Kushner, Witkoff draft $112B proposal to develop Gaza into ‘smart city’ with luxury resorts.
by Shane Galvin, 22 Dec 25, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kushner-witkoff-draft-112b-proposal-to-develop-gaza-into-smart-city-with-luxury-resorts-and-us-footing-60b/ar-AA1SK9NI?ocid=BingNewsVerp
Trump administration reps have just revealed a grandiose $112 billion plan to rebuild war-torn Gaza into a futuristic international destination dubbed “Project Sunrise.”
The 10-year development plan, drafted by first son-in-law Jared Kushner, US special envoy Steve Witkoff, and two top White House aides, is currently courting investor countries with a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation detailing the bold plan to renovate burning rubble into beach resorts.
Gaza would see the development of luxury hotels, high speed rail and AI-optimized smart grid features that would revolutionize the small slice of the coveted Mediterranean coastline into a bustling metropolis, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Gaza’s destruction has been profound, but we believe what lies ahead is not just restoration — it’s a chance to develop a gateway of prosperity in the Middle East with state-of-the-art infrastructure, urban design, and technology,” the executive summary slide read, according to the outlet.
The total $112 billion cost would be spread out over 10 years, with the US agreeing to “anchor” up to $60 billion in grants and guarantees on debts by raising industry funds.
“Reimagining Gaza as a ‘smart city’ with tech-driven governance and services,” one slide from the PowerPoint presentation beamed.
The ambitious proposal — developed within the last 45 days by Kushner, Witkoff, and White House aides consulted Israeli security experts about the path forward — further called for establishing a “Chief Digital Office and an innovation lab to define standards and guide policymaking.”
The presentation does not go into detail about which countries or companies would be investing in the rebuilding fund, according to WSJ.
Though the plan mapped out distinct phases of construction, it did not provide details for housing the 2 million Palestinians who would be displaced during the massive construction necessary.
There is an estimated 68 million tons of rubble in Gaza after thousands of Israeli airstrikes leveled cities during the two-year war in Gaza.
US officials who have knowledge of the proposal are skeptical that it will come to fruition because a condition would be Hamas agreeing to disarm, the Journal reported.
Witkoff, meanwhile, met Saturday in Miami with high-level delegations from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar to discuss implementation for the second phase of the Gaza cease-fire plan.
Israel Is Preparing for a Permanent Presence in Gaza, Satellite Images Reveal
Since the ceasefire, Israel has constructed at least 13 new military outposts inside Gaza, consolidated existing military infrastructure, built roads, and destroyed more Palestinian property.
Forensic Architecture and Drop Site News. Dec 21, 2025
Since the so-called ceasefire came into effect in Gaza on October 10, Israel has been consolidating its control of over 50% of Gaza and—according to new research by Forensic Architecture—physically altering the geography of the land. Through a combination of the construction of military infrastructure alongside the destruction of existing buildings, Israel appears to be laying the groundwork to establish a permanent presence in the majority of the Gaza Strip.
Israel has constructed at least 13 new military outposts inside Gaza since the ceasefire—primarily located along the yellow line, in eastern Khan Younis, and near the border with Israel, according to analysis of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture.
“Israel is doing what it always does, and what it historically has done best: establish ‘facts on the ground,’ incrementally rather than spectacularly, and make them permanent once those with influence to force it to reverse course either lose interest, decide that the cost of confronting Israel is not worth the price, or come out in open support of Israeli violations. Israel is in no rush and prepared to play the long game,” Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and a former UN official who worked as a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, told Drop Site after reviewing a summary of the Forensic Architecture findings.
The analysis also shows that, between October 10 and December 2, 2025, Israel has:
- Accelerated the growth and infrastructure development of 48 existing military outposts inside Gaza.
- Expanded a network of roads connecting military outposts inside Gaza to the Israeli road network, bases and settlements outside of Gaza.
- Continued construction that began in September 2025 of a new road in Khan Younis, re-routing the Magen Oz corridor to run within Israel’s area of control.
- Engaged in the systematic demolition and destruction of Palestinian property, particularly in eastern Khan Younis, targeting areas which haven’t already been destroyed. New military outposts and roads have emerged across this area.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-israel-building-military-outposts-roads-permanent-presence-yellow-line
One excavator, 10,000 bodies, a sea of rubble: inside Gaza’s effort to retrieve and bury its dead
Under the relative calm of a ceasefire, Civil Defense crews in Gaza are undertaking the monumental feat of recovering thousands of bodies still trapped under the rubble.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj December 25, 2025 https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/one-excavator-10000-bodies-a-sea-of-rubble-inside-gazas-effort-to-retrieve-and-bury-its-dead/
Fatima Salem waits outside anxiously, as rescue crews dig through the rubble of her family’s home in Gaza City on December 15th. With bated breath, she clings to the hope that all 60 of her family members – brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren – who were buried under the rubble after an Israeli airstrike targeted their building, will be rescued.
But this was not a typical rescue operation, and Fatima was not waiting for signs of life. She knew everyone was dead. That’s because the airstrike on her family’s home happened almost exactly two years ago, on December 19, 2023, just two months into the genocide.
The 60 members of the Salem family are some of an estimated 10,000 Palestinians whose bodies remain trapped under the extensive rubble across the Gaza Strip. Due to two years of active Israeli bombardment, the targeting and killing of civil defense crews, and the lack of heavy duty machinery required to excavate the tons of concrete rubble, rescue missions in Gaza have been largely stalled.
But on December 15, the Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip announced the start of a long recovery process of bodies that have remained under the rubble for two years. The operations are focused only on the areas in the Gaza Strip not actively being occupied by the Israeli military, which accounts for roughly half of the territory.
The first rescue mission was for the Salem family in Gaza City.
“Here I lost every person dear to me; they are the closest people to me—my brothers and sisters and their families. I lost everyone in this place,” Fatima Salem cried. When she heard about the rescue mission, she rushed to the scene of the destroyed building, where the souls of her relatives had remained trapped for two years.
She said that her family was targeted on December 19, 2023, after they fled from northern Gaza to Gaza City due to the intensification of shelling and fighting in their residential area. They found refuge in a building whose residents had evacuated, and gathered there with their children and families. No one who was in the building at the time of the bombing survived.
“I want to see them, to embrace them, to bid them farewell,” she said as she stood before rows of bones and skulls wrapped in white plastic shrouds, laid out on the ground in front of her. Some have been identified by their present surviving relatives, while others have not yet been identified.
Omar Suleiman, a member of the forensic department at the Civil Defense, was working at the scene of the Salem family. He described a painstaking process of trying to identify and record the identities of the deceased, saying that crews are documenting descriptions of the condition of the bodies in terms of form, height, and the level of decomposition they have reached, along with preserving a DNA sample when possible.
According to videos published by the Civil Defense on its Telegram channel, what is recovered from the remains of the martyrs is sometimes only bones, not always complete skulls, but rather bones from the chest and the feet, making identification a difficult matter.
According to Suleiman, the level of decomposition in the bodies was very high, which made it difficult for families to identify them. The lack of tools and technology for advanced DNA testing has also made the identification process more difficult. He said that crews were working “with very limited tools and under difficult and exhausting conditions.”
Civil Defense crews say they recovered all the bodies from the building, all belonging to the martyrs of the Salem family, in addition to 17 more bodies buried in the vicinity around the building. After two years, Fatima Salem was finally able to bid farewell.
Thousands of bodies, limited resources
In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, on December 20, recovery operations began in areas of the city, starting with the martyrs of the Abu Hilal family. They were killed on August 13, 2025.
Huda Abu Hilal, in her 20s, was the sole survivor of a strike that targeted her family’s home on August 13, 2025. Though she was inside the building at the time, just before the airstrike, Huda’s mom had asked her to go downstairs for something. At that moment, the home was bombed, and everyone except Huda was killed.
“All my family was killed except me—my mother and father, my sisters, and their children—all of them were martyred,” she told Mondoweiss, adding that because her neighborhood remained under an evacuation order after the bombing, crews were not able to access her home to rescue her family.
At the site, Samah Hamad, head of the forensic department of the Civil Defense, described the challenge ahead for crews.
He said that in Khan Younis alone, there are 75 destroyed buildings with hundreds of bodies buried under the rubble that need to be recovered. Many of the buildings, he said, are located in the area behind the ‘yellow line’ that are inaccessible to Palestinian crews. But even in the areas that they can access, the rescue mission is slow moving.
Hamad notes that the slowdown in these operations is due to the fact that all crews in the Gaza Strip are working with very limited equipment, as only one large excavator is being used in multiple cities and areas in the Strip.
For the past two months since the ceasefire was announced, Huda said she would pass by the rubble of the home often, even if just to recite a prayer for her family still trapped beneath the rubble, hoping that they would be rescued soon.
“Now I can honor my martyred family by burying them, and we can move them to graves and make visiting them a habit,” Huda said.
Israel’s biggest con trick: Hiding the true numbers it has killed in Gaza
10 December 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-10/israel-con-numbers-killed-gaza/
Israel has penned us all into a ‘debate’, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire – not the genocide it is waging by other means
The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a “debate” in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.
It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)
Or even that these “debates” always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.
No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.
The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.
These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on.
Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been.
How long would your elderly parents survive in this hellscape?
How well would your diabetic child fare, or your sister with asthma, or your brother with cancer?
How well would you cope with catching pneumonia, or even a common cold, if you hadn’t had more than one small meal a day for months on end?
How would your wife deal with a difficult childbirth if there were no anaesthetics, or no hospital nearby, or a barely functioning hospital overwhelmed with victims from Israel’s latest bombing run.
And what would be the chances of your baby surviving if its mother could produce no milk from her starvation diet? And if you could not give the baby formula feed because Israel was blocking supplies from entry into the enclave? And if, anyway, the contaminated water supply could not be mixed into the formula powder?
None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.
According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.
The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.
The reality is likely to be even worse. That is without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been left with horrific injuries and psychological trauma.
Israel’s war planners know exactly how this direct-to-indirect ratio works. Which is why they chose to destroy nearly every home in Gaza, to bomb the power, sanitation and water facilities, to level the hospitals, and to block aid month after month.
They knew this would be the way Israel could carry out a genocide while offering its allies – western governments and its army of lobbyists – a “get out of jail card” for their active complicity.
Donald Trump’s so-called “ceasefire” is just another layer of deception in this endless game of smoke and mirrors. The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, reports that less than a quarter of aid trucks are getting into Gaza, past Israel’s continuing starvation blockade, despite Israeli commitments agreed as part of the “ceasefire”. Apparently, this doesn’t register as a gross ceasefire violation. It goes unnoticed.
Unicef reports further that in October alone, at the start of the “ceasefire”, nearly 18,000 new mothers and babies had to be hospitalised in Gaza from acute malnutrition.
The genocide isn’t over. Israel may have slowed the rate of direct killings it is committing by bombing Gaza, but the indirect killings continue unabated. And so does the Israeli-engineered “debate” in the West, one designed to obscure and excuse the mass murder of Gaza’s population.
‘A New Form of Genocide’: Gazans Feel Little Relief from Israeli Strangulation Since the Ceasefire.
December 6, 2025 By Tareq S. Hajjaj Republished from Mondoweiss, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/06/a-new-form-of-genocide-gazans-feel-little-relief-from-israeli-strangulation-since-the-ceasefire/
It’s been nearly two months since the ceasefire was reached in Gaza. Hopes were high among the 2 million Palestinians in the besieged Strip that not only would the Israeli bombings stop, but that everything they had been deprived of for the past two years – food, clean water, adequate medicine and healthcare – would flood into Gaza to ease their struggles. The hopes of regaining a fragment of the life they knew before the war, have dissipated, as the reality of a “new genocide” sets in.
Though some aid has come into Gaza, and people have tried to restore some semblance of normalcy, the reality in Gaza is far from peacetime. Israeli bombs are still falling, people cannot return to their home, and sufficient food aid and medicines are still in short supply.
The strain being felt by Gaza’s institutions, particularly its hospitals, and by ordinary Gazans, remains alarmingly close to wartime conditions. The Government Media Office in Gaza says that the humanitarian situation has not changed during or after the ceasefire, contrary to Israeli claims, and that the siege on Gaza has continued, with border crossings remaining effectively closed. What little goods do enter Gaza, the government says, does not meet “even the minimal needs of the population.”
In the first month of the ceasefire, according to the UN, Israel rejected over 100 requests for the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Today, the World Food Programme says that dietary diversity remains low, and roughly 25 percent of households in Gaza are still reporting eating only one meal daily.
Ismail al-Thawabteh, Director of the Government Media Office in Gaza, says Israel is trying to present a misleading image suggesting it allows the flow of goods. In reality, the amount entering Gaza does not exceed one-third of what was agreed upon in the humanitarian protocol of the ceasefire. “Instead of 600 trucks per day—the minimum needed to meet essential requirements—Israel permits only about 200 trucks, most of which carry limited-value commercial or aid items.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) has reported that agencies are still required to coordinate all entry of humanitarian aid convoys with Israeli authorities. For reference, between the 12th and 18th of November, OCHA said humanitarian organizations coordinated 51 missions with the Israeli authorities. Of those 51 missions, just over half (27) were actually facilitated into Gaza; five were cancelled, 15 were impeded and four were denied.
Palestinians in Gaza tell Mondoweiss that they are feeling “suffocated,” as authorities remain unable to resolve crises such as malnutrition, shortages of food and medicine, or provide even minimal protection against harsh weather conditions.
“This is a new form of genocide,” says Khalil al-Deqran, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza. “The policy of refusing to allow in what is necessary for people’s survival mirrors what happened earlier, when food was withheld, and malnutrition was deliberately created.”
The Ministry of Health only receives about 25% of its basic needs, causing the condition of hospitals in Gaza, according to the spokesperson, to be “deplorable and difficult”, especially in winter, when large numbers of patients, particularly children, seek care. He notes that some pediatric wards are operating at five times their bed capacity, as children live in torn tents or on the streets, leading to widespread disease. “With Israel preventing the entry of shelter materials and reconstruction supplies, the health environment becomes even more dangerous, increasing mortality and the spread of illnesses.”
The Ministry of Health said that essential medications for chronic diseases such as hypertension, heart conditions, and diabetes, which affect 350,000 patients in Gaza, are still barred by Israel from entering the Strip. Infant formula also continues to be restricted, allowed only through a few traders and in minimal quantities. Israel also prevents the entry of critical hospital supplies, including electrical generators, lab equipment, imaging devices, incubators, intensive care units, and operating room equipment – all the essential supplies needed by Gaza’s already devastated hospitals to continue functioning. “The situation remains terrible and exceedingly difficult,” the spokesperson says. Israel has not committed to the humanitarian protocol, and what has been allowed in does not amount to a drop in the ocean of the health sector’s needs.”
“There are multiple cases of malnutrition across Gaza due to the lack of infant formula and the blocking of protein-rich foods such as meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. What enters today consists mainly of non-essential food items, which perpetuates malnutrition” the health ministry said.
“The majority of the trucks Israel allows in carry low-nutritional-value items such as processed foods, chocolate, soft drinks, and snacks, as an attempt to evade humanitarian obligations while keeping the population in a state of absolute food deprivation,” al-Thawabteh said.
According to al-Thawabteh, the Gaza Strip requires a consistent flow of essential goods: grains, flour, proteins, livestock, red and white meat, table eggs, nutritional supplements, shelter materials, construction supplies, agricultural inputs, and raw materials for local industries. He stresses that Israel treats these goods as “prohibited or heavily restricted items.”
By his measure, there have been no real improvements on the ground since the ceasefire. Instead, he says Gaza is witnessing a “deliberate engineering of a starvation policy,” in which Israel showcases images of aid trucks to appear compliant, while “in reality blocking essential supplies and rationing aid in ways that worsen the humanitarian crisis.” This behavior, he explains, “confirms that Israel uses the agreement as a political cover to prolong crises, not as a humanitarian or legal commitment toward civilians. The siege continues, restrictions continue, and the humanitarian infrastructure remains under immense pressure.”
‘The war is not over’
Ordinary families in Gaza are feeling the squeeze every day. Niveen al-Sharfa, a mother of five living in a tent in Gaza City, says nothing has changed since the ceasefire. Even when some goods are available in the markets, her family still cannot afford to buy them. “We expected that once the war ended and the ceasefire began, we would see reconstruction, open border crossings, improvements in hospitals, and the entry of winter essentials such as clothing, shelter, and other necessities. But none of this happened. We are still living in torn tents, and still far from our homes.”
Al-Sharfa recalls that during the war she lived in constant fear under bombardment, but says that even now she remains afraid of hearing at any moment that someone has been killed. “Nothing has changed… everything is the same,” she says.
Even those who experienced slight improvements in daily life after the ceasefire find their hopes diminished when looking at the broader picture.
Amer al-Sultan was displaced from his home in the Jabalia Camp in northern Gaza. He says that life has changed “a little” after the ceasefire in terms of the availability of some food— though prices remain high — unlike during the height of the war, when famine pushed people to eat the leaves off of trees. “I expected to return to my home, but unfortunately, I did not. My home lies inside the yellow zone, and this makes me feel every day that the war has not ended.”
“The world thinks the war is over, but as long as there is an army inside the yellow zone, the war is not over. Just last night, we woke up to the sound of bombardment, explosions, and gunfire in those areas. How can we believe the war has ended when we sleep and wake to the sound of bombs?”
Nidaa al-Dahdouh, a mother of two, sees no sign that the war has ended as long as her children are not living normal lives. She wants to see them going to school, instead of waking up in the morning to collect firewood or to stand in long lines for food aid. “When the war ends, I will see my children getting ready in the morning to go to school wearing warm clothes,” she says. “But so far, they are still suffering in tents and the cold that comes with it.”
“We hoped for safety after the war, that we would return to our homes, and feel that the endless killing had stopped. But none of that happened. We hoped that basic goods would return to their normal prices, but that did not happen either. Yes, some items are available—like fish, for example—but the price is extremely high, and I cannot afford it. So for me, it is as if it does not exist at all.”
Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Gaza Correspondent for Mondoweiss and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter/X at @Tareqshajjaj.
Gaza Denied the Right to Heal: Ceasefire Fails, New ‘Green-Zone’ Plan Threatens Modern Ghettos and Collective Imprisonment
December 4, 2025, By: Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/04/gaza-denied-the-right-to-heal-ceasefire-fails-new-green-zone-plan-threatens-modern-ghettos-and-collective-imprisonment/
Anew report from Euro‑Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warns that a proposed postwar plan for Gaza Strip — backed by United States government and Israeli government officials — could amount to “unlawful collective imprisonment” of Palestinian civilians.
The report finds that “this plan entrenches long-term illegal control and the forcible de facto annexation of territory. It imposes unlawful collective imprisonment on the civilian population, in clear violation of international law and the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”
The report adds, “Entry and exit would be permitted only through security screening, effectively converting these sites into overcrowded detention camps that impose severe restrictions on residents’ freedom of movement and daily life.”
Euro-Med, along with anyone with eyes, ears and a heart would think that the proposed design “mirrors the historical model of ghettos,”
What is being reported demonstrates a clearly coercive environment: Palestinians displaced by war would effectively be forced into the “green-zone” communes by the denial of basic services — housing, safety, food, water — unless they relocate.
Even more troubling: once inside, residents reportedly would face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, daily life, and access to services, raising grave concerns over human rights, forced displacement and long-term structural confinement.
This story demands our attention. After Gaza has been brutally assaulted with genocidal intent, it is now being reshaped in a way that entrenches segregation, displacement and total control. Not much less could be expected from a modern apartheid state that has been allowed to do whatever it has wanted for 77 years.
For more, here is a tweet from Ramy Abdul, Chairman EuroMedHR, detailing their report and a map in which they make it clear: “Gaza’s Yellow Line: Where Genocide is Internationally Acceptable”
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor @EuroMedHR has obtained alarming details about a U.S.–Israeli plan—supported by several Western and Arab states and institutions—that aims to turn Gaza into a forced ghetto, a massive detention zone, and a site of land annexation and resource Show more
More on this from The Nation: in an article published two days ago, Gaza writer Hassan Abo Qamar describes the so-called “ceasefire” as changing nothing — Gaza remains a prison, and its people continue to endure unrelenting hardship.
“The world calls this ‘peace,’ yet in reality ‘peace’ here does not mean the end of anything; hunger, fear, and death remain, while the occupation continues to strangle Gaza through crossings, restrictions, and deliberate obstruction of recovery.”
“The truth is simple: Gaza has been denied the right to heal.”
There is no way to end this article or post it without acknowledging what we see every day: Nothing has changed, and the Israelis are still killing. I end with this video for those following today’s events, including Al Jazeera’s reporting on today’s violations of the ceasefire, in which five people — including children — were killed. Once again, the ceasefire has not stopped the ongoing genocide. And now, with this new plan to create modern ghettos, the Israelis are leaning further into the playbook of the Third Reich.
Israeli army shells east of Gaza Strip, detonates buildings despite ceasefire.
November 30, 2025 , https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251130-israeli-army-shells-east-of-gaza-strip-detonates-buildings-despite-ceasefire/
The Israeli army carried out airstrikes and home demolitions in the military-controlled yellow zone across the Gaza Strip early Sunday, Anadolu reports.
Israeli aircraft struck several areas in Rafah, while naval vessels fired shells toward the city’s coastline, local sources and witnesses told Anadolu.
Israel’s military vehicles stationed near the Morag Axis, norx`theast of Rafah, conducted sweeping operations and heavy gunfire in the area.
Israeli artillery shelled eastern Khan Younis, and helicopters launched fire on buildings amid home detonations in the area, according to witnesses.
An Israeli airstrike hit east of Al-Bureij refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, an Anadolu correspondent said.
In the northern Gaza Strip, the Israeli strikes targeted eastern Gaza City, and intense gunfire from Israeli helicopters was reported from eastern Jabalia.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement it signed with the Palestinian group Hamas, having committed nearly 500 violations and killed 354 Palestinians since Oct. 10, according to the Gaza government figures.
Since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and injured nearly 171,000 people in the over two-year war that has left much of the enclave in ruins.
International tribunal finds Israel guilty of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Mondoweiss, By Marianne Dhenin November 27, 2025
The International People’s Tribunal on Palestine held in Barcelona presented striking evidence of Israel’s forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the deliberate destruction of food security in Gaza.
The International People’s Tribunal on Palestine convened on November 22 and 23 in Barcelona. The event brought together organizers, human rights advocates, and legal experts and offered a platform for survivors of the ongoing assault on Gaza to present evidence of Israel’s international crimes. After two days of testimony, jurors returned their verdict: Israel, the United States, and other Western powers are guilty of the crimes of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinian people.
“The mass killings, deliberate starvation, systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, environmental devastation, and the targeting of hospitals, shelters, schools, and places of refuge were carried out as a matter of state policy, and with full knowledge of their fatal consequences,” said head juror Ceren Uysal, reading from the verdict as the tribunal closed.
Hosted by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, International People’s Front, and People’s Coalition of Food Sovereignty (PCFS), the tribunal offered a quasi-judicial platform for advocates and survivors of Israel’s ongoing genocide to present evidence and legal arguments related to the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. It follows in a tradition of popular forums seeking justice and accountability where institutions have failed to provide it, including previous tribunals on recent crimes in Gaza.
It came as Israel continues to commit violence in Palestine. Israel has violated the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in effect since October 10, 2025, at least 497 times, killing more than 340 people, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. On November 17, the United Nations Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s plan for an international force that he will lead to oversee the continued occupation of Gaza, drawing condemnation from legal experts and rights groups, who argue the plan violates Palestine’s right to self-determination and will fail to protect Palestinians.
Against this backdrop, the International People’s Tribunal repudiated the status quo. It offered striking evidence for Israel’s guilt, particularly for the forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the undermining of their food security. “The strategy of using food as a weapon has been going on for a long time in Palestine and Lebanon, but now it is intensified,” Razan Zuayter, PCFS global co-chairperson, told Mondoweiss. Zuayter also chairs the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), which endorsed the tribunal.
Over the course of the two-day event, more than a dozen witnesses made this case. Farmers testified that Israeli forces had razed their lands, uprooting trees, killing livestock, and blackening the soil. One witness, who testified anonymously for fear of reprisal, described an attack Israeli forces committed on their land in May 2024. “A group of bulldozers and tanks attacked our area and destroyed a set of chicken farms for meat and egg production,” they said. “The stench of death and foul odors spread throughout the place, forcing us to flee.”
Musheir El Farra wept on the stand on November 23, recounting Israeli attacks on his hometown of Khan Younis that killed more than 200 members of his extended family. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/international-tribunal-finds-israel-guilty-of-genocide-ecocide-and-the-forced-starvation-of-the-palestinians-in-gaza/
A Ceasefire in Name Only: Gaza’s Prolonged Purgatory
2 December 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/a-ceasefire-in-name-only-gazas-prolonged-purgatory/
A ceasefire can be a strange thing. The assumption, generally speaking, is that the parties to it restrain themselves for a period of time, ordering their forces and disciplining their charges from straying. But straying happens, transgressions inevitable. Some are genuine enough: silly misunderstandings, hot headed confusion, a fear that the other side has broken it. Room for error, and a degree of death and injury, is crudely permitted.
In the case of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, transgressions have become the lingua franca of the parties, though Israel remains, by far, the perpetrator par excellence. The latter’s departures from the agreement have been so vicious as to prompt the observation that they are pursuing a mutilated reading of the agreement, essentially a “reduce fire.” The deaths of 347 Palestinians in Gaza since October 10, including 136 children, do not point to cooling restraint.
On October 28, at least 104 Palestinians were slaughtered in a single day. This might have suggested a breach so serious as to suggest a repudiation. Not so, claimed Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani. “Fortunately,” he told a US audience, “I think the main parties – both of them [Israel and Hamas] – are acknowledging that the ceasefire should hold and they should stick to the agreement.”
What is becoming apparent is that the ceasefire has led to a state of affairs where Israeli forces have been permitted enormous latitude in the way it inflicts violence on local Gazans. The UN Women’s Chief of Humanitarian Action, Sofia Calltorp, reveals how Gazan women told her “again and again: there may be a ceasefire, but the war is not over. The attacks are fewer, but the killings continue.” Agnès Callmard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, goes so far as to declare that the ceasefire has created “a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal.” What has in fact happened is a mere reduction of “the scale of [Israel’s] attacks” and the meagre allowance of humanitarian aid into the Strip.
In a briefing note released on November 27, the organisation is adamant that “Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” Expulsions continue, prosecutions of alleged atrocities and war crimes by Israeli forces non-existent. The means to build the crucial infrastructure required to sustain life is being hampered, while unexploded ordnance, contaminated rubble and sewage, remain unaddressed.
Structural realities have also intruded. The Israeli Defense Forces remain in control of over 58% of Gaza. According to a clutch of special rapporteurs and experts in the employ of the United Nations, including Francesca Albanese, Ben Saul and Irene Khan, 40 active Israeli sites continue to operate “beyond the agreed withdrawal line, in clear breach of the ceasefire terms.” They also warn that the UN Security Council resolution authorising the deployment of an International Stabilisation Force (ISF), with Egypt and Israel coordinating border matters alongside a spanking new Palestinian trained police force “risks replicating – if not aggravating – the model of security coordination that has entrenched Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime in the West Bank.”
Humanitarian assistance remains at a painful trickle, an obscene state of affairs given the levelling devastation wrought by the war (85% of water and sanitation facilities were damaged or destroyed; likewise 92% of homes). The charity Oxfam does not spare any details in what is needed: “The most pressing needs include food and healthcare and shelter, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene services (WASH) including menstrual products and waste management services.” While some food and goods have become more available in local markets, they remain prohibitively expensive for Gaza’s residents.
Between October 10 and 21, seventeen international non-government organisations had essential aid shipments for Gaza, including water, food, tents, and medical supplies, blocked, with Israeli authorities claiming they were not authorised to do so. Some 99 requests by international NGOs to deliver aid were rejected, along with six requests from UN agencies. “This includes,” stated Oxfam last month, “agencies that continue to have long-standing INGO registration with Palestinian and Israeli authorities and are legally permitted to operate by the latter while new registration processes are ongoing.”
A system of brutality, practised, insistent, even casual, has been entrenched against those in Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank. The summary execution of two men in Jenin by Israeli soldiers after their surrender was lauded by Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who thought the killings the very thing “expected of them.” Implicit is the suggestion that Palestinians are required to behave in specific, tolerated ways: humbly submit to their apparently generous oppressors, suffer ceaseless purgatorial deprivation and accept a ceasefire in name only.
Amnesty: So-Called Gaza ‘Ceasefire’ becoming Smokescreen for continued Israeli Genocide
Juan Cole11/28/2025, https://www.juancole.com/2025/11/ceasefire-smokescreen-continued.html
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Amnesty International concludes that, over a month after a ceasefire was agreed upon in Gaza and all living Israeli hostages were returned, the Israeli authorities continue to pursue the textbook definition of genocide “by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” Moreover, Israeli leaders continue openly to affirm that this course of action is intentional on their parts.
Dan Steinbock here at Informed Comment recently made a similar argument, calling what the Israelis are doing “ecocide.”
The Secretary General of Amnesty International, Agnes Calmard, observed that “Palestinians remain held within less than half of the territory of Gaza, in the areas least capable of supporting life, with humanitarian aid still severely restricted.” Amnesty says that the Israeli military continues to occupy on the order of 55% of the Gaza Strip. There has been no move to rehabilitate the farmland that has been deliberately destroyed by the Israelis over two years or rebuild livestock. The Israelis routinely shoot at Palestinian fishing boats, preventing them from harvesting protein from the sea. The report concludes, “Palestinians are left virtually totally deprived of independent access to forms of sustenance.”
Ms. Calmard warned that: “The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal. But while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”
Amnesty observes that Israeli fighter pilots and troops have killed about 350 people in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire was trumpeted on October 9. Moreover, Israelis are deliberately obstructing the process of rebuilding “life-sustaining infrastructure.” This cruel behavior is also illegal, directly violating “multiple orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for Israel to ensure that Palestinians have access to humanitarian supplies.”
Let me just say that Israeli authorities agreed as part of the ceasefire to allow 600 trucks of food and other aid into Gaza daily. It is only allowing in about 200 trucks per day, only a third of what was pledged. As a result, the World Food Program says it is only able to reach about 100,000 households with food parcels and wheat, and even then it can only get them 75% of full rations. Its target is 320,000 households or 1.6 million needy people.
Again, this is me speaking: These limitations are not natural. They are the result of deliberate Israeli policies. Israeli troops at checkpoints are deliberately slow-rolling the entry of aid into Gaza on orders from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme-right cabinet. They are restricting overall humanitarian throughput, creating “major bottlenecks, including de-prioritization of humanitarian cargo, low offloading rates, scanning capacity, and suspended
Trump Gaza Plan Condemned as ‘Concentration Camps Within a Mass Concentration Camp’
After previous plans by Israel for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, onlookers fear the proposal to house some displaced Palestinians in “compounds” they may not be allowed to leave.
Stephen Prager, Comon Dreams, Nov 26, 2025
A new Trump administration plan to put Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied parts of Gaza into “residential compounds” is raising eyebrows among international observers, who fear it could more closely resemble a system of “concentration camps within a mass concentration camp.”
Under the current “ceasefire” agreement—which remains technically intact despite hundreds of alleged violations by Israel that have resulted in the deaths of over 300 Palestinians—Israel still occupies the eastern portion of Gaza, an area greater than 50% of the entire strip. The vast majority of the territory’s nearly 2 million inhabitants are crammed onto the other side of the yellow line into an area of roughly 60 square miles—around the size of St Louis, Missouri, or Akron, Ohio.
As Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations’ deputy special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, explained Monday at a briefing to the UN Security Council: “Two years of fighting has left almost 80% of Gaza’s 250,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Over 1.7 million people remain displaced, many in overcrowded shelters without adequate access to water, food, or medical care.”
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the new US proposal would seek to resettle some of those Palestinians in what the Trump administration calls “Alternative Safe Communities,”on the Israeli-controlled side of the yellow line.
Based on information from US officials and European diplomats, the Timessaid these “model compounds” are envisioned as a housing option “more permanent than tent villages, but still made up of structures meant to be temporary. Each could provide housing for as many as 20,000 or 25,000 people alongside medical clinics and schools.”
The project is being led by Trump official Aryeh Lightstone, who previously served as an aide to Trump’s first envoy to Jerusalem. According to the Times: “His team includes an eclectic, fluctuating group of American diplomats, Israeli magnates and officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the sweeping Washington cost-cutting effort overseen earlier this year by Elon Musk.”
The source of funding for the project remains unclear, though the cost of just one compound is estimated to run into the tens of millions. Meanwhile, the newspaper noted that even if ten of these compounds were constructed, it would be just a fraction of what is needed to provide safety and shelter to all of Gaza’s displaced people. It’s unlikely that the first structures would be complete for months.
While the Times said that “the plan could offer relief for thousands of Palestinians who have endured two years of war,” it also pointed to criticisms that it “could entrench a de facto partition of Gaza into Israeli- and Hamas-controlled zones.” Others raised concerns about whether the people of Gaza will even want to move from their homes after years or decades of resisting Israel’s occupation.
But digging deeper into the report, critics have noted troubling language. For one thing, Israeli officials have the final say over which Palestinians are allowed to enter the “compounds” and will heavily scrutinize the backgrounds of applicants, likely leading many to be blacklisted.
In one section, titled “Freedom of Movement,” the Times report noted that “some Israeli officials have argued that, for security reasons, Palestinians should only be able to move into the new compounds, not to leave them, according to officials.”
This language harkens back to a proposal earlier this year by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who called for the creation of a massive “humanitarian city” built on the ruins of Rafah that would be used as part of an “emigration plan” for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Under that plan, Palestinians would have been given “security screenings” and once inside would not be allowed to leave. Humanitarian organizations, including those inside Israel, roundly condemned the plan as essentially a “concentration camp.”
Prior to that, Trump called for the people of Gaza—“all of them”—to be permanently expelled and for the US to “take over” the strip, demolish the remaining buildings, and construct what he described as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” That plan was widely described as one of ethnic cleansing.
The new plan to move Palestinians to “compounds” is raising similar concerns.
“What is it called when a military force concentrates an ethnic or religious group into compounds without the ability to leave?” asked Assal Rad, a PhD in Middle Eastern history and a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC.
Sana Saeed, a senior producer for AJ+, put it more plainly: “concentration camps within a mass concentration camp.”……………………………………………
……………………………………….. there is a conspicuous lack of any clear plan for what happens to those Palestinians who continue to live outside the safe communities, warning that Israel’s security clearances could serve as a way of marking them as fair targets for even more escalated military attacks.
“Those who remain outside of the alternative communities, in the ‘red zone,’” he said, “risk being labelled ‘Hamas supporters’ and therefore ineligible for protection under Israel’s warped interpretation of international law and subject to ongoing military operations, as already seen in past days.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-gaza-compounds
Confronting The Media’s Gaza Group-Think
None of this would be so significant, of course, if our celebrated “free press” was, in fact, as free it claims. If it really served as a watchdog on power. If it really held the feet of the political class to the fire. If it really served as a Fourth Estate. Then the politicians would have no place to hide.
But that is not what the corporate media do. Instead, they echo and amplify the political establishment’s priorities. They are, in fact, the media wing of the establishment.
The western media’s failure to report the reality of Gaza didn’t start on 7 October 2023. It’s always been like this. Here’s why journalists won’t tell you the truth about Palestine/
Breaking free of media group-think is a scary, lonely journey. I know. I was forced to do it
16 November 2025
An audio reading of this article can be found here.]
The past two years have seen a catastrophic failure by western journalists to report properly what amounts to an undoubted genocide in Gaza. This has been a low point even by the dismal standards set by our profession, and further reason why audiences continue to distrust us in ever greater numbers.
There is a comforting argument – comforting especially for those journalists who have failed so scandalously during this period – that seeks to explain, and excuse, this failure. Israel’s exclusion of western reporters, so the claim goes, has made it impossible to determine exactly what is occurring on the ground in Gaza.
There are several obvious rejoinders to this.
First, why would any journalist give Israel the benefit of the doubt in Gaza – as we have been doing – when it is the party keeping out reporters? The media’s working assumption must be that Israel has excluded us because it has plenty to hide. The obligation must be on Israel to demonstrate that it is acting out of military necessity and proportionately. That cannot be the starting point, as it has been, of western media coverage.
When one party, Israel, denies journalists the chance to report, our default responsibility is to adopt a posture of extreme scepticism towards its claims. It is to subject those claims to intense scrutiny – all the more so when the world’s highest court has ruled that that Israel’s very presence in Gaza is as an illegal occupier, one that should have left the Palestinian territories long ago.
Second, and just as self-evidently, this explanation arrogantly discounts the work of hundreds of Palestinian journalists who have risked their lives to show us precisely what is happening in Gaza. It is to view their contribution, even as they are being slaughtered by Israel in unprecedented numbers, as, at best, worthless and as, at worst, Hamas propaganda. It is to breathe life into Israel’s self-serving rationalisations for murdering our colleagues – and thereby sets a precedent that normalises the targeting of journalists in the future.
It is also to treat these Palestinian journalists with the same colonial contempt demonstrated by British aristocrats a century ago, when they promised away the Palestinians’ homeland to European Jews, as if Palestine was a possession Britain was entitled to dispose of as it saw fit.
And third – and this is the issue I want to grapple with tonight – the presence of western journalists in Gaza would not have made any dramatic difference to the way the slaughter of Palestinians was presented. Audiences would still have received a sanitised version of the genocide. Failure is baked into western media coverage of Israel and Palestine. I know this firsthand from 20 years of reporting from the region.
Career suicide
When it comes to the festering wound in what was once historic Palestine, the job of western journalists is to obfuscate, equivocate, distort and excuse. It always has been. I will get to the reasons why a little later. [If you prefer, you can skip direct to that section under the subhead “Why so craven?”]
Israel has been able to get away with genocide in Gaza precisely because, for the preceding decades, the western media refused to report on – or hold Israel accountable for – its well-documented ethnic cleansing operations against Palestinians, and its brutal apartheid rule over them.
A few of our most principled journalists tried to report these things in real time. But they publicly paid a high price for doing so. Any colleagues who might have thought of following in their footsteps learnt the necessary lesson: that emulating these journalists would be career suicide.
Let me briefly document a couple of distinguished foreign correspondents in Jerusalem who were made examples of, and then provide more recent illustrations of my own run-ins with western editors………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Becoming an outcast
I only learnt of these distinguished reporters’ troubles some time after I had similar experiences covering the region as a freelance – something I did for 20 years. In my early years, I repeatedly came up against the same editorial pressures and resistance faced by Adams and Neff more than quarter of a century earlier. I felt similarly isolated, besieged, outcast – and eventually abandoned any hope of continuing to report for major western media outlets.
I submitted stories to both the Guardian – where I had previously been a staff journalist for many years – and the International Herald Tribune, now refashioned as the International New York Times.
Let me quickly illustrate an example I had with each…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Why so craven?
The big question is why. Here is an outline of the various pressures, some practical and others structural, that keep the western media so craven towards Israel.
Partisan reporters: Historically, most publications – especially US outlets – have put Jewish reporters in charge of their Jerusalem bureaux, based on the probably correct assumption that, given Israel’s tribal political ideology of Zionism, Jewish reporters will have better access to Israeli officials. Which, in turn, tells us that these papers are chiefly interested in what Israeli sources have to say, not what Palestinians say. In truth, western media aren’t watchdogs. They don’t challenge the existing power imbalance, they reproduce it.
Many of these Jewish reporters have not hidden their deep attachment and partisanship towards Israel.
Many years ago, a Jewish journalist friend based in Jerusalem wrote to me after I first made this point public, stating: “I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like [the New York Times’ then bureau chief Ethan] Bronner have kids in the Israeli army.”
Imagine if you can, the New York Times employing a Palestinian as their Jerusalem correspondent – I know, it’s inconceivable. But not just that: employing them while the correspondent had a child working for the Palestinian Authority, or, even more fittingly, one fighting in a Fatah military brigade.
Meanwhile, the BBC openly backs its Middle East online editor, Raffi Berg, even though its own whistleblowing staff have accused him of skewing the corporation’s coverage of Israel and Palestine. Berg has not been shy in admitting his own tribal affiliation to Israel. In an interview about his “insider” book on Israel’s spy agency Mossad, Berg states that “as a Jewish person and admirer of the state of Israel” he gets “goosebumps” of pride hearing about Mossad operations.
Berg has a framed letter from Benjamin Netanyahu and a photo of himself with the former Israeli ambassador to the UK hanging on his wall at home. He counts a former senior Mossad official as a close friend. And when the journalist Owen Jones wrote a piece revealing the near-revolt of BBC staff at Berg’s role, Berg’s first thought was to seek legal help from Mark Lewis, the former head of UK Lawyers for Israel, well-known for using lawfare as a way to bully and silence critics of Israel.
Can we imagine the BBC appointing a Palestinian or Arab to that same hyper-sensitive post and then supporting them when it emerged that they had a framed letter from the assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and a photo with Yasser Arafat hanging on their wall at home?
Partisan bureau staff: It is considered entirely normal for western media to employ partisan Israeli Jews as support staff. As Neff noted, they exert subtle and sometimes not so subtle pressures on correspondents to be more sympathetic towards Israeli narratives.
An investigation by Alison Weir of If Americans Knew found, for example, that in 2004 Israeli staff at the AP news agency’s bureau in Jerusalem had refused either to use or return video footage sent in by a Palestinian cameraman that showed Israeli soldiers shooting an unarmed youth in the abdomen. Instead, they destroyed the tape.
Media lobby groups: Camera and Honest Reporting operate as a pair of media sheepdogs, aggressively herding journalists into line. As I found, they can make your life very hard indeed: they can mobilise large numbers of fanatical Israel supporters to bombard publications with complaints, they can damage your credibility with your own editors, and they can alert Israeli officials to put you on a media blacklist. Most reporters see them as very dangerous organisations to cross.
Access: A general flaw in journalism’s claim to be a watchdog on power – remember, we call ourselves the Fourth Estate – is that reporters invariably need access to high-level officials, whether for stories, steers or comments. A journalist with such a source is seen by editors as far more useful, and reliable, than one without. This is true whether one’s beat is crime, politics, sport or entertainment.
However, access inevitably comes at a price – of independence. ………………………………….
Pressures from head office: Notice too that media head offices in the US and Europe are subject to another layer of lobby pressure – this time through the lobby’s association of criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League or the Board of British Deputies are there claiming to represent local Jewish communities, who they report to be “upset”, “frightened”, “bullied” or “anxious” every time Israel is criticised.
……………………………………..The result is that the bar set for publication, if a story is critical of Israel, is far higher than it is for other regions. Just think of how readily journalists attribute atrocities in Ukraine to Russia, compared to how reticent journalists – sometime the same ones – are to identify worse crimes in Gaza as atrocities and name Israel as the responsible party.
Israeli government censorship: It is often not understood that Israel operates a military censorship system that limits what journalists can say. This is especially important given that much of what is written by Jerusalem correspondents relates to Israel’s illegal military occupation.
In its severest form, that means Israel simply refuses journalists access to certain areas, as it has done for two years in Gaza. Or it can require them to embed with the Israeli military, as the BBC has done on several occasions during the Gaza genocide. Or it can demand that journalists don’t tell important facts about what is going on.
……………………………………….Israeli government control: Israel licenses foreign correspondents by issuing them a Government Press Office card. For the past 20 years, Israel has issued the cards only to journalists formally working for a news organisation it regards as “accredited”. ………
……………………………………..Rebuilding our worldview
These practical pressures gain much of their force because journalists and editors have historically been afraid of being accused of antisemitism by Israel. It is tempting to overestimate this pressure. I suspect it is better viewed as a cover story, rationalising the failure of journalists to do their job properly – as illustrated by their reluctance to identify the Gaza genocide as a genocide.
But beyond these practical pressures, there is a deeper reason for why the western media avoid serious criticism of Israel.
Israel is integral to a continuing western colonial system of power projection into the oil-rich Middle East. Israel is the West’s ultimate client state. Western establishments need Israel protected.
None of this would be so significant, of course, if our celebrated “free press” was, in fact, as free it claims. If it really served as a watchdog on power. If it really held the feet of the political class to the fire. If it really served as a Fourth Estate. Then the politicians would have no place to hide.
But that is not what the corporate media do. Instead, they echo and amplify the political establishment’s priorities. They are, in fact, the media wing of the establishment………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-11-16/media-group-scary-journey/
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/
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.
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