give their lives in the Gaza Strip to make these photos possible, he said, adding, “We must return to war – and destroy!”

Ben-Gvir resigned from his post earlier this month in protest at the ceasefire deal.

He has long been opposed to cessation of the brutal Israeli military onslaught and called for the regime to “occupy” Gaza.

President Donald Trump’s pick for the United States ambassador to the United Nations has become the latest administration nominee to voice the belief that Israel has “biblical” dominion over the occupied West Bank.

Elise Stefanik’s comment came during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. 

At the hearing, Elise Stefanik pledged to continue the US’s defense of Israel and advance Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda.

Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman from New York, further said that she supports the claims made by the far right in Israel that Jews have the “biblical right” to take land from Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Stefanik was definitive when asked if she shared the view of far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and former hawkish minister Itamar Ben Gvir that Israel has a “biblical right to the entire West Bank”.

She responded with one word, “Yes.”

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen further asked Stefanik whether she supported Palestinians' right to self-determination.

Stefanik refused to answer the question directly, saying, “I think they deserve more than the failures that they have suffered under the leadership of terrorists.”

Representative Stefanik was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2014, the youngest woman elected to Congress at the time, at just 30 years old, and represented New York's 21st Congressional District.

She is known to be a staunch advocate of Israel supports its decision to defund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 

Stefanik is an advocate of claims by Zionists that that Israeli regime is justified in killing and ethnically cleansing Palestinian Christians and Muslims from their lands and homes.

She made headlines in 2024 by questioning the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about what she claimed was antisemitism on college campuses.

At the time, US students at university campuses all across the country were protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

After positioning herself as a champion in the fight against the alleged rise in antisemitism, Rep. Stefanik began receiving large donations from Republican Jewish donors.

Stefanik has long been one of most ardent defenders Israeli occupation and annexation policy. 

In June 2024, US-Israeli billionaire Miriam Adelson reportedly donated $100 million to Trump for his presidential campaign in exchange for a promise to allow Israel to annex the West Bank. 

Israel's occupation and Jewish settlement of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 have brought the Palestinian Christian community to the brink of extinction.