Turkey has ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel as of Thursday, according to the Turkish trade ministry.

“Export and import transactions related to Israel have been stopped, covering all products,” the ministry said in a statement, citing the “humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories as the reason.

“Turkey will strictly and decisively implement these new measures until the Israeli government allows an uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” the trade ministry added.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz responded forcefully to Ankara, accusing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of violating agreements by blocking ports for Israeli imports and exports.

“This is how a dictator behaves, disregarding the interests of the Turkish people and businessmen, and ignoring international trade agreements,” Katz wrote on X/Twitter.

Katz said he directed Israel’s foreign ministry to pursue alternatives for trade with Turkey, emphasizing a focus on local production and imports from other countries.

“Israel will emerge with a strong and daring economy,” he added. “We win, and they lose.”

The two countries had a trade volume of $6.8 billion last year.

Last month, Turkey imposed trade restrictions on Israeli exports over Israel’s ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza following the Oct. 7 massacre.

Thursday’s announcement by Turkey was the latest step in a recent wave of hostile moves targeting Israel, with Erdogan being one of the Jewish state’s harshest critics.

Just one day earlier, Turkey announced its intention to join South Africa’s so-far-unsuccessful case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in Gaza.

That came after Erdogan in March threatened to “send [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to Allah to take care of him, make him miserable, and curse him.” He previously accused Israel of operating “Nazi” concentration camps and compared Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.

Weeks earlier, Erdogan said that Netanyahu was a “butcher” who would be tried as a “war criminal” over Israel’s military operations in Gaza. He has also called Israel a “terror state.”

Turkey hosts senior Hamas officials and, together with Iran and Qatar, has provided a large portion of the Palestinian terror group’s budget.

Several Western and Arab states designate Hamas, an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, as a terror group.

However, Erdogan has defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

Israel withdrew all its troops and civilian settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relations have nosedived since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, when the terrorist group that rules Gaza murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel and kidnapped 253 others as hostages, launching the ongoing war in the Palestinian enclave.

The post Turkey Halts Trade With Israel, Continuing Pro-Hamas Stance Since Outbreak of Gaza War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The widow of Tal Chaimi — a resident of Kibbutz Nir Yitzchak in Israel who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 — gave birth to a baby boy on Thursday at the Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva.

Ella Chaimi is now the single parent of four children, including 9-year-old twins and a six-year-old. “This birth is filled with mixed emotions as I welcome into the world our child who brings with him lots of joy while also remembering Tal, who was a wonderful husband and father,” she said in a released statement. “I wish he was here with us right now.”

Idit Engel, a midwife at Beilinson Hospital, said that Chaimi and her family “have been through devastation, and I hope that this baby brings them much joy.”

“I have known Ella for many years and have cared for her during her previous pregnancies,” added Beilinson’s Women’s Hospital Prof. Arnono Weisnizer. “I know her and her family well having previously worked in the Gaza envelope, and my heart breaks for what they have gone through. Their family has been through dark times, and the birth of this baby is a light for them and for the people of Israel.”

Tal, 41, was taken as a hostage by Hamas terrorists as they attacked Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak during their assault across southern Israel on Oct. 7. A third-generation member of the kibbutz, he was part of the Nir Yitzhak rapid response team and went out during the early hours of Oct. 7 to confront terrorists invading the community. Ella hid in the safe room of the family’s house with her children while Tal and the rest of the kibbutz’s response team were out protecting the community.

Tal’s death was confirmed by authorities on Dec. 13. He was killed on Oct. 7, and his body is believed to be held by terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Nir Yitzhak was one of several communities attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, during which the terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and took 253 others as hostages.

The post Israeli Widow Whose Husband Was Kidnapped, Murdered on Oct. 7 by Hamas Delivers Fourth Child first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Anti-Israel faculty have been increasingly using a new tactic to push to terminate university presidents who punished students and requested police help in ending an ongoing paroxysm of pro-Hamas demonstrations that began erupting on college campuses across the US last month.

Votes of no confidence in the presidents’ leadership have happened or are forthcoming at Barnard College, Emory University, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly), and potentially other schools — a measure that all but guarantees a new leader will be installed at those schools.

On Tuesday, Barnard College President Laura Rosenbury lost a no-confidence vote handily, with 77 percent of participating faculty voting against her in an apparent act of retribution prompted by her suspending over 50 anti-Israel protesters and evicting them from campus. The action was, according to The Columbia Spectator, the first no-confidence vote against a president in the college’s history. The move came after the Barnard chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) unanimously recommended the vote, citing the college’s decision to suspend students involved in the demonstrations.

At Emory, meanwhile, 90 percent of faculty members in Oxford College, an undergraduate division of the university, voted “no confidence” in President Gregory Fenves this week, according to The Emory Wheel. The vote came after Fenves took similar measures to end unauthorized demonstrations on campus and clear an encampment where the protesters had planted themselves.

Pro-Hamas demonstrations at Emory saw numerous clashes between law enforcement and students and faculty. In one instance, economics professor Caroline Fohlin was arrested for attempting to prevent the detention of a protester. Officers restrained her, bringing her to the ground, while she said repeatedly, “I’m a professor!” In another incident, students pelted objects at officers while using their bodies to press them against a building.

The faculty at Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences are currently holding their own no-confidence vote, the results of which will reportedly be unveiled on Friday afternoon.

In Texas, over 600 members of the UT Austin faculty have signed a letter proclaiming they “no longer have confidence” in President Jay Hartzell, who invited local police to quell unauthorized anti-Israel demonstrations which resulted in students commandeering a section of campus and refusing to leave. The UT Austin chapter of the AAUP spearheaded the effort.

“We, faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, no longer have confidence in President Jay Hartzell,” the letter said, describing the restoration of order during final exams as a violation of trust. “We demand that criminal charges against students and others be dropped. We demand that the students not face disciplinary action at the university for their activities on April 24.”

Other school presidents have faced similar backlash for seeking to restore order on campus. At Cal Poly last week, 193 of 203 faculty attendees voted no confidence in President Tom Jackson Jr. Then on Monday, over 300 faculty members signed a letter demanding that Jackson and his chief of staff, Mark Johnson, resign, lambasting them for calling the police on student protesters when they occupied a campus building.

The wave of no-confidence votes, which may grow in the days ahead, came amid an explosion of anti-Israel demonstrations at universities amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Indeed, for the past two weeks college students have been amassing in the hundreds at a growing number of schools, taking over sections of campuses by setting up “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” and refusing to leave unless administrators condemn and boycott Israel. Footage of the protests has shown demonstrators chanting in support of Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization; calling for the destruction of Israel; and even threatening to harm members of the Jewish community on campus. In many cases, activists have also lambasted the US and Western civilization more broadly.

The protests initially erupted across the US but have since spread to university campuses around the world, primarily in the West.

Scrutiny of faculty participation in the pro-Hamas demonstrations and efforts to change university leadership is necessary but has been lacking in public discourse about the protests, according to experts who have spoken with The Algemeiner since the disruptions began.

On several campuses — including George Washington University in Washington, DC, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and the University of Southern California, among others — faculty have colluded with or joined students in calling for the destruction of Israel and celebrating Hamas’ violence against the Jewish state as a form of “resistance.”

At Northeastern University in Boston, professors formed a human barrier around a student encampment to stop its dismantling by officers. At Columbia University in New York, faculty at the school, as well its affiliate Barnard College, staged a walkout in support of the demonstrations and demanded the abeyance of disciplinary sanctions against anti-Zionist students — dozens of whom cheered Hamas and threatened more massacres of Jews similar to Oct. 7 — who have violated school rules.

The power of faculty — an overwhelming majority of whom identify as leftist — to govern the university and set the tone of its culture has been a key source of radicalism and anti-American ideas that have wielded significant influence in the academy, according to campus antisemitism expert Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who founded the AMCHA Initiative watchdog group.

“It’s the faculty. Faculty are behind the vote of no confidence at Barnard College and also at [Cal Poly],” Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner this week. “Faculty run the university, and they are out of control. They have tenure, and university presidents do not. So, it’s not that administrators are capitulating to students. They are capitulating to the faculty, because they know that if they run afoul of the faculty, they are history”

Breaking the faculty’s hold on American higher education, she argued, can only come with the abolition of tenure and a wholesale reformation of higher education.

“This situation is not sustainable, and we have to focus specifically on the faculty. Take away their shared governance. Take away their tenure,” she said. “You have to get rid of tenure because it has protected faculty whose goal is to upend and undermine the university itself. It’s not just about social justice — their aim for decades has been to destroy the university as we know it and to use the university as a tool for revolutionizing society. If you can’t recognize how illegitimate that is, then the universities are lost. We will lose if we do not have the will to take them on.”

Asaf Romirowsky, an expert on the Middle East and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner that since the 1960s, far-left “scholar activists” have gradually seized control of the higher education system, tailoring admissions processes and the curricula to foster ideological radicalism and conformity, which students then carry with them into careers in government, law, corporate America, and education.

“This is 1984,” he explained, alluding to George Orwell’s classic novel about a dystopian state. “As we can see, these rallies are not peaceful as their supporters have insisted. They are violent, verbally and physically. People are ending up in the hospital with injuries. This is analogous to Nazi Germany, and that should be a wake-up call to the American people. If these are the institutions that should be the vanguard of American democracy and Western values and this is what they are producing, we should be seriously questioning the functionality of higher education as a whole.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Anti-Israel Faculty Target University Presidents With New Tactic in Bid to Oust Them Over Campus Protest Response first appeared on Algemeiner.com.