Malak Musleh, who was among those killed in the bombing of al-Baqaa Café in Gaza City on 29 June
Last month, Gazans honoured their donkeys, dressing them up and walking them down a red carpet to celebrate the animals and contrast their resilience and support to that provided by global leaders. Reports soon followed of the large-scale theft of donkeys from Gaza by Israel. Some are being transferred to a farm in Israel called ‘Let’s Start Again’. Glossy videos describe their care. Some are said to have been exported to France and Belgium.
Meanwhile trauma centres in Gaza are recording the questions that children are asking: when it rains will we drown in the tent? When they bomb the tent, will we burn? Why do they always bomb us? I don’t want to die in pieces. Will the dogs that ate the dead bodies of the martyrs turn into humans? Do children who have their legs amputated grow new legs? Do the Israeli pilots who bomb children have children?
The image that comes to mind when I think of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a monster blender that drags in the starving and spits out the wounded and the dead. If you track the numbers there are bad days and worse days but the daily killings at one of the only permitted food sources in Gaza are proceeding like this: 8, 13, 17, 25, 24, 80, 11, 44, 37, 31, 25, 26, 27. For each murdered son, brother, daughter or mother who volunteered to approach this mechanism of carnage in the hope of returning alive with supplies for those waiting hungry and dependent in a shelled building, in a makeshift tent or under rubble, there are many more who return injured. A friend has lost two brothers in recent months who were both killed trying to get aid for the family from these distribution centres.
In late June, a couple of Israeli soldiers admitted that they had direct orders to shoot unarmed Palestinians seeking aid. As Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says, it makes no sense for the perpetrators of genocide to be entrusted with the provision of aid to the people they are trying to kill.
Most Palestinians in Gaza who have managed to survive the past 21 months have lost their homes and been displaced several times. Almost all are now malnourished. Fresh food is all but unattainable as agricultural land has been destroyed and aid is denied entry. The young journalist Bisan Owda was given her first apple in five months by an international aid worker from outside Gaza: ‘I swear to God I had almost forgotten how it tastes.’ The French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu went to Gaza with Médecins sans Frontières in December 2024. ‘We were only allowed to bring personal medication and three kilos of food,’ he said, ‘with no more than one kilo per product.’ Thousands of aid trucks are lined up at the border but denied entry by Israelis.
By 10 June more than 680,000 Palestinians had been forcibly displaced (most not for the first time) since Israel broke the ceasefire in March. Israel now controls 82 per cent of the strip. The Norwegian Refugee Council reported in late June that the shelter system was on the verge of failure. Around a year ago, I sent a message to my friend Marwa in Gaza as another friend in London was worried about a doctor she knew who was sleeping in the street with no cover. ‘Ah the problem of the tents,’ Marwa’s long voice message began. She explained how expensive, how rare, how damaged they were.
Last month 149 countries voted in the UN General Assembly to demand an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire. Only 12 voted against (including Israel and the US) and 19 abstained (including India). But still no tents can enter Gaza. No tents, no food, no fuel, no medicine, no baby formula. Gaza has been under siege by land, sea and air since 2006, with tighter blockades put in place on 9 October 2023 and total closure on 2 March 2025. In the words of the UN, Gaza is ‘the hungriest place on earth’. Filiu described a ‘situation of total, widespread distress’. Caused not by an earthquake, flood or other natural disaster, but by the deliberate actions of a government headed by individuals with ICC arrest warrants issued against them.
Have we no shame? Have we no political clout at all? In the hospitals that still stand, blood transfusions are almost impossible as would-be donors are too malnourished and anaemic. ‘Even that which should be healing us,’ my friend Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta told me on the phone from Lebanon, ‘is now killing us.’ Where they can, hospitals are setting up new units for starving babies. Some are reporting that they have not a single carton of milk left. UNICEF reported that ‘acute malnutrition is rising at an alarming rate’ on 16 June. The head of paediatrics at al-Nasr al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital described a daily increase in meningitis infections linked to the lack of clean water. Life expectancy in Gaza, according to a ‘conservative’ estimate published in the Lancet, nearly halved between October 2023 and September 2024, from around 75 to 40 years of age, the lowest in the world by nearly twenty years (it’s 59 in Somalia).
Most schools that are still standing are used as shelters for the displaced. They continue to be bombed by Israel. The bombing intensified around the Eid al-Adha festival in early June. After al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was bombed again on 5 June, the archbishop of York condemned the ‘relentless and outrageous pattern of attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities in Gaza’. On 10 June, the WHO announced that al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis was ‘essentially out of service’. Two days later, according to Medical Aid for Palestinians, the Israeli army issued forced displacement orders in the area around Nasser Medical Complex, the last remaining hospital in southern Gaza.
At the same time, 7amleh (the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media) reported a total internet blackout, beginning with an attack on the ‘main fibre backbone connecting Gaza City and north Gaza’:
This is not a technical failure. It is a deliberate strategy of digital erasure and forced isolation, part of a broader campaign of displacement, domination and dehumanisation.
In these unimaginably murderous conditions, people are continuing to study and pursue their research interests. They are forming Emergency Committees to co-ordinate the future of the education sector. They continue to report on their situation despite the targeting of journalists (at least 23 have been killed this year). They document human rights abuses and war crimes. They share their food if they can get it. They find ways to entertain the children with clowns, dance, music and storytelling. They fix damaged cables and rebuild hospitals. Doctors and medical workers, exhausted by hunger and separated from their families, continue to work inhumanely long hours under bombardment. They look for joy where they can find it.
These signs of spiritual resistance, of refusing to be cowed into docile victims, are intolerable to the Israeli army. On 29 June, Israel killed at least forty Palestinians at al-Baqaa Café in Gaza City. The dead included two journalists, Ismail Hateb and Bayan Abu Sultan, the boxer Malak Musleh and the footballer Mustafa Abu Amireh, two of hundreds of athletes killed since October 2023. I looked Musleh up and was surprised to find news of her killing on the Instagram page of the journalist Hussam Shabat. I clicked on the link: ‘Hussam was assassinated by Israeli occupation forces on 24 March 2025 for doing his job as a journalist. This account is now managed by his team.’
Then on 12 July the Israeli army declared that even the sea is prohibited. ‘This cruel and inhumane order is deliberately timed to coincide with the extreme heat wave gripping Gaza now,’ Jewish Voice for Peace commented. Bisan Owda went to the beach the following day expecting it to be deserted but instead found children playing in the sea and people still ‘enjoying the water’.
The UN Commission of Inquiry’s most recent report found that ‘Israel has obliterated Gaza’s education system and destroyed over half of all religious and cultural sites’. All three commissioners resigned this week, citing personal reasons. A few days earlier, the US had imposed sanctions on the UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, for having ‘directly engaged with the International Criminal Court in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries’. In April, the Foreign Office warned retired Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws and Danny Friedman KC of Matrix Chambers that they faced possible US sanctions for their involvement in the ICC’s war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.
The ICC, once described to me by one of its officials as a ‘fragile flower’ of the international legal system, has also been threatened directly. According to al-Jazeera, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was told in May by a defence lawyer at the court, Nicholas Kaufman, that if he issued arrest warrants for the Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, ‘they will destroy you, and they will destroy the court.’ On 16 July, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber rejected Israel’s request to withdraw its warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.
Meanwhile, in the first week of July, Israel bombed Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon and Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank. As Mustafa Barghouti put it, ‘Israel is imposing full occupation over the West Bank and creating a new reality.’ In early June, as part of an ongoing offensive lasting more than 130 days, 58 buildings were razed in Tulkarem. More than 25,000 residents have been displaced. A week later, 300 houses were destroyed in Jenin and Nur Shams, where 40,000 people have been displaced. ‘Once full of life,’ a Red Cross official said, ‘the camps are now reduced to rubble.’
One gets sick of putting numbers on the horror. ‘In my twenty years working in this area and working throughout conflict zones all over the world,’ the head of Oxfam Ireland told RTÉ, ‘we’ve never seen anything like this.’ Protesters continue to fill the streets of Europe and across the world. A Pew Research survey conducted across 24 countries found that most people have an unfavourable view of Israel and Netanyahu. In Bogotá, the Hague Group held an emergency conference at which twelve countries, including South Africa and Indonesia, agreed to implement six measures ‘to break the ties of complicity with Israel’s campaign of devastation in Palestine’. The Spanish parliament voted to apply sanctions on Israel. The UK’s largest union, Unite, voted for an arms embargo. Dockworkers in Morocco, Spain and Greece are taking action to obstruct the export of weapons to Israel.
On 30 June, the English High Court issued its judgment denying the application by al-Haq to curtail the sale of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, while the UK government pushed through legislation to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
This week, a protester in Kent was confronted by armed police and threatened with arrest because she had a Palestinian flag and signs that said ‘Free Gaza’ and ‘Israel is committing genocide’. There was no mention of Palestine Action and when asked she denied supporting them. But the armed officers told her that ‘mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups.’
