Over 92 Percent of Homes in Gaza Are Rubble. How Do We Even Start Rebuilding?
To resurrect Gaza, the world must reckon with the genocide. Despite the ceasefire, Israel is blocking access to cement.
By Hend Salama Abo Helow , Truthout, November 22, 2025
n the wake of the United Nations Security Council rubber-stamping Donald Trump’s plans for Gaza — including the creation of a so-called “board of peace” and a militarized “international stabilization force” — the very notion of rebuilding is slipping through the cracks, overshadowed by what is framed as the more urgent need to keep the peace in place. But peace manufactured this way is nothing but an expansion and deepening of the humanitarian crisis already unfolding.
Gaza City was already in a perpetual state of destruction and rebuilding long before the current genocide erupted. It has endured relentless aggression that reduced residential homes to rubble, wiped out entire neighborhoods, and massacred civilians. Five wars — 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and May 2023 — brutally dismantled Gaza’s infrastructure, economy, agriculture, education, and culture, leaving behind a consumed cycle of devastation.
Yet each time, once the bombardment stopped, reconstruction began, even if it was in a slow rhythm. Gaza would rise again — recovering, thriving even, in forms more vibrantly echoing and picturesque than before. But this genocide has unleashed an unprecedented scale of destruction, so vast and unrelenting that stumbling upon an intact home today feels like witnessing one of life’s seven miracles………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://truthout.org/articles/over-92-percent-of-homes-in-gaza-are-rubble-how-do-we-even-start-rebuilding/
Thanks to US, in Gaza it’s death by a thousand planes
25 November 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Walt Zlotow, https://theaimn.net/thanks-to-us-in-gaza-its-death-by-a-thousand-planes/
In 1948 the US launched an airlift of food and supplies to keep Berliners fed and healthy during the Soviet blockade of allies from Berlin. During the airlift’s 15 months, US planes delivered over 1,800,000 tons of life sustaining material…a humanitarian gesture for the ages.
Twenty-six months ago the US embarked on another airlift. Alas, this one was not humanitarian. It was to further Israeli genocide that has largely obliterated Gaza’s 139 square miles. Even with the not so peaceful ceasefire, America keeps airlifting in supplies to keep killing and degrading hapless Palestinians trapped in the ruins. Over 300 slaughtered and 900 wounded since ceasefire began 45 days ago. Israel just received planeload number 1,000. Along with 150 cargo ships, the US air/sea lift has poured into Israel over 120,000 tons of advanced munitions, weapons, armored vehicles, medical equipment, communications systems, and personal protective equipment.
Besides destroying Gaza, US war material supports Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, West Bank; even bombing imagined bad guys in US ally Qatar.
Whew! That takes a lot of US treasure that could be used to provide health care for all, end food insufficiency for 50 million sufferers, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, convert to green energy, among other critically needed uplifting of the commons. How much treasure squandered on all that death and destruction? Over $21 Billion for Gaza alone with another $12 billion for Israel’s other bombing and terror campaigns.
Back in 1948 the beleaguered Berliners proclaimed the US Berlin airlift heaven sent. Seventy-seven years on, desperately starving and sick Palestinians not yet killed under American bombs dropped from US plans view the US genocidal airlift as arising from the lowest level of hell.
When medics become targets: Ukrainian strikes on Russian rescue workers and the silence of western media.
Eva Karene Bartlett, November 20, 2025, https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/when-medics-become-targets-ukrainian?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=179646211&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Since Russia began its SMO in 2022, Western media have repeatedly accused Russia of an “unprovoked invasion” and of “war crimes”.
Honest observers, however, state that Russia has acted with considerable restraint in Ukraine—targeting military and logistics sites, not civilians—and remind of Ukraine’s eight years of warring on the civilians in the Donbass prior to the commencement of the SMO in 2022. Further, they emphasize that once again, in December 2021, Russia made clear its concerns in hopes of a diplomatic solution. These were, again, steadily ignored by Western governments and media.
Likewise ignored is Ukraine’s deliberate, shelling and drone striking of medical and rescue personnel. Under international law, medical and rescue personnel and their vehicles are protected and must not be targeted. Ukraine and its ally Israel are guilty of routinely, deliberately, targeting medics and other rescuers, maiming and killing them. These are war crimes, but the West remains mute, instead concocting stories of “Russian war crimes” in the face of Ukraine’s very real ones.
In September 2019, when I first visited the Donbass, in a village in the Gorlovka region I met an elderly resident of living alone in a home falling apart from previous Ukrainian shelling. During our conversation she said that ambulances wouldn’t be able to reach her if she was injured by the shelling, it would be too dangerous for them to try.
I was likewise told by Zaitsevo administration that ambulances could not reach the villagers.
“The paramedics don’t go farther than this building; it’s too dangerous. If somebody needs medical care near the front lines, someone has to go in their own car and take them to a point where medics can then take them to Gorlovka. The soldiers also help civilians who are injured.
A woman died due to huge blood loss because no one could reach her house to take her away in time. She was injured in the shelling and bled to death.”
This is one sordid reality for civilians living in villages heavily bombarded by Ukraine.
But the medics heroically do go to potentially dangerous areas to rescue civilians, and they have for years been deliberated targeted by Ukrainian forces when doing so.
In 2022, I interviewed numerous medics and Emergency Services workers in Donetsk regions, and subsequently made a short video about Ukraine’s deliberate targeting of rescue personnel.
Speaking with Emergency Services in Donetsk’s Kievsky district, for the two hours I was there we came under heavy Ukrainian shelling.
The windows of the building had already been blown out and were sand-bagged to attempt to protect the workers. The Chief of the centre, Andrey Levchenko, told me how five days prior his office had been impacted with shrapnel from the shelling. He thankfully had just stepped of his office before the blast and was not injured or killed.
The day prior to my visit, when out on a call to rescue civilians trapped in a building set ablaze by Ukrainian shelling, rescuers were shelled, resulting in one of them being hospitalized in critical condition.
The survivors told me that, prior to the shelling, they saw a drone overhead, which makes it credible to believe that Ukraine deliberately targeted the rescuers.
Levchenko told me that Ukraine routinely double and triple strikes rescuers.
“As soon as we go out to help people the shelling resumes.” The double or triple strike tactic often means that rescuers who have come to help those injured in the first strike are then themselves targeted, depriving civilians in need of urgent medical assistance as a result.
I also spoke with Sergei Neka, Director of the Department of Fire and Rescue Forces of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. He reiterated what I’d been told.
“Our units arrive at the scene of the accident and Ukraine begins to shell it. A lot of equipment has been damaged and destroyed.”
Two female medics I interviewed told me coming under repeated Ukrainian shelling is normal. They spoke of their fear, bu said, “How about the patients? They’re hurt and even more scared, they’re waiting for our help. If I don’t help, who will help if everyone runs away?”
By September 2022, Ukrainian forces targeted and killed 19 Donbass rescuers, injuring over 50 more.
Ukraine continues killing medics
Fast forward to the present. Following are just some of Ukraine’s more recent attacks on medics and other rescue workers.
On August 11, a Ukrainian drone targeted an ambulance in Gorlovka, killing two medics and seriously injuring the driver.
In May, a Ukrainian drone strike killed two Emergency workers who had come to the site of a first drone strike in Lugansk. In an Israeli-style second strike, Ukraine targeted the rescuers deliberately after the arrived at the scene.
In March, Russian Emergencies Ministry employees came to extinguish a car on fire following a Ukrainian drone strike in Gorlovka. A Ukrainian drone targeted them, injuring the deputy head of the firefighting service and damaging a fire truck.
There are tragically many more such instances which I could list. However, the point is that it is beyond clear that Ukraine’s shelling and drone targeting of Russian medics, firefighters and other rescuers has been a deliberate policy since before 2022.
It is also clear that Western concern for medics allegedly targeted elsewhere (think the fake rescuers of the al-Qaeda aligned White Helmets in Syria during the global war on Syria) will never extend to any concern for Russian rescuers actually targeted by Ukraine.
Israel Launches Major Attacks Across Gaza, Killing at Least 28 Palestinians, Including Many Children.
by Dave DeCamp | November 19, 2025 https://news.antiwar.com/2025/11/19/israel-launches-major-attacks-across-gaza-killing-at-least-24-palestinians-including-many-children/
The Israeli military launched strikes across Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 28 Palestinians, including 17 women and children, as it continues to violate the US-backed ceasefire deal.
The Israeli military claimed that its forces came under fire in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, but provided no evidence, and according to Israeli media, there were no casualties among IDF troops, and the attack occurred on the Israeli-occupied side of the yellow line. Hamas later denied that its fighters fired on Israeli troops, and called the claim “a weak and exposed attempt to justify their ongoing crimes and violations.” Following the alleged incident, the IDF unleashed strikes on Gaza City.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that one Israeli strike targeted the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs in southeastern Gaza City, killing at least 10 people, including two women and three children. Al Jazeera reported that a family of five in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood was wiped out by Israeli strikes.
In southern Gaza, WAFA reported that at least four Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes on the al-Mawasi tent camp on the coast. The news agency also said that an Israeli attack on a neighborhood of Khan Younis killed two children.
The Israeli escalation came two days after the UN Security Council passed a resolution affirming President Trump’s so-called “ceasefire deal” that places the Gaza Strip under the control of the US-led board. Since the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect on October 10, the Trump administration has backed Israel’s continued attacks on Palestinians.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said earlier in the day that since October 10, Israeli forces have killed 280 Palestinians and injured 670. The strikes on Wednesday bring the total death toll during the “ceasefire” to more than 300.
Israel Moved Gaza’s Yellow Line And Then Shelled Palestinians For Being On The Wrong Side.
Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 22, 2025
Drop Site News reports that the IDF quietly moved part of the “yellow line” which divides Gaza 300 meters forward, and then started shelling Palestinians for being on the “wrong side” of the line.
They just keep finding new ways to carve off more pieces of Gaza and murder more Palestinians.
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Haaretz has a disturbing story out about a 14 year-old Palestinian boy who was waiting for his school bus in the West Bank on a quiet street eating a cookie, when suddenly a bunch of IDF vehicles pulled up and a soldier shot him directly in the face with a teargas canister. Then they sped off.
The boy lost his right eye in the attack………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-moved-gazas-yellow-line-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=179610682&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
At Least 13 Palestinians, ‘Mostly Children,’ Killed by Israel in Lebanon Massacre
Despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces have killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in Lebanon.
Brett Wilkins, 19 Nov 25, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israeli-airstrikes-lebanon
A series of Israeli airstrikes on targets in southern Lebanon have killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100 others in recent days, including 13 people—mostly children, according to local officials—massacred Tuesday at a camp for Palestinian refugees.
Officials and residents said that the Israeli strike on Ain al-Hilweh near Sidon struck an area where children were playing soccer. Ain al-Hilweh is the largest camp in Lebanon housing refugees from the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing and terror campaign through which the modern Israeli state was founded—and their descendants.
The Israel Defense Forces said it targeted members of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas “operating in a training compound” in the camp.
Hamas rejected the IDF claim as “fabrication and lies.”
The strike was the deadliest IDF attack in Lebanon since Israeli troops shot and killed at least 24 people including 6 women and injured 134 others in January.
The IDF carried out subsequent attacks, including a Wednesday morning drone strike on a vehicle in Al-Tayri that reportedly killed two civilians including the town’s treasurer and wounded at least 10 university students. Israeli forces also bombed a residential area of the town of Tair Filsay in Tyre district. It is unknown if anyone was harmed in the strike.
Often overshadowed by its genocidal war on Gaza—which has left at least 249,600 people dead, maimed, or missing; millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened; and the coastal strip in ruins—Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Lebanon has killed more than 4,000 people since October 2023, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. This figure includes at least 790 women and 316 children. More than 16,600 others have been wounded. Upward of 1.2 million Lebanese were also forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks and invasion.
This, despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in its northern neighbor—which Israel has invaded or bombed numerous times since 1948, killing and wounding tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians.
Israeli forces also bombed the Qizan an-Najjar area, south of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing at least one Palestinian and wounding a mother and her child, according to local officials, who said at least 280 Palestinians have been killed and 650 others wounded in nearly 400 Israeli violations of the October ceasefire with Hamas.
Israel’s unrelenting, underreported ethnic cleansing of West Bank Palestinians
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL , 20 Nov 25
Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza is obvious to all with a moral conscious. Killing upwards of 100,000 Palestinians under 50,000 tons of US bombs obliterating Gaza’s 139 square miles is easy to process. Denying food, water, medicine causing degradation and death to the remaining 2,200,000 Palestinians reinforces that genocidal reality.
But many remain unaware of Israel’s relentless policy of ethnically cleansing the 3.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem annexed by Israel in 1967. Israel is positively gleeful about bringing the West Bank entirely into Greater Israel for Israelis only. In July the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic motion that the West Bank is “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people” and that “Israel has the natural, historical and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel.”
Folding the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Greater Israel, with or without (preferably without) those pesky Palestinians, has been the Israeli dream since that illegal 1967 annexation. A decade later Prime Minister Began initiated an inexorable settlement policy to implement that dream. Jewish settlement rose from just a few thousand in the late 70’s, to over half a million by the October, 2023 Hamas attack in Gaza.
The now two year Gaza genocide coincided with accelerated settlements, attacks on Palestinians, their homes, villages, harvests making life horrendous for the West Bank and East Jerusalem’s 3,300,000 Palestinians. Israeli settlement now approaches 750,000. With the world fixated on the horror perpetrated in Gaza, West Bank ethnic cleaning proceeds under the radar.
Israel pretends to oppose Israeli settler violence when in fact they both ignore an encourage it. Case in point is Zvi Sukkot, former head of settler terrorist organization The Revolt who had been marginalized by the Israeli government. Sukkot was arrested in 2010 for possible involvement in a mosque arson in the West Bank but released. By early 2023 he joined the Israeli Knesset. After the Hamas attack Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him chair of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samara (Israel’s name for the West Bank). The leap from heading up a terrorist group to heading up a governmental agency tasked with Palestinian removal tells you everything about Israel’s agenda for the West Bank.
Is Israel determined to drive out West Bank Palestinians to fold that Palestinian land into Greater Israel? With America’s unrelenting support you can bank on it.
‘We lose many patients’: Inside Gaza’s last hospitals
“Hospitals have become targets for the Israeli occupation and the Israeli army. Many hospitals have been destroyed… Doctors, nurses, and medical teams have been kidnapped from hospital premises.”
by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi November 18, 2025 / The Real News Network
Since October 2023, at least 34 hospitals in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. In that same time, as the humanitarian need for urgent medical care in the Gaza Strip dramatically increased, Israeli forces detained at least 405 Palestinian healthcare workers, according to NGO Healthcare Workers Watch. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN takes you inside one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals………….https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/18/we-lose-many-patients-inside-gazas-last-hospitals/
IDF Kills Two 15-Year-Old Boys in the West Bank, Israeli Settlers Torch Mosque
by Dave DeCamp | November 13, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/11/13/idf-kills-two-15-year-old-boys-in-the-west-bank-israeli-settlers-torch-mosque/
The Israeli military killed two 15-year-old boys in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday, according to the Palestinian Authority, as Jewish settlers in the territory continued their attacks on Palestinian communities.
The PA said the two boys, Bilal Bahaa Ali Baaran and Muhammad Mahmud Abu Ayash, were killed “by bullets from the occupation this afternoon, Thursday, near Beit Omar, north of Hebron.”
The Israeli military said that it killed two Palestinians, whom it claimed were on their way to “carry out a terror attack,” but offered no evidence to back up the claim or any other details about the slaying. Earlier this year, the IDF expanded its “open fire” policy in the West Bank, which led to an increase in the killing of civilians.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that three Palestinians, including a 14-year-old, were wounded by Israeli military gunfire in the town of Eizariya, southeast of Jerusalem.
Also on Thursday, Jewish settlers set fire to a mosque in the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya, near Salfit in the northern West Bank. Al Jazeera reported that the settlers sprayed racist, anti-Palestinian graffiti, and photos of the scene show burned Qurans.
There’s been a surge in settler attacks in the West Bank, coinciding with the start of the olive harvesting season, as Palestinian olive farmers are frequently targeted. The UN recorded a total of 266 settler attacks in October, the highest in a single month since it began recording in 2006, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“Since 2006, OCHA has documented over 9,600 such attacks. About 1,500 of them took place just this year, roughly 15% of the total,” OCHA said earlier this month.
The surge in violence in the West Bank came after a de-escalation in Gaza as a result of the US-brokered ceasefire deal, which Israel has repeatedly violated by launching attacks and killing more than 240 Palestinians since the truce went into effect, according to numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Israel Is Still Starving Gaza, And Other Notes
Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 06, 2025
In an article titled “Not enough tents, food reaching Gaza as winter comes, aid agencies say,” Reuters reports that “Far too little aid is reaching Gaza nearly four weeks after a ceasefire” due to Israeli restrictions preventing aid trucks from getting to their destinations, and that according to an OSHA report last week “a tenth of children screened in Gaza were still acutely malnourished.”
A report from the UK’s Channel 4 News shows warehouses full of food that aid groups say isn’t being allowed into Gaza nearly as rapidly as needed.
In an article titled “‘Under the Guise of Bureaucracy’ — Israel Blocks Humanitarian Groups From Delivering Essential Aid Despite Calm in Gaza,” Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that “Israel has implemented a new procedure requiring all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to reapply for official approval, with many denied, despite the relative calm in Gaza following the cease-fire.”
They’re using bureaucratic red tape and arbitrary restrictions to put as much inertia on the effort to rush aid into Gaza as possible. As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah put it, Israel has “successfully rebranded its genocide as a ‘ceasefire.’”
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Still can’t wrap my head around the fact that internationally renowned activist Greta Thunberg said she was tortured and sexually humiliated by Israeli soldiers when she was abducted for trying to bring aid to starving civilians, and the world just shrugged and moved on.
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It’s so silly when US empire apologists cite “the Monroe Doctrine” to defend US warmongering in Latin America, as though “the entire western hemisphere is our property” is a perfectly legitimate policy to have.
The Monroe Doctrine was just American imperialists telling Europe, “You see all these brown people over here south of our border? These are our brown people. You can do whatever you want to those brown people over there in Africa and Asia, but these brown people over here belong to us. Only we get to dominate and exploit them.”
That’s all it has ever been, and people cite it to justify warmongering toward Venezuela or wherever as though saying “yeah well that’s the Monroe Doctrine” is a complete argument in and of itself. It’s bat shit insane nonsense and it should be rejected in its entirety.
US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous wherever it happens. It always causes immense suffering and instability, it’s always justified by lies, and it never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. No amount of bleating the words “Monroe Doctrine” will ever change that.
The US empire backs genocidal Gulf state monarchies like the UAE and Saudi Arabia because if those states were democratically governed their people would prioritize their own interests over the agendas of the west. They wouldn’t permit US military bases on their territory, and they never would have tolerated Israel and its abuses in the region. Fossil fuel policy would be set without regard for western interests. The entire region could long ago have united into a superpower bloc which rivaled or outmuscled the western power structure using its critical resources and trade routes.
That’s why you see the US and its allies preaching about the values of Freedom and Democracy to the public while privately telling these tyrannical monarchies they can do whatever they want and receive the backing of the imperial machine. Not until their pet tyrant fails to sufficiently kowtow to the interests of the empire does the west suddenly get interested in advancing Freedom and Democracy in their nation.
This is one of the major dynamics at play in Sudan. The United Arab Emirates has been backing the genocidal atrocities of the RSF and the US empire is placing no pressure on them to stop, because that’s part of the deal. As long as the UAE plays along with the agendas of the empire, the empire will tolerate or actively facilitate its abuses……………………………………………………………….. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-is-still-starving-gaza-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=178143727&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
‘Groundhog Day’: Israel Breaks Ceasefire to Attack Gaza, Killing 104 People, Including 46 Children.
Democracy Now, October 30, 2025
Israel launched major airstrikes on Gaza, killing at least 104 people, including 46 children, in the deadliest attacks since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire was announced. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered “powerful strikes” on Gaza Tuesday after Israeli officials accused Hamas of killing an Israeli soldier in Rafah — which Hamas has denied. Netanyahu is trying “everything possible to resume the genocide in Gaza,” says Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza. “The only condition is that he needs to maintain the facade of the ceasefire.”
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: Israel launched major airstrikes on Gaza beginning Tuesday night, killing at least 104 people, including at least 35 children — about a third of the dead — in the most lethal attacks since a U.S.-brokered ceasefire began on October 10th.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered what he called “powerful strikes,” unquote, on Gaza after Israeli officials accused Hamas of killing an Israeli soldier in Rafah. Hamas denied involvement in the soldier’s death.
President Trump defended Israel’s attacks while also saying nothing is going to jeopardize the ceasefire……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/29/gaza_israel_strikes_muhammad_shehada
It’s Just Wall-To-Wall News Stories About The US And Its Allies Abusing The World.
Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 29, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-just-wall-to-wall-news-stories?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=177462655&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
It’s just news story after news story about the US and its allies terrorizing the world today.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been filming themselves committing horrific massacres in Sudan over the last couple of days, reportedly murdering some two thousand civilians. You can see the bloodstains on the ground in satellite images. As we discussed the other day, the RSF and its atrocities are backed by the UAE, a close partner of the United States.
Meanwhile Israel has committed another wave of massacres of its own throughout the Gaza Strip, reportedly killing 104 people in a single day, including 46 children. This is as many Palestinians as would typically be killed on any given day in Gaza prior to the so-called “ceasefire”.
CBS News’ 60 Minutes has released a cartoonishly blatant war propaganda piece on “Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator” about how poor and unhappy the people of Venezuela are under their current government. The piece featured an interview with Republican Senator Rick Scott, who said that “If I was Maduro I’d head to Russia or China right now; his days are numbered.”
The US can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don’t truly know they’re serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press.
In the same interview, Scott also said that if Maduro is successfully ousted, “it’ll be the end of Cuba.”
“America is gonna take care of the southern hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy,” he added.
The senator’s statements suggest that the US is preparing a push in Latin America similar to what it has been executing with Israel in the middle east, eliminating any powers which refuse to bend the knee. South of the US border the top two disobedient governments are the socialist states of Venezuela and Cuba. In the middle east the US and Israel have spent the last two years bombing Iran and Yemen, securing a regime change in Syria, and doing everything they can to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah in order to rule the region uncontested.
And of course we’ve still got the horrifying US proxy war in Ukraine, where men continue to be dragged off against their will to fight in a nightmarish conflict that most Ukrainians now oppose, but which Zelensky is saying he intends to keep fighting for years against the will of the public. This whole miserable ordeal could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but the western power alliance avoided off-ramp after off-ramp in order to ensure that Russia would get sucked into another costly military quagmire.
All over the world the US and its allies are murdering and abusing people in order to dominate the planet and ensure the survival of the capitalist system with which its power is intertwined. It is a giant murder machine feeding on human blood and the life force of our biosphere while providing nothing but obstacles to a healthy world.
The US-centralized empire is a disease that affects our entire species. We had better find a cure, and fast.
A Torturous Sanitation Disaster Is Unfolding in Gaza’s Displacement Camps
Every morning we wake to disease, dust, and the unbearable stench of open sewage.
By Sara Awad , Truthout, October 25, 2025
Ceasefire is a relief. After two years of surviving war, we can finally breathe — but that doesn’t mean our suffering is over. For many of us, it’s only just begun. The tents, and the people still living in them, stand as a heavy reminder that our struggles are far from over. After two years of immense destruction by the Israeli military, most families in Gaza are now living in tents — nylons and fabric that don’t protect them either from summer or winter.
In tent life, there is an unlivable war — a war that doesn’t begin with bombs, but with the absence of everything that makes life human. It is a war whose weapons are the denial of clean water, the lack of hygiene, the absence of toilets, dignity, and safety. I am not writing this as a distant witness. No — I am writing this from within it. From the ground. From inside the tent. These are not stories I’ve heard; these are the sensations I experience.
One month living in a tent was enough for me to understand the immense sanitation disaster and horrific conditions that make displaced people feel suffocated by everything around them. This kind of news doesn’t make headlines, and you might not have heard about it. But it is a silent kind of violence — one that kills us every day.
I am here to tell you how my people — including my family — are facing the devastating consequences of the sanitation crisis in these tents.
Thousands of makeshift tents at displacement camps all across Gaza are full of families seeking refuge.
A lack of sufficient toilets, access to clean water, and the presence of open sewage are catastrophic consequences faced by displaced Palestinians — conditions that have persisted since the early months of Gaza’s displacement crisis.
After spending over a month in Gaza City under Israeli occupation, 39-year-old Asma Mohammad and her family fled to the central Gaza Strip, seeking refuge in Al-Nuseirat Camp to escape the ongoing Israeli offensive. Speaking to me via WhatsApp, she described the daily struggle to access basic sanitation. “I have to walk nearly half an hour just to reach the bathroom,” Asma said. “I stopped drinking coffee or tea so I wouldn’t have to walk so far to use a filthy toilet that’s shared by hundreds of people.”
This is something that touches our dignity. I know what she meant because I am experiencing the same thing. Here where I am in az-Zawayda, in central Gaza, men spend a whole week building a bathroom — a toilet. It takes so long because there is no sewage system anywhere anymore. Israel has destroyed the vast majority of sewage facilities in every part of Gaza……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://truthout.org/articles/a-torturous-sanitation-disaster-is-unfolding-in-gazas-displacement-camps/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=ec58022e30-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_10_25_06_42&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-ec58022e30-650192793
Israel and US Scorn ICJ Ruling Against Starving Civilians as Method of Warfare
The World Court says Israel has a duty as the occupying power to cooperate with UN relief efforts, not impede them.
By Marjorie Cohn , Truthout. October 24, 2025
World Court) told Israel what seems obvious to any reasonable person — that it cannot starve civilians as a method of warfare. But Israel does not act in accordance with international law, as evidenced by its two-year campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, during which it has killed over 68,000 Gazans (more likely 680,000, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said on September 15).
In its 71-page advisory opinion, issued on October 22, the ICJ reiterated that Israel is illegally occupying the Gaza Strip. The court unanimously held that as the occupying power, Israel has obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza, has essential supplies of everyday life, including water, food, shelter, clothing, bedding, and fuel, as well as medical equipment and services. The court also held that Israel must respect and protect all medical and relief personnel and facilities.
The ICJ ruled 10-1 in its advisory opinion that Israel has an obligation to facilitate humanitarian relief by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and other international organizations and third states, and must refrain from impeding that relief.
And the court unanimously held that Israel must respect the prohibition on deportation and forcible transfer in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and the right of the Palestinian prisoners held in Israel to be visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The court noted that transfer is forcible not just when it is achieved by physical force, but also when people have no choice but to leave because the occupying power has inflicted conditions of life that are intolerable.
The ICJ rejected Israel’s bogus defense that its national security trumped its obligations under international humanitarian law, saying that the protection of security interests is not a “free-standing exception” allowing a state to violate its international humanitarian law obligations………………………………………………………………………….
Impacts of ICJ Advisory Opinions
Although advisory opinions of the ICJ are nonbinding, they carry great moral, political, and diplomatic weight with third states. On July 19, 2024, the ICJ held that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and all states have an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation. As a result of that ruling (and domestic pressure), several states have now recognized Palestine as an independent state…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said that it “categorically rejects” the ICJ’s October 22 advisory opinion, stating that the court ignored the “extensive evidence” Israel provided of what it claimed was UNRWA’s “infiltration” by Hamas and UNRWA’s complicity in terrorist activities. “This is yet another political attempt to impose political measures against Israel under the guise of ‘International Law,’” the ministry alleged.
Likewise, the U.S. State Department called the advisory opinion “corrupt,” claiming that it “unfairly bashes Israel and gives UNRWA a free pass for its deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Current Situation
Before the October 10 ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas took effect, UN-supported global experts warned that over 640,000 Palestinians were facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity and that there was an “entirely man-made” famine in Gaza City.
Since the ceasefire began, Israel has started allowing some aid into Gaza, but nowhere near enough to meet its legal obligations and assist the starving Gazans. The UN World Food Program is getting about 750 tons of food aid into Gaza daily, still far below its target of 2,000 tons per day. Although the ceasefire agreement requires 600 trucks per day of food and other humanitarian supplies, only 263 trucks entered Gaza on October 20, and 281 trucks entered Gaza on October 22, less than half of the agreed-upon number.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has suspended operations, as it runs out of money and faces leadership problems and logistical obstacles to a resumption of its work.
Meanwhile, the ICJ is considering the merits of South Africa’s case against Israel that alleges Israel breached the Genocide Convention. Arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — for intentionally and knowingly depriving the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival and intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population — are pending in the International Criminal Court.
During the past two years, millions of people globally have demonstrated in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement has achieved widespread popular support.
The new advisory opinion issued by the ICJ will continue to shame Israel in the eyes of the world. https://truthout.org/articles/israel-and-us-scorn-icj-ruling-against-starving-civilians-as-method-of-warfare/
Vaunted Trump Ceasefire? Israel has a genocidal Palestinian ethnic cleaning to complete
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 22 Oct 25, https://theaimn.net/vaunted-trump-ceasefire-faggedaboudit-israel-has-a-genocidal-palestinian-ethnic-cleaning-to-complete/#google_vignette
The tremendous support given to Trump’s second ceasefire in Israel’s genocide in Gaza ignores reality and history.
How quickly the Trump high-fivers forget Israel abandoned Trump’s first ceasefire that lasted from January 19 to March 18. During that time Israel continued to kill hundreds of Palestinians while restricting food, water and medicine. Then, with Trump’s bombs, they resumed their grotesque genocide further obliterating Gaza while killing tens of thousands more Palestinians.
The first ceasefire released 33 Israeli hostages, leaving 48 to languish as Israel returned to their first priority, ridding Gaza of its Palestinians not yet disappeared. It took nearly 7 months for pressure to build on Israel to agree to a second ceasefire to return remaining hostages, 20 living and 28 dead.
But like Ceasefire 1, Ceasefire 2 is just genocidal ethnic cleansing by subtler means. In the first 9 days, Israel’s military has killed or wounded nearly 400 Palestinians, while again restricting food, water and medicine. Israel still occupies over half of Gaza, establishing yellow lines forbidding Palestinians to cross.
On ceasefire day 10 Israel unleased massive air strikes across Gaza. In their most grotesque ceasefire violation, Israel bombed a vehicle that strayed across Israel’s yellow line, killing 11 family members including 3 women and 7 kids.
Was Trump outraged? Only at Hamas who he’s threatening to obliterate by giving Israel the green light to ‘finish the job.’
This should surprise no one with a moral conscience. Israel has been violating the ceasefire in Lebanon for nearly a year. During that time they’ve killed over 4,000 Lebanese, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and gobbled up 5 Lebanese areas.
That’s some ceasefire you negotiated Mr. Trump. All you accomplished is delay Israel’s one and only goal…bringing a Palestinian free Gaza into Greater Israel.
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