Two Months in Gaza

Israel has killed over 16,000 Palestinians (and over 7,000 children) in Gaza. Over 7,000 more are missing.

It has wounded over 40,000 Palestinians and by targeting medical workers and hospitals in particular it has ensured that many of the wounded will die.

It has prevented food, water, electricity, medicine from entering Gaza.

It has attacked water towers, flour mills, bakeries, farms and orchards, ambulances, shelters, solar panels, desalination plants, sewage treatment pumps and stations, markets, gravediggers in graveyards, warehouses, universities, press offices, an orphanage, fishing boats, rescue teams, mosques, houses and schools.

Having forced most Palestinians from their homes in the Gaza strip, it has corralled them in the southwestern corner, along the crossing with Egypt. It is bombing these areas as well, including the crossing at Rafah, as well as medical convoys evacuating the injured out of Palestine, and is keeping the two other crossings (at Beit Hanoun and Karem Abu Salem), which it has controlled for decades, closed.

The United States, which supplies Israel with almost all of its weapons, in October stationed a destroyer and two aircraft carrier groups in a triangle around the colony.

In the West Bank, Israel has killed over 200 Palestinians in two months and imprisoned over 3,000, with plans and a budget to extend its settlements further. In occupied Jerusalem, it has permitted Jewish extremist groups to march through Muslim neighbourhoods to Al Aqsa Mosque on Thursday.

Recently it revised the official death toll from the October 7 attacks down to “around 1,200” of whom 859 were police officers or civilians.

“This is not a safe corridor, it’s a corridor of fear.”

When Israel began its ground invasion of northern Gaza after weeks of bombing, it said that two roads were safe for civilians to use fleeing south. Survivors of these corridors said Israeli soldiers fired at them, humiliated them, robbed them and kidnapped their family members, hit them, and bombed civilian convoys heading south. The video below was taken by a survivor fleeing south on the Rasheed coastal road.

“The conditions required to deliver aid to the people of Gaza do not exist.”

Israel has made aid deliveries increasingly difficult with the UN and other agencies now only operating in the south around Rafah. Israeli attacks on the food and water supply, besides the siege, have continued to the point that most people in Gaza are now on the brink of starvation amid mass outbreaks of disease, a risk increased by preventing them from clearing waste or pumping out wastewater. The video below shows drinking water flowing through the streets after Israel bombed a water tower early November.

Here Palestinians in the south collect bottled water being distributed late November.

“Each day without a ceasefire brings millions in Gaza closer to starvation.”

Having created the conditions for famine, Israel is also destroying farming assets in Palestine (including ancient olive groves in the West Bank) to destroy future chances of rehabilitation. It razed farmland during the “humanitarian pause,” as shown in this analysis of satellite photos. Below, an occupation soldier enters a Palestinian home after invading Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.

“What more can we document for you?”

Israel has also killed over 60 journalists in Palestine and Lebanon, shooting or shelling many of them dead while they were reporting. It killed Amal Zuhd with her family in their home in Gaza City by an airstrike late November.

It killed Ayat Khadura, whose last video message is shown below, on November 21 by an airstrike on her home in northern Gaza.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has accused the occupation of targeting journalists, and Reporters Without Borders has filed a war crimes suit against Hamas and Israel for targeting press workers.

Israel has also targeted the families of journalists, including 22 family members of reporter Momin Alshrafi in Jabaliya yesterday.

In late October, Israel killed almost all the family members of veteran reporter Wael al Dahdouh.

Yesterday, Gaza journalist Ismail Jood asked in this video message, “We don’t know what more to do. What more can we document for you? …There is no place left to put the dead.”

“Leaving behind memories and dreams.”

Last week, beginning its ground invasion of southern Gaza, Israel released a map of numbered zones which it is “evacuating” neighbourhood by neighbourhood, forcing Palestinians from their homes.

It informs people in the zone numbers it is about to attack using leaflets or SMS, methodically forcing Palestinians out of most of Gaza.

Earlier this week, it bombed the main road connecting the southern towns of Khan Younis and Rafah, and is invading both.

According to survivors, it has continued unannounced bombardments of homes in the south.

Among the newest designated safe places is al-Mawasi on the coast in the south. Journalist Bisan Owda explained, “We’ll die here of hunger. They will not pay to buy the bombs and kill us. We’ll die here alone.”

“We can hear voices from under the debris.”

With a lot being written about airstrikes and “rubble,” on November 23, Gaza resident and painter Mohammed Dalo described how he survives airstrikes near his home.

“When the bombing is close and the sound is terrifying, being someone with a motor disability, the first thing I do is close my eyes, hug my shoulders to my head, and hold myself in the position of a child in its mother’s womb. I am harder on myself. My heart begins to feel completely slow and begins to beat rapidly, and since I am a heart patient, my breathing becomes rapid and I feel that it is very difficult. Part of what I ordered!”

Many of the deaths after Israel’s bombings have been slow. Yesterday, in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, rescuers pulled out two young girls, Maria Abu Safi and her younger sister Lana, from the debris of a poultry hatchery where they had been sheltering with over a hundred other people after fleeing from the north. “I woke up and felt something hurt, so I raised my hands and found a wall above me, and from the many pains, I went back to sleep,” said Maria. She said she heard her sister screaming in pain. “We stayed four days under the rubble, with no food or water… I was trying to get out, but there were many stones above us.”

This video by journalist Hani Abu Rezeq shows the aftermath of the airstrikes on Deir al Balah.

Victims were brought to the hospital mortuary and laid to rest in Deir al Balah.

The aftermath of Israel’s bombing of the Ahli Baptist Hospital which killed over 400 people sheltering in the grounds.

Last week, Gaza resident and writer Rizwan al Alkhris described the sound of airstrikes near his home.

“The sound in the video does not reflect the truth. The sound is several times louder with a large vibration in the area. It is a small, recurring earthquake. The city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, was exposed in the last hours to many of these Israeli fire-belts, which have not stopped until now. Our people have been subjected to great injustice for about two months, and very great disappointment.”

Another Khan Younis resident captured footage of a bomb entering the Hamad residential complex on December 2.

Gaza journalist Saleh Aljafarawi recorded the aftermath, as people fled the site of the bombing.

Returning afterwards, “Amid the difficult economic conditions, a man struggles to look for clothes for his family in the cold of winter under the rubble of their house destroyed by occupation planes.”

“It’s a sign of global moral decay and an assault on human dignity”

The photo above shows Mohammed Tamimi, cousin of Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, released from occupation prisons last week. Israeli soldiers shot him in the head with a rubber bullet when he was 15, and later arrested his cousin Ahed when she slapped an Israeli soldier when she was 16. In the interview below, she says that “we should all slap soldiers,” and that the sacrifice made by older Palestinians, of “78% of our land,” will not be accepted by younger Palestinians.

“At the core of the current problem lies Israeli occupation as well as its expansionist mentality and repressive actions that completely ignore law, human rights and universal principles,” said Turkish foreign minister Öncü Keçeli.

“Israel attacks anyone who disagrees with its policies, and cannot remain above international law… It must face responsibility for its war crimes and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” said Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi.

The UN secretary-general invoked a provision in the charter yesterday to compel the Security Council to discuss a “humanitarian ceasefire” in Palestine. So far the United States has vetoed all ceasefire calls by other nations. Here its president is seen at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in downtown Nantucket, where he was confronted by demonstrators shouting “Free Palestine!” and “Ceasefire Now!”

In the last two months, armed Palestinian resistance factions have reported destroying dozens of Israeli armoured vehicles and killing hundreds of occupation soldiers.

Six countries have ended or are reconsidering diplomatic ties with Israel, as demonstrators around the world call for sanctions and the boycott of goods produced in Israel.

This short film by Massri Films shows what is lost with every bombing.

These Palestinians tell their loved ones goodbye.