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Prominent journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was arrested six weeks ago in Kuwait where he remains in detention and faces prosecution in a special tribunal over social media posts related to the Iran war. His detention comes as part of a wider crackdown on online speech in Kuwait and other Gulf countries during the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran that has engulfed the region.

Shihab-Eldin, 41, an American born Kuwaiti citizen, is an award-winning journalist with more than two million followers across social media platforms. He has worked with PBS Frontline, The New York Times, Al Jazeera English, Vice on HBO, The Huffington Post, and has appeared as a guest major news outlets, including BBC, CNN, NBC and MSNBC.

“We are seeing escalating censorship of journalists and news outlets across the world in relation to the Iran war, including in the Gulf. National security is being used as a pretext to crack down on freedom of speech and Shihab-Eldin’s detention is emblematic of that. He must be freed immediately,” Sara Qudah, the Middle East and North Africa Regional Director for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said in an emailed statement.

Shihab-Eldin was arrested on March 3 in Kuwait City and has remained in prison since then with limited access to his lawyer. There has been little transparency around his case, but the charges he faces are reported to be related to his social media posts, including a video showing a U.S. fighter jet crash near a U.S. air base in Kuwait, according to CPJ, which stressed that the videos and images he shared had been publicly available. The charges Shihab-Eldin faces may include allegations of spreading false information, harming national security, and misuse of a mobile phone.

After the Iran war began, Kuwait’s Information Ministry published a list of strict “guidelines” for media coverage, which included a ban on publishing or circulating “rumors, unverified news, or misleading information” or “any content that insults brotherly or friendly countries or that could harm Kuwait’s foreign relations.”

Shihab-Eldin is reportedly being prosecuted by a new specialized court overseeing crimes involving state security and terrorism set up by official decree by Kuwaiti authorities on March 31. The courts were established to “resolve cases with high speed,” and the Kuwaiti government claimed they were “necessary due to the extreme danger terrorism poses to national stability and peace,” according to Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Wasat.

In Kuwait, Shihab-Eldin is one of dozens of people who have been arbitrarily arrested since the war began, according to the Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR). Other prominent figures detained, reportedly following social media posts, include activists Fareah Alsaqqaf and Suad Al-Munayes, according to HuMENA, a human rights group. They remain in custody without access to legal counsel and without being clearly informed of the legal basis for their detention.

On Kuwait, the GCHR said in a statement it has “received credible reports from various local sources confirming that the State Security Apparatus has carried out dozens of arbitrary arrests of citizens who peacefully expressed their opinions on social media.” It added, “most of those arrested were being held in secret State Security prisons for several days, during which they are denied contact with their families or lawyers, which is a commonly used tool to intimidate them. They were then referred to the Public Prosecution and detained in the Central Prison, after arrest warrants were issued against them for 21 days pending the completion of investigations.”

“Most governments in the Gulf region and neighboring countries, exploiting the current war, are intensifying their systematic repression to suppress public freedoms, including freedom of expression online and offline,” GCHR said.

Last week, authorities in the United Arab Emirates said police had detained 375 people across Abu Dhabi alone over the course of the war for filming and “disseminating false information” on social media.

Shihab-Eldin is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School where he has also taught as an adjunct lecturer. His journalism has earned him a British Journalism Award, an Amnesty International Media Award for Digital Creativity, and an Amnesty International Human Rights Defender Award.

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The U.S. military-led group supporting “stabilization efforts” in Gaza has put forward plans for a housing block for Palestinians in Gaza in an area under full Israel military control. According to materials circulated by the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) and obtained by Drop Site News, the “planned community,” if developed, would contain and control its residents through biometric surveillance, checkpoints, monitoring of purchases, and educational programs promoting normalization with Israel.

The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) on October 17, one week after Hamas and Israel agreed to an exchange of captives and a ceasefire was supposed to go into effect. The center, which is based in a large warehouse-style building in Kiryat Gat in southern Israel and involves dozens of countries and organizations, is supposed to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza,” according to CENTCOM.

The CMCC is led by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Patrick D. Frank and includes both U.S. and Israeli military officials along with personnel from dozens of countries, including France, Britain, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. The CMCC was a key feature of President Trump’s “ceasefire” plan, though it is unclear where exactly it will operate within the new structures being created after Trump announced Phase Two of the plan last week, including the formation of a so-called “Board of Peace” to oversee Gaza with a Founding Executive Board beneath it and a Gaza Executive Board of Palestinian technocrats beneath that.

In November, news first emerged that the Trump administration was planning the construction of a number of residential compounds, dubbed “Alternative Safe Communities” to house Palestinians in Gaza east of the yellow line, an area occupied and controlled by the Israeli military. Analysis of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture suggests the first of these so-called communities is being prepared on a 1-square-kilometer plot of land in Rafah in southern Gaza at the intersection of two military corridors.

“Plans are rapidly accelerating for what U.S. officials last week cynically referred to as the ‘Gaza first planned community,’ previously known as ‘alternative safe communities,’” Jonathan Whittall, a senior UN official in Palestine between 2022 and 2025 and the executive Director of KEYS Initiative, a political affairs and strategic advisory organization, said after reviewing a transcript of the materials obtained by Drop Site. “This is the next phase in the weaponization of aid.”

Last week, a presentation was given at CMCC headquarters about the “Gaza First Planned Community” that is being built to house up to 25,000 Palestinians.

Palestinians would have to pass through a checkpoint to access the zone. “Residents will be able to enter and exit the neighborhood freely, subject to security checks to prevent the introduction of weapons and hostile elements,” the materials state. “All entering residents will be registered with biometric documentation to enable identification for movement and civil services.”

“The registry will be based on Palestinian ID numbers issued by the authorities in coordination with COGAT,” a reference to the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories—the branch of the Israeli military that oversees Palestinian civilian affairs in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—giving the Israeli military even more surveillance control over Palestinians housed in the zone.

CENTCOM directed inquiries from Drop Site about the CMCC’s plans to the White House, who in turn directed inquiries to the State Department. No one provided comment.

The presentation does not specify who would be selecting Palestinians to live in the zone, though all security checks for Palestinians in Gaza in the past (for example to be allowed to enter or exit the enclave) have ultimately gone through COGAT. It does, however, provide a set of criteria for deciding which Palestinians should be “invited” to live there:

The population should be based on Palestinian residents invited based on the following criteria:

• Priority is given to residents of the Shaboura and Rafah areas from before the war.

• Intact extended families are preferred to enable mutual aid and prevent friction.

• Essential professionals are required: teachers, medical staff, rescue personnel, community workers, merchants, administrative/municipal staff, and banking/finance professionals.

• All individuals will undergo security vetting to prevent the entry of weapons or Hamas elements.

As for Palestinians who may have lived there or have a legal claim to the land, the presentation notes that “an examination is required regarding potential private rights holders, including mechanisms for registration and compensation.”

The promise of compensation to private land owners is striking in the face of the reality in Gaza after over two years of Israel’s genocidal assault, where most of the housing and civilian infrastructure in the enclave has been reduced to rubble, nearly the entire Palestinian population have been displaced from their homes, and Israeli troops occupy over half of the territory.

The disparity between CMCC’s plans and Israel’s actions on the ground is reportedly leading several European countries to consider reducing their presence at the center or to stop sending personnel altogether, according to Reuters, citing concerns that CMCC has failed to increase the delivery of aid into Gaza.

The proposed residential zone is referred to in the CMCC presentation as “the Emirati compound.” While it is unclear why that name was chosen, the Emirati field hospital, which is funded by the UAE, is nearby in Rafah. The UAE established formal relations with Israel in September 2020, as part of the Abraham Accords brokered by the first Trump administration that included other countries, including Bahrain, Morocco. Since then, the UAE has normalized relations with Israel more than any other Arab country, with robust trade, tourism, and defense cooperation. On Tuesday, the UAE accepted Trump’s invitation to join the “Board of Peace” that will oversee Gaza, becoming one of the first countries to do so.

Part of the CMCC’s proposals regarding schooling in the planned residential zone seem aimed at promoting an Emirati-inspired reeducation program. It states that “Temporary ‘Emergency Studies’ can expedite a curriculum framework to resume classrooms. The curriculum will not be Hamas-based but will follow ‘Culture of Peace’ principles, e,g., modeled after the UAE.” The text of the normalization agreement between the UAE and Israel says both countries will “undertake to foster mutual understanding, respect, co-existence and a culture of peace between their societies.” The UAE embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to inquiries from Drop Site.

The CMCC presentation also states that “educational programs can prevent diversion of an uneducated and unoccupied population to misaligned activities.” Despite Israel’s brutal occupation, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, reaching over 97 percent in 2020, with high rates of enrollment in secondary and higher education.

The plan would also bring economic transactions under Israeli surveillance, replacing Gaza’s largely cash-based economy with “Electronic Shekel wallets” which would be used as “primary modes of commerce as they are secure and mitigate diversion of goods and funds to the Hamas financial channels.”

The CMCC also proposes that “residents should be permitted to import products into the Gaza Strip to facilitate and encourage commerce and economic growth” but that “products would be subject to security restrictions and checks at crossings.” The presentation makes no mention of the fact that Israel, which controls all of the crossings into Gaza, has severely restricted the entry of goods for nearly 20 years.

“This community being established in Rafah will form the blueprint for how Israeli control could be deepened and rolled out further,” Whittall told Drop Site. “After Gaza was razed, starved, and deliberately blockaded over the past years, these ‘new’ communities built on the rubble of peoples homes are not only governance labs to test ultimate control and subjugation, but they are also the reincarnation of refugee camps. They are designed to contain a new generation of dispossessed Palestinians, effectively screened and corralled into shrinking Israeli-controlled zones in exchange for survival. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘red-zones’ remain under assault, increasingly cut off from a humanitarian system that is being deliberately obstructed.”

To enforce the CMCC’s restrictive vision, which would corral selected Palestinians into a zone where Israel and outside forces have complete economic, social, and security control, a police force would be installed that would operate under an international security force. “Civil policing will operate on-site to maintain public order, operating under the ISF,” the presentation states, referring to the International Stabilization Force that has yet to be formed but will be led by Major General Jasper Jeffries, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Central. The presentation adds, “Security-sector reform requires updated police and civil defense laws, strong oversight and accountability, people-centered security approaches, and measures to prevent radicalization.”

Text of the Presentation Delivered at the CMCC in Southern Israel on January 14, 2026

Municipality

• The population should be based on Palestinian residents invited based on the following criteria:

  • Priority is given to residents of the Shaboura and Rafah areas from before the war.

  • Intact extended families are preferred to enable mutual aid and prevent friction.

  • Essential professionals are required: teachers, medical staff, rescue personnel, community workers, merchants, administrative/municipal staff, and banking/finance professionals.

  • All individuals will undergo security vetting to prevent the entry of weapons or Hamas elements.

• Residents will be able to enter and exit the neighborhood freely, subject to security checks to prevent the introduction of weapons and hostile elements.

• Initially, a temporary community directorate should be appointed from among the residents. Elections for a neighborhood directorate should be held in the future as the project develops.

• The directorate would facilitate coordination with the relevant authorities for regional services (major infrastructure) and with funding bodies for municipal services.

• The directorate would manage basic municipal services such as water, sanitation, electricity, etc although service payment by residents requires further discussion.

• All entering residents will be registered with biometric documentation to enable identification for movement and civil services.

• The registry will be based on Palestinian ID numbers issued by the authorities in coordination with COGAT.

• Residents needing to travel abroad may use their Palestinian passports. Those who have lost documents or require new ones can process them through the Palestinian Authority (PA) via a local post office branch to be opened on-site.

• Residents can report deaths or births occurring during the war to the PA population registry via the local post office

• Since the Emirati compound is intended to be on public land, an examination is required regarding potential private rights holders, including mechanisms for registration and compensation.

• The public use of land with private rights requires in-depth discussion with legal entities.

• Donor-funded projects within the community will be coordinated by a supervisory mechanism to ensure funds go directly to local projects since the PA’s Municipal Development and Lending Fund (MDLF) [mechanism cannot] be used.

Economy

• The Israeli Shekel will remain legal tender, as it is in the rest of Gaza and the West Bank.

• Electronic Shekel wallets should be primary modes of commerce as they are secure and mitigate diversion of goods and funds to the Hamas financial channels.

• A Bank of Palestine branch in the community would provide secure and transparent commerce.

• Private sector shops and markets should be prioritized to promote productive economic initiatives.

• Efforts should be made to promote paid employment for the maximum number of residents. Employment will be based on essential professions, public services, and unskilled labor for the public good and managed through an established employment bureau.

• Intensive agriculture in the outskirts of the community promotes options for employment outside the neighborhood (in non-Hamas controlled areas) will be examined, prioritizing labor-intensive farming.

• Residents should be permitted to import products into the Gaza Strip to facilitate and encourage commerce and economic growth. Products would be subject to security restrictions and checks at crossings.

Health

• Community medical centers must be established to provide services as independently as possible.

• Specific analysis is needed regarding service scope, referrals for severe cases, physician specialties, support staff (nurses, para-medical), and facility requirements (pharmacies).

• Health services should reflect the needs of the population and be tailored accordingly.

• As available without interruption of existing population needs, relocate local medical services and staff from surrounding areas to include durable medical equipment and supplies such as the Emirate hospital in Rafah.

• Rebuild immunization and cold-chain systems.

• Expand nutrition programs and therapeutic feeding for mothers and children.

• Strengthen community-based prenatal and postnatal care.

• Recommend exploration of options for critical medical service not available in the new community.

Education

• Accurate assessment is needed to determine the number of classrooms and staff needed to include teachers, support staff (assistants, psychologists, special education), and administration.

• Temporary “Emergency Studies” can expedite a curriculum framework to resume classrooms. The curriculum will not be Hamas-based but will follow “Culture of Peace” principles, e,g., modeled after the UAE.

• Schools could serve as protected environments providing food, sanitation, health services, and mental health support.

• Education should be treated as a life-saving humanitarian priority alongside food and health to prevent a lost generation and restore social stability. Educational programs can prevent diversion of an uneducated and unoccupied population to misaligned activities.

• The education framework can focus on three overlapping priorities:

  • Setup (Immediate - 18 months): Establishing safe temporary learning spaces and restoring routine.

  • Catch-Up (6 - 24 months): Accelerated learning to restore literacy/numeracy and bridge students back to the formal system.

  • Pathways (12 months+): Restarting formal education, exams, and workforce development as governance and security allow.

Justice: Law and Public Order

• Law and order will be regulated according to the legislation existing in the area prior to 2007.

• The framework outlines a post-conflict justice system for a new Rafah-area community, prioritizing rapid restoration of judicial functions, legal order, and public trust.

• The legal landscape includes shared Palestinian Authority laws but divergent penal codes in Gaza and the West Bank, underscoring the need for long-term legislative harmonization.

• Digitization of justice services is necessary to restore records, improve efficiency, and expand access.

• Civil policing will operate on-site to maintain public order, operating under the ISF.

• Immediate capacity building is required for judges, prosecutors, and justice personnel, focusing on case management, courtroom administration, legal drafting, evidence handling, investigative oversight, and digital literacy.

• Training must address post-war realities: destroyed infrastructure, missing records, trauma, displacement, and the need for restorative justice. European partners can support initial training for 20 judges and 20 prosecutors, with long-term institutionalization through a judicial diploma program.

• Women’s access to justice requires survivor-centered procedures given heightened risks, vulnerabilities, and loss of documentation.

• Corrections reform includes constructing detention facilities that meet international standards, vetting and training staff. Emphasis is placed on procedural and dynamic security, rehabilitation, classification, and alternatives to incarceration.

• Security-sector reform requires updated police and civil defense laws, strong oversight and accountability, people-centered security approaches, and measures to prevent radicalization.

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DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA STRIP—Ten-year-old Rateb Abu Qleiq sat in a rusted chair in front of his tent in Deir al-Balah. As he spoke, he unconsciously swung his right leg, which was amputated just below the knee, back and forth—the stub tracing a short arc in the air. On his lap he cradled a makeshift prosthetic, nothing more than a piece of plastic sewage pipe outfitted with an orange covering secured by a piece of string.

“My leg is gone,” Rateb told Drop Site. “This pipe doesn’t make up for my leg.”

Rateb was severely wounded in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis earlier this year that killed his mother and brother. His right leg was crushed and had to be amputated. He has undergone five surgeries in his abdomen since the attack.

“I felt sad that I’m no longer like the other kids because my leg was amputated. I don’t know how to play with them. I wish I had a leg so I could play with my friends,” he said.

Desperate to move again, Rateb and his cousin fashioned the prosthetic leg out of a plastic sewage pipe he found in the street. “I don’t want to give up, and my determination is strong. I dream of having a real prosthetic limb,” Rateb said. “If my leg hadn’t been cut off, the first place I’d go is the field to play football. I want to return to our home and have my mom, my dad, and my leg with me.”

Rateb Abu Qleiq, 10, fashioned a makeshift prosthetic limb out of a plastic sewage pipe after his right leg was amputated following an Israeli airstrike. Deir al-Balah. November 2025. (Video courtesy of Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

“When he first wore it, he was so happy, as if it were his real leg, he would walk on it. But poor thing, because it was made of plastic, it started to hurt his leg. No matter what, it’s still just a sewage pipe,” Rateb’s uncle, Mohammed Abu Qleiq, told Drop Site. “It doesn’t replace a real prosthetic limb, and it doesn’t make up for his leg. But this was the simplest thing we had.”

“Rateb has lost everything. He is the only survivor from his family, with only his sister and brother left. Rateb lost his mother, he lost his brother, and his father is out of Gaza so doesn’t even see him anymore,” Abu Qleiq added. “He’s also deprived of the most simple joys of life, like playing with his friends, walking, and seeing his friends.”

Along with the nearly 70,000 Palestinians confirmed killed in Gaza over the past two years, Israel’s genocidal war has wounded over 170,000, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. A recent report by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that nearly a quarter of those injuries are potentially life-changing, with over 41,000 people—or nearly 2% of Gaza’s population—affected. Up to a quarter of those are children. In August, as Israel’s military assault was continuing in full force, the UN said an average of ten children were losing one or both legs every day.

In September, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities reported that at least 21,000 Palestinian children had been disabled in Gaza since October 2023. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Health announced that over 6,000 amputation cases had been registered, with children comprising 25% of the total, making Gaza home to the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.

“These figures reflect the profound human suffering endured by thousands of injured individuals and their families, highlighting the urgent need for rehabilitation services and psychosocial support, especially for children who have found themselves facing permanent disabilities at a young age,” the health ministry said in a statement.

Blast injuries remain the most common form of injury, according to the WHO report, with amputations, burns, spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injuries, most in need of rehabilitation.

Yet rehabilitation services in Gaza, like the health care system as a whole, are under enormous strain. Before the war, the Hamad Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics in Gaza City, which is funded by the Qatar Development Fund, was the only hospital specializing in prosthetics and rehabilitation in the Gaza Strip. In October 2023, at the outset of the war, the hospital sustained heavy damage from Israeli shelling and airstrikes, and was eventually forced to close the following month after repeated attacks in the area. The hospital was hit several more times in the ensuing months.

Following the so-called “ceasefire” that went into effect on October 10, the Hamad hospital opened a branch in Al-Zuwaida in central Gaza. Its rooms are filled with Palestinians undergoing rehabilitation and treatment, mostly for amputated limbs. In one room a child practiced walking on a prosthetic leg, first on a flat service then on an uneven one made of foam. Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, with no sidewalks or streets, let alone ramps or accessible access for the disabled.

Patients receive treatment at the Hamad Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics in Al-Zuwaida. November 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

“The prosthetics department is working hard to provide the best services to these amputation cases. Approximately 100 cases have benefited from receiving prosthetic limbs,” Ahmed Jamal Al-Absi, the head of the prosthetics department at Hamad Hospital, told Drop Site.

While the facility specializes in molding and creating prosthetics, they have run out of raw materials as Israel continues to heavily restrict medical supplies to Gaza in violation of the ceasefire agreement. “The materials are running out after fitting about 100 prosthetic limbs,” Al-Absi said. “Now we are entering a situation where there can be no prosthetic limbs. Since 2023, no materials for prosthetics have entered the stock. We are trying hard, along with international organizations and our partner institutions, to coordinate the entry of these materials due to the closure of the crossings.”

“Some cases have already been registered for travel abroad, as there are complex cases that require surgery abroad and the provision of prosthetic limbs. But with such a large number, we cannot serve them all at Hamad Hospital,” he added.

The Hamad Hospital in Al-Zuwaida molds and fashions prosthetics with limited resources. November 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Gaza once had around 1,300 physiotherapists and 400 occupational therapists but dozens have been killed in Israeli attacks and many more injured or displaced. “The conflict has devastated the rehabilitation workforce,” the WHO said. “Despite the huge number of amputations, Gaza has only 8 prosthetists to manufacture and fit artificial limbs. “

The few Palestinians who have managed to receive prosthetic limbs and rehabilitation call themselves fortunate. Five-year-old Ahmad Murad Ashour was injured in an Israeli strike in April 2025 as he was walking down the street. The injury to his left leg led to an initial amputation below the knee, though complications led to a second amputation higher up at the joint. Months later, he was eventually able to be fitted for a prosthetic leg at Hamad hospital.

“We’ve been taking him to hospitals for so long. We faced many difficulties,” his father, Abu Ahmad, told Drop Site. “We applied for him to travel abroad, and his referral was ready—so we can continue his treatment. He, along with his brother, who was also injured, need further medical care. We came to the hospital here, and they fitted him with a prosthetic leg...thank God for everything.”

“We struggled a lot to get him a prosthetic,” Abu Ahmad continued. “I see many, many cases in Gaza. I see them as I walk down the street. My son’s case is one thing, but there are children without legs, without arms. This is all happening in our country.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report. Sami Vanderlip edited the video.

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GAZA CITY—The Israeli military carried out one of the deadliest attacks on Gaza since the “ceasefire” took effect last month, killing over 30 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, and wounding dozens more in a series of airstrikes late Wednesday and early Thursday. The dead and wounded arrived at hospitals in an endless stream, children were covered in dust and blood, men carried small bodies wrapped in shrouds, and wails of grief rose in the air

These horrific scenes, a daily feature of the past two years of Israel’s acute genocidal assault, had returned again. “The war has returned to the Gaza Strip,” Mahmoud Bassal, spokesperson for the Civil Defense in Gaza, told Drop Site inside a hospital tent at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City as the casualties were being brought in. The wounded arrived every few minutes, brought in by ambulances, cars, motorized rickshas—or carried on foot. The dead were wrapped in blankets and sheets.

The dead and wounded arrive at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on November 19, 2025. (Video courtesy of Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Most of the casualties came from multiple Israeli airstrikes targeting a tent encampment sheltering the displaced in Khan Younis that killed 17 people, including five children, and from a pair of airstrikes on a building belonging to the Awqaf (Religious Endowments) Ministry sheltering the displaced that killed 16, including seven children, according to hospital officials.

“What is happening in Gaza is something no mind could have imagined,” Bassal said later in the evening as he knelt in front of the bodies of three young children wrapped in one body bag. “It’s madness. These children are being killed—their only crime is that they are children…So to the world, to the nations, to the mediators, to those who oversaw the ceasefire, to those who contributed to stopping the war—now the occupation returns to kill our children—what are you going to do?” He added, “Who will cry for these children? The entire family is gone. The mother died, the children died, the father died—who will cry for them? The world must understand what is happening in Gaza and the gravity of what is taking place.”

Israel claimed without evidence the strikes were in retaliation to Hamas fighters firing at Israeli troops in southern Gaza. At least 33 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli strikes, including 12 children and eight women, according to Gaza’s ministry of health. Hamas dismissed Israel’s claims as an “attempt to justify their ongoing crimes and violations” and condemned what it called a “horrific massacre” and “a dangerous escalation.” It marked the third deadliest attack on Gaza since the ceasefire after a wave of Israeli bombardments on October 28-29 that killed over 100 Palestinians and another on October 19-20 that killed 45.

Bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. November 20, 2025. (Video courtesy of Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

The morgue at Al-Shifa hospital on Thursday morning was full of corpses stacked on top of one another wrapped in white body bogs or blankets. Outside, family members wept and embraced their killed relatives one last time before burial.

The Awqaf building in the Zeitoun neighborhood that was targeted was barely standing on Thursday, more a web of broken concrete and rebar than a coherent structure. Cots, mattresses, and blankets were strewn in rooms without walls and cracked columns.

Ishaq Al-Damgha was sitting on the steps of the building when the first of two missiles hit on Wednesday night. “The first missile landed, and the second one fell like a ball of fire onto the place; it set the area ablaze, blew it up, and destroyed everything. It shattered everything and covered the whole area in dust. When the first missile struck, I was sent flying—into the second lane of the street, more than 10 meters away,” Al-Damgha told Drop Site. “We retrieved martyrs—children, men, and women. We retrieved two girls—my cousin’s daughters. After three hours, we retrieved my cousin—three [martyrs]. Then from the Malakah family, a small girl, maybe two years old or younger. We also removed a young man from the Malakah family. From the Azzam family—three children with their mother and father. From the Badwan family…Children and women were the overwhelming number of martyrs.”

The aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on a building belonging to the Awqaf (Religious Endowments) Ministry sheltering displaced Palestinians. November 20, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

On Thursday, Israel moved to expand the area under its control by advancing with a tank incursion in eastern Gaza City and physically moving the yellow concrete blocks that demarcate the “yellow line” to where its troops withdrew last month as part of the ceasefire agreement. The area under its control had already comprised some 58% of the enclave. The blocks were moved an additional 300 meters westward in the neighborhoods of Al-Tuffah and Al-Shujaiya, before the troops pulled back and began shelling the area. Families woke up Thursday to suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the “yellow line,” causing panic and a new wave of mass displacement.

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said in a statement that Israel “is committing a blatant violation” by shifting the yellow line westward “resulting in the mass displacement of our people.” Qassem said the changes contravene the maps agreed upon in the ceasefire deal and called on mediators to pressure Israel to immediately cease continued violations.

Yellow blocks moved by the Israeli military in Al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City. November 20, 2025.(Video courtesy of Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Israel’s attacks came two days after the UN Security Council voted to approve a U.S.-sponsored resolution authorizing an international stabilization force in Gaza, which would not fall under the command of the UN, but rather a so-called Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump. The committee would have sweeping authority over Gaza, including overseeing reconstruction, security, economic recovery, and coordinating the distribution of humanitarian aid.

Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, blasted the vote. “Not a single member of the Council had the courage, principle, or respect for international law to vote against this US-Israel colonial outrage,” Mokhiber wrote on social media. “This proposal has been rejected by Palestinian civil society and factions, and defenders of human rights and international law everywhere.”

Israel has killed at least 312 Palestinians and wounded 760 since the “ceasefire” went into effect on October 10— leveling entire neighborhoods and destroying more than 1,500 buildings. It has also continued to restrict the amount of aid into Gaza and has not allowed the agreed-upon 600 aid trucks per day into Gaza—what the United Nations has said in the past is the bare minimum amount needed.

Meanwhile, over 17,000 displaced families have been affected by winter storms, according to the UN, with people sleeping in flooded tents without warm clothing. “More than 4,000 households are currently sheltering along the shoreline [in Khan Younis],” the UN said in an update on Wednesday before the Israeli attacks that targeted that very area. “Preliminary findings highlight dire conditions: rising sea levels are encroaching on tents and threaten to submerge the entire area, while strong winds have already caused multiple tent collapses.”

In a statement on Thursday, the Gaza Government Media Office blasted the latest Israeli attacks and its move to seize more territory. “These ongoing crimes represent a clear disregard by the occupation for the ceasefire decision, adding to nearly 400 violations that have been recorded since the decision came into effect,” the office said. “These violations have claimed the lives of more than 300 martyrs, left hundreds wounded, and worsened the catastrophic conditions that our people are experiencing in the limited remaining space of the Gaza Strip.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report. Sami Vanderlip edited the video.

Correction: This article has been amended to state the Israeli attacks on November 19 and 20 were the third deadliest since the ceasefire took effect, not the second.

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UG Solutions, a leading U.S. military subcontractor that provided security for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), is stepping up its recruitment efforts amid possible plans for several aid distribution sites to be set up in Gaza by next month, Drop Site has learned.

A former army officer who applied for a position as an “International Humanitarian Security Officer” at UG Solutions told Drop Site that a company official told him in a job interview at the end of October that 12 to 15 sites were being planned to open in Gaza and that the company was “going to need a lot more guys.” The former army officer spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns.

The future of Gaza is at a critical juncture following this week’s Security Council vote to approve a U.S.-sponsored resolution authorizing an international stabilization force in Gaza, which would not fall under the command of the UN, but rather a so-called Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump. This committee would have sweeping authority over Gaza, including overseeing reconstruction, security, economic recovery, and coordinating the distribution of humanitarian aid.

The use of private military contractors in aid distribution in Gaza first began in May with GHF opening four distribution sites in Gaza guarded by security contractors, many of whom were U.S. military veterans recruited by UG Solutions. For the four and half months that GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites. The sites were dismantled after a U.S.-brokered “ceasefire” agreement went into effect in Gaza on October 10.

The UG Solutions official who conducted the phone interview, Joel Reyes, told the former officer that deployment to Gaza was expected by early to mid December with deployments lasting 90 days. The officer was told the salary would be $800 per day for a “static guard” and $1,000 per day for “mobile guard” duty, plus a $180 per diem. When asked what the job entailed, Reyes told the recruit it was “pulling security.”

In response to inquiries about whether the claims of new aid sites in Gaza with a planned deployment for December were accurate, UG Solutions senior vice president of government affairs Jennifer Counter told Drop Site in an email that “UG Solutions is preparing for a wide range of potential scenarios in Gaza, ranging from an advisory role based on our experience from January 2025 to the present day, to a robust security presence in support of humanitarian aid delivery and possible technical assistance to the International Security Force.”

There are other indications of ramped up U.S. presence being planned in Gaza. On September 25, just one day after the $30 million GHF contract officially ended, a new U.S. contract with a company called Q2IMPACT was initiated, amounting to $7 million over five years to “monitor the efficacy of humanitarian aid in Palestine and Lebanon.” Rob Jenkins, the former head of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, and Sean Jones, a former USAID mission manager to Egypt, are senior advisers, according to Q2’s press releases.

The former army officer first submitted an application to UG Solutions in June. Patrick Shoaff, a former Special Forces Green Beret who is the Director of Mission Support and Integration at UG Solutions, responded in an email in late July saying the former officer’s candidacy had moved forward in the recruitment process. The former officer did not hear from UG Solutions again until the phone call from Reyes at the end of October. Four days after that call, the officer received an email from UG Solutions saying he was “prequalified for consideration in an upcoming overseas operation” in “a high-threat environment” and that a second interview would be scheduled.

During the second interview in early November, another UG Solutions official questioned the officer in more detail about his military background and deployments, and asked him to give an example of “an ethical dilemma” he faced during his military service, the officer recalled. The UG Solutions official, whose name the officer declined to disclose, said that, if accepted, there would be three to four days of training at a facility in New Bern, North Carolina. This would include training in “rules of escalation” and “humanitarian aid operations,” in addition to shooting examinations and other courses. The UG Solutions official asked if the officer would be willing to take orders from someone more junior in military rank. He also said they were looking for recruits willing to work on a long term basis for the company.

A few days later, the officer received an email from Reyes rejecting his application and informing him that the company had “received many applications for this role and the search has been very competitive.” Reyes refused to comment when contacted several times by Drop Site.

The role of GHF and private military contractors in any future aid distribution in Gaza has been highly contentious. In late August, as ceasefire negotiations were underway and Israel’s genocidal military assault was in full force, Hamas agreed to remove language that would have prevented the GHF from remaining in Gaza after the agreement went into effect in what was seen as one of several major concessions.

In response to inquiries about whether UG Solutions was in discussions about guarding aid sites in Gaza in the coming period, Counter said: “We are prepared to provide security services to humanitarian aid sites in Gaza should the Board of Peace determine that distribution locations or storage areas need our skills and expertise,” in a reference to the Trump-led body to oversee Gaza that was authorized by the Security Council resolution this week.

“UG Solutions is in on-going discussions with relevant stakeholders about the situation on the ground in Gaza, our experiences there, and ways that we can again assist the humanitarian aid system and distributions,” Counter said. “The passage of the U.S.-led U.N. Security Council resolution on 17 November 2025 will likely help bring clarity to next steps in Gaza and UG is prepared to respond rapidly should our services be requested.”

Shortly after GHF operations began in Gaza in May, UG Solutions was quickly thrust into the spotlight over its conduct. In July, videos and accounts from two UG Solutions guards obtained by the Associated Press revealed that company subcontractors were firing live ammunition, stun grenades, and other weapons at nearly every distribution in Gaza, “even if there was no threat.” Later that month, Anthony Aguilar, a UG Solutions subcontractor who was deployed to Gaza, resigned over what he described as war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians seeking food at GHF aid sites, which he called “death traps.” In August, several news outlets revealed UG Solutions had hired members of a U.S. biker gang with a history of anti-Muslim hate speech to serve as security guards in Gaza.

In response to whether UG Solutions was stepping up recruitment in preparation of another deployment to Gaza, Counter told Drop Site: “Our recruitment is ongoing for Gaza and several other international projects, most of which require the same skill set that we deployed to Gaza.” She added, “Many members of our team who have spent the better part of 2025 in Gaza are eager to return to the Strip because they believe in the humanitarian mission there, built relationships with members of the community, and wish to help those suffering from the effects of war.”

Last month, the North Carolina chapter Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NC), along with other local groups, called on the North Carolina secretary of state and the state attorney general to investigate UG Solutions, which is based in Davidson, North Carolina, for its actions in Gaza. “Companies incorporated in North Carolina must not be complicit in war crimes or human rights abuses abroad,” Al Rieder, the manager of CAIR-NC, said in a statement. “The evidence that a North Carolina-based company allegedly participated in attacks on starving civilians in Gaza is horrifying. We are urging the state’s top officials to uphold the law and ensure that North Carolina is not used as a base for operations that contribute to the suffering of innocent people.”

Since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10, Israel has violated the deal by continuing to attack Gaza, killing at least 290 Palestinians, and by not allowing the agreed upon 600 aid trucks per day into Gaza—what the United Nations has said in the past is the bare minimum amount needed. In August, the world’s leading expert on food crises, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, declared a famine in Gaza. Over 450 Palestinians, including over 150 children, have died of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of September, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Alexandra Hall with Adalah Justice Project and Jack Poulson contributed to this report.

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When Israel launched its war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, following Hamas’s military offensive, Los Angeles-based journalist Jacki Karsh felt she had to do something.

“October 7th happened and everything changed for me because I knew this was going to be a war of information the second it happened,” Karsh said in a December 2024 interview with Los Angeles Mom Magazine. She went on to quote an October 2023 post on X by Aviva Klompas, the former head of speechwriting at the Israeli mission to the UN, that said: “The IDF is going to attack our enemies by land, sea, and air. And the rest of us are going to fight on the battlegrounds of academia, law, business, media, and every other damn front we can think of.” Commenting on the post, Karsh said, “So this is my front. Journalism is my front. And I am doing what I can.”

Karsh, who describes herself as “a six-time Emmy-nominated multimedia journalist,” said among the many incidents that convinced her to try and “shift some of the narrative” on Israel was when Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City was bombed on October 17, 2023. The attack quickly became a topic of dispute in the U.S. media after the Israeli military denied responsibility and blamed it on an errant rocket fired by Palestinian militants. “The story was reported incorrectly and then the correction was so muted, it was not like, ‘Wow! We just completely messed up this story,’” Karsh told eJewishPhilanthropy this past August. “They were getting more information from the terrorists who were responsible for Oct. 7.”

In November 2023, Karsh first presented the idea of starting a journalism fellowship to the Jewish Federation, a pro-Israel group that says part of its mission is to “support a secure State of Israel” and where Karsh has served as a board member in Los Angeles for several years.

Founded with her husband in 2025, the Jacki and Jeff Karsh Journalism Fellowship describes itself as “the world’s only journalism fellowship solely dedicated to Jewish topics” and bills itself as “resolutely nonpartisan.” The fellowship began accepting applications in July and its inaugural class of fellows will begin the program in January 2026. It centers around three retreats, held in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York, where up to ten fellows will engage with “leading journalists, scholars, policymakers, and innovators,” holding sessions on topics including “Middle East Misinformation” and “How to Cover Antisemitism.”

In response to an inquiry from Drop Site about how the Karsh fellowship can be “resolutely nonpartisan” when the founder claims it was created to help Israel win an “information war,” the director of the fellowship, Rob Eshmen, responded in an emailed statement: “The Karsh Journalism Fellowship trains and supports journalists committed to fairness and accuracy on Israel and Jewish issues. Jacki Karsh’s guiding principle is simple: the best response to misinformation and disinformation on these issues is excellent journalism grounded in evidence, integrity, and independence.” He added, “Our mentors and fellows will represent a wide range of political and cultural perspectives, and we encourage open, nuanced dialogue on complex issues.”

The fellowship has attracted 16 scholars and journalists from several mainstream publications to serve as mentors, including The Atlantic, Spectrum News, The Spectator, Ynet, Times of Israel, and two journalists at The New York Times: Jodi Rudoren, the former Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, who now oversees newsletters for the paper, including The Morning and DealBook; and Sharon Otterman, who covers education, health, and religion in the New York City area for the Times and who has closely covered the Palestine solidarity campus protests at Columbia and other universities.

The New York Times handbook of “values and practices” for its journalists states they “should take care to ensure” any public engagements—including giving speeches, participating on panels, teaching classes and presenting at conferences—do not “create an actual or apparent conflict of interest, or undermine public trust in The Times’s independence.”

In response to an inquiry from Drop Site about whether having staffed reporters mentoring for a program whose founder has said it exists to help Israel win an “information war” represented a conflict with the Times’ standards, spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in a statement: “It’s ridiculous to suggest participation as a mentor in this fellowship is anything other than helping to build the reporting skills necessary for the next generation of independent journalists.”

Other fellowship mentors include CNN’s Van Jones, who recently issued an apology after drawing intense criticism for comments he made on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday making light of images of dead Palestinian children and saying they were part of an Iran and Qatar disinformation campaign; and Michael Powell, a staff writer at the Atlantic and a former national reporter at The New York Times, whose recent articles include “The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World,” that criticizes groups like Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders for becoming “stridently critical of Israel.”

As the founder of the fellowship, Karsh has been an open and die-hard supporter of Israel in both her articles and public comments.

“The Israel story is on the facts side, so you’re already starting from a good place because the truth is at the end of the day—the IDF is the most moral army in the world,” she said in an interview with StandWithUs Campus in March. “The Israeli population is made up of Christians, Druze and Arabs and Israelis, Jews—it runs the gamut—and so there’s no apartheid there and I think if you just go through each of those things systematically, the facts are on the Israeli side.”

Karsh has described Hamas as “real life monsters” and compared Hamas to Nazis. She has also questioned the Gaza health ministry’s casualty numbers, which have been found to be accurate by the United Nations and even the Israeli military. “When numbers come from a Ministry of Health run by Hamas, whether that’s done deliberately or not, it influences how people perceive the story—and it can even shape policies,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Karsh has also been highly critical of the Palestine solidarity protests and encampments on university campuses and the media coverage of them. In a December 2024 article in Jewish Journal titled, “Editorial Bias: Campus Newspapers Must Stop Marginalizing Jews,” she writes: “Student journalism at some of the most elite universities had already become a breeding ground for rhetoric that marginalizes Jewish voices and vilifies Israel.” Citing Columbia University’s student newspaper, she writes: “The Columbia Spectator has demonstrated systemic editorial bias against Jewish students by downplaying concerns about antisemitism and portraying pro-Israel positions as inherently problematic.” The Columbia Spectator received the Society of Professional Journalists award for “Best All-Around Student Newspaper” in 2024.

Commenting on the same topic in an interview, Karsh later said, “nobody is writing government policy based on a Tik Tok video but you read an investigative piece that’s produced by The New York Times, I’m going to bet you that some congressperson is going to quote that and is going to write policy based on it. That’s the problem, [students newspapers are] a feeder to all these mainstream news outlets that they’re carrying that bias with them into these spaces.” She added, “My focus is how Jews are being portrayed in the media, as well as Israel.”

To the best of our searching, Karsh has never publicly expressed any concern or sympathy for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, including over 20,000 children, the displacement of 95% of the population, the widening famine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and universities, among other acts that human rights groups, leading genocide scholars, and the United Nations have found to be a genocide.

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GAZA CITY—Inside Al-Shifa’s crowded emergency department on Saturday, wounded men, women, and children lay on metal cots groaning in pain. Some were sprawled on the blood-caked floor bandaged with nothing more than rags. One man held an IV bag in his hand for an injured patient on the floor. A baby, barely a few months old, her face and legs bloodied and bruised was struggling to cling to life. On a nearby cot, a man wept as he embraced the body of a young girl, lying dead in jeans and a black top.

The situation at Al-Shifa hospital has become catastrophic as the Israeli military conducts a scorched earth ethnic cleansing campaign of Gaza City, with relentless aerial bombardment, repeated attacks on health care facilities, and Israeli tanks and troops advancing deeper into the city.

Scenes inside Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. September 27, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Ambulances arrived in a steady stream outside carrying the dead and wounded. Paramedics brought corpses in body bags and placed them on the ground in a row outside the hospital entrance, one of them a young child charred beyond recognition and wrapped in a tarp. A large abandoned warehouse inside the facility was filled with metal cots and empty supply cabinets.

Hardly able to speak, Adam Mohammad Abu Karsh lay wounded on a bed in the hallway, untended to by the overwhelmed medical staff. “I went to the café by the sea because I wanted to take my family out. A tank started shelling at us. My cousin and I were injured. They brought me here to Al-Shifa Hospital,” Abu Karsh told Drop Site, wincing in pain. “There’s shrapnel inside me. The surgery was supposed to happen two hours ago,” he said before being overcome by the pain.

Outside in the streets around Al-Shifa, thick black smoke billowed in the air from nearby airstrikes as drones buzzed loudly overhead. Rubble and destroyed buildings surrounded the hospital alongside several tents and makeshift shelters built from cloth and tarp.

Yasmin Bakr, a mother from Gaza City, fled to the south with her family where they lived on the street, unable to afford the high price of a tent. She returned to Gaza City after hearing that her sister’s house was bombed. “I came from the south and found a massacre at Al-Shifa—not healing [“shifa” means healing in Arabic],” Bakr told Drop Site from inside the hospital. “My sister’s daughter is in intensive care. My sister was martyred, her 16-year-old son and her other son. And these are her two older children,” she said, pointing to two young boys lying on a cot next to her, both in bandages. “There’s no treatment, no medicine, not even a pen to write with.”

Bakr said she is trying to take her injured family members to the south but can’t find an ambulance to transport them. “The situation here is extremely, extremely bad. And we’re afraid the Israelis will come in now and attack us. My sisters and my sister’s children and I are pleading with God to get us to the south. Just hand us the paper and provide us an ambulance to take them. This is death itself—we are living death here,” she said. “At any moment, they might storm the hospital. Within seconds or minutes, they’ll be upon us. Just now, they threatened the entire residential block behind Al-Shifa, where my family lives. We are fighting with death here. And when we try to go south, they shoot at us from behind.”

During its military offensive on Gaza City, which began in mid-August, Israel has repeatedly attacked hospitals and health care facilities, forcing a number to shut down completely, including the Al-Rantisi Children’s hospital, the Eye Hospital, and the Jordanian Field Hospital in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa. The UN recorded at least 17 Israeli attacks on or near health facilities in Gaza City over the last two weeks alone.

“Israel’s military attacks on and around hospitals in Gaza City are leaving sick and injured civilians with nowhere to turn to for lifesaving care, as escalating attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are leading to countless casualties,” the UN Human Rights Office said in a statement on Monday. Only seven out of 13 hospitals in Gaza City are still operational, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and only barely. Meanwhile, the repeated attacks have rendered safe access to the medical facilities that are still functioning nearly impossible.

“The intensification of Israeli military attacks on civilian infrastructure in Gaza City, including direct attacks against hospitals and other health facilities, is dramatically impacting the already crumbling healthcare system in Gaza and worsening the dire humanitarian situation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remain trapped in Gaza City,” the UN Human Rights Office added.

On September 26, the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced it was suspending activities in Gaza City due to the escalating Israeli assault. “We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities, as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces,” Jacob Granger, MSF Emergency Coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement. “This is the last thing we wanted, as the needs in Gaza City are enormous, with the most vulnerable people - infants in neo-natal care, those with severe injuries and life-threatening illnesses—unable to move and in grave danger.”

Israeli airstrikes near Al-Shifa hospital. September 27, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

In what many feared was a prelude to an all-out attack on Al-Shifa, the Israeli military last week released aerial footage it said showed Hamas fighters shooting from inside the hospital.

Al-Shifa was once the largest hospital in Palestine. The Israeli army first raided Al-Shifa early on in the war, in mid-November 2023, after falsely claiming that Hamas ran a command and control center under the hospital. It withdrew during a temporary ceasefire 10 days later. In mid-March 2024, they invaded and occupied Al-Shifa for a second time arresting hundreds. At the beginning of April, staff returned to find the hospital completely destroyed—its buildings burnt and its wards and equipment severely damaged. Mass graves of hundreds of bodies were also discovered on the hospital grounds, some of victims “were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands ... tied and stripped of their clothes,” Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at the time.

The health ministry, in coordination with local communities and international NGOs, succeeded in restoring partial functionality to the hospital in September 2024. Yet amid Israel’s latest assault, rumors swirled in the past few days that Al-Shifa had shut down again, prompting the health ministry to release a statement on Monday assuring that Al-Shifa was still providing medical services “despite the difficult current situation and the major challenges facing the health sector, especially in Gaza City.”

Now, Al-Shifa is completely overwhelmed with dozens of new casualties every day, severe shortages in supplies and medical staff, and the Israeli military is advancing closer.

“In general, the situation becomes more and more dangerous by the hour,” a paramedic with the PRCS told Drop Site on Saturday as he stood outside Al-Shifa’s main entrance. He asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “Since this morning, we’ve retrieved martyrs and many injuries from the Ansar area, the Abbas area, and the port area—where the remaining civilians are gathered, those who haven’t been displaced because they don’t have the money or resources,” he said. “When we arrive to transport the wounded and martyrs to Al-Shifa Hospital, we find no nurses, no doctors, no staff to receive the cases. This is because they have fled due to the intense fear and nonstop bombardment of the northern areas in the northern part of the valley. They’ve all moved to the southern areas, because there is no stability or safety left here.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.

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GAZA CITY—Umm Jana’s two-and-a-half year-old daughter, Jouri, died earlier this month from malnutrition. Now, her other daughter, five-year-old Jana, is also slowly starving to death and there is little Umm Jana can do to save her.

“My daughter Jouri—because of the famine—was deeply affected. She developed severe malnutrition and health complications that led to her death. I hope I never have to go through with Jana what I went through with Jouri,” Umm Jana told Drop Site News in an interview at the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society Hospital in Gaza City. Jana was lying on a cot beside her, barely stirring.

“We're living through extremely difficult days and a very harsh famine,” she said. “Jana is battling death. Her condition is extremely severe. She needs to be transferred abroad because there is no adequate treatment for what she’s experiencing.”

On Friday, the world’s leading authority on food crisis—the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—officially declared a full-blown, Phase 5 “catastrophic” famine in the governorate of Gaza, which includes Gaza City, a classification characterized by “starvation, destitution, and death.”

Aaed Abu Khater’s 13-year-old son, Atef, died from malnutrition earlier this month in Gaza City. “Atef was like the rest of the people, suffering from a lack of food and water,” Abu Khater told Drop Site. “Imagine looking at your child, and you can’t feed him. You can’t do anything for him…The most precious thing I had, my son, died of hunger.”

Without proper nutrients, including vegetables and protein, Atef’s weight dropped dramatically and his condition continued to deteriorate until he was no longer able to walk or move. Abu Khater carried him to hospital where he spent 18 days on IV fluids before being discharged due to a lack of beds. “When we were finally able to feed him, the hunger had exhausted him so much he could barely eat. He could barely chew potatoes and he couldn’t eat bread,” Abu Khater said.

During the three days he was back at home, two of Atef’s cousins were shot and killed in an aid massacre at the Zikim crossing. “You’re going to die either way. If you go to Zikim, you’ll die. If you stay in your tent, you’ll die. You’ll die from hunger, or you’ll be shot. It’s a trap,” Abu Khater said.

Atef was clearly dying at home, so his father prepared to take him back to the hospital. In the morning, as his mother washed him and got him ready to go, he died sitting in a chair. “If I showed you his picture when he was in middle school, Atef was tall, and I’d say his weight was around 60 kilograms. By the time we buried Atef, he was barely over 25 kilos. When we buried him, we did it in a small grave, about 50 centimeters wide, placed next to those of his uncles. He was a skeleton—just bones covered in skin,” Abu Khater said.

According to the IPC, for a region to be technically classified as experiencing famine, at least 20% of people must be suffering extreme food shortages, with one in three children acutely malnourished, and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or malnutrition and disease.

Conditions in the North Gaza governorate, which includes Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, are estimated to be just as severe or even worse. Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and Khan Younis in the south, which are currently classified as Phase 4—experiencing “emergency” hunger—are expected to officially be declared in a famine by September.

“As this famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the IPC said. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed. Any further delay—even by days—will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of Famine-related mortality.”

“If a ceasefire is not implemented to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip,” the IPC emphasized, “and if essential food supplies, and basic health, nutrition, and WASH services are not restored immediately, avoidable deaths will increase exponentially.”

United Nations officials said in no uncertain terms that the famine in Gaza is a result of Israeli policy, with the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Volker Turk calling it “the direct result of actions taken by the Israeli government” and adding, “It is a war crime to use starvation as a method of warfare, and the resulting deaths may also amount to the war crime of willful killing.”

Tom Fletcher, the under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator said it was a “21st century famine, watched over by drones and the most advanced military technology in history…It is a famine on all of our watch. Everyone owns this, the Gaza famine is the world's famine."

Israel has imposed a harsh siege on Gaza for nearly two decades. Beginning in 2007, Israeli authorities mandated that Palestinians in the enclave should receive the minimum amount of food to avoid malnutrition, providing 37% fewer fruits and vegetables than the average Israeli has access to.

When Israel launched its genocidal assault in October 2023, it imposed a full-spectrum blockade, which eased and tightened over the course of the past 22 months. In March, Israel imposed the longest full-spectrum blockade of the war, with no aid entering Gaza for nearly three months. It dismantled the UN aid distribution system that was in place and, on May 27, it began allowing in a little amount of aid in a system overseen by the U.S., Europe and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, with just four distribution sites located in heavily militarized zones. Since then, over 2,000 starving Palestinians have been killed as they try to get food in aid massacres.

The forced starvation campaign reached a tipping point this summer. At least 273 people in Gaza have died of famine and malnutrition since the start of war, including 112 children. A staggering 86 of those starvation deaths—or 68% of the total—have occurred in the past month, according to a tally of Health Ministry figures. Absent a ceasefire and a massive influx of aid and medical treatment, many more are projected to die of hunger and malnutrition in the coming period.

In June 2024, Israel bombed the tent camp where the Abu Khater family was taking shelter. Abu Khater was injured, one of his other sons was killed, and his youngest son was wounded with shrapnel in the eye. “One died from a bombing. Another died from hunger. Maybe another one will die from scabies, or disease, or the sewage, or from lack of hygiene. You go to sleep terrified, you don’t know where death is going to come from,” Abu Khater said. “There are hundreds, thousands going through the same thing. It’s repeating daily.”

Dr. Musab Farwana, a pediatrician in the Pediatric Department and Malnutrition Department at the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society Hospital, told Drop Site that all medical facilities in Gaza have a dire lack of supplies.

“As a hospital, we lack baby formula, nutritional supplements, Cerelac, biscuits, and therapeutic food like peanut butter paste—all of which on its own is not enough. For children aged around one to one and a half years, we also need vegetables, meats, and proteins. Vegetables provide essential vitamins. This is something the entire population of Gaza, around 2.4 million people, is deprived of. We all lack these nutrients,” he said.

Inside the hospital, emaciated children and babies barely able to move lie in cots or sit with blank stares, drawn faces, and ribcages and spines poking out from their torsos.

Inside the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society Hospital in Gaza City. August 7, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah)

“We’re seeing children not only with malnutrition but also with severe dehydration due to the lack of clean drinking water. The cases are very critical. We are at risk of losing many children. If things continue like this and are not addressed urgently, the situation will worsen. We will lose more and more innocent lives—dozens, even hundreds of children.”

Madlalah Dawwas’s 9-year-old daughter, Maryam, is in danger of dying by starvation. A skeletal figure, she lay on a cot in the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society Hospital, barely able to move. Dawwas told Drop Site she first began losing weight three months into the war as food became increasingly scarce. The family had been forcibly displaced to the south and Dawwas took her to several hospitals to be treated for malnutrition. During the ceasefire in January, when the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza significantly increased, Maryam’s condition improved.

“During the truce, Maryam improved by 80%. But when the truce ended and the war returned, the fear came back. Fruits and vegetables were cut off again, famine returned all over again—and I began to fear for Maryam again,” Dawwas said. “Maryam lost so many things she loved, and I couldn't provide them to her in this famine,” she said adding, “She would, open my phone sometimes and ask me to turn on the internet, because she loved watching food videos on YouTube—Western food videos, and the meals she liked.”

As she spoke, Dawwas reached over and used a syringe to insert a few drops of milk into her daughter’s mouth.

Madlalah Dawwas with her 9-year-old daughter, Maryam, in the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society Hospital in Gaza City. August 7, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah)

“When Maryam is sleeping, I stare at her. I just want to wake her—not to feed her or give her milk or change her diaper—just to make sure she’s still breathing. I always imagine she’s gone, but then I distract myself, try to focus on something else, and say: ‘No, thank God. God will not take her from me.’ I just want Maryam to go back to how she used to be.”

The IPC report warns that the man-made famine is only projected to spread. “Increasing reports of malnutrition-related deaths indicate that the most vulnerable in society are beginning to succumb. This trend is expected to increase amongst vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and those with chronic diseases, before spreading to the wider population.”

“The overall situation is no secret to anyone, including the entire world: Gaza is going through an extremely severe and man-made famine caused by the complete Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip,” Dr. Farwana said. “We are a people who deserve life. A people who have been oppressed, wounded and abandoned by everyone, whether the Western world or the Islamic world. We are not being treated with basic human decency. We have been wronged by everyone.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.

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GAZA CITY—The prominent Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif was buried in Gaza City on Monday, a broken slab of rock used as a headstone, one day after his assassination by the Israeli military. Five other journalists —four from Al Jazeera, Mohammed Qraiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammed Noufal, and one from media outlet Sahat, Mohammed Al-Khalidi—were killed alongside him and also laid to rest.

All six were killed on Sunday night in an Israeli airstrike on their media tent outside Al-Shifa hospital in what the Israeli military proudly proclaimed was an assassination targeting al-Sharif. Israel has now killed 238 journalists in Gaza, according to the Government Media Office.

At just 28 years old, Anas had emerged as the most recognized Palestinian journalist still alive and reporting from Gaza. He remained in the north from the beginning of Israel’s onslaught of the enclave and became a near-constant presence on television and online, reporting almost every day on airstrikes, shelling, massacres, displacement, famine, death, and dismemberment—while relaying glimpses of hope and accounts of Palestinian resilience whenever he could.

Barely an hour before he was killed, al-Sharif warned of the impending Israeli invasion. “If this madness does not end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop,” he wrote. “Silence is complicity.”

His last post, just minutes before he was killed, warned that Gaza City was under intense bombing: “Relentless bombardment… For two hours, the Israeli aggression has intensified on Gaza City.” The Israeli security cabinet last week approved Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans for a full-scale invasion to “take control” of Gaza City in yet another escalation of Israel’s 22-month genocidal assault.

Israel’s murder of the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City is seen by Palestinian journalists as an opening salvo in the coming invasion and a warning to the remaining journalists in the city—signaling that Israel can and will eliminate the most prominent journalistic voices on the ground.

“We fear that this could be a prelude to massacres in Gaza City, especially after the occupation's threat to completely occupy the Gaza Strip and completely destroy Gaza City in particular,” Kamer Labad, a correspondent for Al-Aqsa TV, told Drop Site on Monday, as he stood in the graveyard while his colleagues were being buried. “They do not want these pictures to be broadcast, and it’s also a clear threat to other journalists not to convey the voices of Gaza to the outside world.”

The funeral procession of Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues in Gaza City. August 11, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah)

Facing no consequences for its actions—other than occasional words of condemnation from foreign governments and human rights organizations—the Israeli military has acted with increasing levels of brazenness in its killing of journalists in Gaza over the past 22 months. “Despite warnings by international organizations to Israel not to kill Anas al-Sharif or any other journalists, they did it, the Israeli occupation forces killed the Al Jazeera crew and other journalists, simply because they can do that and nobody can curb them,” Sami Abu Salem, a member of the Palestine Journalist Syndicate, told Drop Site as he stood in the cemetery in Gaza City on Monday. “I think the Israeli occupation forces are very annoyed because the truth is coming from Gaza through Palestinian journalists.”

Initially, Israeli forces would deny that they killed journalists or would claim their deaths were the unintended consequences of the war, clinically known as “collateral damage.” They eventually began to claim that some of the slain journalists were militants after they killed them, as was the case with Hamza al-Dahdouh in January 2024, and with Ismail al-Ghoul in July 2024, among others. None of the so-called evidence the Israeli military produced to back up these claims was close to credible, and in many cases, the evidence was outright ludicrous. After killing al-Ghoul, they released a document claiming that he had received a military ranking from Hamas in 2007, when al-Ghoul was 10 years old.

In October 2024, they went a step further and placed six Al Jazeera journalists on a hit list, including Al-Sharif, claiming they were militants while openly threatening them. Hossam Shabbat, a Drop Site contributor, was named on the list and assassinated in March. The following day, the Israeli military bragged about his killing and said, “Don’t let the press vest fool you.” In April, they admitted to bombing a hospital to kill journalist Hassan Eslaih, who was recovering from his wounds in a previous assassination attempt barely a month earlier in an airstrike on a media tent outside Nasser hospital that killed two other journalists.

Al-Sharif had been directly and repeatedly threatened by the Israeli military for many months. In November 2023, he reported receiving multiple calls from Israeli army officers ordering him to cease coverage and to leave northern Gaza. He said he also received messages and voice notes on WhatsApp from Israeli forces disclosing that they knew his location. Less than three weeks after he was called by the Israeli army, his family home in the Jabalia refugee camp was bombed, killing his 90-year-old father, Jamal al-Sharif. The threats only escalated from there, with the Israeli military spokesperson posting videos taunting him online.

On July 23, the Israeli military spokesperson reposted a video online accusing al-Sharif of being a member of Hamas’s military wing after he reported on the famine spreading in Gaza. Al-Sharif repeatedly called on the world to protect him and other journalists in Gaza. “After I reported live on civilians collapsing from hunger, I was directly targeted with public incitement by the army’s spokesperson,” he wrote three weeks ago. “This is an attempt to silence us—and to cover up a genocide unfolding in real time. I call on international officials, human rights defenders, and global media to speak out and share this message. Your voice can help stop the targeting of journalists and protect the truth.” He characterized Israel’s threats as “Silence or Death,” and he vowed not to be silent.

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement the next day saying it was gravely concerned for Al-Sharif’s safety and said he was being “targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign,” while the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Irene Khan called Israel’s threats “a blatant attempt to endanger his life and silence his reporting on the genocide in Gaza.”

Israel paid no heed, assassinated him, and proclaimed it had “struck the terrorist Anas Al-Sharif, who posed as a journalist for the Al Jazeera network.”

Footage of the aftermath of the attack is horrific. The mangled corpses of Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh can be seen being pulled out of the wreckage while their colleagues scream over them.

Journalist Abdel Qader Sabbah, who provided reporting from Gaza City for this article and was a close friend of al-Sharif, managed to keep filming as he came upon their bodies. Sabbah had been with al-Sharif just two days prior, helping him to set up a live shot to go on air. He said of his conversation with al-Sharif that, “We understand these are our last days.”

The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on the media tent outside Shia hospital in Gaza City. August 10, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah)

“All the journalists, or dear colleagues, who tried to convey this truth—the occupation killed them after threats. It threatened and carried out its threats. No one can deter it, it does what it wants, it kills,” Sabbah later said in a social media post on Monday. “Everyone tries to stop the occupation from killing journalists and colleagues…But there is no deterrent, rather, there's growing insolence.”

He added, “But we can say that no matter how much you kill and assassinate—and this is what I heard today from all the journalists at the cemetery this morning—they will continue. What you want to achieve by silencing us or preventing the truth, that will not be possible for you. We are all on the same path. 237 journalists—even if they become 500—we will continue. Don't expect any one of us to stop or to give up the message just because you killed one of us.”

Despite the brazen nature of Al-Sharif’s killing, the reaction and coverage from western media institutions remained muted or otherwise repeated Israel’s absurd justifications. Reuters’s headline parroted Israel’s false claims: “Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader.” Canada’s National Post ran a headline based solely on Israel’s statement that Al-Sharif orchestrated rocket attacks for Hamas. The BBC in its own coverage lent credence to Israel’s justification for Al-Sharif’s assassination. Today, protesters gathered outside the BBC’s offices in London for a vigil and presented a banner that read “You killed Anas.”

The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., said it was “saddened and troubled” by al-Sharif’s killing and issued a boilerplate call for “a thorough and transparent examination of the circumstances surrounding al-Sharif's death” despite the fact that Israel had openly threatened al-Sharif for months and publicly announced it had killed him.

Like journalists in Gaza before him, including his close friend, Hossam Shabbat, al-Sharif was well aware he would likely be killed and pre-wrote a posthumous letter in April to be published after his death. We are republishing it in full:

This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings.

Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabalia refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (Al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final. I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification—so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.

I entrust you with Palestine—the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.

I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor 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. I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed.

I entrust you with my dear son Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission.

I entrust you with my beloved mother, whose blessed prayers brought me to where I am, whose supplications were my fortress and whose light guided my path. I pray that Allah grants her strength and rewards her on my behalf with the best of rewards.

I also entrust you with my lifelong companion, my beloved wife, Umm Salah (Bayan), from whom the war separated me for many long days and months. Yet she remained faithful to our bond, steadfast as the trunk of an olive tree that does not bend—patient, trusting in Allah, and carrying the responsibility in my absence with all her strength and faith.

I urge you to stand by them, to be their support after Allah Almighty. If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting.

O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it.

Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.

Anas Jamal Al-Sharif

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GAZA CITY—President Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee toured an “aid distribution” site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Rafah in southern Gaza on Friday. During the U.S. envoy's highly stage-managed visit, at least 82 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the enclave, including 49 people seeking food aid with more than 270 injured.

The visit came as the leading international authority on food crises—the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—this week said that the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” warning that the situation has reached “an alarming and deadly turning point” and predicting “widespread death” without immediate action.

“A theatrical performance is currently taking place at the U.S. aid distribution centers, attended by Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff: A civilized distribution of aid, without repression and pepper gas, without gunfire or casualties, without stampedes," Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee and a coordinator for local NGOs based in Deir al-Balah, said. "Today, the goal is to discredit thousands of video clips, to wipe away the blood of nearly 1,000 starving martyrs and hundreds of wounded in the traps of humiliation.”

Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza reached a tipping point last month, with Palestinians collapsing in the streets and with men, women, and children dying from hunger and malnutrition on a daily basis. Three new deaths from the spreading famine were recorded by the ministry of health on Friday, bringing the total number since the start of the war to 162, including 92 children—many of them over the past three weeks alone.

Dead and wounded Palestinians seeking aid at the Zikim crossing brought to Hamad hospital and Shifa hospital in northern Gaza. August 1, 2025. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

On Friday, many dead and wounded Palestinians attacked by Israeli forces, while seeking food from United Nations convoys at the Zikim crossing in northern Gaza, were carried by people from the site to the steps of the shuttered Hamad hospital near the coast. Ambulances had been unable to reach the site of the attacks, but were waiting to transfer them to partially functioning hospitals in Gaza City. Some of the bodies carried into the hospital appeared emaciated.

Emergency workers wrapped the corpses in body bags and loaded them onto ambulances. At Al-Shifa Hospital, injured young men and boys were admitted to the medical facility in a seemingly endless stream, and many were suffering gunshot wounds. Family members wept over the corpses laid on the ground in front of the hospital entrance.

“The situation is hard. Deadly,” said Ahmed al-Madhoun, who was wounded in the leg trying to get food at Zikim and sat wincing in pain outside Shifa. “There were martyrs lying on the ground, wounded everywhere. It’s unreal. You see death with your own eyes,” he told Drop Site News. “I only gathered two cans of beans and a can of something else. I had just started getting out of the vehicle, and as soon as I got out, they opened fire on me. One person was martyred, and I was wounded. I kept crawling until I reached Hamad hospital.”

Fares Afana, the head of emergency and ambulance services in Northern Gaza, told Drop Site that at least 14 aid seekers had been killed at Zikim on Friday and more than 150 wounded.

“The Israeli occupation continues to target those waiting for aid in the Zikim area,” Afana said. “This method of distribution—we’ve spoken about it often—is a humiliating way to treat our Palestinian people.” He added, “What stood out yesterday, and today, was gunfire aimed at upper body parts: the chest and head…All the people waiting for aid are unarmed civilians. They pose no threat to the occupation forces, so there’s no justification for this direct targeting of hungry, aid-seeking Palestinians.”

Meanwhile, Witkoff posted photos on X donning a flak jacket and a black MAGA hat. He was flanked by armed guards as he met with officials at the GHF site in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which has been razed to the ground and ethnically cleansed by the Israeli military. He said that he spent over five hours inside Gaza “level setting the facts on the ground, assessing conditions, and meeting with [the GHF] and other agencies…to give [the president] a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation, and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza.”

Huckabee, in a post on X that was quickly deleted, claimed Palestinians in Gaza “love Trump” and said that Palestinians refer to “one of the few” remaining buildings still standing in Rafah as “Trump tower.” He later posted that the visit was “to learn the truth about [GHF] aid sites,” adding “We received briefings from [the Israeli military] and spoke to folks on the ground. GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!”

Public Relations and The Facts on The Ground

The PR-oriented visit stood in stark contrast to the scenes of chaos and bloodshed from the daily aid massacres of starving Palestinians, since the GHF took over aid distribution in Gaza in late May. The GHF had established just four hubs in remote, militarized zones—three in the south and one in Wadi Gaza—and none in northern Gaza, where scant deliveries of UN aid convoys have been allowed in.

Between May 27 and July 31, at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food—859 in the vicinity of the GHF sites, and 514 along the routes of food convoys—according to the UN. Most of the killings were committed by the Israeli military but also by U.S. security contractors and armed Palestinian groups allied with Israel.

International outcry over the images and increasing reports of starvation-related deaths in Gaza prompted Israel last week to announce that it would impose “humanitarian pauses” for 10 hours a day in parts of Gaza, allow in more aid along secure routes, and allow airdrops of food. The measures have had little effect on the ground, according to aid workers in Gaza, the UN, and international NGOS.

Since the so-called “humanitarian pauses” were put in place on Sunday, at least 593 Palestinians were confirmed killed across Gaza, according to health ministry figures and news reports, including 300 seeking aid, and over 1,967 injured.

The “secure routes” inside Gaza that Israel said it would designate for humanitarian aid convoys—from 6  a.m. to 11  p.m.—were said to include corridors through Zikim, Netzarim, a direct road to Deir al-Balah, and two “central routes.” But on Thursday, the UN raised serious doubts about access and safety. “Despite Israeli announcements regarding the designation of convoy routes as secure, trucks continue to face long delays that expose drivers, aid workers and crowds to danger,” UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said, adding that only “a single route has been made available” for teams exiting Kerem Shalom, where Israeli forces maintain “an ad hoc checkpoint.”

UNOCHA data underscores the dysfunction: of the 92 coordinated aid movements between last Wednesday and Tuesday, 16% were denied outright, 26% were approved but blocked or delayed, 47% were fully facilitated, and 11% were withdrawn for logistical or security reasons.

Afana—the head of emergency and ambulance services in Northern Gaza—said one of the reasons for the looting was the targeting of local tribal groups trying to secure the convoys. “A group of tribal security men was targeted by surveillance drones, resulting in 6 martyrs among them,” Afana told Drop Site. The Gaza Government Media Office added that most aid never reaches UN warehouses. Instead, they are either unloaded by starving civilians who are often fired upon by Israeli forces, or looted by Israeli-backed armed gangs. Eleven tribal volunteers securing aid were also killed by Israeli forces earlier this week, the Media Office added.

Meanwhile, the already minuscule amount of food reaching Palestinians has barely increased. “The slight increase in what is coming in is not nearly enough to even scratch the surface to meet the people’s needs here on the ground,” Olga Cherevko, a staff member at the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, told Al Jazeera on Friday. “There are so many factors on the ground that point to the fact that, despite the slight relaxation of [Israel’s] various constraints [on aid entry], we’re still in the same situation,” Cherevko said. “People are continuing to starve, malnutrition rates continue to go up, people are risking their lives to get food, and there’s no change substantially and operationally, really.”

The Israeli military confirmed that six countries were allowed to airdrop aid into Gaza—including France, Germany, Spain, Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates—yet the amount remains woefully insufficient and has been criticized as a dangerous and ineffective method of aid delivery, with parcels landing in remote, militarized areas or falling into the sea.

“The ongoing airdrops and limited convoys have not succeeded in delivering food to the thousands of families living under severe conditions. The risk involved in accessing aid remains extremely high and the quantities that do make it in are far from enough to meet even the most basic needs,” Amawi said. “People are running long distances over sand, rubble, and danger zones just to be in the right place at the right time when the parachutes fall. I personally know individuals who have made this desperate run more than five times in a single day and still return empty handed. The emotional and physical toll is overwhelming. Imagine the weight of hunger, heat, fear, and disappointment repeated again and again. This is not humanitarian relief. It is more like torment and humiliation that robs people of their dignity. Aid should not require such suffering. It should reach people where they are, not force them into a race for survival that many, especially children, the elderly, the sick, simply cannot win.”

Human Rights Watch published a report on Friday concluding that “US-backed Israeli forces and private contractors have put in place a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”

The report said, “The dire humanitarian situation is a direct result of Israel’s use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war—a war crime—as well as Israel’s continued intentional deprivation of aid and basic services, which amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination, and acts of genocide.”

Jawa Ahmad and Herman Gill contributed to this report.

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GAZA CITY—An Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza City sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians on Friday killed at least 5 people and wounded 22, including several children. The attack came as Israel is under increasing international scrutiny and criticism for the outright famine it has pushed Gaza into, with scores of adults and children dying of hunger and malnutrition in the past few days alone.

Israel attacked the Cairo Elementary School for Girls in central Gaza City just as people had gathered in the school yard for Friday prayers, according to multiple eyewitnesses. Many of the displaced in the school are from areas in northern Beit Hanoun, which has been nearly completely destroyed and emptied by the Israeli military. So far, Israel has not published even a perfunctory justification for the strike and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions submitted by Drop Site about the attack.

“During Friday prayers, they bombed the school with the worshippers inside,” Ibrahim Abu Amsh, an eyewitness told Drop Site at the scene. “Most of the injured were children—defenseless, hungry children. All of them were in a state of exhaustion, unable even to stand—they probably hadn’t slept all night due to hunger.”

The Cairo Elementary School for Girls in Gaza City the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike. July 25, 2025. Shot by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

Dead bodies lay in the hallways, some ripped apart and limbs torn off. People fled the building in panic carrying children and few belongings. Blood covered the walls and floors. People lifted the dead and wounded, some badly burnt, to ambulances outside using blankets. At least one baby was among the dead, with the left side of its body blown off and flesh torn apart, being carried outside by emergency medical worker Omar Abu Mohsen.

“The school is full of displaced people—full of children, of women, of men, and of the elderly. The enemy is merciless,” Abu Mohsen said. “This is an enemy that seeks the extermination of the Palestinian people.”

Remnants of the munition photographed at the scene were identified as the rocket motor portion of a U.S.-manufactured Hellfire missile, according to a weapons expert who reviewed the footage.

“The lot number indicates it was made by Lockheed Martin in 2012,” Trevor Ball, a munitions researcher and a former U.S. army explosive ordnance disposal specialist, told Drop Site, who added that the specific designation was AGM-114K-2. “It is a precision weapon so it would hit where aimed unless there was a malfunction of some kind,” Ball said. “This specific variant features a fragmentation sleeve which increases the fragmentation generated by the munition to more effectively kill or injure people in its area of effect.”

Israel’s continued military assault on Gaza kills scores of Palestinians across the enclave on a daily basis. At least 89 were killed over the past 24 hours, according to the ministry of health. This follows 89 killed on Thursday. 113 on Wednesday. 77 on Tuesday. 134 on Monday.

“Isn't it enough that they’ve starved us to death? Isn't it enough that they’ve slaughtered us?” Zainab Adwan, who was displaced from Beit Hanoun and sheltering at the school, said. “The Israelis can’t confront the resistance. If they were real men, they would go face the resistance fighters at the borders. There are no fighters here. Where are the resistance fighters? These are just civilians.”

Friday’s attack came as Israel’s campaign of forced starvation in Gaza has reached a tipping point into rapidly increasing cases of death. Over the past five days alone, at least 54 Palestinians have died, including over 20 children, as a result of starvation and malnutrition, according to the Ministry of Health. The widening famine is affecting the entire population in Gaza. People are arriving at emergency rooms in a state of exhaustion, hunger and dehydration. Doctors and journalists who care and report on the famine are themselves weakened and struggling to work. Hospitals have run out of key treatments and medicines to urgently treat the ballooning cases of malnutrition.

Starting on March 2, Israel cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine, and other aid to Gaza. In late May, it allowed in a trickle of aid through a system largely overseen by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The meager amount of food allowed in was only accessible at four distribution hubs located in militarized zones where Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries have shot and shelled at starving crowds killing over a thousand aid seekers in less than two months. In the face of increasing criticism, Israel is now trying to pin the blame for the spreading famine on the United Nations, claiming it is refusing to distribute aid even though Israel has actively prevented it from doing so.

On Friday, Israel said it would soon allow other countries to drop aid from the air into the Gaza Strip. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are expected to begin airdrops in the coming days. Aid drops have taken place a number of times in Gaza over the past 21 months, and have not resulted in sufficient amounts of aid reaching Palestinians, and have also led to death and injuries multiple times.

“Airdrops are the most expensive & inefficient way to deliver aid. It is a distraction to the inaction,” Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, said in a social media post. “Today, more children died, their bodies emaciated by hunger. The flawed distribution system (GHF) is not designed to address the humanitarian crisis. It’s serving military & political objectives. It’s cruel as it takes more lives than it saves lives. Israel controls all aspects of humanitarian access, whether outside or within Gaza.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.

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DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA—At 7 a.m. on Sunday, Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Heswan, a 26-year-old school teacher in Deir al-Balah received a message on his phone from the Israeli military. The communication included a map with expulsion orders for a part of the city covering several neighborhoods to the south.

“It was the hardest hour of my life,” Abu Heswan told Drop Site. “Just yesterday I was preparing to teach children. And now I had to decide what to carry, where to go, and wondering whether my family would survive.”

With a large family—a father, uncles, five brothers, two sisters, and all their children—he scrambled to think of what to do. “We asked ourselves: ‘Do we take the furniture or just blankets? Can we even carry anything at all? Where will we go?’”

The family decided to split up. Abu Heswan took most of the women and children to find shelter, while his father and brothers stayed behind to try and secure the house before departing. At around 4:15 p.m., the area was hit with heavy bombardment.

“I was meters away when I heard the explosion,” Abu Heswan said. “I knew it was our neighborhood. People were screaming, injured voices were calling for help. I panicked—my father, my brothers—they were still there.”

He rushed back to find his father injured, but alive. His uncle, 54-year-old Mohammad Shaaban Abu Heswan, had been killed by shrapnel. Beside him lay Abu Heswan’s 11-year-old cousin, Sama, bleeding profusely from her leg, which had been severed. They carried her to the hospital where doctors managed to save her life.

The family eventually fled from the south of Deir al-Balah, where the Israeli ground attack was concentrated, to the north of the city, where they now live crammed in a tent. “We didn’t take anything but the clothes on our backs,” he said.

Israel’s military campaign in Deir al-Balah on Sunday marked the first time since the beginning of the war 21 months ago that Israeli troops launched a major offensive on the city, located in central Gaza. Unlike every other major city or town in Gaza—including Gaza City, Khan Younis, Jabaliya, Rafah, Beit Lahia, and elsewhere—Deir al-Balah is the only city in Gaza that had not yet been subject to a major Israeli ground operation or suffered widespread devastation.

The displacement orders issued by the Israeli military on Sunday cover about 5.6 square kilometres (2.1 miles) of Deir al-Balah, spanning four neighborhoods that house between 50,000 and 80,000 people, including some 30,000 people sheltering in dozens of displacement sites, according to UN estimates. The expulsion area cuts through the city all the way to the Mediterranean coast, effectively cutting access between Deir al-Balah and cities to the south of Khan Younis and Rafah.

In addition to tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians, Deir al-Balah is also where the headquarters of several UN agencies and international NGOs are based.

On Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Israeli forces raided its main staff residence in Deir al-Balah, forcing women and children to forcibly displace on foot toward the coast. ”Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot, and screened at gunpoint,” the group said in a statement. “The latest evacuation order in Deir al-Balah has affected several WHO premises, compromising our ability to operate in Gaza and pushing the health system further towards collapse. WHO’s main warehouse located in Deir al-Balah is within the evacuation zone, and was damaged yesterday when an attack caused explosions and a fire inside.”

The United Nations moved most of its operations to Deir al-Balah after Israel invaded Rafah in May 2024, and the UN said it would remain in Deir al-Balah in defiance of Israel’s expulsion orders. “We are currently staying,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said during a press conference on Monday. “Deir al-Balah is our humanitarian hub. From there, staff is dispatched to different parts of Gaza. That’s where our equipment is. That’s currently where our headquarters are.”

The affected displacement area is also home to critical water infrastructure, including the Southern Gaza Desalination Plant, three water wells, a water reservoir, as well as a wastewater pumping station. “Any damage to this infrastructure will have life-threatening consequences,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

The latest directive means that nearly 88% of Gaza is now under displacement orders or within an Israeli “militarized zone,” meaning that over two million people are supposed to squeeze into a fragmented 12% of the enclave.

“It seemed the nightmare couldn’t possibly get worse. And yet it does,” said Volker Turk, the UN United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The assault on Deir al-Balah came as Israel’s campaign of forced starvation on Gaza is reaching a tipping point. 33 Palestinians have died of malnutrition and starvation over the past two days alone, according to the Gaza health ministry. There are reports of people arriving at emergency rooms in a state of extreme exhaustion and fatigue or collapsing in the streets.

Palestinians who try to get food from so-called “distribution hubs” run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or from the few UN trucks carrying flour allowed into Gaza are shot, shelled, and attacked by Israeli troops on a daily basis. Over 1,000 have been killed in aid massacres in less than two months.

“Stop the bloodshed. End the famine. People are fainting in the streets from hunger,” Ahmed Rayhan, a 25-year-old resident of Deir al-Balah, told Drop Site. “We need an immediate truce. We need open crossings for food, medicine, and to evacuate the wounded.”

Rayhan was forcibly displaced from his home in Deir al-Balah on Sunday along with his eight family members after Israel issued the expulsion orders. He found out when his neighbor received a call from the Israeli military with a recorded message. He said the attack on the city came in the afternoon. His 47-year-old relative, Khaled al-Fleet, was severely wounded when shrapnel lodged in his skull. “We didn’t sleep a single minute. The jets struck every five minutes. The helicopters were firing nonstop. The artillery never paused. And the quadcopters—those were the most terrifying—they entered homes, hovered, and fired.” He and his family eventually managed to move to a shelter in the center of the city.

More Statements from Western States Amid Genocide

Amid the continued Israeli military assault and starvation campaign, 28 countries, including major European powers like Britain and France, issued a joint statement on Monday saying “the war in Gaza must end now.”

“The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability, and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food,” the statement said. “We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life saving work safely and effectively.”

Israel and the U.S. rejected the statement. In a post on X, U.S ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said: “Disgusting! 25 nations put pressure on Israel instead of savages of Hamas! Gaza suffers for 1 reason: Hamas rejects EVERY proposal. Blaming Israel is irrational.”

While the statement by European and other nations was strongly worded, it offered no changes in policy.

“This was a deliberate statement [by Western nations] to divert attention from their refusal to take any meaningful action to achieve the objectives they lay out,” Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and a former UN official who worked as a special adviser on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, told Drop Site. “They have all the leverage they need, all the means they need, to more or less instantaneously bring about the objectives that they claim they are seeking to achieve, but they have made a deliberate policy choice not to do so, and their primary contribution in this genocide is to send weapons to Israel, to ensure that there are no meaningful consequences for Israel.”

“The Trump administration at least had the decency and the honesty not to pretend to care,” Rabbani added. “But these European and other western governments put out a statement that they know is meaningless, that is basically designed as a sop to public opinion to give the impression of actually caring, of actually doing something while using that as a cover to continue with business as usual.”

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GAZA CITY—Israel's war of extermination in Gaza continues to plunge to new depths of horror. Starving Palestinians have begun to collapse in the streets and die of hunger as a result of the siege. Those who try to get food are gunned down in ever deadlier aid massacres. The Israeli military issues frequent mass expulsion orders and further expands its ground operations, slicing up the enclave and forcibly displacing Palestinians into more concentrated zones. All the while, the relentless aerial assault and ground attacks persist.

Over the past five days alone, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to ministry of health figures. The confirmed death toll since the beginning of the war crossed 59,000 on Monday in what is widely acknowledged to be a vast undercount. Over the past two months, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed as they are forced to seek aid in militarized zones in a system mostly overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy U.S.- and Israeli-backed group.

One of the deadliest days for aid seekers came on Sunday, when over 70 people were killed, at least 67 of them in northern Gaza where Israeli troops opened fire on crowds trying to get food from a World Food Program convoy entering through the Zikim crossing.

“The tank came, surrounded us, and started shooting at us and we kept raising our hands,” Ibrahim Hamada, who was wounded in the leg, told Drop Site as he lay on a hospital gurney wincing in pain. “There were many martyrs, no one was able to retrieve them. I crawled on my stomach just to reach a car to take me to the hospital,” he said. “I went there to eat, because there was no food at home.”

Scenes from Shifa hospital after Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid near the Zikim crossing. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah. July 20, 2025.

Over 150 people were wounded in the attack. Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City was overwhelmed with the dead and wounded, most of them young men and boys. Malnourished, gaunt faces poked out of white shrouds laid over their bodies on the ground. At the nearby Sheikh Radwan clinic, more than a dozen corpses in white body bags were lined up in the courtyard. Relatives searching for their loved ones came and gingerly pulled back part of the surface of the body bags to peer inside and see if they recognized anyone.

“The situation is very difficult. We transported the martyrs, as you can see, and moved the injured from a place close to the area that was targeted by quadcopter bombs, gunfire, or by the new [weaponized] crane located at the aid distribution site,” said Mohammed al-Hout, an emergency medical worker with the Red Crescent. “People were shot in the head or the feet.… Some of the martyrs have shattered skulls.”

Scenes from Sheikh Radwan clinic after Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid near the Zikim crossing. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah. July 20, 2025.

The UN World Food Program said in a statement that 25 trucks carrying food entered Gaza on Sunday through the Zikim crossing “destined for starving communities in northern Gaza.”

“Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies,” the WFP said. “As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers, and other gunfire.” The statement added: “These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation.”

Also on Sunday, nine Palestinians were killed near an “aid distribution” hub in Rafah run by the GHF. The killings happened at the same site where over 20 people had been killed a few days earlier when GHF guards gassed starving Palestinians fenced in at the hub, causing many to die from suffocation and a stampede.

These daily killings of Palestinians desperate for food and an imminent famine have combined to create an unprecedented emergency in Gaza. Israel’s full-spectrum blockade imposed on March 2 was nominally lifted on May 27 when meager amounts of aid began to be distributed to four militarized GHF hubs, three of which are located in the southern end of Gaza and one in Wadi Gaza. With the entire population on the brink of famine, Palestinians have no choice but to starve or risk their lives at so-called aid distribution hubs.

“People got hungry. They had no choice but to head towards the places of death. Either way, they’re going to die,” Abu Maher Al-Masry, who witnessed Sunday’s killings near the Zikim crossing, told Drop Site. “I am a grown man who can't even walk from hunger. It has been more than a day since I last had a single bite to eat.”

On Sunday, the health ministry said that 18 people had died from starvation over the past day. A day earlier, the ministry issued an urgent bulletin saying “unprecedented numbers of starving people of all ages are arriving at emergency rooms in a state of extreme exhaustion and fatigue. We warn that hundreds of those whose bodies have emaciated will be at risk of certain death as a result of starvation and their bodies' ability to withstand being overwhelmed.” Multiple reports have documented Palestinians sifting through garbage, scraping spilled food from the ground and eating from trash in the streets. The UN estimates that nearly one in three people is not eating for days.

Journalist Nahed Hajjaj posted on social media: “Do not be surprised when we journalists stop covering news here. I swear by God that today I could not get up from the hunger. There is no food. Even if someone has money, there is nothing in the market to even purchase.”

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif broke down in tears during a live broadcast outside Al-Shifa Hospital as a woman nearby collapsed from hunger. “People are collapsing in the streets from hunger—just falling right there from extreme starvation,” he said. In response, an Israeli military spokesperson jeered at Al-Sharif on social media, saying it was “nothing but crocodile tears that comes as part of a deceptive and staged Hamas performance.”

A total of 86 Palestinians, including 76 children, have died of hunger and malnutrition since the war began in what the health ministry on Sunday called “a silent massacre.”

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)—that used to help oversee aid distribution in Gaza before Israel imposed its blockade and barred independent organizations—said on social media that the crisis was “all man-made, in total impunity.”

“Food is available only a few kilometers away,” Lazzarini posted on X on Sunday. “UNRWA alone has enough stock available outside of #Gaza for the entire population for the next 3 months. We have not been allowed to bring any aid in since 2 March.”

The widening starvation and famine comes as the Israeli military continues to expand its ground invasion, issuing repeated displacement orders, with more than 86% of Gaza now in a so-called “red zone”—either under active displacement orders or in a “combat” zone.

For the first time since the beginning of the war, the Israeli military on Saturday issued displacement orders in an area of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, stretching to the coastline, along the so-called “Kissufim corridor.” Deir al-Balah is one of the few areas where Israeli ground troops have rarely operated and where the headquarters of several UN agencies and medical NGOs are based. The expulsion order effectively cuts access between Deir al-Balah and cities in the south of Khan Younis and Rafah. The Israeli military ordered people to head south to al-Mawasi, a tent camp on the southern coast that has been designated a “humanitarian zone,” which Israel has regularly bombed—most recently killing over 20 people, including children, sheltering in tents in an airstrike on Sunday.

Displacement orders were also reissued for northern Gaza, with the entire area north of al-Quds street and Salah Khalaf street designated an off limit “combat zone.”

Last week, the Israeli military announced it had finished bulldozing a 15-kilometer (9.3-mile) path through Khan Younis establishing what it called the "Magen Oz" corridor, cutting eastern Khan Younis off from the west side. The corridor is the latest of several zones that the Israeli military has carved through Gaza using wide-scale demolitions to divide the strip into separate regions: the Morag corridor, which adjoins Magen Oz and cuts Rafah off from Khan Younis; the Mefalsim corridor, which separates northern Gaza from Gaza City; and the Netzarim corridor, which runs along Wadi Gaza, cutting off the north from the south.

There are no signs that Israel’s assault will ease anytime soon and the international community has taken no steps to force Israel to end its attacks and to allow massive amounts of aid needed to stave off mass starvation.

“Damn this silence. Damn this famine,” said Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee and a coordinator for local NGOs. “Damn it all—humanity has collapsed.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.

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Story by Zaki Awadallah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous

KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA—Like hundreds of other young men, Haitham al-Batniji, 28, arrived at the path leading to a so-called “aid distribution” center run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), in Khan Younis early on Wednesday morning.

At around 6 a.m., word spread that the site had opened and the crowd ran towards the distribution hub, according to multiple eyewitnesses, located some two to three kilometers (nearly two miles) away. When they arrived, a nightmarish scene unfolded.

The site was closed, though sacks of food could be seen through a narrow and fenced in entrance. Starving and desperate, the crowd squeezed into the area. People were pushed up against the fencing, chest to back, hardly able to breathe. Some fell on the ground and were unable to get up. Then, according to eyewitnesses, GHF guards stationed nearby threw stun grenades and used pepper spray on the crowd, causing mayhem.

“It was a terrifying sight,” al-Batniji told Drop Site News. “The Americans were spraying pepper gas at us; it burns and affects the nervous system of the human body. You just can't handle it. You’re under pressure. The people are all pushed together and all trampling on each other. There is no air and you feel shortness of breath—everyone wants to go get their food.”

At least 21 people were killed in the incident, according to the Gaza health ministry, and 15 of them died from suffocation due to the gas and the stampede at the site—what the ministry now calls “death traps”—while six others were shot on the road leading to it. Among those killed was al-Batniji’s 22-year-old cousin, Wael. “As soon as he arrived, he fell and was trampled on by everyone.”

“Those behind me started to step forward and push each other. People threw each other onto the fence. The Americans refused to open the gate and left it closed,” Musa al-Quwaider, 23, told Drop Site. “The suffocating people were left lying on the ground, and no one came to them. They didn’t acknowledge them.”

Over 870 Palestinians have been killed in near daily aid massacres since the GHF began operating in Gaza in late May, with Israeli troops and American contractors opening fire on men, women, and children desperately seeking food. The health ministry noted that Wednesday’s incident marked the first time deaths have been recorded as a result of suffocation and a stampede, adding another horrifying dimension to the crisis.

“All the people were pressing all on top of each other to the point that there were children in front of me. [There was] maybe a 14- or 15-year-old boy saying to me, ‘Uncle, please save me,’” Mohammed al-Nams, 28, said, adding that GHF guards nearby refused to open the gate despite the crush of people. “I was surrounded for about 15 to 20 minutes, and we couldn’t catch our breath.”

Al-Nams said it was at that moment when the guards gassed the crowd. “It’s as if they meant to kill you. They meant to suffocate you.”

Medics at Nasser hospital found clear traces of gas inhalation on the victims’ bodies. “When these martyrs arrived at the Nasser Medical Complex morgue and were examined by the forensic doctor, traces of redness were found in eyes, dilated pupils, and the effects of the gas, along with sweating and suffocation, were all strong evidence that there were cases of gas poisoning and suffocation,” Dr. Marwan Al-Hams, director of field hospitals in Gaza, told Drop Site. “We received a report from the director of forensic medicine in Khan Younis, and he said that the cases were suffocation because of gas and because of the stampede.”

For the first time, the GHF released a statement acknowledging mass deaths at one of its sites, but it claimed, without evidence, that “agitators in the crowd” caused the stampede.

GHF operates four so-called “aid distribution” sites in Gaza, three of which are in militarized zones in the far south of Gaza and another in a militarized zone in central Gaza. Previously, the UN distributed aid through a coordinated delivery system that featured around 400 locations across Gaza. The Israeli- and U.S.-backed GHF system that replaced it has been criticized by the UN and hundreds of international NGOs as the weaponization of aid and part of an Israeli plan to displace Palestinians in Gaza to a small, concentrated zone in the south.

Palestinians often have to travel for hours to reach the GHF sites, while the organization has issued confusing and conflicting announcements for when the hubs are open. In a recent report, the UK-based research group Forensic Architecture found that the average duration of openings at GHF stations was just 23 minutes. “In 23% of cases we examined, GHF stations were announced to be closed again even before the previously announced opening time,” the report said. “60% of the announcements on GHF’s Facebook page were published less than one hour before the stations opened. Given that many civilians need to walk for up to three hours to reach the stations, it is unlikely they could arrive in time. As a result, civilians are queuing over night and some are moving their tents closer to GHF stations, contributing to an ongoing displacement of Gaza’s civilian population southwards, and towards militarized areas.”

Since Israel imposed a full-spectrum siege on March 2, the entire population of Gaza has been driven to the brink of famine and nearly 70 children have died as a result of acute malnutrition.

Despite the daily killing of people seeking aid at, or near, GHF sites, starving Palestinians say they have no choice but to risk their lives and go to try and get food. “I know that the place is dangerous, but there is nothing I can do,” Al-Batniji said. “What am I supposed to eat? How am I supposed to drink? How am I supposed to bake bread? How am I supposed to provide for my family? No water, no nothing.”

As Palestinians in Gaza await any word on the “ceasefire” negotiations, the ongoing emergency situation has only become increasingly dire for those caught between the “death traps” laid by the GHF and imminent starvation.

“We are approaching a moment when hunger is no longer just pain, but transforms into a killer roaming the alleys and shelters, causing people to collapse in groups in the streets, in their homes, and among the ruins of tents—simply because they can’t find anything to eat,” Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee and a coordinator for local NGOs, told Drop Site. “We are on the brink of a collective catastrophe. Death in Gaza today is no longer caused only by bombs. Hunger has become a silent weapon claiming lives without a sound—a form of slow, deliberate extermination.”

Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.

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GAZA CITY—Influential clans, tribes, and community leaders in Gaza have joined forces to launch an independent effort to protect aid convoys and to prevent chaos and looting. The endeavor comes one month after the U.S. and Israel launched a so-called “aid distribution” project that has enabled Israeli forces to kill starving Palestinians every day as they desperately try to get food to feed their families. Since the beginning of the “aid distribution” charade, Israeli forces have killed at least 549 people.

On Tuesday, the National Gathering of Palestinians Tribes, Clans, and Families convened a meeting in Gaza City to launch the initiative. “These trucks arriving in besieged Gaza—which has been starved for 90 days by our enemy—must reach their rightful recipients, the needy,” said Abu Salman al-Mughni, a tribal leader. “They must not go to a corrupt group of thieves and rogue merchants to be sold in the markets at exorbitant prices that no one can afford. For this reason, the tribes, from all factions, have united to secure these trucks, ensuring they reach the warehouses and are then distributed fairly to all our people.”

The effort succeeded in securing a rare shipment of dozens of UN aid trucks that entered through the Zikim crossing on Wednesday; passed through Rashid street, a coastal road, without incident; and arrived at UN warehouses where people lined up to receive the aid. The tribes and community leaders prevented crowds from approaching the area the trucks passed through by erecting a series of barricades and forming human chains. Men associated with the tribes climbed atop the trucks—some armed with rods and others with guns—to escort the trucks to the warehouses.

Video credit: Abdel Qader Sabbah

The process stood in stark contrast to previous scenes where, absent any distribution system, thousands of desperate people overwhelmed aid convoys, with Israeli soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing dozens of Palestinians on a daily basis.

“We advise everyone to take a firm stand with their sons and youth to prevent them from heading to the death traps,” Abu Samed Abu Rawaa, another tribal leader involved in the effort, told Drop Site. “We are the protective shield. Everyone must understand that it is the occupier who seeks to spread chaos—they are the ones who want our people to appear this way…to portray our people as barbaric.”

The most prominent figure in Gaza accused of looting aid trucks is Yasser Abu Shabab, a 32-year-old who was previously jailed in Gaza for drug trafficking. Abu Shabab is now the head of a powerful group called the “Anti-Terror Service” that is armed by the Israeli military and has been widely accused of looting aid convoys.

In their remarks, tribal and clan leaders singled Abu Shabab out by name, warning that anyone associated with him would be dealt with harshly. “[Israel] propped up that disgraced and condemned Abu Shabab in order to spread corruption in the land,” Dr. Alaa El-Din Al-Aklouk, a leading member of the National Gathering of Palestinian Tribes, Clans and Families, said. “Some of our sons and family members join Abu Shabab and run around in order to recruit people. You men must advise your sons and youth to stay away from this filthy germ created by the occupation.” Echoing comments by Israeli officials, Shabab has blamed Hamas for looting aid trucks without providing any evidence—a claim that both the UN and international organizations have also denied.

Hours after the tribal and community-led initiative to secure the aid convoys was launched on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a joint statement accusing Hamas of stealing the aid and ordered the Israeli military to prevent it.

In response, the Government Media Office in Gaza said the Israeli government was “promoting lies” in order to “legitimize the continued blockade, starvation, and the prevention of humanitarian aid.”

“This tragedy is for whom?”

Israel imposed a full-spectrum siege on Gaza on March 2, with no food, medical supplies, fuel, or other humanitarian goods allowed to enter for nearly three months—the longest total blockade since Israel’s genocidal assault began. The Israeli siege brought the entire population of Gaza to the brink of famine, with malnourished children dying of hunger.

On May 27, the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing a trickle of aid through four militarized distribution hubs, three in remote parts of southern Gaza and one near Wadi Gaza. The project was condemned by the U.N. and international organizations—which previously led aid distribution in Gaza—as a weaponization of aid. The scheme forced thousands of desperate Palestinians to walk for hours over long distances through Israeli military zones to reach the hubs. Separate from the GHF system, a small number of U.N. aid trucks, mostly carrying flour, has also sporadically been allowed in. The total amount of aid being distributed is not nearly enough to stave off mass starvation, according to the U.N.

Israeli troops have shot at, shelled, and attacked the crowds with tanks and quadcopters on a daily basis both at, or near, the GHF hubs, and as they gathered near the UN aid trucks. Over the past four weeks, at least 549 Palestinians have been killed and over 4,066 injured, according to the Gaza health ministry, in what are now commonly called “aid massacres.”

Meanwhile, the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF) labeled the GHF aid distribution scheme “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid" and called for it to be “immediately dismantled.” The group said in a statement on Friday that the GHF “is degrading Palestinians by design, forcing them to choose between starvation or risking their lives for minimal supplies.”

Last week, the White House and State Department authorized a $30 million USAID grant to the GHF, with possible additional grants of $30 million that could be dispersed on a monthly basis.

The executive chairman of the GHF, Johnnie Moore—an evangelical Christian and a former Trump adviser—has rejected all criticism of the GHF and echoed Israeli talking points that deny the mass killing of civilians by Israeli troops at, or near, GHF hubs. “The US endorsement of the effort is Exhibit A that it is actually working, despite a disinformation campaign that is very deliberate and meant to shut down our efforts,” Moore said in a televised interview on Sky News on Friday. “The IDF is a professionalized military. Hamas is intentionally harming people for the purpose of defaming what we’re doing.”

His comments came despite revelations published by Haaretz on Friday that confirmed what Palestinians in Gaza have been saying for the past four weeks—that Israeli soldiers are opening fire on unarmed Palestinians gathering near food distribution sites, even when they posed no threat. In the report, soldiers said Israeli commanders instructed troops to shoot at civilians approaching aid sites before they opened or after they closed—using machine guns, mortars, and grenades. Soldiers described systematic live fire, including from tanks and said the killings weren’t isolated mistakes but part of a pattern dubbed “Operation Salted Fish”—the Israeli version of Red Light, Green Light. “We shoot, they run, we shoot again,” one soldier said. “This is our communication.”

The association of tribal and community leaders have said they will continue their efforts to protect and organize the limited amount of aid that is being allowed into Gaza. “We pledge to stand by our people during this unjust siege,” al-Mughni said. “Every day, we are losing 40 or 50 martyrs. This tragedy is for whom? And at what cost? We must put an end to this destructive phenomenon.”

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DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA—With the world’s attention on Iran, Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza has reached new and horrifying depths. Every single day, starving Palestinians are forced to journey to remote areas to try and get food and attacked en masse, turning so-called aid distribution sites into open killing fields.

The attacks on Palestinians seeking food have dramatically increased over the past week, with dozens of people being shot and shelled on a daily basis. The death toll from the past few days alone is shocking: at least 38 people were killed on Monday, 59 on Tuesday, 22 on Thursday, and 35 on Friday. Over 400 have been killed and more than 3,000 wounded since late May in what the Gaza health ministry calls “aid massacres”—a new term added to the Gaza genocide lexicon.

Ahmed Nejm, a 28-year-old currently displaced with his family of 10 in Deir al-Balah, is in a wheelchair, unable to walk after he was wounded in an Israeli attack on a gathering of Palestinians seeking aid near Wadi Gaza (the Netzarim Corridor) on June 11. He went to the site fully aware of the risks.

“We are trying to manage during this famine,” Nejm told Drop Site. “There’s no bread and no flour. This is what made us go to try and find aid.” He said he arrived with his cousins and neighbors to the site before dawn to wait alongside hundreds of others. Hours later, the Israelis attacked without warning, opening fire with live ammunition and quadcopters. Dozens were killed, including Nejm’s 15-year-old cousin Abdulrahman. Covered in blood, Nejm managed to crawl away as the bullets kept coming. Ambulances were unable to reach the area and he was eventually carried to Al-Aqsa hospital. “We were in an area [the Israelis] had marked as green on the map. I don’t know why they started firing,” he said.

The worst aid massacre came on June 17, when at least 59 Palestinians were killed and over 200 wounded as they gathered to receive flour rations in Khan Younis. Nasser hospital was overwhelmed with casualties. “The medical team responding to the influx of patients had to clear the maternity ward to make space for the wounded, turning delivery rooms into emergency operating theaters. Many of the injuries required amputations to save the patients' lives,” Doctors Without Borders, which was operating in Nasser, said in a statement. “Every day Palestinians are met with carnage in their attempts to receive supplies from the insufficient amount of aid trickling into Gaza.”

“Palestinian lives have been so devalued. It is now the routine to shoot & kill desperate & starving people while they try to collect little food from a company made of mercenaries,” UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said in a social media post on Wednesday. “Inviting starving people to their death is a war crime. Those responsible [for] this system must be held accountable. This is a disgrace & a stain on our collective consciousness.”

The trickle of supplies that the Israelis have allowed to enter has done almost nothing to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Between March 2 and May 27, Israel imposed a full spectrum blockade, allowing no food or supplies to enter. On May 27, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by the U.S. and Israel, set up a few militarized distribution hubs in the south. The project was condemned by the UN and international organizations as a weaponization of aid. Israel has also allowed a very limited number of UN aid trucks to enter Gaza through the Zikim crossing in the north.

Video of Palestinians in northern Gaza gathering for aid. By Abdel Qader Sabbah.

Since the end of April, the number of meals prepared by community kitchens in Gaza has reduced by 83%. Between March and May, the rates of acute malnutrition across Gaza have more than doubled and the entire population is hungry and on the brink of an all out famine, according to the UN.

“Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth,” Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in televised remarks in May. ”It’s the only defined area—a country or defined territory within a country—where you have the entire population at risk of famine.” Israel, he said, is intentionally preventing the delivery of aid, using food as a weapon of war. “The aid operation that we have ready to roll is being put in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations, not only in the world today, but in recent history of global humanitarian response anywhere. The blockade and the tight control of the operation is imposed by a party to the conflict—the occupying power, Israel in Gaza.”

The escalating attacks have come amid severe disruptions to internet and telecommunications networks. Israeli attacks in June severed fiber optic cables, causing complete internet connectivity outages with only limited service restored and increasing the risk of a total communications collapse across Gaza. In addition to fewer images and reports emerging from the enclave, humanitarian coordination inside has been severely affected and Palestinians are increasingly struggling to access life-saving information and emergency services or reach friends and family.

“The situation is really difficult at the moment,” Dr. Yahya al-Agha, a physician at Nasser hospital wrote to Drop Site in a message on Friday. “Communications are down in Khan Younis and we are struggling to access the internet,” he said, explaining that he is only able to send messages from certain locations using an eSIM to connect to Israeli cell networks.

UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who was recently in Gaza, said in a statement the communications blackout is directly contributing to the massacres. “There have been instances where information [was] shared that a [distribution] site is open, but then it’s communicated on social media that they’re closed, but that information was shared when Gaza’s internet was down and people had no access to it,” he said.

Meanwhile no fuel has entered Gaza for more than 100 days, threatening a complete shutdown of field hospitals, supply deliveries, and critical medical equipment, with the UN warning that care units essential for births and medical emergencies will shut down and newborns dependent on ICU machines will suffocate.

The Israeli military continues to issue mass displacement orders and expand so-called combat zones, including one announcement on June 13 that covered vast segments of all five governorates in the Gaza Strip and one today covering large swathes of Gaza City. Over 82% of the Gaza Strip has been designated a red zone since March 18, when Israel resumed its full scale genocidal assault and more than 680,000 people have been newly displaced over the past three months.

The confirmed health ministry death toll since the start of the genocide now stands at over 55,700—5,400 of them killed since March 18—numbers acknowledged to be vast undercounts, with many thousands missing under the rubble.

Israeli attacks on civilians trying to access food have occurred both at GHF aid distribution points and in non-GHF areas where thousands have gathered to wait for the trickle of UN aid trucks that have been allowed into Gaza.

Ahmed Matar, a 20-year-old former information technology student at Al-Aqsa University, was killed on June 10, as he waited to receive aid near the Netzarim Corridor on Rashid street, a coastal road. Desperate for food, he arrived there at 4:30 in the morning after hearing trucks carrying aid would arrive early that morning, according to his cousin Nayfah Matar, 20. At 6:00 a.m, the Israeli military opened fire and bombed the crowd of thousands that had gathered in the area. Matar was struck in the leg and abdomen and died. A neighbor recognized him and carried him to Al-Quds hospital. “When his father arrived to see him, he collapsed on the spot from the horror of the scene and the shock of seeing his son killed, soaked in his own blood,” Nayfah said. “To this day, his father has not fully comprehended his death.”

“Ahmed is one of thousands who lost their lives due to the war and the Zionist occupation. Their hopes and dreams were destroyed, and they lived the most difficult days of their lives: displacement, oppression, humiliation, and famine,” she added. “The occupation continues to commit endless massacres against Palestinians without pause.”

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JABALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, GAZA—It was just after sunset on Friday when an Israeli missile slammed into an UNRWA building in the middle of Jabaliya refugee camp in north Gaza, killing four people—including a child, according to eyewitnesses—and severely damaging a food distribution center, warehouse, and health center run by the UN refugee agency.

“The entire area was destroyed and turned to rubble,” Al Moatassem Shalayel, 20, who had left the area moments before, told Drop Site. Shalayel’s 45-year-old uncle, Ehab Abu Hussein, was killed in the bombing. “We’re gathering his belongings, like his prayer beads and his cap. His body was torn apart, but we want to keep any memory of him.” Shalayel lost multiple family members over the course of the war. “I don’t have any uncles or aunts left now, only my grandmother,” he said.

Soon afterwards, the Israeli military spokesperson said they attacked Jabaliya using aerial surveillance and precision munitions.

“Everything was shut down and bombed. It’s all gone now, completely destroyed,” Shalayel added. “[Israel’s goal] is to starve and suffocate the people. Their aim is to keep us from eating or drinking. They just want to leave us hungry.”

The May 9 attack on the UN distribution center came as part of Israel’s scorched-earth bombing campaign that resumed in full force on March 18 following a brief “ceasefire.” Since then, Israel has targeted charity kitchens, displacement camps, schools, hospitals, so-called “humanitarian zones,” and other civilian gatherings on a regular basis. On Saturday alone, Israeli airstrikes bombed two tents used for preparing food in Khan Younis and Gaza City.

Over 2,700 Palestinians have been killed over the past seven weeks, including more than 900 children, according to the Gaza health ministry. The official death toll since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal assault is nearly 53,000, with many thousands more missing under the rubble.

Israel has also imposed a full spectrum blockade on Gaza since March 2, denying entry to all food, medicine, fuel, and other basic supplies in a policy of forced starvation and collective punishment—now in its third month. Thousands of Palestinians are suffering from acute malnutrition, including thousands of children, as Gaza has been plunged into the worst humanitarian crisis since the war began.

Aid organizations have stopped food distribution and bakeries have closed. Over the past several days, a third of UN-supported community kitchens—which are a last lifeline for much of the population—have shut down due to the depletion in food supplies and limited access to fuel. “We live off charity kitchens. Every day, they bring us lentils, they’re exhausting us with lentils,” Tala Ghassan Al-Masri, 13, who survived Friday’s bombing in Jabaliya, told Drop Site. “I wish I could eat bread, fried potatoes, tomatoes, and things my sister and mom used to make for us.”

Markets are almost empty and prices for basic items like flour or vegetables have skyrocketed. Nine-year-old Hala al-Ghandour was in a nearby market in Jabaliya on Friday when the Israeli airstrike hit the UNRWA building. “I heard a loud sound and saw a flash and an explosion,” she said. “I was coming to buy one tomato and one cucumber. Everything is expensive, and we can’t afford much.”

Last week, Israel’s security cabinet reportedly approved a plan to further escalate its military offensive on Gaza and proposed a plan to deliver limited quantities of aid under severe restrictions—establishing militarized zones inside of Gaza where private contractors, potentially including those from a U.S. company, would distribute food through a process that includes highly restrictive security vetting and calorie-controlled quantities. Fifteen UN bodies and over 200 NGOs denounced the plan in a joint statement.

“This plan seems designed to reinforce Israeli control over life-saving supplies and it's a plan that will force people into military zones—completely putting them at risk in order for them to collect aid,” UNRWA spokesperson Tamara Alrifai told Drop Site. Alrifai said the plan not only runs “counter to humanitarian principles” but also it is “logistically unworkable.”

The plan proposes to allow the entry of sixty trucks of supplies per day, far below the minimum of at least 500 trucks a day that the UN says is required. “This is an attempt to impose an alternative to an internationally recognized humanitarian, multilateral system led by the UN that includes other humanitarian organizations. There is a whole ecosystem for the conduct and delivery of humanitarian assistance in emergencies that works, and this plan seeks to completely ignore that system and replace it,” she said. “This plan will endanger the lives of civilians, since they're going to be ‘allowed’—but in reality, forced—to go to Israeli designated distribution hubs in the south during continued bombing and hostilities.”

The Trump administration also appears to be moving ahead with its own plan for aid distribution, which would be spearheaded by a newly created non-governmental “foundation” and involve private security contractors, former U.S. military officers, and humanitarian aid officials. President Trump is scheduled to visit the region this coming week, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Israel’s continued siege and bombardment has also severely limited Palestinians’ access to water in Gaza. On Saturday, the Palestinian Water Authority issued a statement that the destruction of infrastructure and prevention of entry of fuel have led to a near total halt in water service provision, describing Gaza as “a region dying of thirst.” About 75 per cent of households reported deteriorating access to water over the past month, according to UNICEF, with acute watery diarrhea now accounting for a quarter of disease cases recorded in Gaza.

In Jabaliya, as in other areas, sewage networks have been destroyed or lack fuel to operate, leading to widespread sewage flowing in the streets and growing infestation of rodents and insects in overcrowded displacement shelters, according to the Jabaliya municipal officials.

“My message to the world is that we want this war to end, we want life to go back to normal,” Shalayel said. “We want to see good days in whatever is left of our lives. That’s all.”

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GAZA CITY—Three generations of the al-Khour family were wiped out when Israel bombed their family home in the al-Sabra neighborhood in central Gaza at dawn on April 26. The elderly patriarch of the family, Talal al-Khour, his wives, daughters, sons, and grandchildren were all killed in the attack. A total of twenty-two people—including twelve children—perished, their bodies blown apart and buried under the rubble.

"The airstrike occurred at dawn while we were asleep. Suddenly, we woke up to a blast that felt like an earthquake. We rushed into the street and found that the five-story home of the Al-Khour family had turned into a pile of rubble,” Mohammad Al-Ajla, a 37-year-old neighbor who helped retrieve the bodies, told Drop Site News. "As soon as the dust from the strike cleared, neighbors began trying to rescue members of the family. The recovery operation continued for eight straight hours. We saw bodies everywhere. There were children without heads."

With the help of residents in the area, Civil Defense teams were able to retrieve fifteen of the bodies, which were later buried together in a mass grave. The remaining bodies remain trapped under the debris. Emergency rescue crews were forced to dig through the wreckage with their bare hands as a result of Israel denying the entry of equipment into Gaza and deliberately targeting the little machinery available, according to the Civil Defense spokesperson, Mahmoud Bassal.

"We could hear the cries of the wounded trapped under the rubble, but we were helpless to reach them. Over time, the screaming faded, and we no longer knew whether they were still alive or had been killed,” Bassal told Drop Site. "Many lives could have been saved, but the ongoing blockade and the denial of essential tools eliminated every possible chance for rescue.”

Since Israel resumed its scorched earth bombing campaign on March 18, Gaza has been transformed into a desert of death, in which rubble and ruin form the backdrop for an unceasing campaign of mass killing. The Israeli military has carried out multiple airstrikes and shelling across the enclave on a daily basis, pounding homes, displacement camps, cafes, hospitals, charity kitchens, so-called “humanitarian zones,” and other civilian sites.

The scale of the attacks is almost impossible to track. On Wednesday alone, three residential buildings in the Nuseirat refugee camp were bombed; one of the strikes killed six members of one family, including three siblings, all children. In a nearby building, eight people in a single home were killed. In Jabaliya, at least three people from the same family, including two young girls, were killed in Israeli artillery fire. On the coast, west of Gaza City, a fisherman was killed while pulling his boat ashore. In western Khan Younis, an overnight drone strike on a tent killed six people, including children. This is not a comprehensive list and does not even cover a 24-hour period.

Over two days last week, the Israeli military also targeted and bombed over 30 bulldozers and other pieces of heavy machinery. Some of them had been donated during the “ceasefire” to clear rubble, repair critical infrastructure, and rescue people after airstrikes, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The scenes emerging from across Gaza, from Rafah in the south to Beit Hanoun in the north, are staggering in their horror. Children blown apart across rooftops or while riding their bikes; dead bodies strewn across a cafe, some still seated, slumped in their chairs; corpses wrapped in white body bags lined up alongside one another; suicide drones crashing into tents housing sleeping families; screaming parents and wounded children scattered in the streets.

“The massacres do not stop. We are being slaughtered from vein to vein,” Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif said in a social media post.

At least 2,300 Palestinians have been killed over the past six weeks alone—the equivalent of over fifty people killed every day. Over 740 of the dead are children, the Director of the Information Unit at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Zaher Al-Wahidi, told Drop Site. Since the start of the war, more than 2,180 families have been entirely annihilated—with all members killed—while more than 5,070 families have lost all members except for one surviving individual, according to the Government Media Office.

The relentless assault comes as Israel has imposed a policy of forced starvation on Gaza’s two million residents, sealing off Gaza completely and denying the entry of all food, fuel, medicine and other humanitarian goods since March 2—by far the longest blockade since the beginning of the war. More than 65,000 children in Gaza have been hospitalized with severe malnutrition, according to a statement this week by the Government Media Office.

Israel has made it clear that the intensifying military assault and the ongoing blockade are explicitly aimed at bringing Hamas to its knees. Negotiations for a ceasefire appear deadlocked with Israel scrapping crucial elements of the original three-phase deal signed by Hamas and Israel in January, and now pushing for Hamas to formally surrender, disarm, and exile its leadership as a condition to end the genocide.

Israel’s defense minister has reiterated that the denial of food, medicine, and other aid is being used to collectively punish the Palestinians of Gaza. "No humanitarian aid is about to enter Gaza,” Israel Katz said, announcing that “preventing humanitarian aid from entering Gaza is one of the main pressure levers."

Using starvation as a weapon of war has had a devastating effect. Last week, the UN warned that Gaza “is now likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023.”

The World Food Program recently announced that it had run out of food. “The situation is at a breaking point,” the organization said in a statement. Food prices have risen by 1,400 percent. With no remaining supplies of flour or fuel, Gaza’s bakeries have stopped functioning and remaining stocks of food are being rapidly depleted. The flour that is available is often insect-infested. Families are increasingly resorting to mixing crushed macaroni with flour to make bread and allocating just one piece of bread per family member per day.

With shortages of cooking gas and firewood, families are forced to burn plastic and other waste to cook the little food they have. People are foraging for wild plants and eating sea turtles that have washed ashore in order to survive. The UN last week said it identified 3,700 children suffering from acute malnutrition in March—now up to 80% from the month before. A total of fifty-three children have died of malnutrition since the war began.

The heads of twelve major aid organizations issued a joint statement last week warning that “Famine is not just a risk, but likely rapidly unfolding in almost all parts of Gaza,” and characterizing the situation in Gaza “one of the worst humanitarian failures of our generation.”

Over the past few weeks, the Israeli military has bombed the al-Ahli Hospital and the Al Durrah Paediatric Hospital, both in Gaza City; the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis and the Kuwaiti Field Hospital in Mawasi; and massacred fifteen emergency workers and first responders. The hospitals that are still standing are barely functioning, with severe shortages of medicine, equipment and doctors.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military continues to squeeze Palestinians onto smaller tracts of land within Gaza. About 70 percent of Gaza has been designated as “no-go” zones or placed under displacement orders. Over the past six weeks, roughly 420,000 Palestinians have been displaced yet again, with no safe place to go.

“This is deprivation by design,” the acting head of office for OCHA, Jonathan Whittall, said in a statement. “Land is being annexed from the north, from the east, from the south of the strip as forces advance…Gaza is being starved, it’s being bombed, it’s being strangled. This looks like the deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life.”

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MAWASI KHAN YOUNIS & JABALIYA—The Israeli military is using so-called suicide drones—highly precise attack drones—in strikes on displacement camps in Gaza that have killed at least 30 Palestinians, including 14 children, according to photos, videos, and eyewitness testimony obtained by Drop Site News.

In at least five separate strikes over the past week, including one in Jabaliya refugee camp, one in Beit Lahia, and three on families sheltering in Mawasi Khan Younis, Israel deployed attack drones called SkyStrikers, which are manufactured by Elbit Systems, the largest private defense contractor in Israel. Mawasi Khan Younis is designated as a “humanitarian zone” that the Israeli military has ordered Palestinians in Gaza to displace to yet has nevertheless repeatedly bombed. Photos and video of the drones’ remnants were reviewed and identified by Trevor Ball, a munitions researcher and a former U.S. army explosive ordnance disposal specialist.

“One-way attack drones are effectively missiles, and under most technical definitions they are considered missiles,” Ball said. “Effects-wise, these are pretty similar to the bombs and missiles they were using to strike tents and schools before. The biggest difference is these are loitering munitions, where they can circle a target for a period of time before engaging.”

Loitering munitions—also referred to as suicide drones or kamikaze drones—are outfitted with warheads and are designed to hover and locate a target before crashing into it at high speed.

According to promotional material from Elbit Systems, the SkyStriker “is a fully autonomous loitering munitions (LM) that can locate, acquire and strike operator designated targets with a 5 or 10 Kg warhead installed inside the fuselage, enabling high-precision performance.” The SkyStriker is powered by an electric engine that “offers a low acoustic signature, allowing covert operations at low altitude.” The Israeli military recently released a separate video showing suicide drones striking targets in Gaza.

Elbit, which first unveiled the SkyStriker in 2017, highlights the precision capabilities of the drone to “strike targets with pinpoint accuracy.” The company also points to the relatively low cost of “loitering munitions” for their ability to “carry out precision attacks without the high costs associated with expensive ammunition like guided missiles and rockets.” A promotional video by the company also showcases the SkyStriker’s capabilities, including hitting the exact center of relatively small targets.

Under a section titled “Minimizing Collateral Damage,” Elbit states, “The SkyStriker also has the rare ability to abort missions if necessary. If the situation on the target seems to be changed – such as the sudden appearance of non-involved civilians – the operator can command the munition to return to loitering mode before hitting the target, ready to re-engage when conditions are right.”

“I'm not sure why we are seeing them now,” Ball said about their use in Gaza. “They could be wanting to test them in a ‘real world’ environment, or it could be a change in how they are conducting strikes. It might be more efficient now for them to use these drones compared to other platforms (Hermes/Apache/Jet), especially with the smaller geographic areas people in Gaza are allowed by the IDF to occupy.”

Elbit Systems supplies hundreds of products to the Israeli military, including munitions, drones, guided rocket systems, reconnaissance capabilities and other systems. Israel’s war on Gaza has boosted its earnings, with the company last month reporting stronger quarterly profits, due in part to higher revenues from the war, and expecting continued growth in 2025 amid a spike in global defense spending.

The Israeli military did not respond to any specific questions submitted by Drop Site about the attacks.

April 17: Mawasi Khan Younis

On April 17, a SkyStriker drone smashed into a tent in Mawasi Khan Younis, near Asdaa—once an amusement park in Gaza—killing at least ten members of the Abu al-Rous family, including three women and five children. Footage from the site of the attacks shows the charred remains of a makeshift shelter, built out of corrugated metal and tarp in an open area by the side of a road. The parts of the SkyStriker were clearly visible at the site of the attack.

April 19: Mawasi Khan Younis

Two days later, on April 19, five people were killed in an attack by a SkyStriker drone on a tent housing displaced Palestinians near a British field hospital in Mawasi Khan Younis. Those killed included three members of the Abu al-Nida family, two of them women. Clothes, mattresses, and other household goods are visible in the wreckage near the remnants of the drone.

“This is the drone that hit us. There was a lot of fire,” Ziad al-Maghrabi, a neighbor who lives in an adjacent tent, told Drop Site, as he pointed to the remains of the SkyStriker. “What did we do so that they attack displaced people? They hit us in our tents with a plane like this—hitting people in dilapidated, worn out tents? People who are thirsty and hungry and they hit us with these planes? What’s the reason?”

April 21: Mawasi Khan Younis

On April 21, a SkyStriker drone attack on a tent opposite the Karza cafe in Mawasi Khan Younis killed a married couple, Hassan Abu Zeid and Israa al-Maghari. Footage and photographs of the aftermath show a destroyed tent alongside ripped mattresses and other belongings strewn on the ground. Again, the wreckage of the drone is clearly visible.

April 17: Beit Lahia

The Israeli military has also used SkyStriker drones in northern Gaza over the past week.

On April 17, a SkyStriker drone struck a tent in Beit Lahia, the northernmost town in Gaza, killing six members of the al-Atal family—a father, mother and their four children. The drone remnants are clearly visible.

April 17: Jabaliya refugee camp

In the early hours of April 17, an attack on a tent in eastern Jabaliya refugee camp killed seven members of the Asaliyah family—a married couple and their five children.

“At around 1:20 a.m., there was a sound like an earthquake in the neighborhood,” a relative of the victims, 27-year-old Ibrahim Asaliyah, told Drop Site. “We woke up in a panic and went to the tent and found the fire raging. We went in and found them in their beds with body parts scattered everywhere. We started gathering their body parts in nylon bags. ”

Photos from the site also show the wreckage of the tent and the remnants of the SkyStriker drone.

“I was a witness to the entire event. We picked up the suicide drone after it exploded—what appeared to be its wings. It was something terrifying,” Asaliyah said.

Another relative, 17-year-old Tawfiq Asaliyah, also woke up to the sound of the explosion and ran to the scene. “The suicide drone hit my cousin’s tent—we heard the explosion,” he said. “We knew they were martyred, they were asleep when it happened.”

“These missiles, they call them smart bombs or smart suicide drones,” Ibrahim Asaliyah said. “But what are these children guilty of? In the end, this is a war of ethnic cleansing.”

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Imprisoned Palestinian journalist and Drop Site contributor Mujahed al-Saadi was recently sentenced to an additional four months behind bars.

Al-Saadi was arrested on September 19 from his home in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, where he lives with his wife and three young children. An Israeli special forces unit broke down his door and beat him before hauling him away. (You can read more about the details of his arrest here.)

He was subsequently sentenced to six months in administrative detention, a mechanism used by Israeli authorities to detain Palestinians for months or years without charge or trial or the possibility of appeal.

Several days before his initial six-month prison term was scheduled to end last month, Israeli authorities extended his prison term by an additional four months, according to his colleague in Jenin. Al-Saadi will now remain behind bars until at least the end of July.

After being held at Megiddo prison, not far from Jenin, al-Saadi was transferred to Al-Naqab prison in the desert of southern Israel. Like other Israeli detention facilities, both Megiddo and Al-Naqab are notorious for abuse and mistreatment of prisoners. A report by the Palestinian human rights group al-Mezan on Al-Naqab prison documented “widespread and systematic use of physical and psychological torture and other inhuman and degrading treatment, medical neglect, and starvation policies.”

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A veteran journalist based in Jenin, al-Saadi has covered the region since 2012. He reported a story for Drop Site News in September on Israeli forces laying siege to hospitals in Jenin during its invasion of the city and refugee camp. In the course of his reporting, he and a group of colleagues came under fire from Israeli troops, who proceeded to charge at them at high speeds with bulldozers.

On May 11, 2022, al-Saadi was reporting on the aftermath of an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp. He was standing only a few feet from Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera journalist, when an Israeli sniper murdered her. (You can watch al-Saadi’s account of that day in the Fault Lines documentary, “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh.”)

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli authorities have arrested an unprecedented number of journalists and media workers in Palestine, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Nearly 90 journalists have been arrested over the past 18 months, with at least 35 of them still in detention.

Israel has killed over 210 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, making it the deadliest place in the world for journalists in living memory.

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