CrossFireArabia
CROSSFIREARABIA – The Israeli occupation has violated the ceasefire in Gaza a mind-boggling 3338 times since it was announced on 10 October 2025 when US president Donald Trump boasted he has stopped the Israeli war on strip.
Since that time as well, Israel has killed 1027 civilians in the strip. And this is not to mention that over 3200 people have been injured. And these figures may well go up by the time this article is published. The ceasefire has given the Israeli army a carte blanche momentum to dominate the skies of Gaza and shoot at anything that moves; these are of course mostly civilians, mostly women and children.
Regardless of whether we like it or not, the Israeli army controls the major portions of the Gaza Strip. It started at 53 percent on the day of the ceasefire then slowly crept up to 55, 57, 60 percent and now it wants to move to 70 percent while squeezing the population there into smaller and smaller areas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been proud to announce this fact recently!
One effect of this is to establish even wider control of the Gaza Strip under the euphemism of yellow zones where it’s prohibited for people to live in and are declared security zones for the Israeli army to roam in as they please. Another insidious aspect of this is to take ‘potshots’ at the civilian population whenever they feel like it and which is on a daily rota of albeit controlled killing and injury. The Israeli army can’t get at the Hamas operatives because they are not embedded in the population. They are of course nowhere near finished but lie in wait for the appropriate time to continue their war against Israel.
And in between all this, Gazan life – in between destruction, torn-down buildings and mayhem – continues. A case in point is the recent recovery of the remains of the 40 martyrs killed by the Israelis during their genocidal campaign on Gaza in the post-7 October, 2023 butchery. These remains were found by the Gaza civil defense teams after much searching of the grounds of the Sheikh Al Radwan Cemetery in Gaza City.
The cemetery, or to be fair to the Israeli soldiers, they bulldozed and desecrated the cemetery multiple times in the past two years going on a rampage of willful destruction, as if bodies are going to get up from the graves and attack them. The effect of the bulldozing and mutilation of the graves was horrific, mixing the remains of the bodies of the Palestinian killed with the earth and other remains, creating a gory story of unbelievable horrors. In this war, Israeli soldiers made the digging up cemeteries their favorite past-time, a macaber practice made all over Gaza – and this was done for no known, sane, reasonable reason anybody could think of.
In the latest recovery however, Palestinian civil defense officials say the remains are now being transported to local forensic scientists with the hope they would be identified for their families and relatives who would at least know what happened to them.
This is going to be a complex task because of the fact that nearly all of the health system in Gaza stands decimated, not to mention there is very little equipment and medicines in the down-torn hospitals today. And the fact that Israel still tightly controls what goes into Gaza through a blanket embargo it imposed on the enclave since 2006. So the fate of the remains of the bodies will remain in doubt at least for the time-being. Israel will stand accused for its abomination.
The Israeli genocide with people like Netanyahu gleefully watching, and indeed ordering for more blood to be shed, ripped Gazan society apart while dehumanizing its social formation. Latest statistics show today that mass Israeli bombs thrown on the Strip created at least 28,000 Palestinian widows.
Over the past two and a half years, they lost their husbands, their fathers, mothers, uncles and cousins reducing Gaza into hollowed gorges of ruined concrete. These widows become overnight breadwinners for their young children and babies regardless of the fact that Gaza today is in a starvation-mode with no jobs available.
These are just a few of the social changes Gazan are trying to grapple with inbetween the daily Israeli onslaughts of rising deaths and a too unwilling international community to tell Israel to stop and afraid of the black sheep.
Dr. Marwan Asmar who is currently the editor of crossfirearabia.com holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.
