Moving Human Targets
The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a Genocidal War
+ This week’s Israeli seizure of nearly five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank is the largest land grab in the more than three decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords. First, the lands were declared “closed military zones,” then the Netanyahu government reassigned them as “state lands,” allowing Israeli settlers to apply for leases on which to build homes and prohibiting Palestinian ownership. The annexed lands, which are near the border with Jordan, sabotage the possibility of the contiguous Palestinian state promised by Oslo and spell an end to the “two-state” solution.
+ In addition, the Israeli government’s Higher Planning Council had approved plans for 5,295 homes in dozens of Israeli settlements across the West Bank.
+ On 27 June, the Israeli government approved the “legalization” of five West Bank settlement outposts, which are considered illegal under Israeli and international international humanitarian law. The outposts set to be legalized are Evyatar (Nablus) in the northern West Bank, Sde Efraim and Givat Assaf (Ramallah) in the center and Heletz and Adorayim (Hebron) in the south.
+ These acts are war crimes. This is, in fact, what the war is all about. It’s been going on since 1947. And they’ll take it all–unless they’re stopped.
+ Since the beginning of 2024, UN monitors have documented 27 attacks against Palestinians by settlers who reside in three of these five settlement outposts, including two attacks from Evyatar, nine from Sde Efraim and 16 from Givat Assaf.
+ Palestinian landowners from the town of Dura have hundreds of dunams of land adjacent to the Adorayim outpost, which the Israeli army has prevented them from accessing since 7 October. According to farmers from Dura, in two separate incidents since 7 October, Israeli forces attacked, beat, threatened and threw them off their land when they attempted to access it. The zoning map of the Adorayim settlement outpost reportedly includes an additional 120 dunams of land belonging to Dura town that have not been accessed by the owners since 7 October.
+ Dr Mustafa Barghouti: “The fact that 63 ( out of 120 ) members of the Israeli Knesset from government coalition and opposition are proposing a joint resolution to prohibit the establishment of an independent Palestinian State is a sufficient indicator that the Israeli establishment does not want peace. It wants the annexation of the occupied territories.”
+ An Israeli settler group has occupied a nature reserve near the Gaza border and they’ll stay “until they are allowed to settle in the Gaza Strip”.
+ Ziv Stahl, executive director of the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, on how Smotrich’s administration overhaul of Israeli policy in the West Bank is aimed at the complete annexation of the Occupied Territories: “We’ve just moved into the state of completing this process of annexation [of the West Bank]. This was achieved by appointing Smotrich as a minister in the Ministry of Defense, who can actually be said to be the governor of the West Bank. He established the Settlement Administration and for the first time a civilian deputy, who is a civilian within the Civil Administration, which is a military body. All of these steps are actually meant to complete this transition, which is an entirely new legal framework. If, in the past, we were in a legal framework of occupation, which is a temporary state, according to international law. We are actually moving into a state of annexation, of the imposition of Israeli sovereignty. This means expropriating the powers from the army and transferring them to government offices, to civilian authorities who will actually manage the territories. And that is already a framework. And Smotrich says it and says it clearly: It’s already permanent. It’s not temporary. He even said it explicitly, “Even after I go, this situation will remain. It’s here to stay.” I mean, they completely canceled the impermanence of the Occupation and applied sovereignty, even if it was not done by direct law. This is the real meaning of these things.”
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+ An Israeli lawyer, after visiting Sde Teiman detention camp: “I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7.” Sde Teiman, the military camp used for detainees from Gaza, “was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”
+ After seven months in an Israeli detention camp, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiyah, pediatrician and director of al-Shifa Hospital, was finally released. Dr. Abu Salmiyah was arrested after he refused to make public claims that Hamas fighters were using al-Shifa for military purposes. During his detention, Salmiyah was repeatedly beaten and humiliated by his interrogators and prison guards. After his release, Abu Salmiyah told Al Jazeera that Palestinian detainees were suffering in extreme conditions, which he described as “tragic, unprecedented in Palestinian history, with severe food shortages and physical humiliation.”
+ According to the New York Times, Israeli doctors at the Sde Teimen, torture facility, were told not to write their names on official documents for fear of being identified and charged with war crimes by the ICC.
+ Israeli ministers approved a law last week that reserves administrative detention only for non-Jews, meaning the detainees can be held without charges or access to a lawyer. From October 7 to the beginning of May, 10 Jews had been held in administrative detention and 2,733 Palestinians.
+ Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir: “Look at my surprise and misfortune. In recent days, I have dealt with questions if the Palestinian prisoners have a fruit basket or if they don’t have it. And I say, the Palestinian prisoners must be killed. Shot in the head. The law of executing prisoners, it will be passed on the third reading in the Knesset. We will give them a little to live on and nothing more.”
+ According to the Israeli human rights group Hamoked, as of the first of July, there are 9,623 Palestinians in Israeli custody, including 3,379 administrative detainees (35 percent), who are being held without trial, and 1,402 people (15 percent) held as “unlawful combatants.” These figures don’t include any of the thousands of Palestinians from Gaza who have been detained by the Israeli military since 7 October 2023. Their number remains unknown.
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+ Last week Al Jazeera broadcast footage of more Palestinians in Gaza being used as human shields by Israeli forces. The videos showed Palestinian detainees with their hands cuffed behind their backs, forced by Israeli soldiers to enter buildings in front of them. Some of the Palestinians had been stripped of their clothes and had cameras hung around their necks. One prisoner is seen being compelled to walk into a tunnel while tied to a rope and holding a camera.
The BBC reported that two more Palestinian men who were injured during an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank last week, said Israeli soldiers forced them onto the hood of a military Jeep and drove them – sometimes at high speed – down village roads.
+ Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora Affairs, said that a victory by the French neo-fascist Marine LePen would be “excellent for Israel.” He said in a radio interview this week that he was “impressed” by the positions of the leader of the rightwing National Rally and that Netanyahu shared his opinion of her. All major Jewish organizations in France oppose LePen.
+ Ayelet Waldman wrote in New York magazine: “While the dwindling of the Israeli left is a tragedy, the reality is that in some way there never was an Israeli left to begin with…their commune, their classless society, was composed exclusively of Jews.”
+ UNRWA’s Louise Wateridge on the “unbearable” conditions in northern Gaza: “Honestly the people here are so exhausted. They’re tired. It very much feels like the humanitarians are pushing a rock up a hill, trying to get any kind of progress, trying to get any kind of support to the community. We need more access. We need more aid, more supplies. There’s never been enough. For eight months there’s never been enough. Now is the worst. And without much doubt tomorrow will be the worst again. I talk about the people who are now having a choice: the choice is between living amid piles of trash that are rotting in the heat or in bombed-out rubble-filled buildings with no bathrooms and no running water. And it’s a very similar case for the humanitarians, who are now going back to buildings that have been bombed out, have been destroyed and we are now running humanitarian operations from these very same buildings.”
+The father of Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces in a car in Gaza in January, was recently killed in an Israeli air strike.
+ Sigrid Kaag, the UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction: “With their homes shattered and lives upended by war, civilians in Gaza are clinging to their dignity under the most inhumane conditions.”
+ Zvi Ba’rel writing in Haaretz: “In Gaza, the term “humanitarian aid” is misleading. Vast quantities of goods, estimated at 6,000 tons, have been laid in warehouses since June 9. There is no agreed group or entity that is prepared to distribute it due to fears for staffers’ lives.”
+ According to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, newborn babies now have little chance of survival in Gaza, ”Mothers are so malnourished they cannot breastfeed, so their babies are dying…starving to death – because they cannot get the vital nutrition they desperately need.”
+ The Israeli military’s Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi “publicly urged his soldiers not to film themselves committing war crimes.” He didn’t order his troops to stop committing them.
+ In a letter to the top ministers of the Netanyahu government, Ronen Bar, head of the Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, all but confessed that torture is routine in Israeli detention camps: “IL has difficulty fending off allegations against it, at least some of which are founded, such that its conduct may be considered an international crime (‘inhumane treatment’) and a violation of international conventions (The Convention against Torture).” (TP-that was really popular with US "Traditional Conservatives” like Sen. Jeff Sessions, as well!)
+ The Israeli newspaper Yediut Ahranot reported that Shabak Rosen Bar admitted his week that there are more than 21, 000 prisoners in Israeli jails, even though the total capacity of all Israeli prisons is only 14,500. Nearly half of all prisoners in Israel are Palestinian.
+ In October, Israel banned visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to all Palestinians in Israeli custody. In mid-June, the Netanyahu government announced this ban would be permanent. Human rights groups condemned the new policy as yet another violation of international law.
+ 42 IDF reservists who were sent to fight in Gaza since Oct. 7 signed a letter of refusal to continue serving, citing the military leadership’s indifference to civilian deaths. One told Haaretz: “The vibe is ‘you can fire wherever you want.’”
+ Only weeks after Palestinians were allowed to return to the ruins of Khan Younis, the IDF once again issued an evacuation order for the devastated city, forcing families to once again endure forced displacement. UNRWA estimates that more than 250,000 will be forced to flee the area, dragging their meager belongs, children and elderly down the shattered streets in 90F with little or no potable water.
+ Sam Rose, UNRWA: “People know that if they don’t get out within 24 hours, then worse is to come.”
+ Louise Wateridge, UNRWA: “The buildings aren’t building anymore. They are shells. You can see the life that used to be there.”
+ According to UN Women, the UN’s agency for gender equity and women’s empowerment, no fewer than 557,000 Palestinian women in Gaza are facing severe food insecurity. A survey conducted by UN Women throughout the Strip in April found that 76 percent of interviewed pregnant women reported suffering from anemia, and 99 percent reported facing challenges in accessing necessary nutritional supplies and supplements. In addition, 55 percent of new mothers reported suffering from health conditions that undermined their ability to breastfeed, and 99 percent faced challenges in securing enough breastmilk, compromising infant survival, growth and development.
+ Given the lack of fuel in Gaza, Palestinian women are increasingly relying on burning wood, plastic and other waste materials to cook, exposing them to hazardous smoke and pollutants that cause respiratory and other health issues.
+ The Brookings Institution asked 750 Middle East experts to describe Israeli actions in Gaza.
+ 41% said “major war crimes akin to genocide”
+ 34% said “genocide”
+ 16% said “not akin to genocide, but still major war crimes”
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+ The World Food Program reiterated this week that near-famine conditions continue to grip all of Gaza: “They do not have enough food to keep going. Many of them go to bed hungry, having one meal a day if they are lucky…Famine is not just about food. People need nutrition. They need access to healthcare. They need clean water, and they need shelter.”
+ The lack of food in Gaza has become so extreme that people are beginning to eat tree leaves and weeds. “People are cooking weeds,” Mahmoud Issa told Mondowiess this week. Issa is a local journalist, who lives in Gaza City, “They cook leaves in water and spices. Even using the water is risky, because there’s no power to run the desalination plants.”
+ Palestinian children in Gaza now spend 6-8 hours a day collecting water and food, often carrying heavy loads for miles.
+ Haneen Ajour, the Norway Refugee Council’s representative in Gaza, on what it’s like to be hungry in Gaza now: “Having lost our homes, going back to normal now means going back to worse. We wonder if we will have a house again, if we will have food.
“We had enough food and clothes before, those were not things we would worry about. Then suddenly, we were told to leave our homes. I am discovering what it means to be hungry, and how it feels in real life. It is harder than death itself, it is the hardest thing you could ever experience.
“Food is just one face of this crisis. Suddenly, you find yourself dressed in your finest clothes but unable to secure your next meal. Your cash is stuck in the bank and you have nothing left to spend.
“We realized we had to go out if we didn’t want to starve to death. We used to be too scared to go out, but then we realized we had to get out if we didn’t want to starve to death. But you are effectively sacrificing yourself in order to get hold of low-quality food. Children are malnourished and have lost so much weight.
“When we were in Rafah, people were being starved, so tinned food and bad quality food became an acceptable choice. Bad cheese that cats wouldn’t eat became too expensive to get.”
+ According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society over 10,000 people–half of them children–have become disabled since October 2023, making them among the most vulnerable people in the Gaza Strip. According to UNICEF’s assessment of accessibility conditions at 39 shelters in Rafah in March 2024, only 41 percent reported that water distribution points were accessible to people with disabilities and a third of Rafah’s shelters reported that their latrines were inaccessible to people with mobility disabilities.
+ Médecins Sans Frontières says Israel has blocked it from bringing any medical supplies into Gaza since the end of April.
+ The 37 million tons of debris in the Gaza Strip contain about 800,000 tons of asbestos, other contaminants, and unexploded munitions. At least 10 percent of fired ammunition failed to explode but remains a lethal hazard, which is now killing and maiming Palestinians on a nearly daily basis. Some recent incidents: On 31 May, a displaced Palestinian man and his two children were injured by an unexploded munition at a school in southern Khan Younis. On 5 June, six children were injured when an unexploded munition exploded near Al Aqsa University in western Khan Younis. On 29 June, a nine-year-old girl was killed, and three others injured, by an unexploded munition in the Qizan An Najjar area, south of Khan Younis.
+ On Wednesday Israel’s Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, a member of Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power Party, reposted a tweet calling for the reoccupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
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+ Benjamin Allison wrote in Foreign Policy: “Israeli military doctrine, even before Oct. 7, was remarkably tolerant of civilian casualties, as seen in the Dahiya (or Eisenkot) doctrine, which dictated… ‘disproportionate’ attacks on civilian infrastructure” to bring “the enemy to its knees.”
+ The sanitary conditions in Gaza continue to deteriorate. Displaced people are living near huge piles of rotting garbage and human waste pits, which exude suffocating odors in the extreme heat of summer. Packs of starving dogs prowl the streets and dig through the garbage piles for scraps of food. On 30 June, the Ministry of Health warned that hospitals have been overwhelmed with more than 10,000 cases of Hepatitis A and 880,000 cases of respiratory illnesses. Cases of diarrhea, skin infections and lice outbreaks are also soaring. Rates of diarrheal infections are more than 25 times higher than they were in September of last year, according to the WHO. A cholera outbreak is expected, if the situation doesn’t improve soon.
+ According to UNRWA, in the month of June there were 115 planned humanitarian assistance missions that had been coordinated with Israeli authorities in northern Gaza. But only 53 (46 percent) took place as planned. 41 (35.7 percent) were impeded by Israeli forces and another 11 (9.6 percent) were denied access. 10 (8.7 percent) planned missions were canceled for logistical, operational, or security reasons. In southern Gaza, out of 299 coordinated humanitarian assistance missions 213 (71.2 percent) were completed, while 34 (11.4 percent) were impeded and 16 (5.4 percent) were denied access by Israeli force. Another 36 (12 percent) were canceled.
+ Between 7 October and 1 July, 539 Palestinians, including 131 children, have been killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The deaths include 522 killed by Israeli forces, ten by Israeli settlers, and seven where it remains unknown whether the perpetrators were Israeli soldiers or settlers. Additionally, more than 5,420 Palestinians have been injured in the same period, including about 830 children. At least a third of the total injuries were caused by live ammunition.
+ An Israeli military officer told Haaretz this week: ”Lately, there have been more serious incidents that occur in plain sight. There are no arrests and no condemnations.”
+ Over the same period, Israel has conducted at least 28 airstrikes in the occupied West Bank, during which 77 Palestinians, including 14 children.
+ In the first six months of 2024, 111 Israeli Arabs have been murdered. Over the same period in 2022, the number was 46. Many of these murders have been committed by Israeli gangs, some of them particularly sadistic. For example, in June, the dismembered body of Rabia Araidi was found in a northern Israeli town. Araidi was the son of Naim Araidi, Israel’s former ambassador to Norway. An Israeli gang claimed credit for his murder and bragged online about beheading him. According to Haaretz, “[Israeli security minister] Ben-Gvir is the primary culprit for this professional and moral failure. His promise of governability has turned out to be an empty one. In his obsession with counting how many pitas prisoners receive, he has left a vacuum that has been filled by organized crime.”
+ In an interview with Haaretz, retired High Court Justice Anat Baron said that she hasn’t seen much evidence to support Israel’s punitive policy of home demolition, where the houses of family members of suspected Palestinian militants in the Occupied Territories are routinely destroyed: “As justices, we were given access to Shin Bet reports on the subject, and I didn’t see [evidence of] deterrence of those who might become terrorists. Many security experts thought the opposite: that home demolitions actually spur more terrorism.” Baron described home demolition as a form of collective punishment that violates Israeli and international law: “Home demolition constitutes collective punishment, contrary to the basic principles of Israeli law. The notion that parents sinned and the children are to be punished is unconscionable.”
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+ Mariyan, a Palestinian Christian from Gaza:: “When I entered my apartment, I was shocked that the Israeli soldiers left a bunch of alcohol bottles on the table with my underwear in the middle with a bullet on it; they also tore down the ultrasound picture of my baby.”
+ Once again Hamas has responded positively to the latest “amended” US ceasefire plan. But according to the Israeli daily, Yediot Ahronot, disclosed that the heads of Israel’s security agencies expressed outrage that Netanyahu and Smotrich have attempted to “sabotage the deal” by blocking communications with the mediators in advance of the negotiations.
+ This week an Israeli airstrike targeted an apartment complex in Gaza City that killed seven people, three of whom were children. Al Jazeera interviewed a neighbor who saw the children fall to their deaths from the third floor of the building. The body of one of the children was found without a head.
+ Once again Israel bombed the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where more than a thousand refugees were sheltering. Afterward, the hospital announced that several wings were no longer functional due to a lack of power.
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+ During his weekly meeting with his cabinet, Netanyahu reiterated his intention to continue the military operations in Gaza and on the border with Lebanon vowing that Israel would continue “to fight until achieving our goals; destroying Hamas, returning our hostages, ensuring that Gaza will no longer be a danger, and returning the residents to the north.”
+ After an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon targeted and killed Muhammad Naameh Naser, commander of Hezbollah’s Aziz Unit, Hezbollah responded by firing more than 200 rockets into northern Israel, igniting fires across the Galilee. Naser was the second-highest-ranking Hezbollah commander to be killed in the last three weeks.
+ This week U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “noted that Hezbollah had said that if a cease-fire were reached in Gaza, it would stop firing into Israel. That ‘underscores why a cease-fire in Gaza is so critical,’ he said.”
A war with Hezbollah would likely be catastrophic for Israel, but it seems to be a war that both Netanyahu and Gallant want.
+ An analysis by Al Jazeera of the military actions on the border of southern Lebanon shows that 82% of the airstrikes have been conducted by Israel and 96% of the fatalities are Lebanese.
+ In a Ha’aretz oped, Israeli historian Benny Morris calls on Israel to nuke Iran: “If Israel does not have the capability to eradicate the Iranian nuclear plant by conventional means, then it must use its unconventional capabilities for this purpose….The world media, campuses and world leaders will rebuke us, but many will also understand and support us. We have reached a decisive moment, and our leaders must decide and act. Otherwise, may Allah have mercy.”
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+ The UN announced this week that more than 90 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza have been displaced from their homes, many of them multiple times.
+ Here’s the account of a young girl who survived the Israeli army’s invasion of the Al Shuja’yia neighborhood in Gaza City: “The Israeli forces stormed into our house. They tried to take my brothers away. When my mother intervened to stop them, they grabbed her, pulled her outside, forced her down in front of a tank and ran over her before our eyes. Then they took my brothers. I don’t know what’s happened to them.”
+ According to the World Health Organization, all 320 patients and all of the staff at the European Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals, were evacuated following evacuation orders issued by the Israeli army in Khan Younis.
+ Craig Mokhiber: “Israel is committing torture and sexual abuse, summary executions, collective punishment, extermination, record murder of children, humanitarians, medical personnel, journalists, destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, ethnic cleansing. Leaders declaring genocidal intent. Soldiers gleefully recording their own atrocities. Stop calling it a war.”
+ Suppose Biden withdraws but doesn’t resign and Kamala Harris becomes the nominee but doesn’t resign herself. In that case, she’ll be bound to all of his worst policies, from Gaza to Ukraine, unable as Biden’s sitting veep to unshackle herself from them during the campaign.
+ Two weeks after saying she didn’t know what Netanyahu was talking about following his video trolling the Biden White House for not shipping Israel enough 2,000-lb bombs, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre invoked Netanyahu as a witness to Biden’s mental acuity: “The prime minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu: “I have had more than a dozen phone conversations, extended conversations, with President Biden. He also came on a visit to Israel during wartime, which is a historic first. I found him very clear and very focused.” Of course, it’s clear to just about everyone now that Netanyahu wants Trump to return to the White House and the best shot at that happening is for the insensate Biden to remain his opponent.
+ Biden followed this up by saying he planned to meet with Netanyahu when he comes to Washington to deliver his address to a joint session of Congress.
+ Biden’s legacy is secure: arms dealer for one of the worst genocides of the 21st century. Stay or go, they can’t take that away from him.
+ Back in October, Biden requested funding for the forced mass deportation of Palestinians into Egypt and other nations.
+ Brett Holmgren, the State Department’s top intelligence official, has warned that the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza is fueling recruitment among terrorist organizations and providing “inspiration for lone actors.”
+ After being falsely smeared as an anti-semite by Keir Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn trounced the sniveling challenger from the back-stabbing party he used to lead…
+ Starmer’s Labour got fewer votes than Corbyn did in both 2017 and 2019.
+ Votes for Keir Starmer in his Holborn & St Pancras constituency:
2017: 41,343
2019: 36,641
2024: 18,884
+ Since 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s principal intelligence agency has been spying on Americans for their political activism using the excuse of “counterterrorism” investigations. Targeted groups include StopCopCity activists, reproductive rights activists and student anti-genocide protesters. In Georgia, police and local prosecutors in Atlanta used the DHS intelligence files to justify their crackdown. During congressional testimony last week, Ken Wainstein, the Department’s Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, said:
“There have been numerous occasions where we have asked them [Homeland Security collectors as well as state and local authorities] to search, collect, and provide warnings about the possibility for violence developing around events of heightened tension, ranging from the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol to the reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the mass gatherings in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel.”
+ The ADL went to the UAW’s federal monitor, Neil Barofsky, to complain about the union backing a ceasefire resolution and urged him to use his power behind the scenes to get it overturned.
+ On June 25, members of the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers voted to pass resolutions in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and the permanent removal of the New York Police Department from Columbia University’s campus.
+ On Monday, the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the USA voted to divest from Israel bonds and passed a resolution denouncing Christian Zionism, citing human rights abuses against Palestinians.
+ Spain has joined the South African genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. It is the first European country to do so.
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Let’s give the last word this week to Palestinian journalist Motasem A Dalloul on the deteriorating conditions in Gaza’s tent cities: “Do you know what it means to live in a tent or a partially or completely destroyed house?!
“It means that there is no toilet, no bathroom, no kitchen, no hygiene, no running water, no cooker, no warmer, no fan or air conditioner, no beds, no cupboards, no laundry, no clean or ironed clothes and no everything!
“It means that there are crickets, bugs, snakes, centipedes, scorpions, lizards, rats, mice, cockroaches, fleas, flies and the worst thing is the mosquitoes which suck our blood silently or keep buzzing and producing the worst ever noise pollution.
“Add to all of this: lack of privacy among the same family members and among all the families in a certain area.”