The General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions (GFPTU) is cancelling all events commemorating 1 May International Workers’ Day, due to the difficult circumstances facing the Palestinian working class, it stated Thursday.
The number of unemployed Palestinians has reached approximately 550,000, with unprecedented unemployment rates reaching 85% in the Gaza Strip and 38% in the West Bank, the Federation added according to Qudspress.
More than 250,000 workers were prevented from accessing their workplace in the 1948 territories since October 7, 2023, and have been without income for more than 30 months., the GFPTU continued. This led to the depletion of their savings and is forcing them to sell their belongings to meet their families’ needs.
About 50 workers were killed and more than 38,000 arrested during the same period while the Federation holds the Israeli government responsible for conditions of Palestinian workers and demanding they be compensated, their rights restored, and be returned to their jobs.
The GFPTU noted that they are filed complaints with the International Labour Organization (ILO), but have yet to receive a response, indicating about 90% of workers lack social protection systems, amidst declining job opportunities, the expansion of the informal economy, and rising living costs.
GAZA CITY, Gaza—Nahla Al-Majdob woke up in the middle of the night last week to her seven-year-old daughter, Aya, screaming in their tent. “I turned on my phone light but I didn’t see anything at first,” Al-Majdob told Drop Site News. “Then I noticed bite marks on Aya’s toe.” It was not the first time. “I’ve woken up many nights to find rats around our mattresses,” she said. “Sometimes they’re right next to us, sniffing.”
Like nearly all Palestinians in Gaza, Al-Majdob and her family were forced from their home by the war and have been living in a flimsy tent near what used to be the port on the shoreline of Gaza City. Compounding the hardships of displacement is a growing population of rodents menacing families across the enclave.
“The rats come out from the rubble and the garbage,” Al-Majdob said. “They crawl over our clothes and gather where we store food. If we leave anything out, it will be contaminated.”
Al-Majdob, her husband, and her daughter, are all diabetic, making them particularly vulnerable to infection from rat bites. Her family has come to fear the night, when the rats forage in the dark, chewing through tents, clothes, and flesh.
“Before the war, I would never eat anything touched by rodents, but now, if I find them in the white flour, I sift it and use it anyway,” she said. “If I throw everything away, we will starve.”
She added that the rodents also appear to have become bolder as their numbers have grown. “They’re not afraid of us anymore,” she said. “I push them away with a stick or anything I can find, but they keep coming back after a few minutes.”
Nahla Al-Majdob with her daughter, Aya, in their tent in Gaza City on April 22, 2026. Photos by Ahmed Dremly.
Palestinian families in Gaza are living in overcrowded tents and makeshift shelters, surrounded by waste and debris, with limited access to safe water and sanitation services. Among the widespread and severe environmental health hazards that result from the conditions, the United Nations reported this month, is a proliferation of rodents as well as cockroaches, flies, and other pests, contributing to disease transmission.
In a rapid assessment of more than 1,600 displacement sites across Gaza this month, the UN found that, in over 80% of them, rodents and pests were frequently visible, affecting 1.45 million people. Practically all of the affected families reported skin infections, including scabies, lice and bedbugs, with more than 70,000 cases recorded so far in 2026.
On April 12, Amani Abu Selmi was absorbed in preparation for her upcoming wedding, which was just one week away. She has lived with her family of five in a makeshift tent near Nasser Hospital since 2024 after their home in Khan Younis was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. She went through the traditional rituals of a bride-to-be, checking and showing each piece of clothing to friends and relatives who stopped by. The next morning, her joy was shattered. Rats had chewed their way inside and shredded her belongings.
Abu Selmi’s mother, Ghalia, was returning from the market when she found her younger daughter, 13-year-old Samar, running toward her screaming that something terrible had happened. Inside the tent, Ghalia found Amani standing in shock, holding up pieces of her torn bridal dresses.
“The mice and rats spared nothing,” Ghalia told Drop Site. “These were new clothes for her, and now they were riddled with holes. I started crying because I knew how hard it had been for us to afford them in the first place.”
Amani had tried to protect her clothes from rodents, covering them with a wooden board weighed down by stones. But the rats and mice had burrowed underneath.
“She was especially heartbroken over her hand-embroidered Palestinian thobe,” Ghalia said. “She had dreamed of wearing it the morning of her wedding. It’s part of our tradition.” Rodents, fleas, and insects have long been an issue in their tent but Ghalia said the situation has deteriorated dramatically over the past three months.
Several days ago, Ghalia said she found her 19-year-old son’s eye had swollen shut. “There were small bite marks near his eye. He didn’t even realize what had happened until I asked him. He said he felt something on his face while sleeping,” she said. She took her son, Raef, to the nearest Red Crescent clinic, where doctors confirmed that the wound had become infected and prescribed him a course of antibiotics.
“They move all day inside the tent freely,” Ghalia said. “Even when it’s full of people, they dig tunnels underneath us.” She said she caught 20 mice in a single day using sticky traps, but it did little to contain the problem. “I tried to block their holes with mud again and again, but they always come back,” she said. “It’s terrifying. I can’t live like this anymore.”
Majd Sukar, the head of the Preventive Health Department for the Gaza Municipality, told Drop Site that complaints about rodents have significantly increased since the so-called ceasefire in October 2025, when the Israeli military halted its scorched earth bombing campaign even though it continues smaller scale attacks on an almost daily basis.
“The scale of destruction in Gaza has created ideal breeding grounds,” Sukar said. “The Israeli blockade on rodenticides, the mountains of uncollected waste, and untreated sewage are the primary drivers of this crisis.”
The municipality’s efforts to tackle the situation have also been severely limited by Israel. “We’ve lost most of our municipal vehicles in Israeli attacks,” Sukar said. “We simply don’t have the capacity to remove waste or respond effectively.”
Israeli restrictions on aid into Gaza have hampered efforts to deal with the growing rodent infestation. According to Doctors Without Borders, Israel has repeatedly denied the entry of multiple items needed for basic health sanitation, including rodenticide and insecticide.
“We’ve tried to find alternatives,” Sukar said. “We worked with Gaza’s university experts and tested different alternatives, but none were effective. Even many local initiatives have failed. Many people have brought us homemade poisons, but they don’t work either.”
The municipality has launched awareness campaigns, advising families to store food securely, clean their surroundings, and seek medical care immediately after bites, especially for children and those with chronic illnesses. Yet Sukar said they are fighting a losing battle.
“Rats are now everywhere in Gaza, in destroyed homes, shelters, hospitals, everywhere.” Reports have also grown of a large, particularly aggressive and adaptable rat known as the Norway rat. “We urgently appeal to the UN Secretary-General that we need waste removal equipment and pest control supplies. This is not a secondary issue, it’s a public health catastrophe,” Sukar said.
“We are suffering from two wars,” he added. “The war of bombs, and the war of rats.”
Saber Dawas in his tent inside Al-Yarmouk stadium in Gaza City on April 19, 2026. Photos by Ahmed Dremly.
Saber Dawas, a 38-year-old father of six, has tried desperately to keep the rats at bay inside their tent in a displacement camp in Al-Yarmouk stadium in central Gaza City.
He tried storing food in plastic containers, sealed bags, and even a cleaned drum for storing flour. “It didn’t matter,” Dawas said. “A rat chewed straight through the drum.”
Even though food is expensive and scarce, he ends up throwing away whatever he suspects was contaminated. He now suspends most of his food supplies in plastic bags from a wooden stick wedged into the tent’s frame, hoping to keep it out of the reach of rodents.
He said he sleeps lightly, constantly on alert. “Sometimes I feel like I’m guarding my family all night,” he added. “We’re at the beginning of summer. This will only get worse.”
Ahmad Dremly is the Gaza-based project coordinator for We Are Not Numbers. He is a journalist, translator, and educator and contributed this article to Drop Site
Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said Monday that intense fighting could resume across all of Israel’s active fronts this year according to the Drop Site website.
“We remain ready and on alert for the possibility of a resumption of intense fighting on all these fronts—2026 could still be a year of fighting on each of them,” Zamir told army officers during a meeting. I
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declined to say whether the Trump administration would support Israel resuming the war in Gaza, but said that “the entirety of this project only works if Hamas is demilitarized.”
Hamas has consistently refused to discuss disarmament until Israel ceases its violations of the ceasefire and fulfills its Phase One obligations according to Drop Site.
Tel Aviv’s escalation with Iran has made the risks of daily life in Israel more immediate and visible, according to an Israeli journalist who previously worked for Haaretz and left the country after Oct. 7, 2023.
“It was never safe,” Asaf Ronel told Anadolu in an interview. “But when you live inside it, you don’t notice.”
He said it was only after leaving Israel for Berlin that he became aware of the constant underlying stress.
“It took me months to understand why I’m so relaxed here,” he said. “I suddenly had hobbies. Because this layer of fear for your life is gone.”
But, he added, that sense of fear builds gradually over time.
“It accumulates. You keep denying it. You keep trying to maintain a facade of normalcy in your life,” he said. “Like everybody does until they’re broken.”
According to Ronel, the situation has deteriorated sharply in recent years.
He described the Oct. 7 attacks as a turning point that exposed deep vulnerabilities in Israel’s security system.
“The level of collapse of the military establishment on Oct. 7 was obvious,” he said.
At the same time, he argued that Israel’s military response has intensified insecurity.
“The more violence they’re using, it’s only creating more danger to them,” he said.
Ronel also criticized the role of the army more broadly, describing it as “functioning as a machine for oppression and violence against Palestinians and surrounding populations.”
Frequent trips to shelters have become routine, he added, though he stressed that Israeli civilians’ experience differs significantly from that of Palestinians.
“Israelis never dealt with anything similar to the daily life of Palestinians around us,” he said.
‘Israeli media is 99% propaganda’
From Feb. 28 until the current ceasefire, Iranian retaliatory strikes hit multiple locations across Israel, targeting military sites, energy infrastructure and other areas, exposing what analysts describe as mounting pressure on the country’s interception systems.
Strikes penetrated Israel’s multi-layered defenses in multiple districts, including Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva, Bnei Brak, Holon, Arad, Dimona, Nahariya and Haifa.
Ronel said the scale of these developments is not fully reflected in domestic media coverage.
“Maybe the media should tell them that … there’s also the other side that’s quite sophisticated and capable of hurting them directly,” he said.
According to Ronel, Israeli media has failed to convey these realities, focusing instead on military achievements.
“Israeli media is 99% propaganda, self-propaganda,” Ronel said.
“They’re not even aware that they’re doing it,” he added, describing what he called a “level of denial of reality” that has become institutionalized.
He pointed to reports of a growing shortage of the most sophisticated missile interception systems and the military adjusting its defense priorities accordingly.
“The media is not reporting it,” he said.
‘Broken state and society’
Ronel said the current crisis reflects deeper structural problems within Israel that predate the latest escalation.
“It was clear that the country is broken,” he said, pointing to widening gaps in public services, infrastructure and governance.
He also pointed to broader institutional failures, saying basic systems were no longer functioning effectively.
“It didn’t seem like there was anyone who knows how to fix it, at least not in charge,” he said.
He said the events following Oct. 7 reinforced that view.
“And then, a few days later, when the genocide started, it was clear that not only the state is broken, but the society,” he said.
While he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should not be seen as the sole cause, he argued that both the government and wider society have moved in the same direction, turning what he described as the “constant state of emergency of the Zionist life” into a condition that has become “much, much more severe.”
Unsafe at home and abroad
Ronel said insecurity is not limited to Israel’s borders, arguing that perceptions of Israeli identity have also shifted internationally.
Saying he had never lived outside Israel for more than a month before Oct. 7, Ronel said he still does not feel safe abroad.
“Because I’m an Israeli, and Israeli identity carries meaning – this meaning now is the meaning of genocide and attempts to destabilize the world economy.”
He predicts that more Israelis will move abroad to “look for ways to live.”
According to recent research conducted by professors at Tel Aviv University, there has been a notable rise in emigration from Israel in recent years.
The research suggests that around 99,000 Israelis left the country in 2023 and 2024, while fewer than 20,000 returned in 2024. More than three-quarters of those who left were under 40.
For Ronel, too, the chances of his family returning are “getting lower and lower.”
Israeli soldiers continue to commit suicide in what is becoming a disturbing phenomenon that is becoming linked to Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023, and now the war ongoing Lebanon.
The Israeli media have continued to report on what is becoming a rising trend of soldiers taking away their lives in Israeli society.
In its Sunday edition of 26 April the Israeli Haaretz newspaper highlighted the fact that eight Israeli soldiers and police officers committed suicide this month alone. The paper adds that three reservists who took part in the war on Gaza also ended their lives this month, making the total to 11 in less than one month.
The number of suicide rates have been increasing since 2023. Then 17 took away their lives, including seven after the 7 October, when the Israeli genocide on Gaza began. Thus, after that, 21 soldiers ended their lives in 2024 and increasing to 22 in 2025. In between the figures it is estimated that 279 soldiers attemoted suicide but didn’t succeed.
Statistics show in the previous decade the average suicides were 12 per year stabilizing from the 28 cases peak of 2010.
Data reports for 2026 shows that reserve soldiers formed the highest number of suicides, at least five cases as compared to three among conscripts and two cases in the ranks of those who take up soldiering as an occupation.
The Israeli military establishment is finding itself unable to control the suicide phenomenon with those in leadership roles realizing the fact that soldiers who are suffering from psychological distress are not seeking help. Haaretz quotes one officer in human resources as saying the army “thought at the beginning of the war it can control the situation but it later blew in its face”.
Psychological experts say the recent rising suicide rates is to do with the fact Israel has never experienced the present kinds of wars it is presently involved in like Gaza and/or Lebanon. The soldiers are under continuous pressure to fight and the fact that the reservists are being called up more than once magnifies the crisis that already exists.
Haaretz points out the army has decreased its support for soldiers who need psychological treatment and sends them back to the warfront before evaluating their psychological state. The soldiers are continually under pressure by their officers to go back to fight or else face arrest.
Also, the declared numbers don’t show the real picture, the newspaper argues, pointing out that there are soldiers who committed suicide after they left the military service with the Israeli army admitting that by the end of 2025, there were 15 cases of this kind. The paper said there were four such cases with three in the last month.
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