How Israel planned the Gaza genocide decades ago
Jonathon Cook, 12 June 2026
In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration
The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.
Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.
Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”
Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”
Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”
Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”
No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.
Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war – often referred to as the Six-Day War – not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.
The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.
None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza – levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population – is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.
Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” – the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.
Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.
Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.
Starvation policy
The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” – or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.
Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.
This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state.
Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.
The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonise all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants.
Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. “We are interested in emptying out Gaza first,” he said.
Given international pressures, he was clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would need to proceed by stealth, so as to attract less attention. Foreshadowing Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza that started in 2007, he proposed that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment” Israel was imposing there.
The ethnic cleansing programme could be hastened, he suggested, by depriving the population of essentials like water. “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water, they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.”
In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel would go on to calculate the minimum number of calories to allow into Gaza so that the people there would grow steadily more malnourished. Or as senior government adviser Dov Weisglass explained in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its “diet”, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment.
They destroyed those “orchards” and transformed the “diet” into a full-blown starvation blockade – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court.
Targeting innocents
The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives.
Haaretz’s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.
As the paper reports: “The historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.”
Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task – as in 1948 – was to prevent their return.
Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, into which Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers’ job was to murder any Palestinian families trying to get back to their homes.
Here is one soldier’s testimony, reported by Haaretz, that Avnery noted in his autobiography:
We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children.
In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.
Today’s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Erasing context
As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: “You have to know the past to understand the present.”
Which is precisely why western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present – in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon.
Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response – and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that – to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023.
An obvious truth has been obscured: that for at least eight decades, Israel has been exploiting any opportunity it could find to expel the Palestinians from their homeland……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Prisons of complicity
Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2026-06-12/israel-gaza-genocide-planned/
The Zionist Plan for a Concentration Camp in Gaza
Israel moves to intern 600,000 Palestinians in the “most moral concentration camp in the world.”
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire Jul 10, 2026
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno. These should be destinations Israeli Jews remember and abhor, and yet we are told, by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (PDF), that a concentration camp in the works on the ethnic cleansed ruin of Rafah is somehow not only moral, but the most moral concentration camp in the world.
The support given by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the criminal plan being promoted by Defense Minister Yisrael Katz, involving the construction of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, which would incarcerate all the enclave’s residents, is a moral and historic nadir for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. No matter how they try in Israel to wrap this move with laundered epithets, they are talking about a concentration camp.
The Zionist state, according to Katz, plans to herd 600,000 Palestinians currently forced to shelter in tents and makeshift homes within the coastal al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza to an area in the ruins of Rafah city. “Eventually, the entire civilian population of over two million in Gaza would be confined to this small ‘city,’” the Middle East Eye reports.
Katz said that once concentrated in the new city, Palestinians would be encouraged to “voluntarily” leave the Gaza Strip for other countries, as part of an “emigration plan” he said “will happen”.
In July, 2025 the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) proposed a “Humanitarian Transit Area” where Gaza residents would “temporarily reside, deradicalise, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so,” Al Jazeera reported. GHF operated food distribution sites outside the United Nations system.
Humanitarian aid organizations and UN-affiliated experts say GHF previously violated humanitarian principles by directing civilians to hazardous militarized aid sites instead of establishing a neutral network. The BBC reported that more than 500 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid since the GHF began operating in May, 2025. Oxfam and Save the Children report Israeli forces and armed groups “routinely” fired on Palestinians seeking aid. GHF ended its operation in late 2025.
In March, the RAND Corporation published Pursuing Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration in Gaza: A Critical Pathway to a Durable Peace. The white paper follows a Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) three-stage strategy used by UN Peacekeeping to transition war-torn societies to peace.
The RAND report does not take into account Israeli policies of settlement expansion, collective punishment, arbitrary imprisonment, and periodically “mowing the grass,” that to say conducting violent raids into Gaza. Decades of Zionist mistreatment of Palestinians naturally perpetuates radicalization and determined resistance.
The Strategic Hamlet Program
In 1962, the administration of Ngo Dinh Diem, in collaboration with the Kennedy administration, initiated the counterinsurgency Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam. This rural pacification initiative involved relocating South Vietnamese villagers into barbed-wired “protected hamlets,”…………………………………
The French constructed “protective villages” in Tonkin, later known as agrovilles,…………
The Malaysian strategic villages were established in the 1950s under the Briggs Plan, a British counterinsurgency population-control and resettlement program……………….
British Concentration Camps in South Africa………………………………
Violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s “New Rafah” plan is a high-tech version of previous concentration camps. In a similar fashion to the Strategic Hamlet Program and the Boer camps in South Africa, “New Rafah” is primarily intended to separate Palestinian civilians from Hamas and prepare for the forced migration of two million people (despite the fact few if any countries are willing to take ethnically cleansed Palestinians)……………………………………. https://anotherdayintheempire.substack.com/p/the-zionist-plan-for-a-concentration
The Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Agenda Continues To Roll Forward
Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 03, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-agenda?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=204779474&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
As both US and Israeli leaders openly contemplate attacking Iran again, it’s easy for the world to miss the fact that the genocidal alliance has also dramatically reinvigorated its ethnic cleansing agendas in Gaza.
The Adelson-owned pro-Netanyahu outlet Israel Hayom reports that in the coming weeks the so-called “Board of Peace” overseeing life in the Gaza Strip is planning to relocate Palestinians to “humanitarian shelters” that are not under Hamas control.
Israel Hayom reports that an area near the destroyed city of Rafah is the first location where such camps will be set up. This is noteworthy because one year ago defense minister Israel Katz stated that there was a plan to construct a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where “the emigration plan” for the Palestinians would then be implemented, adding that Benjamin Netanyahu was working on finding foreign nations to accept the population of Gaza.
It’s hard to ignore the similarities. Both accounts even state that the plan is to police the displaced Palestinians using an international force. The 2026 Israel Hayom report states that the camps will be overseen by “multinational forces under the Board of Peace’s management”, and Israel Katz stated in 2025 that Israel is seeking international partners to manage the zone.
So to be clear, in July of last year Israeli officials were publicly stating that they were going to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah to house the Palestinians under international supervision while working to relocate them from their homeland to other countries, and in July of this year we learn that we will soon see Palestinians in Gaza relocated to “humanitarian shelters” near Rafah overseen by international forces.
So it sounds like the same plan. If it is, then it’s a plan for ethnic cleansing.
Israel has already expanded its control over Gaza from 53 percent to 70 percent of the Strip, concentrating the survivors of the genocide into a mere 30 percent of the Palestinian territory. And now, according to Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen, the plan is to expand control to 100 percent.
Israel National News quotes Cohen as saying during a recent radio interview that “our control of the territory will only continue to expand until we reach 100%,” adding, “two months ago we controlled 53% of the Strip, about a month ago around 60%, and today we’re approaching 70% of the Strip’s area.”
This comes amid other reports we discussed recently which strongly indicate that the Trumpanyahu administration is renewing its push to remove all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The other day we learned from the Israeli press that Israel’s national security agencies had been instructed to rebrand the ethnic cleansing plan as a “plan for free movement” in order to mitigate international resistance to the agenda. A few days before that, we learned that Israel’s new national security chief had convened a meeting with officials from the IDF and Shin Bet to discuss the plan to displace the Palestinians of Gaza to other countries.
Again, Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza have always been about ethnic cleansing from the very beginning. Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
The goal has always been to remove the Palestinians from Gaza so their territory can be taken from them. This was never anything other than a blatant Israeli land grab. They’ve been framing it as a “war” so that after they seize and colonize Gaza they can say “the Arabs fought a war and lost, they deserved to lose territory” like they always do, but it was never actually a war.
Calling the Gaza genocide a “war” is like seeing a man beating up a toddler and calling it a “fight”. It’s one of the world’s most sophisticated military forces raining explosives on an area packed full of children with the backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, opposed only by a few thousand guys running around in sandals with homemade rockets and ancient Kalashnikovs.
That’s not a war. It’s an ethnic cleansing operation. That’s all this has ever been.
Netanyahu’s War on Humanity: Ethnically Cleansing the Palestinian West Bank
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism.
June 29, 2026, H. Scott Prosterman Informed Comment, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/29/netanyahus-war-on-humanity-ethnically-cleansing-the-palestinian-west-bank/
Since October 7, 18 new settlements and eight new army bases have been constructed on what was Palestinian family homes for generations. When Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest government took power in 2022, it accelerated a far-right campaign to ethnically cleanse the northern areas of the West Bank. The first step was to balkanize the formal Palestinian holdings in the 1994 Oslo Accords. That was augmented by roadblocks and IDF outposts. Now, a settler project decades in the making is taking root in the northern West Bank, as the IDF turns a blind eye to the flagrant violations of human rights and international law.
Netanyahu at the least ignored intelligence warnings about the Gaza buildup to October 7, 2023, because of his dedication to splitting the Palestinians by propping up Hamas in Gaza. October 7 prompted the Likud and IDF to treat the West Bank as a war front with tanks and armed drones. Avi Bluth, the Israeli Central Command chief is directing this atrocity in collaboration with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Defense Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The grand design is to blow up the Oslo Accords, and ethnically cleanse the West Bank one sector at a time, in preparation for annexation. A collateral casualty of October 7 was the 2023 repeal of the Disengagement Law, and the provocative reintroduction of settlements into populated Palestinian areas. And they’re being repopulated and expanded at warp speed to create new, intractable “facts on the ground.” The Homesh and Sa-Nur settlements have already been repopulated. Others are on track for quick restoration.
Since the 2005 when Israel relinquished four isolated settlements in the area in an effort to consolidate Jewish demographics, the Likud government has aimed to reclaim that land. The occupation on steroids has claimed 18 new sites that further disrups what remains of the land where 720,000 Palestinians live. Israel has prosecuted a brutal campaign of intimidation and expropriation against the native Palestinians since October 7; accompanied by new military outposts to protect the new settlements and new roads on stolen land. That includes 14 new settlements, which encircle ancient towns and villages such as Jenin and Tulkarm, where no Israelis have ever lived in modern times.
Though Area A of the West Bank is off limits to Israelis under the Oslo agreement, the settlers backed by Likud and the IDF are building new structures faster than ever. One village targeted is Beit Imrin, where a settler was killed last May in an ATV accident of his own making, but was declared a Palestinian terrorist incident by the IDF and police. The village has since been sacked in various settler raids. That also prompted a violent pogrom in 20 more Palestinian towns, burning cars and homes including with people inside.
The website +972 has chronicled these events since 2021, before the current Likud government took hold. This includes the incidents at the Masafer Yatta village, which was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land. Not surprisingly, the uber-Zionist propaganda machine has gone into overdrive in attempt to discredit the film by Likud in Israel, and Republicans in the US. The Siamese twin criminal alliance between Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald Trump has been analyzed in these pages numerous times since 2019.
B’Tselem is the Israeli information center dedicated to human rights in the West Bank. It advocates for “human rights, liberty and equality” guarantees for Jews, Palestinians, and all people “living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” It also facilitates legal counsel for people ensnared by the Likud-IDF pogrom machine, and whatever protections can still be affected. They noted on “X” this week that, “Since October 2023, settler violence and military raids have forcibly displaced at least 4,635 Palestinians in the West Bank. Entire communities have been driven out of their homes in 62 cases, with another 15 communities partially displaced.”
These are pogroms, the same dynamic used to drive Jews from their homes in the Pale of Settlement and other parts of Europe since the Crusades. It’s tragic and maddening that Israel under Likud has resorted to the same brutality, which ultimately led to the creation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. And all with the blessing of the Republican Party and US Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Prof. Juan Cole pointed out that, “Ultimately, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians, including the Christians.” That doesn’t sit well with Huckabee and his fellow Christian Nationalists, who have been promoting the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza for Christian settlements, leading to fissures in the Likud-US Evangelical alliance. But that alliance is predicated upon the myth that the Palestinian people don’t warrant recognition as an ethnic group with valid claims to their historic homeland.
The area between Nablus and Jenin has been targeted for new settlements and IDF bases because it is the largest, contiguous area of Palestinian territory remaining. Residents of the Homesh and Yuval settlements candidly say their goal is to break it up. Lost on the settlers and the government is the enormous costs involved in securing the area for settlement expansion. This adds to the financial and security burden of a military already stretched thin among operations in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza; and was done without any input or assessment from the Israeli Central Command. This campaign has brought horrors to the daily lives of Palestinians in the form of settler and military raids, roadblocks, restricted access to their own land, uprooting trees and destroying infrastructure, as depicted in the film No Other Land. One especially grotesque act was done by the settlers of Sa-Nur, when they ordered residents of Asasa to dig up a fresh grave of an elderly man and move him soon after he was buried.
The Palestinian refugee crisis was dramatically escalated recently, when the IDF dismantled the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams. That involved bulldozing homes and infrastructure, where refugees from the 1947 Nakba have been living since 1953, and resulted in 32,000 Palestinians being displaced from their homes – the largest displacement since 1967. The IDF then bi-sected the Jenin camp with a new military road wide enough for two tanks to escalate the intimidation and inconvenience.
Haaretz reports that, “Most movement restrictions currently imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank are being carried out without required legal approvals, violating IDF protocols.” The IDF is breaching its own codes to meet with the Likud political agenda. IDF legal adviser Cobi Marcus addressed that in a letter to Commander Bluth, describing it as “anarchy,” and an ongoing pattern. But this has been going on since 1967, and escalating dramatically in recent years, as noted in Red Pepper Media: “Between 1967 and 2022, Israeli settlers stole roughly seven per cent of all the land in the West Bank. From 2022 to 2024, they doubled that to 14 per cent, stealing as much land in two years as over the previous 55. Activists on the ground estimate the number has likely tripled by 2026.” This has disrupted farming and grazing practices, and brought greater costs for Palestinian farmers and shepherds.
An ongoing characteristic of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank is the targeting of civilians area for punishment, rather than just military targets. Destruction of civilian infrastructure has been a violation of International Law since the 1949 Geneva Convention, but Israel acts as if they have some exemption. Israel targets civilians because, “they assume that Palestinian children will grow up to be terrorists,” as writer Hugh Curran noted. Recent airstrikes in Lebanon have killed 3,800 people and wounded over 11,000. The IDF has also destroyed 17 Lebanese hospitals and bombed 68 more, along with 100 schools, according to the World Health Organization.
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism. The pervasiveness and embrace of this pathology has prompted many Jews to divorce their Judaism from Zionism. This form of Zionism supports of a corrupt prime minister, whose government depends on the inclusion of a criminal sector to maintain power and standing. There’s nothing spiritual or righteous about that.
H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan
Obliterating Gaza’s Children: The Damning UN Report
SCHEERPOST, June 27, 2026, Dan Steinbock Informed Comment
From Gaza and beyond, Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children. It is in line with the new Obliteration Doctrine and the topic of a new UN report.
When I was working on The Fall of Israel (2024) and particularly The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), what I found most repulsive was the targeting of children in the Gaza Strip.
By late 2024, the testimonies of health professionals on location indicated that the deaths of many children in Gaza were not just collateral damage, but outcomes of deliberate, targeted actions.
The testimony of Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a young American trauma and general surgeon who had volunteered in Palestine including the European Hospital in Khan Younis, was particularly compelling.
“I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones,” Sidhwa said. “But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.”
The statement of Dr. Sidhwa, who subsequently became one of the endorsers of my book, The Obliteration Doctrine, was supported by dozens of other remarkable and courageous medical volunteers in Gaza. And these testimonies, in turn, have been supported by many reports of multiple international NGOs and multilateral organizations.
So, the latest report of the UN Independent International Commission is hardly new. Nonetheless, it is among the most consequential documents to emerge from the Gaza war. Its conclusion is stark: Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, actions that the Commission argues constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The Commission’s findings
The Commission’s report concludes that the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not incidental collateral damage but part of a recurring pattern of conduct. In line with the Genocide Convention, it argues that such actions are a key indicator of genocidal intent because they strike at the future existence of the Palestinian people.
According to the inquiry, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed between October 2023 and October 2025, representing roughly 30 percent of all fatalities, while over 44,000 were injured. Even since the October 2025 ceasefire, at least 265 children have been killed by Israeli military fire, and 400 more injured, many of them with “catastrophic” wounds.
Children and the logic of genocide
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I showed that modern warfare in Gaza evolved beyond traditional military objectives toward the destruction of the social foundations of Palestinian existence. The Commission’s findings reinforce this interpretation.
Historically, genocide scholars have emphasized that attacks on children occupy a unique place in genocidal campaigns. The 1948 Genocide Convention identifies not only direct killing but also the infliction of conditions calculated to destroy a protected group. In Gaza, famine served the same genocidal function as starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.
Children embody demographic continuity, cultural reproduction, and collective future. Consequently, systematic violence against children has appeared repeatedly in cases later recognized as genocide, from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda.
The Commission explicitly states that targeting children attacks “the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and determine their future.” Its findings connect killings to broader patterns: destruction of schools, hospitals, pediatric facilities, neonatal care units, food systems, and water infrastructure.
That’s the ultimate objective: the genocide and ecocide of Palestine, its culture and children. Israel’s devastation of Lebanon follows in the footprints.
From an empirical perspective, the cumulative effect is measurable. Public-health research consistently demonstrates that childhood exposure to mass violence produces lifelong deficits in physical health, educational attainment, psychological resilience, and economic productivity.
Israel did not triumph in Gaza. Moral darkness did.
Human cost beyond death statistics……………………………………………………………………
Hind Rajab, the voice that refuses to disappear…………………………………………………………………………….
High technology and moral decay……………………………………………………………….
The cost to Israeli society and soldiers………………………………………………………
If Gaza becomes the new norm
The broader international implications may be even more alarming. If the deliberate targeting of children becomes normalized, the consequences extend far, far beyond the Middle East.
International humanitarian law depends fundamentally on protecting civilians, especially children. If powerful states can openly disregard these norms without meaningful accountability, the deterrent effect of international law weakens everywhere.
Empirical evidence suggests that impunity encourages repetition. The failures to prevent atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur contributed to future violations by signaling weak enforcement. Conversely, successful accountability mechanisms have historically reduced recurrence.
The risks include greater regional radicalization, transnational terrorism, refugee flows, intensified great-power rivalry, erosion of international institutions, and the spread of increasingly unrestricted warfare.
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I warned repeatedly that what happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. The Strip became a laboratory for new forms of warfare later exported elsewhere.
The Commission’s findings raise precisely that concern. If the systematic destruction of children, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure becomes accepted in one conflict, future belligerents may invoke the precedent.
The ultimate question raised by the report is therefore not only what happened to Gaza’s children. It is whether the international community is willing to preserve the principle that children remain beyond the reach of war itself.
For if that principle fails in Gaza, it will not survive elsewhere.
Dan Steinbock is the author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, . He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/27/obliterating-gazas-children-the-damning-un-report/
UN report finds Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children
by Stephanie Tran | Jun 23, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/un-report-finds-israel-deliberately-targets-palestinian-children/
A UN Commission of Inquiry has found Israeli forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, their actions amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza. Stephanie Tran reports.
In a report released today, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel found that Palestinian children had been subjected to targeted killing, starvation, torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention and repeated displacement.
The Commission found that “much of the harm suffered by Palestinian children was not incidental but
“intended to destroy the existence of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”
It said the “sheer number” of cases it investigated showing children were directly targeted by Israeli forces constituted “a key element” in demonstrating genocidal intent from Israeli authorities.
Last year, the Commission found that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The report also makes reference to its 2024 findings on “violations and abuses against Israeli children committed by the military wing of Hamas”. It found that “Israeli children were subjected to physical and emotional mistreatment on 7 October 2023.” 40 children were killed in the attack and hundreds injured, with many children losing one or both parents.
“Many children witnessed the killings of their parents and siblings and were also filmed for propaganda purposes by Palestinian armed groups.”
‘Children deliberately targeted’
The Commission found that Israeli security forces have directly targeted Palestinian children with the intention to kill them.
“Israeli security forces have consistently, directly and intentionally targeted individual children across Gaza during evacuations, in shelters and designated safe zones, at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites and after the ceasefire agreement in and around the so-called ‘yellow line’.”
The report found that children had been targeted “from newborns to adolescents” and that in some cases children were shot while holding white flags.
The Commission said evidence including precision gunfire, injury patterns and the use of sniper rifles, drones and quadcopters capable of visually identifying targets indicated deliberate targeting.
Since 7 October 2023, more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, representing 30% of the total deaths.
Speaking to MWM, Commissioner Chris Sidoti said the documented deaths represented only a portion of children killed during the genocide.
“We have seen over 20,000 children killed directly as a result of the violence,” he said.
“Israeli security forces have consistently, directly and intentionally targeted individual children across Gaza during evacuations, in shelters and designated safe zones, at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites and after the ceasefire agreement in and around the so-called ‘yellow line’.”
“That does not include children who have not been identified, those who are buried under the rubble, those whose bodies have not been identified, those who have simply disappeared and are counted as missing.”
Sidoti said the figures also excluded children who had died from disease, starvation and the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.
“There are tens of thousands more children who have died as a consequence of this fighting,” he said.
He said some children had been deliberately targeted by snipers and drones.
“We know of snipers and of quadcopters that have killed children, deliberately targeting the children, not killing anybody else around them.”
The report found that children had been targeted “from newborns to adolescents” and that in some cases children were shot while holding white flags.
The Commission said evidence including precision gunfire, injury patterns and the use of sniper rifles, drones and quadcopters capable of visually identifying targets indicated deliberate targeting.
Since 7 October 2023, more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, representing 30% of the total deaths.
Speaking to MWM, Commissioner Chris Sidoti said the documented deaths represented only a portion of children killed during the genocide.
Sexual violence against children
The Commission found that sexual and gender-based violence was being used “in the context of detention and arrests as a method of warfare and intimidation against Palestinian children”.
“Sexual violence against Palestinian children in Israeli detention is not exceptional but a systematic, state-enabled assault on their bodies and their dignity and deliberately meted out to cause humiliation,” the report states.
The Commission documented cases of forced public nudity, sexual assault, genital violence and sexual threats against children in detention.
Sidoti said some forms of abuse amounted to torture.
“Sexual violence itself is common, but it is not always used for the purposes of torture,” he said.
“A part of the sexual violence that we saw involved the stripping of children in public, their humiliation, and what, under Australian law and international law, constitutes child abuse.”
The Commission concluded that sexual violence against Palestinian children constituted both war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It further found that sexual violence “constitutes part of the genocidal act of causing serious bodily and mental harm.”
“Such deliberate violence was intended not only to cause immediate and long-term harm to the individual children, but
“to target and destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza, because children embody the group’s biological continuity and collective survival.”
Deliberate starvation and healthcare destruction
The Commission concluded that Israel had committed the war crime of wilful killing and the crime against humanity of extermination by intentionally using starvation as a method of warfare and depriving children of essential medical care.
The report found that Israel has “intentionally inflicted these conditions of life, in particular on Palestinian infants, children and young persons in Gaza”.
Attacks on hospitals, neonatal wards and maternity services, combined with shortages of fuel, medicine and medical equipment, have caused the deaths of newborns and seriously harmed pregnant women and infants.
Sidoti said the findings reinforced the Commission’s previous conclusions that Israeli actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.
“Our findings in relation to children confirmed those findings,” he told MWM.
He pointed to attacks on hospitals, neonatal and paediatric services and the destruction of medical equipment.
“All of these things indicate an intent that children should die, and that means for us reinforcement of our findings in relation to genocide“
Destruction of schools
The Commission concluded “Israeli security forces have intentionally directed attacks against educational facilities, resulting in the denial of Palestinian children’s right to education for present and future generations.”
More than 97% of schools in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed.
“The destruction of the education system has been an attack on the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people as a whole,” the report states.
The Commission found that the collapse of education and healthcare systems had caused
“Irreversible learning loss, neural developmental delays and diminished future opportunities.“
The report also documents Israeli soldiers filming themselves destroying children’s toys, playground equipment and personal belongings.
“The confidence of the Israeli soldiers to film themselves in this manner and post the evidence online is a clear reflection of the lack of accountability,” the report states.
Detention, torture and abuse
The Commission found that Palestinian children held by Israeli authorities had experienced prolonged blindfolding, forced stripping, severe beatings, deprivation of food and water, sleep deprivation and denial of medical treatment.
It found a pattern of “severe and deliberate mistreatment” particularly affecting Palestinian boys.
Children were subjected to prolonged kneeling on hard surfaces, attacks targeting their heads, faces and genitals, threats involving dogs and detention alongside adult prisoners.
The Commission concluded that the treatment of detained children constituted the crimes against humanity of torture and other inhumane acts causing serious suffering.
Sidoti said the number of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities remained unclear.
Sidoti said the number of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities remained unclear.
West Bank settler violence and killings
The Commission also examined Israeli military operations and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
It found evidence that Palestinian children had been deliberately shot, denied medical treatment and subjected to violence by settlers.
“The Commission has identified a pattern of targeting of Palestinian children in the West Bank, mirroring Israeli practices in Gaza including deliberate shooting of children, particularly of boys. Israeli soldiers target boys, labelled as “terrorists”, on the basis of their male and Palestinian identity, with lethal force.”
The report describes cases in which wounded children were left bleeding while soldiers prevented ambulances from reaching them.
The Commission concluded that Israeli authorities had failed to protect Palestinian children from settler violence.
It concluded that settler violence functioned
“not as a deviation from state policy but as a means of implementing it”
“Both the State of Israel and violent settler groups share and collaborate in the same strategic objectives: the entrenchment of Israeli settlement on Palestinian land, annexation of Palestinian territory and the displacement of Palestinian people from their land.”
Chain of command and accountability
Sidoti said the Commission had found responsibility extended beyond individual soldiers.
“We have made that finding that there is a clear chain of command and it does go right to the top,” he said.
“It is not just individual soldiers who are responsible for individual war crimes. … There is a chain of command that means that those at the top have issued clear orders as to the nature of this campaign, the objectives the military are to achieve.”
“Our conclusion on the basis of the evidence that we collected is that that constitutes a genocidal purpose.”
Sidoti said growing international attention had shifted from expressions of concern to discussions about concrete measures by individual states.
“The responsibilities under international law now fall on individual governments and groups of governments to decide what action to take and take it.”
He said governments, including Australia, should consider measures directed not only at individuals but also at institutions.
“We need to address questions of institutions now, and not just individuals who are committing war crimes. That means the Israeli Defense Forces as an institution, the Israeli government as an institution, and the settlements themselves, right across the West Bank, as organized violators of international law” he said.
Israel declines to respond
Sidoti said Israeli authorities had been provided with a draft copy of the report before publication.
“Our procedures require that we give all of our reports to the Israeli authorities in draft form before they’re finalised,” he said.
“The Israeli authorities had a draft of this report two or three weeks ago, and they had an opportunity to comment to us.”
According to Sidoti, Israeli authorities did not provide formal comments to the Commission.
“They did not do so, but instead … they prepared an 18-page rebuttal which they distributed to some diplomatic missions here in Geneva.”
The Commission called on states to ensure accountability for crimes committed against Palestinian children and urged the international community to “employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent the commission of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
MWM asked Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade whether Australia intends to take any action in response to the Commission’s findings.
They have not provided a response.
The Commission of Inquiry on OPT, including East Jerusalem, and Israel will be holding a livestreamed press conference at 9:30 PM (AEST) to discuss the findings of the report.
Israel takes perverse pleasure in torturing, raping, and murdering Palestinian hostages
In August 2024, Israeli human rights advocacy group, B’Tselem, published a report highlighting the systematic torture, abuse, and rape of Palestinian prisoners. The spokesperson for B’Tselem said,
“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.”
Palestinians abducted, imprisoned, starved, electrocuted, tortured, raped, and even subjected to simulated burial. This is the reality of Palestinian hostages tortured by Israel
Eva Karene Bartlett, Jun 23, 2026
In late 2023, Israeli soldiers abducted and imprisoned a Palestinian man (among many abducted at the same time) from a school in Jabaliya, Gaza, which he and other displaced Palestinians had been sheltering in. He was held hostage in Israeli prisons for nearly two years, during which time he was severely tortured by repeated and prolonged electrocution (including multiple times a day). His Israeli torturers at some point locked him in coffin-like box for two weeks in their attempt to psychologically break him.
According to Imad Nabhan, he refused to act as an informant for Israel. The Israeli soldiers first attempted to bribe him into collaboration, then defaulted to Israel’s (now well-documented) norm of brutal physical and psychological torture of Palestinian captives.
Nabhan’s release in October 2025 saw Imad so physically debilitated by the electric shock torture that he fell unconscious into violent seizures numerous times daily.
At the end of May, he spoke about the torture he endured in Israeli prisons, including his “coffin torture”. He reported that he had been held in “an iron container with a wooden box inside it,” where his hands and feet were tied, fed through a tube in a small hole, just enough to keep him alive.
“It seemed they wanted to make me feel like I was dead so they could get whatever information they wanted. I stayed inside that coffin for 15 days. I felt like I was alive in a dead body.”
In October 2025, while a journalist in Gaza was attempting to interview Nabhan after his release, Imad fell into one of his seizures, his whole body writhing and convulsing, his head repeatedly banging against the ground.
This lasted for 30 seconds, and started again a minute later as his father tried to shield his son’s head from hitting the ground. He spoke of Imad’s torture, showing the marks left on his legs from the repeated electric shocks.
His father had said until his release, he’d thought his son was dead. “We thought he’d been martyred, because there was information they shot people and were running over their bodies with tanks. So after two years, we were surprised that was alive in prison and was released.”
The Israeli torture and abuse meted out to Imad Nabhan is not unique, it is the norm, and in recent years there have been increasingly numerous accounts from former prisoners of the torture, rape, abuse, starvation, and denied medical care they endured in Israeli captivity, in violation of all international norms…………………………………………..
Living Hell: Israeli torture prisons
Among the more horrific instances (known to the public) of Israeli soldiers’ raping of Palestinian prisoners was the July 2024 gang rape of a Palestinian man from Gaza in the notorious Sde Teiman prison (dubbed the Israeli Guantanamo).
Hiding their faces with their shields, Israeli soldiers took turns raping the prisoner so severely he was hospitalized unable to walk, with “a torn rectum, damaged lungs, and broken ribs.” [Note: Many Palestinians who have testified about their severe torture in Israeli prisons were not given medical care afterward.]
Astonishingly (to normal people), after a video of the rape was leaked and aired on Israeli television, not only was the Israeli public reaction not disgust or horror, but Israelis, members of the Knesset, and Israeli ministers protested the detention of soldiers accused of the gang-rape. None of the soldiers were charged.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called their brief detention “shameful”, saying the rapists were “our best heroes”.
In August 2024, Israeli human rights advocacy group, B’Tselem, published a report highlighting the systematic torture, abuse, and rape of Palestinian prisoners. The spokesperson for B’Tselem said,
“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. When the issue of Palestinian hostages tortured in Israeli prisons is reported these days, the focus is often only on Palestinians from Gaza. But on a near daily basis throughout the West Bank, Palestinian men, women and children are abducted, arrested and held imprisoned, without charges, many of them repeatedly so. It is clearly not about crimes committed but about trying to break Palestinians psychologically, by the same means of torture, starvation, sexual abuse, and physical abuse.
Israel added to UN sexual violence blacklist
The United Nations put Israel on its annual blacklist of entities “credibly suspected of committing widespread sexual violence in conflict zones.” Victims include 31 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, including 14 men, seven women, nine boys, and one girl.
Violations included, “rape, including with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals.” Nine in the report were raped, including gang rape, some repeatedly.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….. That Israel faces no consequences nor any pressure to stop such torture, what is described as a systematic top-down policy, highlights yet again the death of international law and the meaningless of UN designations. As I’ve argued many times over the years, what’s the point of listing Israel as a serial murdered and rapist if no international body will actually stop Israel from continuing to abduct, torture and rape Palestinians?…………………………………………………………………… https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/israel-takes-perverse-pleasure-in?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=202287735&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
More Palestinians killed by Israeli military and settlers across occupied West Bank in last 3 years since Gaza hostilities than previous 17 combined – Oxfam
11 June 2026 AIMN Editorial, https://theaimn.net/more-palestinians-killed-by-israeli-military-and-settlers-across-occupied-west-bank-in-last-3-years-since-gaza-hostilities-than-previous-17-combined-oxfam/
More than one in five killed over last 20 years were children.
More Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military and settlers across the occupied West Bank in the last three years than in the previous 17 years combined, analysis from Oxfam has found. The number of children killed over the last three years was also higher.
An analysis of United Nations data found that 1,036 Palestinians – including 225 children – had been killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 2006 and the end of 2022. However, in the last three years, from 2023 to the end of last year by comparison, 1,244 Palestinians – including 268 children – have been killed.
Over the 20 years, 22 per cent – more than one in five of those killed – have been children.
For the same periods analysed, in the 17 years between 2006 until the end of 2022, 86 Israeli settlers, including 12 children, were killed by Palestinians. In the last three years – from 2023 to the end of 2025 – 43 Israeli settlers have been killed, including ten children.
The West Bank continues to be subjected to Israeli policies and practices of fast-tracked annexation, amid record mass forced displacement, movement restrictions, killings by army and settler militias, and ongoing military operations. Checkpoints and closures are fragmenting the territory and limiting access to essential services and livelihoods, while repeated state-backed settler violence is driving mass displacement.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam International Humanitarian Policy Lead said: “The mounting killing of civilians in the West Bank is tragic and horrifying. While the eyes of the world have been on Gaza, attacks in the West Bank have been accelerating. Since the atrocities committed by Hamas and other armed groups in 2023, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza while also enabling an unprecedented surge of violence across the West Bank.
“Oxfam works with Palestinian families whose lives have been destroyed. It is devastating that scores of children are being killed. This is the human cost of impunity, Israeli violence and cruelty in full view, while world leaders look the other way”.
A record number of Palestinians in the West Bank – nearly 46,000 – have been forcibly displaced over the last three years, compared to just over 13,000 for the previous 14 years combined by Israeli military operations, settler violence, demolitions and access restrictions. Many families are having to live in unstable and insecure conditions, often with host communities or in informal shelter arrangements, with limited access to essential services.
Saed* is 50 years old and was forced out of his home in the Ein Samya community. He said: “We used to deal with settlers all the time, but over the past three years, settler violence has increased massively. Eventually we had to leave and now a settler is staying in my home. I saw him. He took over the community too. It breaks my heart to talk about the past.
“We went to another community in Jericho, but it did not stop there. Settlers closed the roads, carried weapons, harassed and terrified our children on their way to school, and grazed their livestock inside our community, next to our houses. In the worst cases they would steal our livestock under the protection of the army and police.”
Communities across the West Bank have experienced repeated demolitions and destruction not just of their homes but water pipelines, animal shelters and trees. Last year, the World Health Organisation documented over 230 attacks on healthcare facilities, including obstructed access, the vandalization of ambulances and harassment of medical staff.
There is now a record 925 obstacles that permanently or intermittently restrict the movement of over 3 million Palestinians across the West Bank including East Jerusalem. This is 43 per cent more than the annual average of 647 movement obstacles in the preceding 20 years.
In the first three months of this year alone there have been more than 540 settler attacks, 33 Palestinian people killed and more than 2,200 people displaced. More than 60 water and sanitation structures have been vandalized, including pipelines, irrigation systems and water tanks, which have undermined access to water in 32 Palestinian communities.
Despite Israel’s ongoing process of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Oxfam and its partners continue to support vulnerable communities across the West Bank with humanitarian assistance, including clean water, food, the rehabilitation of agricultural water cisterns and livestock shelters.
Oxfam is calling for an end to Israel’s unlawful occupation and further annexation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to the foreign complicity in the illegal occupation and settlement enterprise. A just and sustainable peace must be anchored in international law and the right to self-determination.
Visual data reveals extent of systematic Israeli white phosphorus attacks on south Lebanon: Report
These shells are designed to release 116 burning felt wedges that can be detonated high in the air and drift over a radius of up to 250 meters, causing widespread fires on the ground.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Environment has formally accused the Israeli military of committing ‘an act of ecocide,’ resulting in an estimated $25 billion in damages
The humanitarian risks of these munitions are devastating because white phosphorus causes horrific, deep-tissue burns that can reach the bone and may reignite if exposed to oxygen after treatment.
News Desk, JUN 7, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/visual-data-reveals-extent-of-systematic-israeli-white-phosphorus-attacks-on-south-lebanon-report
A report by The New York Times (NYT) published on 6 June gathers thorough documentation that the Israeli military has repeatedly deployed white phosphorus over populated areas in southern Lebanon during its ongoing war and invasion of the country.
Visual evidence collected by NYT, including verified social media footage and news coverage, shows distinctive smoke trails and airbursts over cities like Nabatieh and Tyre, as well as smaller towns like Qlayaa, Khiam, and Yohmor, with incidents documented as recently as May 2026.
While the Israeli military maintains that its use of these munitions is intended for smoke screens and complies with international law, human rights experts assert that deploying such an indiscriminate incendiary substance in civilian-heavy areas violates the laws of war.
The body of evidence gathered by numerous international observers and human rights groups is extensive and corroborates these findings.
Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have verified dozens of videos and photos showing the airbursting of US-made M825A1 artillery shells.
These shells are designed to release 116 burning felt wedges that can be detonated high in the air and drift over a radius of up to 250 meters, causing widespread fires on the ground.
In Yohmor, HRW geolocated eight images from March 2026 showing these munitions exploding over residential neighborhoods, directly resulting in fires in homes and vehicles.
Similar evidence from Dhayra in October 2023 includes testimony from residents and doctors who treated nine civilians for suffocation and respiratory damage caused by the “garlic-like” smoke.
Independent researchers have now documented over 200 uses of the substance in Lebanon since October 2023, which the Lebanese government reports have caused more than 600 fires.
This pattern of use extends far beyond recent events in Lebanon; Israel has a long history of deploying white phosphorus in the region, including during the 1982 and 2006 wars in Lebanon, extensively in Gaza in 2009, and throughout its ongoing genocidal campaign since 2023.
Amnesty International documented the use of white phosphorus artillery shells in densely populated civilian areas in Gaza shortly after the launch of the war on 7 October, 2023; this deployment directly violated a 2013 pledge by the Israeli military to phase out the use of the incendiary substance in populated areas.
The humanitarian risks of these munitions are devastating because white phosphorus causes horrific, deep-tissue burns that can reach the bone and may reignite if exposed to oxygen after treatment.
Beyond the immediate physical trauma, the substance poses long-term environmental hazards by contaminating soil and water, necessitating specialized cleanup operations before farmers can safely return to their land.
Due to the indiscriminate nature of these illegal weapons, rights groups continue to call for an immediate halt to their use in residential areas.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Environment formally accused the Israeli military of committing “an act of ecocide,” back in April 2026, citing a National Council for Scientific Research report that details $25 billion in damages, including the destruction of thousands of hectares of forest and orchards alongside extreme phosphorus soil contamination in strikes conducted between 2023 and 2024.
Israel Has Engineered a Deadly Shortage of Medications and Health Care in Gaza
June 5, 2026, By Hend Salama Abo Helow, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/05/israel-has-engineered-a-deadly-shortage-of-medications-and-health-care-in-gaza/
A Palestinian doctor in Gaza says the territory is facing its worst medication shortage since Israel began the genocide.
My mother has been a hypertension patient for the past 25 years. Ever since her initial diagnosis, she has adhered strictly to her prescribed medication. Yet since the genocide broke out, her medicine gradually ran out until it vanished from the markets altogether, with no clinic, pharmacy, warehouse, or stockpile left untouched by the shortage.
Eventually, my mother was forced to redraw her therapeutic map around two alternative drugs with relatively similar efficacy to the one she had lost. The doses were measured carefully according to her condition. But the fear of losing the medication again grew on her, so she began rationing her doses, taking half a pill instead of a full one, to make them last longer.
Although the ceasefire that followed was supposed to allow the unhindered influx of humanitarian aid and life-saving medical supplies at scale, it proved to be nothing but another trap. My mother went to collect her monthly prescription, only for the pharmacist to tell her that this would likely be the last refill, as the medication had already been depleted.
This is not an isolated plight endured only by my mother, but the status quo for 350,000 chronic patients in Gaza whose health, like hers, hangs in the balance, conditioned on the fluctuating status of the borders.
Faced with a shattered health care system, patients’ survival is dependent on Israel’s tightening restrictions on border crossings. The World Health Organization has warned that Israeli forces are no longer only claiming people’s lives through bombs, but are also endangering Palestinians by denying them urgently needed health care services and medication.
Israel is willfully violating international law, which obligates the occupying power to maintain health care services, not undermine them nor use them as a bargaining chip.
Dr. Ahmad Al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital, described the ongoing crisis as “the worst period ever of depletion of medical supplies,” stressing that it even far outweighed the medicine shortage Gaza had witnessed earlier during the genocide. “It is the worst ever,” he emphasized.
He condemned the use of the word “ceasefire,” stating, “We are nearly 900 days into a war despite the one-sided truce.” He pointed to more than 2,400 breaches of the so-called ceasefire, during which 765 Palestinians were killed and roughly 2,100 wounded. Al-Farra further noted that around 1,700 medical staff have fallen during the two years of genocide, while many others remain captured in Israeli prisons.
Bringing the picture together, he told Truthout that 25 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are now out of service, while 103 out of 137 primary health care centers have been damaged, and medical supplies have totally run out.
Al-Farra, in a broken voice, remarked that hospitals have become “nothing more than hollow cement blocks, stripped from the very core they were built for: medical services.”
Sharing the latest not-yet-public statistics of the exact shortages compiled by Gaza’s Health Ministry exclusively with Truthout, he said:
“Fifty percent of basic medications for noncommunicable diseases like hypertension, diabetes, asthma, and respiratory diseases are now missing. Around 70 percent of medical equipment is nonexistent, while 84 percent of laboratory resources are unavailable. At the same time, hospital capacity has surged by 225 percent. Around 25 out of 35 oxygen stations have been damaged, while 61 electricity generators out of 110 have been leveled down.“
The health care system is “in its final throes,” Al-Farra sighed.
The unending crisis has extended beyond governmental hospitals to the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In early April, MSF released alarming reports stating that it had not been able to bring any medical supplies into Gaza since January 1, 2026. Israel has obstructed its vital role in providing necessary health care services for chronic and trauma-related patients, and those requiring surgical operations and post-operative care, all amid a growingly conducive environment for diseases to exacerbate.
Yet Dr. Abdullah Al-Naami, who has worked in the pharmacological field for the last 26 years, doubled down on the alarming report released by MSF about the unfolding medication crisis.
Al-Naami told Truthout that “the current stockpile of medicines is nowhere near enough for the spiraling needs.” He added that “hypertension, cardiovascular, and cancer patients are impacted the most.”
“New emergency cases have been rising due to the low-quality living conditions and contamination inside the displacement camps, including scabies and infectious diseases.” Yet “painkillers, antibiotic pills, ointments, and sterilized gauzes are running critically low. Patients receive their treatment for one month, while the following months remain suspended until further notice and medications become available again.”
Based on the medication scarcity, Al-Naami explained, “this is why we cannot provide the full amount of the prescribed medication. Instead, patients receive either half or quarter the quantities. The Ministry of Health has even resorted to extending the expiration dates of medications and renewing their use after testing their efficacy. All of this is merely to enhance the patients’ survivability amidst suffocating restrictions meant to crush Palestinians’ health.”
Al-Naami also underscored the significant shortages of nebulizers, whose absence has ultimately threatened hundreds of thousands of lives.
Young children are also facing devastating health consequences due to what Al-Farra described as “one of the Israeli strategies”: allowing one specific type of infant formula into Gaza until it became the primary milk depended on by nearly every child, only to later ban its entry after infants’ tiny bodies had already grown accustomed to it.
“Such abrupt switches in milk type result in malabsorption diseases, allergies, and potentially fatal complications,” he explained.
Al-Farra recounted the story of his patient, Huda Abo Al-Naja, a 12-year-old girl who was in the third phase of malnutrition, immunocompromised, and suffering from severe anemia.
He said she had been admitted to the hospital four times due to edema, “the accumulation of fluids in her body.”
Al-Farra lamented that the patient was “a unique and genius child,” fully aware of her own condition. He recalled how she would even compete with the intern doctors, answering questions related to her illness on their behalf.
Her journey fluctuated constantly between remission and relapse, improvement and deterioration, until she eventually developed sepsis that progressed into hypotension and septic shock, leading to admission to the ICU. During her stay, she urgently needed numerous diagnostic procedures and therapeutic interventions, including “bacterial cultures, a central line, arterial blood gas analysis, and electrolyte testing” — all of which were unavailable back then.
“Due to the lack of the necessary diagnostic and therapeutic tools needed to save her life, Huda died,” Al-Farra said.
Al-Farra placed the blame directly on “the collapse of Gaza’s health care system and the complete closure of border crossings imposed all by Israeli forces.”
For those who survived two years of genocidal war, the atrocities did not stop there. They are now at the peril of “a more engineered silent weapon: scarcity of medication,” as Al-Farra put it plainly.
He called on the international community and mediators to pressure Israel into opening the border crossings for the unconditional and unhindered flow of medical supplies. He added the need to reclaim Palestinians’ right to a dignified life and proper treatment, which is “a fundamental legitimate right under international law.”
Nakba Day: Muhammad Shehada on Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza & Ongoing Palestinian Resilience
SCHEERPOST, May 15, 2026 , Democracy Now
Palestinians around the world are marking Nakba Day, 78 years after their forced mass displacement led to the establishment of the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Decades later, Palestinians still face widespread oppression and violence from the Israeli state as it continues its expansionary project. “Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it. Our people are still there, resilient,” says Palestinian writer Muhammad Shehada, who was born in Gaza and now lives in Denmark. Shehada discusses the ongoing process of the Nakba, including its latest intensification after October 7, 2023. “Now this veneer of civility has fallen off. The mask was taken off. And now it’s a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians.”
Shehada also describes current conditions in Gaza — still under Israeli blockade and occupation — and what he calls the “disarmament trap” of unfairly weighted negotiations designed to strip Palestinians of political autonomy. “The ‘realistic’ proposal that Israel is putting on the table is surrender, capitulate, become fully defenseless, weaponless, and entrust the very army that carried out a genocide against you to be merciful towards you once you are an easier target than you ever were before.”
Finally, he responds to the Israeli government’s recent threat to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, after the paper published a column by longtime opinion writer Nicholas Kristof about systemic sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. “It’s the newspaper of record. It’ll be spread and disseminated widely to an American audience,” says Shehada about the allegations levied in Kristof’s piece. “So we see, basically, an Israeli panic attack in return.”
Transcript…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/15/nakba-day-muhammad-shehada-on-israels-ethnic-cleansing-in-gaza-ongoing-palestinian-resilience/
Rodent infestation caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza is now creating a public health catastrophe
More than 70,000 infections have been recorded in Gaza this year, as rats bite children as they sleep and skin diseases kill those prevented from receiving treatment abroad. Health officials say a plague outbreak is no longer a remote possibility.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj May 8, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/rodent-infestation-caused-by-israels-destruction-of-gaza-is-now-creating-a-public-health-catastrophe/
At the beginning of April, Enshrah Hajjaj, a 61-year-old woman with diabetes, woke up in her tent in Gaza City to find blood on her toes. She couldn’t figure out how she started bleeding, so she treated herself inside her tent with her family and carried on with her day. A week later, she woke up again to find the same bleeding toes — but this time, half of them were missing. She began screaming, and her family rushed her to the hospital, where doctors told her that rats had eaten through them while she slept. As a diabetic, she had lost much of the sensation in her feet, a common complication of the disease, and had felt nothing.
Enshrah’s case is far from isolated. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, four displaced people have died from skin diseases directly linked to rodent infestations, though the Ministry was unable to confirm the specific diseases in each case, citing the absence of laboratory materials needed for testing.
Nisreen Kilab, head of the Environmental Health Department at the Health Ministry, said the symptoms observed in several patients indicate a virus transmitted through rodent waste and bites, which can be fatal in some cases. “We suspected several leptospirosis infections, but unfortunately, these cases could not be confirmed through laboratory testing due to the absence of the required means,” she told Mondoweiss.
Kilab said the skin diseases spreading in Gaza are driven by insect, flea, and rodent bites, warning that without urgent intervention, the outbreak will only deepen.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 70,000 cases of ectoparasite infections were reported in Gaza in 2026, while over 80% of displacement camps reported recurring rodent and pest infestations, as well as skin conditions such as scabies and lice. The WHO’s representative described this as “the unfortunate but predictable consequence when people live in a collapsed living environment.”
Enshrah Hajjaj now lives in constant fear, especially at night. “I sleep while awake,” she told Mondoweiss. “I haven’t experienced a single night’s peace after this incident. I can’t feel my feet, and half my foot is numb, so I’m afraid of waking up one day to find that rodents ate off my entire foot without me feeling it.”
The conditions around Enshrah’s tent and the tent encampments in Gaza have been described by health officials as particularly conducive to the spread of rodent infestations, with piles of garbage rising in small hills only a few hundred meters away from the displacement camps. The camps themselves sit amid pools of sewage and mud.
“At first, there was an accumulation of rubble and debris, and later a buildup of garbage near displacement centers,” Kilab said. “More than 90% of Gaza’s population is displaced and living in tents, which has led to a frightening increase in population density, and a high population density means a faster spread of disease.”
Kilab said that the 40 million tons of accumulated waste across Gaza have made matters worse. “These conditions are an ideal breeding ground for epidemics,” she explained.
When skin disease becomes a death sentence
Contracting a skin disease in Gaza has become potentially fatal, while local hospitals lack the means of diagnosing them. Patients who need specialized care abroad cannot leave, as exit permits for medical travel remain beyond reach due to Israel’s continued closure of the Rafah border crossing, despite its obligation to facilitate medical evacuations and general travel through the crossing as part of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Hamas.
Last February, Muhammad Dhiban died after suffering from a skin disease that doctors in Gaza could not identify. The disease damaged his kidneys and reached his brain, causing meningitis. He was unable to travel for treatment and died in Gaza. In April, Ibrahim Abu Aram died from a severe blistering skin condition that covered his body in open sores. According to his family, the infection had spread to his brain. For months, both men and their families appealed to decision-makers to allow them to leave Gaza for treatment, but no response was forthcoming.
Dhiban and Abu Aram likely died of one of several diseases now spreading among the displaced. “There are several diseases transmitted by rodents, such as Lassa fever, typhus, and Salmonella, that are likely making up most of the infections we’re seeing,” Kilab said. “They’re all carried through rodents, insects, and their waste.” She warned that if health institutions failed to contain the epidemic, Gaza could face an outbreak of the plague, a possibility she said is no longer remote.
Abdel Qader al-Basyouni, a father of four, told Mondoweiss now afraid of what might happen to his youngest child, who was recently bitten by a rat while sleeping at night. The child developed a fever and complications that the family described as severe.
Al-Basyouni said that what Palestinians endure in the tents is something no one in Gaza has ever experienced. Rats once rarely entered homes, and hearing of a rat biting a person was extremely uncommon. “Never in my life have I ever heard of a rat attacking and biting a human,” he said. “Not until after this war.”
His wife, Yasmin al-Basyouni, said the garbage never stops accumulating. Neither does the bombing, nor the further accumulation of rubble. Meanwhile, sanitation and cleanup efforts can’t keep up with the rate at which waste is produced.
“So what awaits us?” she asked. “What awaits our children in the tents during the summer, with the greater spread of rodents and insects? Is death waiting for us? Is the plague waiting for us?”
The situation has gotten so dire, she said, that they have been reduced to wondering whether their children will die of bombs or rodent bites. “Are rats also our enemy now?” she added.
FIFA-Backed “Board of Peace” Plan for Gaza Stadium Ignores Needs of Palestinians
By Dalia Abu Ramadan, May 7, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/07/fifa-backed-board-of-peace-plan-for-gaza-stadium-ignores-needs-of-palestinians/
How can recreational projects be proposed when even the most basic foundations of life have not yet been rebuilt?
In February, Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” struck a $50 million agreement with the football-governing body FIFA, with grand promises to build a national stadium, sports academy, and over 50 “mini-pitches.” The initiative seeks to redirect global attention away from Gaza through so-called “peace agreements” that do not exist on the ground — mere labels placed over unremoved ruins.
How can more than 50 football fields be planned while no real effort is made to establish peace first? How can sports projects be discussed in a place still under daily bombardment, where infrastructure has collapsed and conditions continue to worsen with every passing season?
The only change is that the intensity of the fighting has slightly decreased, but life has not become any easier. It is not simple to live while constantly expecting death — your own or that of your loved ones — at any moment.
On April 28, I went out with my mother to shop when we suddenly heard a heavy bombardment. I called my father, who was also outside, and the sound was very close to us. He told us he had heard the same intense bombardment. Minutes later, people in the street began saying that a car had been targeted and completely burned, killing civilians nearby. Among the victims were four people, including Khaled Naeem Abu Nahl, a child who was killed at the door of his home.
This is one of many stories that followed the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza.
On April 29, we had an appointment with a seamstress, but we found her shop closed. My mother called her to ask where she was. The answer came as a shock: Her husband, from the Al-Shawa family in the Al-Saha area, had been killed the day before. “Didn’t you hear?” she asked. My mother hung up in disbelief. How can a simple seamstress, trying to earn a living, suddenly become a widow responsible for an entire family?
In March, a story spread that caused widespread fear, revealing a part of the tragedy we are living through in Gaza away from the rest of the world’s eyes: A father said the screams of his newborn son woke him up one night, and he found the 28-day-old baby’s face covered in blood after a large rat had bitten him on the cheek.
Since the beginning of 2026, some of the most severe crises we have been facing are the spread of rodents amid the continued failure to remove rubble, and the fact that many people are still trapped beneath the debris. Imagine life in a city reduced to ruins — a place turned into a dumping ground for waste and destroyed homes, where we struggle to survive. Rats consume whatever little furniture remains, while we live in tents surrounded by destruction, with sewage seeping from beneath them.
The World Health Organization has reported more than 17,000 cases of disease among displaced people in Gaza linked to rodents and external parasites since the beginning of this year, amid a severe deterioration in health and humanitarian conditions as a result of Israel’s ongoing aggression.
How can a life that resembles hell, deprived of the most basic necessities, be reduced to discussions about building football stadiums, while Gaza’s entire infrastructure has been destroyed? How can recreational projects be proposed in a place where even the most basic foundations of life have not yet been rebuilt?
Trump, together with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, promote projects presented as symbols of peace and prosperity, while the basic needs of people are being ignored.
Imagine building stadiums amid rubble, disease, and a toxic and dangerous environment, while this is being framed as a vision of peace and development.
“It is strange how everything has been set aside in favor of building stadiums. What about stopping the bombardment first? What about the basics?” my friend Lama said.
She points out that some things have slightly improved, such as the entry of food compared to before, yet daily shortages remain — basic items like eggs are still not consistently available. She says the image presented to the world suggests that famine has ended, while the reality on the ground is different.
Lama asks: Do they believe that building stadiums will give the world the impression that Gaza has been rebuilt and is now living in peace?
One day, I was speaking with my friend Ahed, who is about to graduate, and asked her about Trump’s idea. She laughed sarcastically and said, “Instead of building stadiums, focus on securing students in schools and universities — and provide them with transportation first.”
For a moment, and through Ahed’s words, I realized how much we have lost the true meaning of life. I was speaking about the diseases we are facing — dehydration, severe diarrhea, hepatitis, and meningitis — caused by the spread of rodents and the weakened immunity resulting from famine, effects that we are still suffering from today.
Suddenly, Ahed brought me back to another reality that is no less harsh: the destruction of universities, schools, and transportation — as if we are living between two layers of suffering at the same time.
We have forgotten the meaning of luxury; it no longer even crosses our minds. We ask for nothing more than a warm home and genuine safety. But who can truly understand how we feel, if they have not lived our reality?
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one.
At least 2,842 Palestinians had ‘evaporated’ … [which] civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively ‘vaporise’ human bodies
Belen Fernandez 4 May 2026 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-making-palestinians-disappear-more-ways-one
Reports of missing children and ‘evaporated’ bodies reveal a widening pattern of erasure in Gaza, where entire families are killed, lost under rubble or reduced to biological traces
n 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “dozens of children go missing each week” in the Gaza Strip “against the backdrop of the postwar chaos” – a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year.
The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: “[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family’s tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out.” And then he was gone.
The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children “disappeared during the war”, with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.
Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned back in September that the true death toll might already have been more in the vicinity of 680,000.
Speaking of disappearances, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation revealed in February that at least 2,842 Palestinians had “evaporated” in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war – a phenomenon Gaza’s civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of US-manufactured thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively “vaporise” human bodies.
The gruesome tally was quickly eclipsed by the deranged US-Israeli war on Iran and wider regional catastrophe, which has monopolised the news for the past two months. But the topic remains as sinisterly relevant as ever.
In remarks to Al Jazeera at the time, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal outlined the process for determining the number of vaporised victims at homes targeted by Israeli strikes: “If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces – blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps.”
Vaporised bodies
Upon publication of these macabre findings, the Israeli military got its panties into a genocidal bunch and issued a huffy communique to allegedly set the record straight.
Rejecting Al Jazeera’s “false claim of the evaporation of Gazan bodies”, the army insisted that it “uses only lawful munitions” and that it “strikes military targets and objectives in accordance with international law and takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian property to the extent possible.”
It’s not clear, of course, why a military that has been accused of potentially killing nearly 700,000 people – and that wipes out entire families and neighbourhoods without so much as batting an eye – took such particular offence at the whole “evaporation” matter.
Granted, disappearing bodies into thin air is a pretty good way of hiding the true extent of mass slaughter.
And while the vaporisation of Palestinian bodies may not fit the official legal definition of enforced disappearance, it is quite literally exactly that.
According to the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “an enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law”.
In light of Israel’s explicit disappearing act in Gaza, however, a considerable expansion of that definition would seem to be in order.
And yet Israel is guilty of the traditional variety of enforced disappearance, as well. Last August, UN experts denounced reports that starving Palestinian civilians – including a child – were being forcibly disappeared from aid distribution sites run by the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Backed by Israel and the US, the foundation also specialised in massacring desperate folks who had gathered in search of food and other necessary items for survival.
Meanwhile, in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s enforced disappearances of medical personnel, journalists and all manner of other humans have flourished since the onset of the genocide – not that this hasn’t always been par for the course.
Global pattern
For its part, the US has had a hand in enforced disappearances in a whole lot of places around the world, including by aiding and abetting bloodthirsty right-wing regimes throughout Latin America during the Cold War.
Tens of thousands were disappeared in Argentina, Guatemala and beyond as the US and its buddies nobly went about making the hemisphere safe for capitalism.
In Mexico, more than 130,000 persons have been disappeared, the vast majority of them following the launch in 2006 of the US-backed “war on drugs”, which would be more aptly characterised as a war on the poor.
But from Mexico to the Middle East, the number of disappeared hardly conveys the extent of victimisation. The families of the missing are victims, too, condemned as they are to indefinite psychological limbo in the absence of concrete information regarding the fate of their loved ones – without which it is impossible to commence the grieving process or obtain the emotional closure that is necessary to move on with one’s life.
In the case of Israel’s “evaporation” of Palestinians in Gaza, it’s hard to say whether the knowledge that your loved one has been vaporised is concrete enough to enable eventual closure. After all, there’s nothing very concrete about being forcibly vanished without a trace.
Indeed, Al Jazeera quotes Palestinian father Rafiq Badran on the almost inconceivable psychological torment that attends Israel’s sinister new spin on the theme of enforced disappearance: “Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”
Now, with regional war raging as the arms industry rakes in big bucks, it has become even easier for global audiences to tune out the unique plight of the Palestinians – which means that the genocide is effectively being disappeared from the spotlight, as well.
In the end, of course, the Israeli goal is nothing less than to forcibly disappear the very idea of a Palestinian people. But unfortunately for Israel, its blood-drenched legacy will not be so easily concealed.
Israel’s war on water-depriving Palestinians in Gaza of water for at least nearly two decades, if not longer
It’s part of Israel’s multi-layered manufactured misery in Gaza, long before October 2023
Eva Karene Bartlett, May 01, 2026, https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/israels-war-on-water-depriving-palestinians?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=196084075&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email EXCELLENT ILLUSTRATIONS ON ORIGINAL.
When I lived in Gaza, I documented Israel’s systematic destruction of wells & cisterns in the formerly-rich agricultual land in eastern & northern Gaza, also noting:
“(Following the Israeli December 2008/January 2009 war on Gaza) A UNDP survey following the attacks found that nearly 14,000 dunums of irrigation networks and pipelines have been destroyed, along with 250 wells and 327 water pumps completely damaged, and another 53 wells partially damaged by Israeli bombing and bulldozing. Water has been further contaminated by chemical agents used by the Israeli army during its war on Gaza…”
Palestinian farmers often had to resort to trying to irrigate their land by carting jugs of wateron donkey carts over land rutted by Israeli tanks and bulldozers (which routinely invaded to tear up farmland and destroy crops).
On top of depriving Palestinians of their ability to collect water, Israel cut off the natural flow of water to Gaza.
On top of this, Israel ensured Gaza’s coastal waters remained polluted by sewage, never allowing Palestinians to properly maintain and treat sewage, pumping into the sea being the only option to avoid having sewage flood the streets (as happened many times).
Back in 2014 when I wrote an indepth overview of the many sadistic policies Israel employed to ensure Gaza was unliveable back then, I noted:
“Damage to the coastal aquifer from over-extraction will be reversible in 2020 if no action is taken now, a 2012 UN report notes. At the moment, 95% of water in Gaza is undrinkable according to WHO standards.”
Do read the full overview:
-on how Israel has been deliberately starving Gaza since the 2000s, including by drastically limiting imports; shooting on farmers & fishers; destroying agricultural land and stealing or destroying fishing boats
-on the 2008/9 & 2012 Israeli wars on Gaza, which I documented real time from on the ground & in ambulances in northern Gaza
-on Israel attempting to quash popular unarmed resistance by firing live ammunition at protesters (long before the 2018 Great Marches)
-on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s sole power plant and crippling of their electricity, meaning we went without electricity for 14-18 hours on good days, 20 or more hours on bad days (which were the majority), and how this impacted sanitation, hospitals and personal lives
-on the Israeli bombings not reported by Western media, and not during Israel’s sociopathical wars on Gaza…and the sonic booms campaigns were terrorized the population, the sound very much like actual bombs, in relentless campaigns
-on how these, and more, contributed to stunted growth in children and other malnutrion related diseases, as well as anaemia in women, rampant diabetes, and other food and preventable water related diseases – https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/observations-from-occupied-palestine-in-gaza/
This was all 10 or 15 years prior to October 2023. Zionist propagandists’ justifications for their savagery are simply empty talking points
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