Gaza Archives - Page 7 of 153

Voices From Gaza: 700 Days of ‘Hell’

CrossFireArabia
September 6, 2025

The Israeli genocide starting on 27 October, 2023 through mass bombs and missiles dropped on the Gaza Strip is being discribed as hell-on-earth. After 700 days of slaughter in which the enclave was reduced to ruin, debris and mass killings, Gazans speak of the “hell” they are going through between multiple and countless displacements, starvation and waiting in limbo for what is going to happen next. Their lives have been turned upside down and live in limbo of fog.

All the above interviews were conducted by Al Jazeera satellite channel on the 700 days of horrors the Israeli army has subjected the Palestinian civilians of Gaza to.

“700 days and the killings are still going on with the war taking everything from us,” said one man. “The blood of martyrs is still hemorrhaging,” he continued.

“I now envy the people who have died in this slaughter,” said another. “In this past 700 days, journalists were killed, civil defense men gone, hospitals bombed, children murdered and many other things disappeared…”

After 700 days there is nothing left, there is no children left, no food, no drink, starvation everywhere, life has become extremely difficult. I have started to say to myself I wish I was long dead and have left this sorry place,” said another woman.

What about the handicapped

‘“I have three teenager sons who are handicapped and the process of displacement with them is very difficult…we were forced to move by the Israeli army more than 15 times – I walked them, I sometimes carried them would you believe, there is no transport and walked under bombs and missiles, sometimes they’d fall very near us, the danger of being killed is real,” the father of the three said.

“There is no food, no drink, there is no place to live, the sewerage is bad, we can’t do anything.”

He added on this 700 day of living like this, the Israeli army has just called on us to keep moving. “They want to displace us yet again from the north to the south, what is next we don’t know.

We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have tents, we don’t have anything. On the 700 day, the world is just sitting and looking at us while we move from one place to another.

Another 30-year-old who lost her husband and five children and just stares into the void: “Now they are gone I feel life is empty and meaningless. I force myself to work just to forget but its like living in a distant memory and suddenly wake up to this nightmare.

Another man with five small children moving around him said: “I have a handicapped son – a grown up, as you can see and I have to carry him across my shoulder blades whenever we are ordered to keep moving.

We are at the end of our tethers after 700 days of devastation, we see death in front of our eyes, there is no let up, the kids keep screaming at all hours of the day and night. We don’t know what is going to happen to us and now we are called upon to keep moving.”

The same is true of another lady. Her plight is the same as many others. “We are being displaced from one place to another. After 700 days we are not able to settle down to establish a tent we can live in, being displaced is like losing one’s soul and I don’t know when this will end or how.

We are living in devastation, death, slow death. Today I envy the people who have died and become martyrs.”

Another man in crutches said: “Our savings have now ended, we are on aid to say alive, my son used to go to Zakim to get some stuff but they shot at him and now sit by me unable to move.

Blood on the streets

“The past 700 days were the deadliest, killings, bombing, starvation, you see blood seething on the streets, laying bodies of martyrs, people with no legs or arms”.

It has been an extremely difficult 700 days for a woman with the responsibility of looking after three children. “How do I cope, how do I make ends meet. My husband went before my eyes, in front of his kids, I saw, my kids saw an incredible sight of their father spluttering on the wall and now that image never leaves me nor them.

In this 700 days you lost a brother, a relative, a friend as you were forced to move from one place to another in between charities, water queues, cutting wood and all the rest of it. I just can’t describe it,” said one young man.

Sullen future

“For me, my future has perished, gone up in flames, I could have been working by now, having just finished university, but I live in a 4 by 6 tent with nothing to look forward, searching for morsels of food and hewing water, carrying buckets of water not just today but everyday, said a young lady.

Nothing is for certain. The people of Gaza, as of yet, have nothing to look forward to but more slaughter. There is a nagging fleeing, frequently made by Israeli ministers, that the aim is to push these people dubbed at around two million to other countries.

But the Gazans, still after two years of slaughter and going to the third, say they are not leaving Gaza except as dead bodies.

News

Gaza: 185 Die From Starvation in August

CrossFireArabia
September 2, 2025

The Gaza Health Ministry stated Tuesday that 185 people, including 12 children, died of starvation in August, the highest monthly figure recorded since Israel’s war on the enclave began nearly two years ago.

The ministry said 70 of the deaths occurred after the UN-backed hunger monitoring system Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) formally declared Gaza a famine zone last month.

Health officials reported that more than 43,000 children aged under 5 are suffering from malnutrition, alongside 55,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women according to Anadolu.

They added that 67% of pregnant women are now anemic, the most alarming rate documented in years.

The ministry warned of catastrophic consequences if emergency food and medical supplies are not delivered immediately, citing the rapid escalation of hunger-related deaths.

Israel has killed more than 63,500 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

Opinion

Palestinian State and The Poker Game

Dr Khairi Janbek
September 1, 2025

By Dr Khairi Janbek

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a politician above all else. He is dogmatist in rejecting a Palestinian state, and a pragmatist when he talks about it, but all that depends on the position taken by the United States.

Ever since one can remember from the days of the Oslo Agreements, a Palestinian state, as a term swung between two conceptions: A future project on the ground, and a slogan up-in-the-air to pander on, and as many from my generation remember the rather acerbic comment: Gaza-Jericho First of 1993 which came to be the first and the last.

The Israeli government of that time, believed that it would bring the Palestinians to independenance as interlocutors in determining the occupied West Bank of Jordan that came about by discussing the issue through a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.

However, the little that was agreed upon started to be eroded by the first Netanyahu government, which at times implicitly and at times explicitly acted in the way so as to negate the Oslo agreements with impunity.

One would like to say that since then plenty of water has passed under the bridge, but when it comes to the Palestinian issue, it’s always the same water and the same bridge.

At this point one must say that everywhere in the media there are supposedly leaks and plans about the day after with regards to the Gaza Strip. However, the only consensus between the international community at large and officialdom of the Arab world, is that Hamas should surrender its weapons. But really what happens next?

Silence in the Arab world rules the scene which is in a way saying what cannot be said, which is in other words don’t involve us directly but we shall try to do what we can. This is habitually the Arab position in always being reactive rather than active.

And now on the international scene is the big drive to recognize a Palestinian state, which is for the time being affirming a point of principle, and towards which Israel is actually debating the annexation of the West Bank, as if to say, if the West Bank is reoccupied by Israel, where is this Palestine you want to recognize?

And adding insult to injury, the Washington administration has refused entry to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the PNA leadership to attend the UN General Assembly meetings. This indicates that it does not recognize that there is a leadership of the Palestinians.

However, and despite saying this, one wishes to be able to say that we might be jumping the proverbial gun, in the sense that, the issue is just a matter of tit-for-tat telling states: You recognize Palestine we take measures to counter that, but alas the Israeli annexation was contemplated long before the international recognition of a Palestinian state.

Now, what will it mean if Israel does go ahead and annexes the West Bank and cancels the Palestinian authority? Well, once again the international community, to the exclusion of the USA, will have to consider the West Bank as and Israeli occupied territory, and once again, the world will have to go back to the Security Council for an attempt to resolve the issue.

Dr Khairi Janbek is a Jordanian columnist living in Paris, France.

News

Gaza’s Lost Generation

CrossFireArabia
August 30, 2025

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) sounded the alarm on Saturday over the fate of education in Gaza, warning that more than 660,000 children have been deprived of schooling for a third consecutive year as Israel’s devastating war nears the two-year mark.

“The war in Gaza is a war on children and it must stop. Children must be protected at all times,” UNRWA said in a statement, cautioning that the enclave’s youth are at risk of becoming a “lost generation.”

While schools in the occupied West Bank are set to reopen on Sept. 1, Gaza’s classrooms remain shuttered.

The Palestinian Education Ministry said around 700,000 students in the enclave have seen their schooling suspended under bombardment, with more than 70,000 unable to take high school exams for two consecutive years according to Anadolu.

According to ministry data, Israeli attacks since October 2023 have killed at least 17,000 school students and more than 1,200 university students in Gaza, while injuring tens of thousands more.

In the occupied West Bank, dozens of students have also been killed, wounded or detained by Israeli forces during the same period.

The toll has extended to teachers and academic staff. Nearly 1,000 education workers have been killed in Gaza, and thousands more injured or detained across the Palestinian territories.

Israel has killed over 63,400 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

Analyses

Israel’s World Image in The Gutter

CrossFireArabia
August 30, 2025

By Ismael Al Sharif

“This situation must end. It is blackmail, and it must end. Freeing the hostages by force would be safer than negotiating a deal that allows Hamas to survive.” – Trump

These days, leaks, press reports, and international positions are proliferating that are damaging Israel’s image severely. The most recent is a joint investigation by the British Guardian, +972 magazine, and the Hebrew website Local Call, which revealed an Israeli intelligence database showing that five out of every six Palestinians killed in Gaza until last May were civilians. Only one-sixth of the martyrs were Hamas fighters. This figure is only half what Israel previously announced.

What’s more alarming is that Israel’s own reports are based on numbers from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, figures Israel and the United States have long denied.

Leaks attributed to Aharon Haliva, former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman), dating back to March 2024, justified the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. “For every Israeli killed, 50 Palestinians must be killed in return, regardless of whether they are children,” he said. This statement is not merely a slip of the tongue but reflects a hardline religious and ideological current and embodies a systematic political and military strategy.

Two American mercenaries working for the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” appear to admit that the Israeli army working with the US mercenaries bear direct responsibility for targeting hundreds of starving Palestinians with indiscriminate fire.

In this context, the United Nations confirms the Gaza Strip is facing the most severe phase of a man-made famine, not attributed to a natural disaster.

As a result of the popular demonstrations sweeping the streets of Europe and Australia, which have put significant pressure on their governments, criticism has begun to emerge from even Israel’s closest allies.

The Danish Sovereign Wealth Fund announced it was withdrawing its investments from the Israeli entity, and Germany has suspended arms exports there. In a British parliamentary session on 22 July, Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated: “I firmly believe the actions of the Israeli government are causing enormous damage to Israel’s standing globally.” These escalating positions reflect a growing shift in the positions of its allies.

The Israeli media, along with the pro-Israeli global media—one of Israel’s most important soft power tools—are failing to counter these reports, leaks, and shifting positions among its allies.

War criminal Netanyahu himself acknowledged the failure of the Israeli media and its pro-Israel media to repair the deteriorating image of the Jewish state. Logic would have required Israel to improve its media image by halting the massacres and allow humanitarian aid to enter.

Instead, he denied all these accusations and launched an attack on its closest allies, reminding Germany of its Nazi era and its actions would only serve “terrorism” and be a “reward to Hamas.” The Zionist Foreign Ministry also summoned the ambassadors of the above countries and reprimanded them.

War criminal Netanyahu pressured the social media to alter their algorithms. Leaked documents reveal that Twitter and Facebook already restricted posts deemed to be anti-Israel and/or sympathetic to the tragic plight of our people in Gaza. He did not stop there, but went on to criminally assassinate the journalists, the latest of which at the Nasser Hospital, killing four journalists at once, to silence voices and intimidate the media workers from carrying out their mission.

War criminal Netanyahu would not have dared to display such arrogance, defiance, and indifference without American support, as he always relies on “Big Brother” to compensate for his material and moral losses. Take the example of Charles Kushner—Jared Kushner’s father and the US ambassador to France— who wrote an open letter to President Macron, published in The Wall Street Journal.

He expressed his “deep concern about the sharp rise in anti-Semitism in France,” accusing the French government of failing to take sufficient steps to counter it. He also noted that Paris’s critical statements about Israel and its efforts to recognize a Palestinian state “encourages extremists, fuels violence and endanger Jewish lives.”

The letter coincided with the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Paris and the halt to the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps, a symbolic reminder of a tragic past.

However, France rejected and condemned the letter, and the US State Department quickly came out in support of the US ambassador there.

Netanyahu’s motto is: Those who have an ally like the United States have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve.

This is a translated piece written by Ismael Al Sharif and published in the Arabic Addustour newspaper in Amman.