July 2025: A Litany of Palestinian Death; American Institutions Continue Their Complicity
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July 2025 was one of the most dreadful since Israel began its campaign to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’s horrific October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
When Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire with Hamas on March 18, it imposed a full blockade preventing food, water, medicine, and shelter supplies from entering Gaza. Under international pressure, in May Israel began permitting a trickle of aid to resume, managed by the cruelly misnamed, U.S. and Israel-supported, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) rather than the UN and other experienced agencies. The UN Human Rights Office reported that at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed, most of them by the Israeli military, while seeking food aid between May 27 and July 31, including 859 near the GHF sites and 514 along food convoy routes.
In response to the starvation that is already well underway, Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza launched a statement calling for an immediate end to the Israeli government’s food blockade on Gaza. Nearly 50 congregations, 50 Jewish organizations, 800 rabbis and clergy, and over 25,000 individual Jews have already signed on. If you or your congregation have not signed on to the statement, please consider doing so.
While most eyes are focused on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 1,009 Palestinians and injured over 7,000 in the West Bank since October 2023.
On July 28 the notorious Israeli settler Yinon Levi was videoed shooting dead Awdah Hathaleen, in the village of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills (Masafir Yatta). Awdah’s work was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.” The French Foreign Ministry called the shooting “a matter of terrorism.” The Biden administration had placed sanctions on Levi, but President Trump lifted them. Levi was placed under house arrest but has since been released. The IDF did not releas the body of Awdah Hathaleen for 10 days. Condequently, on July 31, more than 60 Palestinian women began a hunger strike to demand the release of the body and 7 other Umm al-Kheir residents in administrative detention.
On July 11, Israel settlers beat to death 20-year-old Saif Musallet, a Palestinian-American, and shot and killed 23-year-old Mohammad Shalabi in the northern West Bank village of Sinjil. The two young men and others were trying to reach land that their families owned where settlers were constructing a new illegal outpost. Several eyewitnesses told journalists that Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinians. Musallet was born in Florida and had traveled to the West Bank for the summer to spend time with his family. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, demanded “accountability for this criminal and terrorist act.”
If past experience is a guide, there will be no accountability. Israelis have killed American citizens with impunity since a soldier crushed Rachel Corrie to death under his D9 bulldozer while she was attempting to save a house from demolition in Rafah on March 16, 2003. The destruction of Palestinian homes near the Philadelphi Axis in 2003 was a herald of the massive destruction of homes in Rafah and throughout the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.
There was no serious investigation into what appears to be the targeted assassination of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022. The DC-based media company Zeteo recently released “Who Killed Shireen?” a 40-minute documentary investigation that identifies the probable killer as a 20-year-old Israeli sharp-shooter.
On July 27 B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories issued a report entitled “Our Genocide” concluding
An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, lead to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words, Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “Nothing prepares you for the realization that you are part of a society committing genocide. This is a deeply painful moment for us.” Amanpour erred in stating that no other Israeli organization had concluded that Israel was committing genocide.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel endorsed B’Tselem’s report and had earlier in July issued “A Health-Centered Analysis of the Gaza Genocide” which describes Israel’s “deliberate, cumulative, and ongoing dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system.” Nonetheless, B’Tselem and PHR are among the rare voices of moral and political clarity among Israeli Jews.
In the “other Jewish homeland,” New York, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University publicly announced in an open letter published in The Guardian that he will not teach his scheduled class on modern Middle East history in the fall because of the conditions Columbia accepted when it capitulated to the Trump administration’s pressure in June.
Columbia agreed to pay a $200 million fine and an additional $21 million to settle investigations brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It also agreed to end the consideration of race in admissions and hiring and to appoint a senior provost to oversee the Middle East Studies Department and to further suppress campus protests by appointing three dozen new security officers with arrest powers. Khalidi wrote to Acting President of Columbia, Claire Shipman:
…it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.
Khalidi is not required to teach. He was recalled from retirement to teach his popular lecture class for which nearly 300 students had enrolled. In an interview with Democracy Now, Khalidi elaborated on his reasons for withdrawing the class. The pressures on the Columbia administration have not come only from the Trump administration and began long before October 7. Khalidi explained that a “fifth column” composed of members of the board and large donors, most of them with no experience in education, faculty from the professional schools, and a small number of students had been attacking and discrediting Columbia’s Middle East program for many years. Indeed, the Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association has expressed concerns about infringements on academic freedom at Columbia since 2004.
The Israeli assault on Palestinian lives in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the repression of the political and civil rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the repression of the unprecedented movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people that has emerged since 2003 continue in full force, even though large majorities of the American people and Israeli Jews demand that Benjamin Netanyahu end his war on Gaza.