Palestinians who were forced out of their homes in Khan Younis by Israel’s military offensive began returning cautiously in small numbers after Israel withdrew its ground forces on Sunday. Many found their former neighborhoods looking like a wasteland. 

Video filmed by a CNN stringer showed rubble and debris strewn along the roads. Much of the city was bulldozed after months of heavy fighting and Israeli bombardment. 

A view of destruction after Israeli forces withdrawal from Khan Younis.  Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu/Getty Images

Most were seen examining the ruins on foot, although some were using bicycles, trucks or donkeys for transportation. They collected kitchen items, leftover food bags and other items salvaged from the wreckage, CNN video showed. Others were seen standing atop destroyed buildings, sifting through heaps of rubble that had once been homes. “This is what has become of Gaza,” said one man, driving through the rubble on his motorbike.  

The footage showed significant damage to the vast majority of buildings, including homes and mosques, with many entirely flattened. The buildings still standing were covered in soot and riddled with bullet holes and artillery damage, with facades torn down.

The city’s Al Amal Hospital has been battered by the fighting there over the past four months.  Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu/Getty Images

The buzzing of Israeli drones above could be heard throughout, as well as occasional gunshots. In what appeared to be the office of a telecoms company, graffiti could be seen on the walls, including drawings of Stars of David as well as anti-Arab profanity in English.  

“Gaza belongs to the Jews,” read an Arabic marking on the wall next to the logo of the Basil Tel company in eastern Khan Younis.

(Source: CNN)

• World Central Kitchen attack has garnered more media attention than deadly Israeli raid on Al-Shifa Hospital, which is ‘deeply dangerous logic’ that indicates the extent of the ‘dehumanization of Palestinians,’ Elborno tells Anadolu
• ‘States need to put pressure on Israel by imposing arms embargoes, by imposing sanctions, by cutting ties with Israel in order to force it to comply with its international obligations,’ says lawyer

LONDON

Israel’s killing of food aid workers is “reprehensible” but not surprising, as it has been targeting journalists, doctors, health workers and aid workers with “full impunity for six months,” according to a Palestinian-American lawyer.

In an interview with Anadolu, Lara Elborno denounced last Monday’s attack on a convoy of US-based charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), saying the targeting of civilians and aid workers must stop.

“Israel’s deliberate killing of seven aid workers is reprehensible, but it’s nothing new. Israel has been targeting Palestinians, journalists, doctors, health workers, aid workers and UN workers with full impunity for six months now, and it must be stopped,” she said.

The April 1 attack killed seven aid workers – three British nationals, an Australian, a Polish national, a US-Canadian dual citizen, and a Palestinian.

It has triggered strong condemnation around the globe and calls for accountability, with many, including WCK founder Jose Andres, disputing Israel’s claim that it was a “mistake” and a case of “misidentification.”

Elborno said she disagrees with the notion that the killing of foreign WCK aid workers is somehow more relevant or more devastating than the context in which they were killed, “which is the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

“On day 180 now of Israel’s genocide, the Palestinian people are reeling from one of the largest massacres in our history,” she said, referring to the recent Israeli siege and attacks that completely destroyed Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, leaving hundreds killed including displaced families, patients and doctors.

However, that took place around the same time that Israel killed these seven aid workers, and “the media has unfortunately been more interested in the latter story,” Elborno noted.

She said this is “deeply dangerous logic” that indicates the extent of the “dehumanization of Palestinians,” and that Palestinian deaths are “somehow inevitable or natural.”

She asserted that this has paved the way for “this genocide and allowed Israel to get away with it for the last 180 days.”

Call for arms embargoes, sanctions

Israel, which is facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has now killed nearly 33,200 Palestinians in Gaza, a majority of them women and children, and injured almost 76,000.

It has laid waste to most of the enclave, displacing millions and leaving them facing starvation due to a crippling blockade on aid and essentials.

Elborno pointed out that Israel continues to kill Palestinians despite two ICJ orders, a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, and a damning report by UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese which said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe it is committing genocide in Gaza.

“Yet the US has continued to funnel weapons, to cooperate in matters of intelligence, and it has kept the funds flowing, and so Israel continues to act emboldened and kill and starve more Palestinians in Gaza,” she noted.

She said this underscores the importance and need for “urgent sanctions” and arms embargoes.

“States need to put pressure on Israel by imposing arms embargoes, by imposing sanctions, by cutting ties with Israel in order to force it to comply with its international obligations to end this genocide, to dismantle its apartheid regime, to stop its 75-year-long violation of the Palestinian right to return and Palestinian self-determination,” said Elborno.

Asked whether countries supplying Israel could face legal challenges in the future, she replied that “risk has already materialized,” pointing to the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights’ case against the Biden administration for complicity and Nicaragua’s proceedings against Germany for its violations of the Genocide Convention.

“Everyone responsible, whether Israel or its Western backers, must be brought to justice,” she noted.

This is essential because if such violations of international law go unchecked, they will become the “new precedent” for other states, she added.

“Every violation that Israel gets away with becomes a new practice that can be accepted elsewhere … I think taking a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza is therefore the only logical human position if one values human life and the future of humanity altogether,” said Elborno.​​​​​​​

(Source: AA)

Imprisoned Palestinian novelist and activist Walid Daqqa, who was suffering from cancer, has died in Israel’s Shamir Medical Center, according to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs.

Daqqa was from Baqa al-Gharbiyye, a predominantly Palestinian city in Israel, and had served for 38 years in Israeli prisons, the commission added, before saying that he had died as a result of a “slow killing” policy carried out against ill prisoners by the Israeli prison administration.

Protesters have gathered in Ramallah in memory of one of the most prominent Palestinian prisoners, who was due to be released next year.

The Palestinian state news agency Wafa described Daqqa as a “freedom fighter”, while Hamas said that it was renewing its “covenant with the prisoners until they gain freedom”, following the news of his death.

In a statement, Hamas noted how Daqqa’s death “took place in the occupation prisons”.

Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir – who is responsible for the Israel Prison Service – said that Israel was “not crying” over the death of Daqaa, who he referred to as a “terrorist”.

In a social media post, he said that Daqqa’s life had ended naturally and that it was not a part of the “death penalty for terrorists” as it was “supposed to” be.

Poor treatment of prisoners

Daqqa is one of the most prominent and longtime Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. He was arrested by Israel in 1986 for killing an Israeli soldier and has remained in prison since then. While in jail, he wrote several books, including a children’s story.

In 1999, he also got married while behind bars. Along with his wife, Sana Salameh, he welcomed a daughter – Milad – in 2020, conceived after his sperm was smuggled out of prison.

“The Israeli officers inside the prison told him they would not allow him to have a child, but he won by having Milad,” his wife told Al Jazeera.

A year later Daqqa was diagnosed with myelofibrosis – a rare form of bone marrow cancer that disrupts the body’s normal production of blood cells. Rights groups began pressuring Israel to release him on medical grounds.

Last year, Addameer, a rights group that supports Palestinian prisoners, said that Daqqa was in “dire need of urgent medical attention”, accused Israeli authorities of denying him the treatment he was prescribed, and called for his “immediate release”.

But Israel refused to free him from prison early, setting his release date for 2025.

Israeli prison authorities regularly delay checkups and urgent surgeries for Palestinian prisoners for years, according to prisoner groups.

Specialised doctors are not regularly available, except for dentists, and “over-the-counter painkillers are administered as a remedy for almost all health problems”, rights groups said in a joint report to the United Nations.

At least 10 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, according to Wafa. But a Haaretz investigation said that the number was actually at least 27.

Before that, in 2020, four Palestinian prisoners died in Israeli custody; and in November 2021, Palestinian prisoner Sami Umour, 39, died after a months-long delay of an urgently needed operation for serious heart problems from which he suffered.

The delay in deciding the case of Daqqa and other sick prisoners was described by Qadura Fares, the director of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, the main Palestinian prisoner rights NGO, as a policy of “slow, systematic killing”.

On Sunday, after the news about Daqqa’s death was announced by Israel, tributes poured in on social media in memory of him and his work.

“He was among the most prominent prisoner intellectuals, with several works to his name, notably ‘Melting the Consciousness,’ ‘Parallel Time,’ and the novel ‘The Secret of the Oil Story,’ which received local and Arab awards,” Lema, a diplomat at the Palestine Mission to the European Union, said in a post on X.

“Daqqa leaves behind a legacy as a Palestinian hero,” she said.

(Source: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES)

Maha Hussaini

In a yard surrounding a modest chalet in Gaza’s Deir al-Balah where her parents took shelter from the Israeli bombardment, one-year-old Iman al-Saqqa takes her first barefoot steps.

When she arrived on 13 October, Saqqa was wrapped in a blanket and cradled in her mother’s arms. Following six months of displacement, she now toddles around independently and is beginning to utter her first words.

With around 50 other people, this makeshift shelter became home for Iman and her parents after their apartment in Gaza City was reduced to rubble by an Israeli air strike on 11 October.

“Iman is my first child. A few months before she was born, we had moved to our new apartment where we designed a pink bedroom for her. We had plans to throw a big party on her first birthday. Never did we think that we would not be able to even bake a cake,” Suhaila al-Saqqa, Iman’s mother, told Middle East Eye.

“We were once planning a luxurious life for her. Instead, I’ve had to teach her to use the toilet [at a very young age] since we cannot always find diapers for her, and if we do, they are very expensive.”

On 7 October, Palestinian fighters stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack, resulting in the deaths of 1,191 Israelis and the seizing of 240 captives. Israel launched a brutal war on the Gaza Strip, with devastating aerial, artillery and naval attacks on the densely populated coastal enclave, followed by a months-long ground invasion.

The Israeli military’s stated goal was the release of the captives, destroying Hamas and targeting its members and fighters. But over 70 percent of the more than 33,000 Palestinians killed have been children and women, according to Gaza health officials and international organisations.

The relentless bombardment has resulted in the destruction of around 70 percent of housing units and the loss of 90 percent of private sector jobs in the Gaza Strip over the course of six months.

Education on hold

From her shelter in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Zaina al-Rayyes curiously tracks the news of the upcoming Tawjihi (final high school) exams for her peers in the occupied West Bank. Before the war on Gaza, she had been gearing up for a pivotal year, setting her sights on being listed among the top students in Palestine’s high school examination.

However, as the war extends into its seventh month, she laments that both her academic and social life have been put on hold indefinitely.

“I haven’t only lost six months of my life, but an entire year. Tawjihi students in the West Bank have already begun preparing for their exams in around two months, while all I am doing here is moving from one shelter to another,” Rayyes, 17, told MEE.

‘Life has stopped. The only thing ongoing here is death’

– Zaina al-Rayyes

“When the school year started, I set aside my social life and everything else, determined to focus solely on my studies to achieve a high score that would secure me a scholarship at one of the world’s esteemed universities abroad. Today, my entire life has been set aside.”

Even if the war ends soon, Rayyes and approximately 620,000 students enrolled in schools in Gaza would not be able to return immediately. At least 351 schools have been completely or partially destroyed during the Israeli bombardment of the strip over the past six months. Among these, 65 are Unrwa-run schools and 286 are government schools, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Education in Gaza.

The remaining schools are serving as shelters for hundreds of thousands of displaced people, whose homes have been either completely destroyed or damaged by the attacks.

“In the limited time I am able to connect to the internet, it has become my hobby to scroll through Facebook groups of Tawjihi students outside of Gaza. I watch them discuss lessons and ask questions about classes and the expected date of exams. I often cry, and my parents wish to do anything to help me continue my education, but they are helpless,” said Rayyes, who evacuated her home in Gaza City in the first week of the attack and has since been displaced multiple times.

“Life has stopped. The only thing ongoing here is death. We cannot plan for our next day. How can I plan for my future, where I would study, or what I want to major in? I am not even sure that I will survive to pass Tawjihi.”

As of Thursday, more than 5,994 Palestinian students and 266 teachers and administrators have been killed in Gaza.

‘Primitive life’

Amid the perpetual sense of insecurity and the relentless sounds of bombardment for six consecutive months, Gaza residents find themselves “battling in yet another war” in their homes and shelters.

With essential supplies like electricity, water, fuel and cooking gas cut off since the first day of the war, every aspect of the residents’ daily life becomes a struggle.

Samer al-Agha, originally a resident of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, currently lives in a tent in Rafah along with his wife, mother and three children.

“During the first four months of the war, there was no cooking gas at all. Everyone in Gaza used either firewood or coal to cook and heat water for bathing,” he told MEE. “But in the next two months, cooking gas has been allowed in, but in very limited amounts. We finally got to buy a gas cylinder at almost five or six times its original price, but it’s ok because even firewood has become very expensive.”

Without access to running water in any household throughout the Gaza Strip, residents have been relying on water distribution vehicles to refill their tankers for drinking, washing and bathing.

“Since the first day when Israel declared the cutting of our water supply, we knew we would stop having water coming from the tap, but we never thought this would continue for six months. For half a year, we have been heating water on fire and using empty cans of canned food to pour water for bathing,” he added.

“To wash our clothes, we cannot use washing machines because we neither have electricity nor water, so we have to do it by hand. One would think these are marginal things but they are not. This is our everyday life, something that we have been sleeping and waking up with for half a year.

“The occupation has made us live a primitive life that even our great grandparents did not live, and it didn’t happen gradually. We suddenly found ourselves living it one day.”

(Source: MEE)

Nidal Adaileh

It is probably fair to say that most of the world’s population stands in solidarity with the bombed and besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. As Eid al-Fitr approaches to signal the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, people are wondering how to celebrate the festival. Many believe that it is inappropriate to celebrate in the customary joyous fashion given that the people in Gaza are still suffering under Israel’s genocidal offensive, with many of them on the brink of starvation as famine grips the territory.

It is heart-breaking to witness what is happening in the Gaza Strip. The Zionists sow grief and pain with their demonic behaviour and abhorrent occupation.

It is traditional to greet Eid in the Islamic world with joy, new clothes, nice food and sweets; Muslims gather with relatives and friends to thank the Almighty for allowing them to pass the fasting month again; and gifts may be exchanged, especially for the children. On Eid al-Fitr 2024, though, Gaza no longer knows the meaning of happiness; joy has been bombed out of them by the Israeli genocide. The collective wish will be to survive and return to their homes — or at least where their homes once stood before Israel destroyed them — and try to rebuild their lives in the absence of the tens of thousands of children, women and men killed by the Zionist onslaught.

The genocide has passed the six-month mark, and everything worthy of visiting on Eid has been destroyed or desecrated: mosque, parks, historic buildings and sites, and even the beaches. In a clear sign of genocidal intent, the occupation state has destroyed more than 200 archaeological sites in the Palestinian territory.

Nevertheless, the spirit of the Palestinians will see them through, God Willing.

The Zionist forces of evil can kill and destroy at will, but they can never destroy the Palestinian desire for justice and freedom from occupation, both of which are supposedly guaranteed by international law.

The lives lost will not be in vain; the martyrs have won already, even as the struggle for freedom goes on. History will not forget the Israeli violations of international laws and conventions; the massacres and the war crimes; and the crimes against humanity. The Palestinians won’t let the world forget; their continued presence in their own land will be a constant reminder. Their supporters around the world let not let the Israelis and their complicit allies forget either. The blood of the martyrs will light the torches of freedom on the path of liberation from Israel’s brutal military occupation.

So, as Gaza gets ready to greet Eid with hunger, bombs and bullets, I have no doubt that there will still be Eid prayers in the enclave. Anything less will signal a victory for the Zionist forces of evil. The Palestinians are stronger than that; their faith is indomitable, and so are they.

(Source: Middle East Monitor)