Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have held rallies and marches in cities around the world in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, demanding an end to Israeli attacks on the besieged and bombarded enclave as Israel-imposed starvation engulfs the entire population.
In London, the Metropolitan Police said it arrested more than 466 people at a protest on Saturday against the British government’s decision to ban the group Palestine Action.
British lawmakers proscribed Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation in July after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base and damaged planes as part of a series of protests. The group accuses the UK government of complicity in what it calls Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Protesters, some wearing black-and-white Palestinian scarves and waving Palestinian flags, chanted, “Hands off Gaza” and held placards with the message “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
In Turkiye’s Istanbul, thousands of protesters demanded more aid be allowed into the Strip, with organisers calling on the international community to take urgent action to end the humanitarian crisis.
Many also took to the streets in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to protest against the blockade and Western support for Israel, demanding the immediate and unrestricted delivery of aid into Gaza.
Several pro-Palestine rallies were also held across Spain, including in the capital, Madrid, to protest Israeli attacks and the starvation in the enclave. Carrying Palestinian flags, protesters shouted, “End to genocide”.
In Switzerland’s Geneva, thousands gathered at the Jardin Anglais to protest against famine and malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza resulting from the Israeli blockade. The crowd staged a sit-in, shouting in English, French and Arabic to demand an end to international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Large rallies showing support for those suffering in Gaza have also been held in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
From a festival celebrating the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples in El Salvador to solemn commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing in Japan and the ongoing Israel-induced starvation and malnutrition crisis in Gaza, here is a look at the week in photos.
Varsen Aghabekian Shahin says international community must take concrete steps to end Israeli impunity for abuses.
The international community must “shoulder its responsibility” and take action against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian foreign affairs minister has told Al Jazeera before an emergency United Nations Security Council session.
In an interview on Saturday, Varsen Aghabekian Shahin said the 15-member council must uphold international law when it convenes at UN headquarters in New York on Sunday to discuss the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The meeting was organised in response to Israel’s newly announced plan to seize Gaza City, which has drawn widespread condemnation from world leaders.
“I expect that the international community stands for international law and international humanitarian law,” Aghabekian Shahin told Al Jazeera.
“What has been going in Palestine for the last 22 months is nothing but a genocide, and it’s part and parcel of Israel’s expansionist ideology that wants to take over the entirety of the occupied State of Palestine.”
The Israeli security cabinet approved plans this week to seize Gaza City, forcibly displacing nearly one million Palestinians to concentration zones in the south of the bombarded coastal enclave.
Palestinians have rejected the Israeli push to force them out of the city while human rights groups and the UN have warned that the plan will worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and lead to further mass casualties.
Israel has pledged to push ahead with its plans despite the growing criticism, saying that it wants to “free Gaza from Hamas”.
The country’s top global ally, the United States, has not commented directly on the plan to seize Gaza City. But US President Donald Trump suggested earlier this week that he would not block an Israeli push to take over all of Gaza.
Aghabekian Shahin told Al Jazeera that if Trump – whose administration continues to provide unwavering diplomatic and military support to Israel – wants to reach a solution, Palestinian rights must be taken into account.
“There will be no peace in Israel-Palestine, or the region for that matter, or even the world at large, if the rights of the Palestinians are not respected,” she said, noting that this means a Palestinian state must be established.
The minister also slammed recent remarks from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the future governance of Gaza.
In a social media post on Friday, Netanyahu said he wants “a peaceful civilian administration” to be established in the enclave, “one that is not the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, and not any other terrorist organization”.
But Aghabekian Shahin said it’s up to Palestinians to decide who should govern them.
“The one that has the legal and the political authority on Gaza today is the PLO,” she said, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
“If Gaza wants to come back to the core, which is the entirety of the Palestinian land, then it has to become under the control and governance of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO.”
Aghabekian Shahin also condemned the international community for failing to act as Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have faced a surge in Israeli military and settler attacks in the shadow of the country’s war on Gaza.
“It is the inaction that has emboldened the Israelis, including the settlers, to do whatever they are doing for the last six decades, since day one of the 1967 occupation,” she said.
“The times are very dangerous now, and it’s important that the international community shoulders its responsibility. The impunity with which Israel was happily moving should stop.”
For more than 21 months, much of the international media danced around the truth about Israel’s war on Gaza. The old newsroom cliche – “if it bleeds, it leads” – seemed to apply, for Western media newsrooms, more to Ukraine than Gaza. When Palestinian civilians were bombed in their homes, when entire families were buried under rubble, coverage came slowly, cautiously and often buried in “both sides” framing.
But when the images of starving Palestinian children began to emerge – haunting faces, skeletal limbs, vacant stares – something shifted. The photographs were too visceral, too undeniable. Western audiences were confronted with what the siege of Gaza truly means. And for once, the media’s gatekeepers could not entirely look away.
The world’s attention, however, alerted Israel, and a new “hasbara” operation was deployed. Hasbara means “explaining”, but in practice, it’s about erasing. With Tel Aviv’s guidance, pro-Israel media operatives set out to “debunk” the evidence of famine. The method was fully Orwellian: Don’t just contest the facts. Contest the eyes that see them.
We were told there is no starvation in Gaza. Never mind that Israeli ministers had publicly vowed to block food, fuel and medicine. Never mind that trucks were stopped for months, sometimes vandalised by Israeli settlers in broad daylight.
Israeli officials, speaking in polished English to Western media, assured the public this was all a Hamas fabrication, as though Hamas had somehow managed to trick aid agencies, foreign doctors and every journalist in Gaza into staging hunger.
The propaganda machine thought it had struck gold with one photograph. A New York Times image showed a skeletal boy, Mohammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq. Israeli intelligence sources whispered to friendly outlets: He’s not starving. He has a medical condition. As if that somehow makes his horrific condition acceptable.
The Times went ahead and added an editor’s note to “correct” the record.
That’s how hasbara works – not by persuading people but by exhausting them. By turning every fact into a dispute, every image into a row. By pushing editors to “balance” a photograph of an emaciated child with a government news release denying he is hungry.
Imagine a weather report where one source says, “It’s raining,” and another insists, “No, it’s sunny,” while everyone stands outside, soaked from the downpour. Gaza is that drenched truth, and yet much of the Western news media still feels obliged to quote the weatherman in Tel Aviv.
Every honest report is met with a barrage of emails, phone calls and social media smears, all designed to create just enough doubt to make editors pull back.
But the claim “He’s not starving. He’s just sick” is not an exoneration. It’s an admission.
A child with a pre-existing medical condition who is brought to the point of looking like a skeleton means he has been deprived not only of the nutrition he needs, but of the medical care. This is forced starvation and medicide side by side.
Palestinian journalists inside Gaza, the only ones reporting since Israel banned all foreign media and killed more than 200 Palestinian journalists, are starving alongside the people they report on. In a rare joint statement, the BBC, AFP and Associated Press warned that their own staff members face “the same dire circumstances as those they are covering”.
At the height of the outrage over these photos last week, Israel allowed in a trickle of aid – some airdrops and 30 to 50 trucks a day when the United Nations says 500 to 600 are needed. Some trucks never arrived, blocked by Jewish extremists.
Meanwhile, a parallel mechanism for aid distribution has been funnelled through Israeli-approved American contractors, which purposefully create dangerous and chaotic conditions that lead to daily killings of aid seekers. Crowds of starving Palestinians gather, only to be shot at by Israeli soldiers.
And still, the denials persist. The official line is that this is not starvation. It’s something else – undefined but definitely not a war crime.
The world has seen famine before – in Ethiopia, in Somalia, in Yemen, in South Sudan. The photographs from Gaza belong in the same category. The difference is that here, a powerful state causing the starvation is actively trying to convince us that our own eyes are lying to us.
The goal is not to convince the public that there is no hunger but to plant enough doubt to paralyse outrage. If the facts can be made murky, the pressure on Israel diminishes. This is why every newsroom that avoids the word “starvation” becomes an unwitting accomplice.
Starvation in Gaza is not collateral damage. It is an instrument of war, measurable in calories denied, trucks blocked and fields destroyed.
Israel’s strategy depends on controlling the lens as well as the border. It goes as far as prohibiting journalists allowed on airplanes airdropping food from filming the devastation below.
For a brief moment, the publication of those photos of starving Palestinians broke through the wall of propaganda, prompting minimal concessions. But the siege continues, the hunger deepens and the mass killing expands. Now the Israeli government has decided to launch another ground offensive to occupy Gaza City, and with it, the genocide will only get worse.
History will record the famine in Gaza. It will remember the prices of flour and sugar, the names of children and the aid trucks turned back. And it will remember how the world allowed itself to be told, in the middle of a downpour, that the sky was clear.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Protesters from the Israeli activist group, Brothers and Sisters in Arms, etched an anti-war message in the sand near a US embassy building in Tel Aviv. It demanded President Donald Trump intervene to stop the war in Gaza.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ office said Israel’s decision to take control of Gaza City is a dangerous escalation that will lead to more “forced displacement, killings, and massive destruction.”
Beitar Jerusalem fans sparked chaos in Riga, hurling pyrotechnics and setting off flares during their loss to Riga FC, yet faced no repercussions.
Al Jazeera’s Nils Adler explores why Israeli clubs like Beitar continue to play in Europe despite fans chanting genocidal slogans and glorifying Palestinian hate.
Palestinians in Gaza City are facing the prospect of further displacement with a mixture of fear and defiance after Israel announced plans for a military takeover of the largest city in the enclave, where nearly a million people are currently sheltering.
The city was thrown into chaos on Friday after Israel’s security cabinet approved plans for the takeover, which would involve the forcible removal of Palestinians already displaced multiple times into concentration zones in the south.
“I swear to God that I have faced death like 100 times, so for me, it’s better to die here,” said Ahmed Hirz, who has been displaced along with his family at least eight times since Israel’s war began.
“I will never leave here,” he told Al Jazeera. “We have gone through suffering and starvation and torture and miserable conditions, and our final decision is to die here.”
That sentiment was shared by others who spoke to Al Jazeera. Rajab Khader said he would refuse to move to southern Gaza, to “stay in the streets with dogs and other animals”.
“We must stay in Gaza [City] with our families and loved ones. The Israelis will find nothing except our bodies and our souls,” he said.
Maghzouza Saada, who was previously displaced from northeastern Beit Hanoon, expressed her outrage over being forced to move again, when nowhere in the Strip could be considered safe.
“The south is not safe. Gaza City is not safe, the north is not safe. Where should we go?” she asked. “Do we throw ourselves in the sea?”
‘State of panic’
Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said residents had been in a “state of panic” since the early hours of Friday over Israel’s plans to ethnically cleanse the area.
He said that some had started to pack up whatever is left of their belongings. “Not because they know where they are going, but because they don’t want to be caught at the [last] moment. They want to be ready for the time the Israeli military is forcing them out,” said Mahmoud.
“The fear, the concern, the desperation are all on the rise. The Israeli military promises an evacuation zone where people, in fact, end up being killed in these areas,” he added.
Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network, said residents were tired of being forcibly and repeatedly displaced. This time, he said, the prospect of evacuation posed even greater dangers, with hospitals, water facilities and other infrastructure destroyed.
“Now, there is nothing to give to the people, and it’s risky,” he said.
“We have to move elders who cannot walk, and we have patients and injured people who cannot move. We cannot leave them behind, and we cannot give them services.”
Some 900,000 Palestinians at risk
As news of Israel’s controversial escalation sunk in, the military continued its attacks on the vulnerable population, killing at least 36 people since dawn – including at least 21 who were seeking aid – according to medical sources.
Among the day’s attacks, an Israeli drone targeted Gaza’s southern municipality of Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis city, killing two Palestinians, according to a source from Nasser Hospital who spoke to Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera Arabic reported that one aid seeker was shot dead by Israeli forces in northern Gaza. And at least two people were killed at an aid distribution site run by the controversial United States and Israel-backed GHF, which is slated for expansion under Israel’s new offensive.
Reporting from Jordan’s capital, Amman, Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid said that the notorious foundation, which currently runs four aid sites where over 1,300 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get food, mainly by Israeli forces, would be operating 12 more hubs in the enclave.
Abdel-Hamid said that Israel had not given an “exact timeline” for taking control of Gaza City, but that a ground offensive was in the offing, with “troop movement along Israel’s southern border with Gaza”. Forcibly removing up to 900,000 Palestinians from the city could, she said, take weeks.
In the longer term, military experts have said Israel’s plans – which would see it assume security control over the enclave, establishing an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority – could take years.
‘War crime’
Amid mounting global condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union and a number of countries, it was unclear what Israel’s chief military backer, the US, made of the plans.
US Vice President JD Vance declined to comment on whether his administration had been given prior notification about Israel’s Gaza City plans, but continued to withhold support for a Palestinian state and underlined that “Hamas can’t attack innocent people”.
Experts say Israel would not be able to move forward with its plan to take total military control of Gaza without billions of dollars in backing from Washington. And few have forgotten President Donald Trump’s stated desire to “clean up” Gaza and turn the enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
On Friday, Hamas called Israel’s plans for Gaza City a “war crime”, saying that the decision explained why the country had suddenly withdrawn from the last round of ceasefire negotiations.
In a separate statement on Telegram, it said Palestinians would “resist any occupation or aggressive force”, slamming the US for providing cover for Israel, and accusing the international community of complicity in crimes against the Palestinian people.
The UN Security Council will hold an emergency session on Saturday to discuss Israel’s escalation.
Video shows a large explosion targeting an apartment building near the al Shifa Medical Complex, west of Gaza City, only hours after the Israeli security cabinet approved a proposal to completely occupy the city.
Berlin says it will halt shipments of military equipment that could be used in Gaza after the Israeli security cabinet approved a plan to expand the war.
Germany has suspended all military exports to Israel that could be used in Gaza after Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to take over Gaza City, an escalation in the 22-month war.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced the decision on Friday, shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed the security cabinet voted in favour of a plan to seize the largest city in the besieged Palestinian territory.
A day earlier, Netanyahu had declared that Israeli forces were aiming to take full military control of the entire Gaza Strip despite mounting international condemnation over Israel’s war, which has killed tens of thousands of people and caused a starvation crisis.
“Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice,” Merz said.
While continuing to back what he called Israel’s “right to defend itself” and the release of captives held by Hamas, Merz stressed that Germany could no longer ignore the worsening toll on civilians.
“The even harsher military action by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, approved by the Israeli cabinet last night, makes it increasingly difficult for the German government to see how these goals will be achieved,” he said.
The timing of another major ground operation remains unclear since it will likely hinge on mobilising thousands of soldiers and forcibly removing civilians, almost certainly exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe.
Gaza health authorities said 197 people, including 96 children, have died of malnutrition during the war in Gaza as Israel continues to impose severe restrictions on supplies of humanitarian aid. A United Nations-backed assessment has warned that famine is unfolding in the enclave.
Merz urged Israel to allow full and sustained access for humanitarian groups, including the UN and NGOs, to help civilians.
“With the planned offensive, the Israeli government bears even greater responsibility than before for providing for their needs,” Merz added.
He also warned Israel against any steps towards annexing the occupied West Bank.
In July, the Israeli parliament approved a symbolic measure calling for the annexation of the West Bank.
From October 2023 to May this year, Germany issued arms export licences to Israel worth 485 million euros ($564m), making it one of Israel’s key military suppliers, according to figures from the German parliament.
Netanyahu’s office said the Israeli army “will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones”.
Palestinians in Gaza City are fearful of being displaced yet again after Israel announced plans to occupy Gaza City. The Israeli cabinet also approved a proposal for full “security control” of the Gaza Strip. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum is there.
Riga, Latvia – Thick black smoke billowed across Skonto Stadium as fans of the Israeli football team, Beitar Jerusalem, defied UEFA rules, setting off several rounds of pyrotechnics.
With only one minute played of the UEFA Conference League qualifier match against Riga FC, Latvian fans looked bewildered as a Beitar fan, wearing a black balaclava, nonchalantly threw a succession of fireworks around the stand, causing a small fire and scorching parts of the away stand.
A banner displaying the name of Beitar supporters’ fan club, “La Familia”, sat draped across the stands. The notoriously racist fan club, which is known for its anti-Arab chants and violent behaviour, has in the past come up against the police in Israel.
In 2016, an undercover police operation resulted in the arrest of 56 fans on suspicion of smuggling weapons and violence.
On Thursday, one Beitar fan held up an Israeli flag in the home stand, garnering cheers from other Beitar fans, but angry stewards ushered them down the steps and into the away stand.
The team, which in its 89-year history has never signed an Arab player, boasts right-wing Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir among its supporters. It is currently playing its home matches in Romania due to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and travelled to Latvia just weeks after fans were filmed chanting “Death to Arabs” while marching through the streets of Bucharest, where their team beat Sutjeska of Montenegro 5-2.
After the Riga game on Thursday, the raucous fans were held inside the stadium perimeter for about half an hour. A solitary home fan shouted “free Palestine” towards the direction of the Beitar fans gathered behind the gates. “F**k Palestine”, came the response.
The game had ended 3-0 to Riga FC, and afterwards, Beitar fans let out their frustration by setting off flares in heavy traffic. Amid the chaos, a number were herded off to police vans by Latvian police.
An Israeli soldier holds his scarf showing the colours of Beitar Jerusalem football club while others hold up an Israeli flag while posing for a group photo at a position close to the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on December 14, 2023 [Jack Guez/AFP]
‘Double standards’
The chaotic, alcohol-fuelled behaviour displayed by Beitar fans may not be new to European football, but it comes amid the backdrop of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians and led to calls from rights groups for Israeli teams to be banned from European football competitions.
The world football governing body, FIFA, has repeatedly delayed its review of a Palestinian bid to have Israel suspended from the international arena over its war on Gaza.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it took FIFA only a matter of days to suspend Russian teams from all international football competitions.
That highlights the “double standards” shown towards Palestinian lives, Dima Said, spokesperson for the Palestine Football Association and former captain of Palestine women’s national football team, told Al Jazeera.
She said seeing Israeli football fans being allowed to shout anti-Palestinian chants without punishment around Europe is “as a Palestinian athlete … one of the hardest things to watch”.
“For me to see that those people who publicly support genocide, who publicly advocate for children to be killed, is something that’s very harmful for me as a human being, first, but secondly, as a Palestinian, it should not be allowed,” she said.
She also pointed to the fact that more than 200 Palestinian footballers have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began.
On Wednesday, the former Palestinian national football team player, Suleiman al-Obeid, was killed in an Israeli attack on aid seekers in Gaza.
Last November, Israeli football fans clashed with apparent pro-Palestinian protesters before and after a Europa League football match between their team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, and Dutch team AFC Ajax in Amsterdam.
Videos shared on social media at the time showed Israeli fans chanting racist, anti-Arab songs, vandalising a taxi and burning a Palestinian flag.
After the game, when fights broke out, Dutch police arrested people who had retaliated against the Israeli fans, as world leaders made accusations of anti-Semitism.
It was an incident that Thomas Ross Griffin, a sports studies scholar and associate professor of postcolonial literature at Qatar University, says demonstrates the impunity with which Israeli fans can act.
“If these were English fans rampaging through the streets, destroying taxis, breaking into property, smashing windows, beating private citizens … there will be condemnation all over Europe, but you attach these fans to an Israeli sporting entity, and suddenly … they’re the victims,” he said.
Beitar Jerusalem will play their home leg against Riga FC in Romania on August 14.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested earlier this week that Israel will ‘take control of all Gaza’.
Israel’s security cabinet has approved Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to occupy Gaza City, located in the north of the Palestinian enclave, according to news reports.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office has yet to publicly confirm the plan, which is a major escalation in the war-torn Palestinian territory and was first reported by the news site Axios on Friday.
Axios reporter Barak Ravid quoted the prime minister’s office as saying: “The Political-Security Cabinet approved the Prime Minister’s proposal to defeat Hamas. The [Israeli military] will prepare to take over Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones”.
Al Jazeera correspondent in Washington, DC, Shihab Rattansi, said Israel’s move to occupy Gaza has been “telegraphed for several days now”.
“Donald Trump has all but green lit whatever Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do. He said it would be up to the Israelis,” he said
On Thursday, Netanyahu said Israel would “take control of all Gaza” in a television interview with American outlet Fox News.
Netanyahu also said in the interview that Israel doesn’t want to be “a governing body” in Gaza and would hand over responsibility to an unspecified third party.
“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it,” he said.
This followed reports in Israeli media earlier this week that the Israeli leader would imminently announce plans to fully occupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
“The decision has been made [to occupy Gaza],” Israel’s Channel 12 news outlet reported on Monday, quoting an unnamed senior official in Netanyahu’s office.
This is a breaking news story. More information to follow soon.
Gaza health authorities say nearly 200 people, including 96 children, have died of hunger in Gaza, as the starving population battles against the odds to get food from dangerous airdrops and deadly aid hubs run by the GHF.
As Israel’s man-made famine under the ongoing blockade tightened its grip on the enclave, hospitals recorded four more deaths from “famine and malnutrition” on Thursday – two of them children – bringing the total to 197.
Amid the mounting death toll, World Health Organization (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that about 12,000 children younger than five were suffering from acute malnutrition in July – the highest monthly figure ever recorded.
The scenes in Gaza City are “apocalyptic”, said Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili, with hundreds of people scrambling for scraps from aid pallets airdropped among the rubble of destroyed buildings.
“Here the fight is not over food, but for survival,” he said.
Mustafa Tanani, a displaced Palestinian at the scene, said that some of the food had failed to land and was “hanging up high” between the buildings, making it “too risky” to try to reach. “It’s like a battle here. We come from far away and end up with nothing,” he said.
“Everyone is carrying bags of aid, and we don’t even manage to get anything. The planes are dropping aid for nothing. Look where they threw it. Up there, between the buildings. It’s dangerous for us,” he said.
Children at risk
Two children died of hunger in Gaza on Thursday, including a two-year-old girl in the al-Mawasi area, according to Nasser Hospital.
Raising the alarm over chronic child malnutrition, the United Nations said that its partners were able to reach only 8,700 of the 290,000 children under age five who desperately needed food and nutritional supplements.
Amjad Shawa, the head of the NGO Network in Gaza, told Al Jazeera Arabic that at least 200,000 children in the Gaza Strip suffer from severe malnutrition, with many deaths caused by a lack of baby formula and nutritional supplements under Israel’s blockade, in place since March.
Gaza’s Government Media Office said that only 92 aid trucks entered the enclave on Wednesday, far less than the 500-600 that the United Nations estimates are needed daily to meet basic needs.
Most of the aid that did make it in was prevented from reaching its intended recipients due to widespread “looting and robbery”, as a result of “deliberate security chaos” orchestrated by Israel, said the office.
‘Orchestrated killing’
As the hunger crisis deepened, Doctors Without Borders, better known by its French-language acronym MSF, called for the closure of the notorious US- and Israeli-backed GHF, which runs deadly aid hubs where more than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed trying to reach food.
The NGO published a report on Thursday featuring testimony from front-line staff that Palestinians were being deliberately targeted at the sites, which they said amounted to “orchestrated killing and dehumanisation”, not humanitarian aid.
MSF operates two healthcare centres – al-Mawasi and al-Attar clinics – in direct proximity to GHF sites in southern Gaza, which received 1,380 casualties within seven weeks, treating 71 children for gunshot wounds, 25 of whom were under the age of 15.
“In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operations, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians,” said the report.
MSF patient Mohammed Riad Tabasi told Al Jazeera he had seen 36 people killed in the space of 10 minutes at a GHF site. “It was unbearable,” he said. “War is one thing, but this … aid distribution is another. We’ve never been humiliated like this.”
Deadly strikes
As the population battled for survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News his country intended to take military control of all of Gaza.
On Thursday, Israel continued to launch deadly air strikes on residential areas, killing at least 22 people.
In Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported that a strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed five civilians.
An attack on the municipality of Bani Suheila, east of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis city, killed at least two people, according to a source from Nasser Hospital.
Six others were killed in earlier attacks in the Khan Younis area. One child died while attempting to retrieve airdropped aid there.
In northern Gaza’s Jabalia, at least one person was killed, according to a local medical source.
Palestine’s Wafa news agency reported several deadly attacks in Gaza City, one targeting a tent in the city’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood that killed at least six people.
The second attack targeted a separate residential area in the city, killing a woman and injuring others, said Wafa.
“Israel’s military escalation continues without any sign of abating. And civilians are still bearing the brunt of this conflict,” said Abu Azzoum.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,258 people.
Families and supporters of the Israelis held captive by Hamas sailed toward the Gaza coast to warn against a ground invasion of the strip. They tossed swim rings as a symbolic life saver for their loved ones, who they say would be hurt by a ground assault.
Washington, DC – The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has accused Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of betraying “American values” by saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In a fundraising email to supporters on Thursday, AIPAC – one of the most influential foreign policy lobby groups in the United States – likened Greene, a far-right legislator, to left-wing opponents of Israel.
“You expect anti-Israel smears from Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,” the group said, referring to Muslim-American Democratic congressmembers.
“But now, Marjorie Taylor Greene has joined their ranks – spouting the same vile rhetoric and voting against the US-Israel alliance.”
Last week, Greene, an ally of US President Donald Trump, echoed the growing consensus of rights groups, academics and United Nations experts that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
“It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza,” the congresswoman wrote in a social media post.
The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Over the past 22 months, Israel has destroyed nearly all of Gaza, repeatedly displaced the enclave’s population, killed more than 61,000 people and imposed a suffocating blockade that sparked deadly hunger in the territory.
On Thursday, AIPAC called Greene’s genocide accusation “disgusting”.
“Let’s call this what it is: Marjorie Taylor Greene is the newest member of the anti-Israel Squad,” the group said.
“She may think this earns her praise from the far-left or online radicals — but we see it for what it is: a betrayal of American values and a dangerous distortion of the truth.”
Greene’s recent stances on Gaza stand in stark contrast with her staunch early support for Israel. In 2023, she led efforts to formally rebuke Tlaib – the only Palestinian American in Congress – over condemning Israeli policies.
With criticism of Israel in the US mostly coming from the progressive left, AIPAC rarely denounces members of Trump’s Republican Party.
But the lobby group said on Thursday that it will challenge “lies” about Israel, whether they come from the “radical left or the radical right”.
Although Trump has been uncompromising in his backing for Israel, a segment of his Republican base has been increasingly critical of unconditional support for the US ally, viewing the relationship as incompatible with the president’s “America first” mantra.
AIPAC spending
For decades, AIPAC has encouraged its members to donate to candidates for public office, and in 2022, it started directly spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat critics of Israel.
Last year, AIPAC helped oust two incumbent progressive congressmembers, spending record amounts on election advertisements.
AIPAC has not announced plans to challenge Greene in next year’s midterm elections.
The congresswoman did not face a primary opponent in her Georgia district last year and won the general election by nearly 30 percentage points.
In recent weeks, AIPAC has been trying to mitigate the growing outrage at Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza, often repeating false Israeli statements denying hunger in the territory and accusing Hamas of stealing the humanitarian aid.
However, despite the group’s efforts, many congressmembers, including some legislators who have been backed by AIPAC, have begun condemning Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
On Wednesday, Democratic Congresswoman Valerie Foushee, whom AIPAC helped elect to Congress in 2022 with $2m in campaign spending, said she was co-sponsoring a bill to block offensive weapons to Israel.
“We simply cannot continue to provide the Israeli government with weapons when they are not being used in accordance with international law to maximize the protection of civilians in Gaza,” Foushee wrote in a social media post.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand that their government reach a deal to release two Israeli captives held in Gaza who have been shown as starving in Hamas footage.
The video showed that captives have been as badly affected by the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza in March as the rest of the population trapped there.
So far, at least 197 people have starved to death in Gaza, 96 of them children and global outrage about the famine Israel is imposing on Gaza has mounted.
However, a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute (PDF) found more than half of Jewish Israeli respondents were “not at all troubled” by the reports of Palestinians starving and suffering in Gaza.
Front pages of international newspapers previously accused of backing Israel’s war on Gaza have carried images showing the massive human cost of Israel’s actions.
Formerly stalwart allies, such as Canada, France and the United Kingdom, have condemned Israel and its actions in Gaza, committing to recognising Palestinian statehood if some kind of resolution is not reached.
I guess Israeli settlers are stopping and destroying aid meant for starving Palestinians, so that Israel-first politicians in the West can accuse Hamas of stealing the aid… pic.twitter.com/6ECMP23g8r
Domestically, two of Israel’s leading NGOs – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, Israel – have labelled Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide, and protests against the war have grown.
A week earlier, hundreds of demonstrators led by wounded soldiers and the families of some of the captives marched on the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, demanding that the war on Gaza be continued.
Widespread awareness of the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and their government’s role in inflicting it, has yet to dawn upon the bulk of Israeli society, Orly Noy, journalist and editor of the Israeli Hebrew-language magazine Local Call, told Al Jazeera.
This is particularly the case because Gaza’s suffering has not been featured in mainstream media.
“I avoid Israeli TV,” Noy told Al Jazeera. “However, I was round at my mother’s yesterday, and they were covering the story of the video of the two captives.
“So, for once, starvation and famine in Gaza was finally on Israeli news,” she said, adding that, instead of denying that starvation existed in Gaza, the wider Israeli public was being told that the only two people starving there were the captives in the Hamas film.
For months now, the mainstream media narrative in Israel has been that the widespread hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is “a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign”.
This perception runs deeper than the framing by Israel’s nationalistic television channels, political analyst and former government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera.
“It comes from decades of self-justification and dehumanisation,” Levy said.
“Most Israelis would be uncomfortable setting out some kind of moral critique of the country, but still have the feeling that something has gone very seriously wrong. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance at play that helps them make sense of it.”
Then there is the language used by politicians, the media and, ultimately, the public to discuss the war, Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said.
“They’ve corrupted language. Instead of ‘concentration camps‘, they say ‘humanitarian city’. Instead of talking about ‘killing’, they say ‘elimination’. Every military operation has a biblical name, which we now use to measure time.
“We don’t say ‘such and such a thing’ happened in June. We say, ‘during Operation Whatever’. It helps people make sense of everything. The jargon’s become a new type of speech. It’s become Orwell’s 1984,” he said, referring to the dystopian novel in which language is dictated by the state.
Changing tides
However, while most Israelis have continued to see Gaza’s starvation through the lens of its media and politicians, there are signs that, at its fringes, the mood is beginning to shift, observers say.
Standing Together’s Alon-Lee Green is arrested while protesting near Gaza [Courtesy of Standing Together]
“This isn’t going to hold up,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al party, said.
“More and more, people are beginning to understand that there is real hunger in Gaza, and if Israel is making such a big deal of sending food now, then how can it not have been responsible for the hunger before?”
Meanwhile, activists such as Alon-Lee Green of the Israeli-Palestinian group Standing Together say resistance to the war is growing across all parts of Israeli society – albeit for often widely differing reasons.
“We don’t care why people are protesting the war. We don’t care if it’s because you don’t want to do another tour with the army, or you don’t want your children to go to Gaza and kill people. If you’re against the war, you’re welcome,” he said.
However, despite the killing of more than 61,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – and thousands more lost under the rubble and presumed dead – much of Israeli society has yet to accept that the suffering Israel is inflicting on Gaza is real.
“From my perspective, we’ve reached the point where the Israeli state and society has lost whatever moral claims they had as a result of the Holocaust,” Shenhav-Shahrabani said.
“They’ve spent whatever symbolic capital that was associated with it.”
Israel’s elite cyber-intelligence unit stored vast volumes of intercepted Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft’s cloud servers, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call.
The surveillance system, operational since 2022, was built by Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s secretive intelligence branch. It enables the unit to collect and retain recordings of millions of daily phone calls from Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The revelations initially reported on Wednesday stem from leaked Microsoft documents and testimonies from 11 sources, including from Israeli military intelligence and the company.
According to the leaks, a large amount of the data appeared to be stored on Microsoft’s Azure servers located in the Netherlands and Ireland, the Guardian reported.
Three sources from Unit 8200 said that the cloud-based system helped guide deadly air strikes and shaped operations across the occupied Palestinian territories.
Microsoft said that CEO Satya Nadella, who met with Unit 8200’s commander Yossi Sariel in 2021, was unaware of the nature of the data to be stored. The company has said an internal review found “no evidence to date” that Azure or its artificial intelligence (AI) tools were “used to target or harm people”.
The revelations come after the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, issued a report mapping the corporations aiding Israel in its occupation and war on Gaza.
The report noted that Microsoft, which has operated in Israel since 1991, has built its largest hub outside the US in Israel and began integrating its technologies across the country’s military, police, prisons, schools, and settlements.
Since 2003, the company has deepened ties with Israeli defence, acquiring surveillance and cybersecurity start-ups and embedding its systems in military operations. In 2024, an Israeli colonel called cloud technologies such as those offered by Microsoft “a weapon in every sense”.
The Guardian reported that internal records at Microsoft showed that Nadella offered support for Sariel’s aim to move large volumes of military intelligence into the cloud.
A Microsoft statement cited by the Guardian said it “is not accurate” to say he provided his personal support for the project.
Microsoft engineers later worked closely with Israeli intelligence to embed security features within Azure, enabling the transfer of up to 70 percent of Unit 8200’s sensitive data to the platform.
While Israeli officials claim the technology helps thwart attacks, Unit 8200 sources said the system collects communications indiscriminately, which are often used to detain or blackmail Palestinians. “When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason … that’s where they find the excuse,” one source was cited as saying.
Some sources alleged the stored data had been used to justify detentions and even killings.
The system’s expansion coincided with a broader shift in Israeli surveillance, moving from targeted tracking to bulk monitoring of the Palestinian population. One AI-driven tool reportedly assigns risk scores to text messages based on certain trigger words, including discussions of weapons or martyrdom.
Sariel, who resigned in 2024 after Israel’s intelligence failure on October 7, 2023, had long championed cloud-based surveillance.
As Israel’s war on Gaza continues, with more than 61,250 Palestinians killed, including 18,000 children, the surveillance programme remains active. Sources said the existing data, combined with AI tools, continues to be used in military operations.
Microsoft claimed it had “no information” about the specific data stored by Unit 8200.
Khan Younes, Gaza – A dear companion doesn’t have to be human to be deeply missed when lost.
Sometimes, it’s a phone – a loyal witness to your joys and sorrows, your moments of sweetness and darkest chapters of pain.
In the harshness of life in the world’s largest open-air prison, it becomes more than a device. It’s an extension of yourself; your portal to the world, your way of reaching loved ones scattered across the prison or outside it.
Through its lens, you sometimes capture joy and beauty, but more often, it only captures falling rockets or the rubble of houses covering the corpses of their residents.
But what are you left with when that loyal companion is disappeared by the genocidal chaos?
My phone succumbed to its injuries
My phone succumbed to its injuries.
I can’t believe I’m describing it this way, with the same phrase I use when reporting on thousands of my people killed after being denied urgent medical treatment, punished simply for surviving Israeli bombs.
But in its own way, my phone endured its share of this prolonged Israeli cruelty, the technocide of power-starvation, corrosion by dust and sand, suffocation in overheated tents, and the constant torment of poor connection.
It tried to hold on, but everyone has a limit of endurance. It fell the day we left our damaged home for our 14th displacement amid chaotic stampeding crowds.
Somehow it survived the heavy blow, but it only lasted 70 days after its screen cracked, its body blistered, until its wounds spread too far to bear.
And then it went dark for good.
Oddly, I felt consoled. Not because it wasn’t painful, but because I wasn’t alone. I’ve seen the same happen to others: Friends, relatives watching their phones slowly perish, just like the people they loved.
Strangely, we find comfort in these small shared losses. Our loved ones have perished, and our wellbeing is shattering, and yet we expect our phones not to. The real miracle is that they lasted this long at all.
Smartphone addiction is thrown around as a buzzword. But in Gaza, if you’re lucky enough to still have one, it’s not an addiction, it is survival.
It’s an escape. A small, glowing portal you cling to. It helps you slip briefly into the past, scrolling through memories, staring at the faces of loved ones who are now names on graves or names you still whisper in hope.
Your phone’s emotionless memory still holds their beautiful smiles. It connects you to people you can’t reach, voices you can’t otherwise hear. It dulls the pain not by healing it, but by distracting you.
Like a hunger you can’t satisfy, so you scroll through reels of mouth-watering food, mocking your emptiness.
The author reporting, holding his phone tight, on May 3, 2025 [Ahmed Al-Najjar/Al Jazeera]
You watch strangers at family dinners while your table is buried under rubble. You wonder, how dare they post such scenes, knowing that children are being starved to death a few kilometres away? And yet you keep scrolling, because for a moment, it’s a brutal soothing sedative.
‘Are you alive?’
When you’re someone who reports daily on the ongoing genocide to the world, finding a new companion becomes an inevitable must. Yet the quest is disastrous in Gaza.
You might think it’s impossible to find one here, where life has become ruins and even bread is scarce, but surprisingly, there are plenty of options, even the latest high-end brands that somehow found their way through the blockade.
But this is Gaza, where a bag of flour costs $700, so the cost of a phone is on a whole different level.
Even the lowest-quality phones in makeshift shops sell for more than what it costs to build the shop itself, inflated by genocidal conditions.
And it doesn’t stop there. You must pay in cash, in a place where almost nothing is free except the air you breathe.
An iPhone might cost $1,000 elsewhere, but here it costs $4,200.
So you turn to cheaper options, hoping for something more affordable, but the calculations remain the same.
But that’s not me – because either way, by spending such unthinkable amounts, you’re solidifying the very reality your captors are trying to impose, and doing it with your own money.
You realise that you’re feeding into their design. We’re already draining whatever’s left in our pockets just for flour during this genocidal siege, and we don’t know how long it will last.
So you cling to what you have, to avoid paying your soul at a GHF centre for deadly “aid” you’ll never get.
For a while now, I’ve felt paralysed, a helplessness especially familiar during June’s two-week total communication blackout imposed by Israel – during which my phone finally died in total silence.
When the captor cuts yet another lifeline, it’s more than just being unable to check on loved ones. It means ambulances can’t be called. It means a wounded person might die in the dark, unheard.
It’s like someone is out there, cruelly deciding when you’re allowed to contact the world or to be contacted, to receive the now-typical: “Are you alive?”
There’s a cruel irony in Israel issuing expulsion orders online even as it cuts off the networks people in Gaza need to receive them. You only find out when you see thousands flooding the streets, the earth trembling beneath their feet from Israeli attacks.
The hand that controls your digital lifeline is the same one that’s been blockading and colonising your land for years.
And you realise, with certainty, that if they could block the very air you breathe, they would not hesitate.
The phone, after it ‘succumbed to its wounds’, shown in Khan Younis, Gaza, on August 4, 2025 [Ahmed Al-Najjar/Al Jazeera]
So, you rise
There are still moments when, instinctively, I reach out to call someone or check something – but my hand touches nothing.
My companion is gone. I remain phoneless, helpless under blockade, both digital and physical.
And then, you start to compare your shackles to the abundance your captors enjoy, genociding you with full access to every technological privilege, every luxury.
You, on the other hand, are being hunted down with the world’s most advanced weapons, under the watchful eye and silent complicity of the tech giants whose tools are backing your erasure.
While they use satellites and precision-guided missiles, you just want to tell the world you’re still here.
How vital your lost companion was. It wasn’t just a phone. It was your sword, your shield, your witness.
And in the face of this tyranny, surrendering is something you cannot afford. So, you rise.
You whisper, “Rest in power, my companion,” because we refuse to be slaughtered in silence.
We will keep telling our truth, even if all we have left is a scrap of paper and a drop of ink.
