The Americans, both the Biden and Trump administrations, gave the Israelis two years to destroy Hamas in Gaza. This is what the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative Dr Mustapha Al Barghouti started by saying. So for them the time was up came 7 October, 2025.
He maintained that it was because they couldn’t finish the job, the White House acted swiftly, stating enough is enough, the war on Gaza must end. What he said its true because today, the quest to end the war on the enclave and let the aid trucks in is an American initiative, who are almost dragging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forward who doesn’t want to end the war.
In a sharp analysis, the Palestinian politician said the Americans, especially President Donald Trump came to realize that the Israelis were not going to destroy Hamas despite the mass destruction of the Gaza Strip through mass weapons supplied by the United States. And that this is when the Trump administration decided to act and enforce the present, albeit fragile ceasefire between Tel Aviv and Hamas and according to him, ending the bloody, destructive, heinous war on Gaza.
But it was not for the lack of trying. When Trump entered the White House in January 2025, he then tried to sell the Rivieria Gaza idea to the region but he finally realized the Palestinian people of Gaza couldn’t be driven out of their homeland, even if it was just temporarily as he claimed and that there was going to be no way of parcelling them out to other countries.
Dr Barghouti pointed out Trump tried very hard talking to states like Indonesia, in the Arab world and those in Africa, seeking all sorts of pressure to persuade them to take the Gazans. But after much diplomatic chitchat, he realized the Palestinians weren’t for moving despite the fact that 250,000 of them were killed and/or injured at the hands of the Israeli army and the horrific mass destruction of their homeland.
This proves that the idea the Palestinian population can be ethnically cleansed – much talk about that in the past two years of the genocide – was a non-starter and that 1948 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven off their land by Israeli militias and terror gangs was not going to be repeated. Dr Barghouti added the last onslaught on Gaza has proved that ethnic cleansing has become a “closed chapter”.
And he added Trump and his team led by Steve Witkoff and Gerard Kushner became aware of that, and that is when it was decided to push for a ceasefire to save Israel from itself. Barghouti putted this way: Trump realized many countries of the world were turning against Israel because of its murderous actions on Gaza and its mass displacement and starvation of the people of the enclave and to let Netanyahu have his own way by refusing to stop the war would be detrimental to US interests in the region.
Thus when Israel tried to re-start the war on Gaza last Monday – and a week into the ceasefire – when two of its soldiers were killed in Rafah through lone fighters and which Hamas immediately disavowed, the Trump administration played down the incident in the interest of maintaining the ceasefire accord reached at the beginning of October, 2025.
Trump first dispatched Witkoff and Kushner to Israel with Vice-president JD Vance who followed on a two-day visit in an effort to keep tempers low. Their visit to Israel today is sending a message that the US administration wants the ceasefire to be followed through in the interest of Trump’s 20-point peace plan for the Middle East.
One can only have a distant view of the current developments regarding the war on Gaza, and consequently in all honesty, a bird’s eye view of the situation. For all intense and purposes, one assumes the Hamas acceptance of plan presented by US president Donald Trump would represent extremely high-stakes gamble for them.
On the one hand it offers a pathway to end the bloodshed and set the road for reconstruction of the bludgeoned Gaza Strip. On the other hand, the plan demands existential concessions, loss of armaments, leverage, and an an end to the movement’s future. If Hamas accepts with sincerity, and the plan is implemented faithfully, it could mark a turning point towards stabilization, but also with risks of breakdown, backlash, internal splits, and which carry the warnings of a precarious road ahead.
It is important in the meantime to advise against the search for victors and/or the vanquished, because in this time and age, wars do not seem to be launched in order to be decisive, and the view of the Gaza war is no different. Essentially it is to be believed and cardinal to the Trump administration, the issue of arms pertaining to Hamas and Hezbullah are seen as obstacles to peace and to Israel’s normalization with the Arab world. Therefore, the objective, one imagines, is to eliminate those arms to the American administration which has wider objectives in this crucial region of the world.
Here, as well, one has to be careful with words. Is Hamas supposed to surrender all of its weapons, or will there be an accommodating plan for the Islamic movement to keep some of its weapons, so long as it is not seen to constitute any future threat?
On the other side of the equation, are we really at the juncture of seeing the total end of Hamas as an organisation? In other words, are we about to see an amnesty for the Hamas fighters, especially those who surrender their weapons and are willing to partake in the future plans for Gaza away from those who wish to leave and to be provided with a safe passage outside the Gaza enclave?
Or is there a plan within the plan. if indeed, the Trump plan is not in essence a diktat, will there be long and tedious negotiations that will accept a form of political participation for a future-transformed Hamas into less than a political organization and more than an NGO?
Then what about the role of the Arab and Islamic countries, whose leaders met with Trump during the last UN General Assembly and who subsequently welcomed Hamas acceptance of the Trump plan? After all, there is the supposition that Arab and Islamic countries will provide, if not brain, then money and brawn. Essentially, without Arab and to a lesser extent Islamic involvement, no plan will have a leg to stand on. But to what extent the Arabs are willing to get involved still remains to be seen.
The UN on Wednesday said women in the Gaza Strip are being forced to give birth on the streets as thousands are displaced amid Israeli military operations that have continued since October 2023.
“Israel’s offensive in Gaza is forcing women to give birth in the streets, without hospitals, doctors or clean water,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told a news conference, citing the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
The “UNFPA says that 23,000 women are going without care, and about 15 babies are being born each week with no medical help,” he added.
Dujarric urged the immediate protection of civilians, saying the situation on the ground “is worsening by the hour.” He stressed that “issuing displacement orders does not absolve parties to a conflict from their responsibilities to protect civilians in the conduct of their hostilities.”
He said Israel “once again ordered” people in Gaza City to leave within the next 48 hours and “move south along a temporary passageway on the Salah ad Din road, which is the one that runs through the center of the Gaza Strip.”
“Thousands of people continue to flee, amid active hostilities. Roads, as you can well imagine, are congested. People are hungry, and children are traumatized,” he said.
Dujarric reported that nearly 40,000 people were displaced to the south between Monday and Tuesday, with about 200,000 movements recorded since mid-August.
“Partners have set up three support points in areas receiving displaced people in southern Gaza to assist separated, orphaned and injured children,” he added.
Highlighting the collapse of health care services, the UN official said that “since the collapse of the ceasefire in March, 80 medical points and primary health care centers providing sexual and reproductive health outpatient services have been affected, with 65 out of service.”
Emphasizing that Israel continues to obstruct aid operations in the enclave, Dujarric said that “yesterday, two humanitarian movements to collect food cargo from the crossings into Gaza were either cancelled or denied.”
“Other missions were facilitated but faced impediments on the ground. The Zikim crossing remains closed for a fifth consecutive day,” he said.
Palestinian journalists seek to document the truth about the Zionists’ brutal siege, while their detractors are working to erase all evidence of the crime scene.
Shortly after the news broke about the Israeli assassination of Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif and his five colleagues in Gaza City, a video appeared on my Facebook feed of chef Yotam Ottolenghi making baked haloumi cheese with fennel syrup.
In real time, the two events have nothing to do with each other. However, delving deeper into the realm of the imagination, both represent long-held Israeli efforts to erase the Palestinian presence on the land.
In a statement on the social media platform X, journalist Ramzy Baroud explained Israel’s motives for the murder of at least 200 journalists in Gaza since October 7, 2023: “silence the truth by murdering those who report it.”
Afterward, they justify these deaths by claiming that the journalists were members of the resistance movement, a claim that is problematic for several reasons.
In a timely excerpt from Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (2025), Mohammed El-Kurd contends that allies often unwittingly refute the claim that victims, such as these journalists, were affiliated with Hamas. In this way, the characterization of the civilian as a “neutral figure” has depoliticized the Palestinian cause, rendering it a “humanitarian crisis” where “revolutionaries are not part and parcel of your nation.”
In the U.S., too, police shootings of Black, Brown and poor people are often justified by slandering the victim’s reputation post-mortem. This should come as no surprise, since the institution of policing harks back to its origin as slave catchers, along with its more present-day exchange of training with the Zionist state.
“It is not enough for a Palestinian to be a journalist to be deemed human,” concludes El-Kurd, “they must be ‘unaffiliated.’”
For “Israelis,” this effort must prove difficult as they are taught to see Hamas everywhere, much like Americans were told to look for communists during the Second Red Scare in the 1950s. The latter were in our bathrooms, under our beds, and if we were not watchful, we might mistakenly marry one.
In “The Hamas are Coming: A View of the Violence from Inside Israel” (2021), Miko Peled writes of this phenomenon that has informed Israeli hasbara (propaganda) for years.
“There are never Palestinians, never people, only ‘The Hamas’ — and ‘The Hamas’ is, by the way, male and singular (in Hebrew),” Peled writes. “’The Hamas thinks;’ ‘The Hamas believes;’ ‘The Hamas should know;’ ‘When the Hamas understands, he will stop;’ and finally, ‘When The Hamas is hit hard he will never dare to attack Israel again.’”
Not much has changed in Israeli hasbara since Peled wrote that piece nearly four years ago. Indeed, the New York Times, taking its cue, as usual, from Israeli sources, repeated that “Mr. al-Sharif,” whom the Israeli military accused of being a Hamas fighter posing as a reporter, but was really “the head of a terrorist cell,” thus the IDF “had taken steps to mitigate civilian harm,” though which civilians, Palestinians or “Israelis,” it does not say.
Barbs were then thrown back and forth. Al-Jazeera called the killing “a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza” while the “Israeli Government” accused “Al Jazeera reporters of serving the interests of Hamas by presenting an exaggerated and distorted picture of conditions in Gaza.”
“The instinct of many defenders of Palestinians is to dispel the connection between the slain Palestinian media workers and their supposed political leanings, as if anywhere in the world these exist in isolation,” El-Kurd explains.
Just as El-Kurd implicates himself in this process, so do I. There have been times when I’ve distanced martyrs from supporting the armed resistance as if this gives us a more legitimate cause to mourn.
When we sanitize the dead in this way, however, “we are inadvertently reifying the colonial rationale that killed them and rendered them killable in the first place,” El-Kurd concludes, so perhaps it is better to just reply “So what?” Indeed, if Zionist soldiers and PR workers can find a place for themselves in global media, why do supporters of Palestine find the need to detach their heroes from armed resistance that occupies a legitimate role in the struggle?
There are many documented reasons as to why Israel targets journalists in the Gaza Strip. Significantly, Palestinian journalists seek to document the truth about the Zionists’ brutal siege, while their detractors are working to erase all evidence of the crime scene.
Moreover, for Western journalists, even those sympathetic to the cause, the only picture they can paint is that of victims who are barely surviving in the rubble.
In an interview with Beacon Press, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes a similar settler colonial narrative that pertains to Indigenous people in the Americas. Asked to explain the most enduring myth pertaining to Native Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz mentions the idea of “eliminationism,” a notion that does away with Native people.
Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century, the myth of the Vanishing Indian was at its zenith, thus allowing the mainstream population to view Native people as noble relics who exist only in the glory days of their past. These same people who at one time they had license to kill Native people are seen now as no longer a threat, subdued as they were in the last Indian massacre at Wounded Knee.
In reality, Native people have survived over 500 years of continual genocide, survival being an “active word,” Dunbar-Ortiz makes clear, involving “an enormous amount of resistance and cultural continuity.”
On the other hand, “victimry” is a more common version, she concludes, because people can feel sorry about the state of Indian Country but without the requirement that they must do anything about it. “So they’re not really then dealing with the reality that Native people are here,” and like the Palestinians, “they’ve resisted, they’ve survived, they haven’t changed their mind about who they want to be and how they want the future to be.”
In “Sumoud: The Unyielding Heart of the Palestinian Cause in Palestine,” Ramzy Baroud describes a similar trajectory for Palestinians. “The profound and unrelenting struggles endured by Palestinians should, by any rational expectation, have irrevocably concluded the Palestinian cause. Yet, the struggle for freedom in Palestine is at its zenith.”
Like the experience of Native Americans, Zionist attempts to erase the presence of Palestinians goes back many decades. Nevertheless, the Palestinian resistance has endured, Baroud continues, due to the “concept of sumoud,” resilience that is akin to Dunbar-Ortiz’s explanation of “survival,” an active process that involves resistance and cultural endurance.
“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are themselves the story and the storytellers,” writes Ramzy Baroud. “Their success or failure to convey the story with all its factual and emotional details could make the difference between the continuation or the end of the Israeli genocide.”
From Refaat Alareer, the poet/teacher/ journalist who asked before his death that his life become a story to ensure that life goes on, to Anas Al-Sharif’s final testament written shortly before his death, Palestinian journalists have been responsible for conveying the truths of Gaza to the world, but they also leave a legacy that inspires future generations to carry on their work.
“Do not let chains silence you or borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland,” Al-Sharif wrote, shortly before his death.
With that last statement, Al-Sharif foretells his own assassination. His message is not one of victimhood, though, but rather a plea that others carry on his work.
On August 11, Dareen Tatour, the Palestinian poet who knew from experience the danger of rebellious words, posted a new poem written to honor the Al-Jazeera team murdered the day before.
Imprisoned for her verse “Resist, My People, Resist Them,” the poet is not so optimistic now that words can stop a bullet. Under the banner Martyrs of the Word and Image—They Left But the Word Remained, Tatour charged that their deaths were the consequence of a world gone silent to their pain.
“They are gone / but the truth remains,” she says, dependent on her to carry it, or “leave it to be bombed again” in the wake of her silence.
Unlike the person that she was ten years ago, Tatour knows now that “the road is longer and harsher,” yet still she is undeterred, for she continues “to write for them [the slain journalists], to be the echo of their voices,” because in this way, the Palestinian narrative will be triumphant.
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The deaths of 21 Palestinian civilians by suffocation, crowd crush, and live fire from US security forces operating in coordination with the Israeli army at an aid distribution centre in Rafah expose the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as an active instrument of the systematic mass killing and starvation policies imposed on Gaza.
These centres are no longer relief sites but death traps, deliberately used to lure starving crowds in scenes marked by humiliation and genocide, which constitutes a grave violation of international law and requires the immediate suspension of GHF’s operations, an urgent investigation, and full criminal accountability.
Documentation by Euro-Med Monitor’s field team revealed that the attack on Wednesday, 16 July 2025, occurred in two phases. The first happened around 4:00 a.m., when Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of civilians gathered on al-Tina Street, north of Rafah, as food aid trucks were being unloaded, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries. Despite the gunfire and casualties, thousands remained. They had no choice but to wait or starve, especially after a GHF worker told them distribution would begin at 6:00 a.m.
Those who fell to the ground could not get up and were trampled. I saw women and children among the victims, and we only managed to escape by stepping over the dead bodies lying there
Abdul Rahman B., one of the survivors
The second phase happened at 6:20 a.m., when crowds surged toward the outer gate of the distribution centre amid severe overcrowding and the closure of the inner gate. This led to a deadly crowd crush, with no safety measures or immediate intervention to prevent or contain the disaster.
Instead of organising the crowds and ensuring their safety, US special forces used pepper spray and fired sound bombs and tear gas at civilians trapped between the outer and inner gates, triggering panic and chaos. Thousands tried to escape, while some attempted to jump into the distribution centre to avoid overcrowding and certain death, only to be met with live fire as well.
The open fire and the resulting violent crowd crush caused the deaths of at least 21 Palestinians, including seven killed by live ammunition and 15 from tear gas inhalation and the crush, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
A review by Euro-Med Monitor of several casualties found no signs of bullet wounds, supporting the conclusion that most victims died from suffocation or being trampled in a closed, overcrowded space with no protective measures in place.
Abdul Rahman B., one of the survivors, told Euro-Med Monitor’s team: “At around 6:15 a.m., a quadcopter arrived and announced that the distribution centre had been opened and required that we head to the gates.”
“People rushed frantically toward the entrances, and when we reached the front gate, we found the inner gate closed and a heavy presence of US forces accompanied by employees speaking Arabic,” said Abdul Rahman. “They asked us to step back 50 metres and enter in groups of no more than 100, but the crowding was so intense that stepping back was impossible.”
He continued: “Minutes later, they began firing sound bombs, followed by tear gas and pepper spray. People were disoriented and suffocating. Some tried to climb the fences to escape, but snipers shot them. Those who fell to the ground could not get up and were trampled. I saw women and children among the victims, and we only managed to escape by stepping over the dead bodies lying there.”
This incident demonstrates that aid distribution centres were deliberately placed in dangerous locations, designed with narrow paths enclosed by barbed-wire fences that can be easily sealed. These routes cannot accommodate the vast numbers of people in need and are fully controlled by the Israeli army, making them resemble elaborate traps for killing and humiliation rather than corridors for humanitarian aid.
GHF, established by Israel to manage its starvation policy, issued a brief statement claiming to have opened an investigation into the incident. This follows a familiar propaganda pattern: whenever starving civilians are killed, an internal investigation is announced, its results are never released, no one is held accountable, and the same crime is repeated without consequence.
An investigation by an organisation established within a framework designed to perpetuate starvation can hardly be considered credible. Given its direct role in managing starvation, GHF must be immediately dismantled and its mandate withdrawn. It operates under the guise of humanitarian work, failing as a neutral intermediary for aid delivery.
GHF functions as a field instrument of blockade, starvation, and killing by operating distribution centres designed to humiliate civilians and gather them in tightly controlled locations under the pretext of “organising” crowds. Rather than protecting those in need, it facilitates the implementation of engineered starvation and creates a closed environment where civilians are killed in the name of humanitarian aid.
Even when a threat is alleged, international law requires security forces to apply force in a proportionate and graduated manner, using lethal force only as a last resort and in response to an imminent and real threat to life. This standard was not met in the documented cases, making the killings a grave and flagrant violation of international law.
The deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians as they seek food, along with the use of starvation as a weapon, is a clear violation of international humanitarian and criminal law. These acts constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute, including wilful killing, targeting civilians, and using starvation as a method of warfare, all of which are strictly prohibited in armed conflicts.
The widespread and systematic nature of these violations against the civilian population fulfils the elements of crimes against humanity, particularly killing, persecution, and inhumane acts causing severe suffering or serious physical or mental harm, when committed as part of a systematic attack targeting civilians.
Placing these crimes in their broader context, including the systematic destruction of means of survival, the denial of aid access, and the imposition of deadly living conditions on the civilian population, along with public incitement by Israeli political and military figures, reveals a clear and deliberate intent to destroy the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. According to Article II of the Genocide Convention, these acts constitute genocide, specifically through the intentional killing of members of the group and the imposition of living conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part.
The international community and complicit governments bear responsibility for the continued crimes against starving civilians at GHF-run aid distribution centres in the Gaza Strip. An immediate halt to GHF operations is essential, along with the launch of an independent international investigation leading to the prosecution of its officials before international and national courts for their involvement in systematic mass killings at distribution sites imposed by the Israeli army as a replacement for the UN mechanism that had operated in the enclave for nearly a year and a half.
International and national judicial bodies must move to hold US President Donald Trump criminally accountable for his complicity in the genocide in the Gaza Strip. This includes his adoption and direct support of the Israeli aid distribution mechanism, imposed by force and transformed into arenas of mass slaughter against starving civilians, as well as his administration’s full-scale provision of military, financial, political, and diplomatic backing that enabled Israel to commit and expand the crime for over 21 months.
The United States, through this organisation and other instruments, continues to provide political, logistical, financial, and military cover for Israel’s crimes, rendering current and former American officials, foremost among them President Donald Trump, subject to international criminal accountability.
Euro-Med Monitor calls for holding all state leaders involved in the genocide committed in the Gaza Strip accountable, whether through direct or indirect participation, by providing political, military, or financial support, or by facilitating its commission in any form. Such acts constitute criminal complicity under Article 25 of the Rome Statute. It holds states that failed to take serious measures to prevent or stop the crime legally responsible under their international obligations, particularly under the Genocide Convention.
A comprehensive and independent international investigation must be launched into the role of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in facilitating and executing serious crimes committed against Palestinian civilians. These investigations should address the individual responsibility of the organisation’s founders, directors, logistics coordinators, team leaders, and any other staff members, whether through planning, facilitating, directly contributing, or knowingly failing to prevent the commission of crimes.
We urge all states with territorial or universal jurisdiction to open immediate criminal investigations against all individuals affiliated with the GHF and its contracted private security firms, in order to hold them accountable for their role in crimes committed against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, particularly including wilful killings, starvation, and cruel or degrading treatment.
All states, both individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal responsibilities by taking urgent action to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip, through implementing effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians; ensuring Israel’s compliance with international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice; preventing the implementation of the US-Israeli forced displacement plan; and holding Israel and its more powerful allies accountable for all crimes against the Palestinians in the Strip. The International Criminal Court must implement the arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defence at the earliest opportunity, in accordance with the principle that there is no immunity for international crimes.
The international community must also impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel for its systematic and grave violations of international law. These sanctions should include an arms embargo; an end to all political, financial, and military support; freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians; imposing travel ban on these officials; suspending the operations of Israeli military and security industries companies in international markets; banning involved companies’ access to banking services; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide Israel with economic benefits that enable its continued crimes.
CrossFireArabia
Dr Khairi Janbek
