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Relatives and loved ones of Palestinians, who lost their lives in an Israeli attack on the ez-Zeytun neighborhood, mourn the deceased as the bodies are being taken to El Ehli Baptist Hospital for funeral in eastern Gaza City, Gaza on August 6, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]
At least 61,258 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip since October 2023, including 197 who have died from hunger, the Health Ministry said on Thursday, Anadolu reports.
A ministry statement said 100 bodies were brought to hospitals in the last 24 hours, while 603 people were injured, taking the number of injuries to 152,045 in the Israeli onslaught since October 2023.
The ministry also said that four more people died from starvation and malnutrition over the past day, pushing the death toll since October 2023 to 197, including 96 children.
A medical source told Anadolu that 16-month-old Mohammed Zakaria Asfour lost his life at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis as a result of starvation-related complications amid a severe shortage of food and medicine due to the Israeli siege.
Activists shared videos on social media showing Mohammed’s extremely frail body and protruding bones.
The ministry also said that 51 Palestinians were killed and 230 injured while trying to get humanitarian aid in the past day, bringing the total number of people killed while seeking aid to 1,706 with over 12,030 others wounded since May 27, when the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operations.
Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza for 18 years and, since March 2 has shut down all crossings, blocking the entry of humanitarian aid and worsening conditions for the territory’s 2.4 million population.
According to Gaza’s government media office, Israel allowed in just 92 aid trucks on Wednesday – far short of the 600 trucks needed daily to meet the needs of the residents.
The Israeli army resumed its attacks on the Gaza Strip on March 18, breaking a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement that took hold in January. Efforts for another truce led by the US, Egypt and Qatar have so far not yielded any results.
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Palestinians inspect the damage following the Israeli attacks on a health facility belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the Sheikh Ridan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on August 6, 2025. [Dawoud Abo Alkas – Anadolu Agency]
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a comprehensive report on 27 July describing the Israeli war on Gaza as genocide. However, the delay in publishing such an indictment is troubling and adds to an existing problem of politically motivated decision-making processes that have, in their own right, prolonged the ongoing Israeli war crimes.
The report accused Israel of committing genocide, a conclusion reached after a detailed analysis of the military campaign’s intent, the systematic destruction of civilian life, and the government-engineered famine. This finding is significant because it adds to the massive body of legal and testimonial evidence affirming the Palestinian position that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.
Moreover, the fact that B’Tselem is an Israeli organization is doubly important. It represents an insider’s indictment of the horrific massacres and the government-engineered famine in the Strip, directly challenging the baseless argument that accusing Israel of genocide is an act of antisemitism.
Western media were particularly interested in this report, despite the fact that numerous first-hand Palestinian reports and investigations are often ignored or downplayed. This double standard continues to feed into a chronic media problem in its perception of Palestine and Israel.
Claims by Palestinians of Israeli war crimes have historically been ignored by mainstream media or academia. Whether the Zionist militia’s massacre of Tantura in 1948, the actual number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982, or the events resulting in the Jenin massacre in the West Bank in 2002, the media has frequently ignored the Palestinian account. It often gains a degree of validation only if it is backed by Israeli or Western voices.
The latest B’Tselem report is no exception. But another question must be asked: why did it take nearly two years for B’Tselem to reach such an obvious conclusion? Israeli rights groups, in particular, have far greater access to the conduct of the Israeli army, the statements of politicians, and Hebrew media coverage than any other entity. Such a conclusion, therefore, should have been reached in a matter of two months, not two years.
This kind of intentional delay has so far defined the position of many international institutions, organisations, and individuals whose moral authority would have helped Palestinians establish the facts of the genocide globally much earlier.
For example, despite the ICJ’s historic ruling on 26 January 2024, that determined that there are plausible grounds for South Africa’s accusation of Israel of committing genocide, the court is still unable, or unwilling, to produce a conclusive ruling. A definitive ruling would have been a significant pressure card on Israel to end its mass killing in Gaza.
Instead, for now, the ICJ expects Israel to investigate itself, a most unrealistic expectation at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises his extremist ministers that Israel will encourage the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The same indictment of intentional and politicised delays can be attributed to the International Criminal Court. While it issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister on November 21, 2024, no concrete action has been taken. Instead, it is the Chief Prosecutor of the court, Karim Khan, who finds himself attacked by the US government and media for having the courage to follow through on the investigation.
Individuals, too, especially those who have been associated with ‘revolutionary’ politics, the likes of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, have been reluctant to act. On 22 March 2024, Ocasio-Cortez refused to use the term genocide in Gaza, going as far as claiming that, while she saw an “unfolding genocide,” she was not yet ready to use the term herself.
Sanders, on the other hand, who has spoken out repeatedly and strongly against Netanyahu, describing him in an interview with CNN on 31 July as a “disgusting liar,” has had repeated moral lapses since the start of the war. When the term genocide was used by many, far less ‘radical’ politicians, Sanders doubled down during a lecture at a university in Ireland. He said that the word genocide “makes him queasy,” and he urged people to be “careful about it”.
These are not simply lost opportunities or instances of moral equivocation. They have had a profound and direct impact on Israel’s behavior. The timely intervention of governments, international institutions, high courts, media, and human rights groups would have fundamentally changed the dynamics of the war. Such collective pressure could have forced Israel and its allies to end the war, potentially saving thousands of lives.
Delays born of political calculation and fear of retribution have given Israel the critical space it needed to carry out its genocide. Israel is actively exploiting this lack of legal and moral clarity to persist in its mass slaughter of Palestinians.
This must change. The Palestinian perspective, their suffering, and their truths must be respected and honored without needing validation from Israeli or other sources. The Palestinian voice and their rights must be truly centered, not as an academic cliché or political jargon, but as an undeniable, everyday reality.
As for those who have delayed their verdict regarding the Israeli genocide, no rationale can possibly absolve them. They will be judged by history and by the desperate pleas of Gaza’s mothers and fathers, who tried and failed to save their children from the Israeli killing machine and the world’s collective silence or inaction.
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Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
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Palestinians struggling with hunger in the Gaza Strip, under Israeli attacks and blockade, arrive at the aid distribution point near the Zikim Crossing in Gaza to access the limited supplies of flour, on August 2, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]
The Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s (GHF) food distribution is “orchestrated killing and dehumanization,” French medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Thursday.
The organization, known by its French acronym MSF, accused Israeli forces and private American contractors of carrying out targeted and indiscriminate violence against starving Palestinians attempting to access food at GHF-operated sites.
It described the GHF as an “Israeli-US proxy that has militarized food distribution” in Gaza.
Titled “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing,” the MSF report draws on medical data, patients’ testimonies, and firsthand observations from two MSF clinics located near GHF distribution points in southern Gaza.
Between June 7 and July 24, the two clinics treated 1,380 casualties linked to violence near GHF-run sites, including 28 who were declared dead upon arrival, the organization said.
Among those treated were 71 children with gunshot wounds, 25 of whom were under the age of 15. According to the MSF, many families, facing extreme food shortages, often send adolescent boys to distribution points, as they are often the only able-bodied males in the household.
The “MSF calls for the immediate dismantling of the GHF scheme; the restoration of the UN-coordinated aid delivery mechanism; and calls on governments, especially the United States, as well as private donors to suspend all financial and political support for the GHF, whose sites are essentially death traps,” it said.
On May 27, Israel launched the separate aid distribution initiative through the GHF, bypassing the UN and international humanitarian agencies.
Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 61,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The relentless bombing has destroyed the enclave, while the poor distribution of aid and a blockade has led to deaths by starvation.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A woman and a child run for cover as a bomb falls from the sky during an Israeli airstrike targeting Abu Hilo School, run by UNRWA, in the Bureij Refugee Camp in central Gaza on July 17, 2025. [Moiz Salhi – Anadolu Agency]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has confirmed that Israel has bombed more than 500 schools sheltering displaced people across the Gaza Strip since October 2023.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the organisation said: “Since October 2023, Israeli authorities have carried out hundreds of strikes on schools sheltering displaced Palestinians, including unlawfully indiscriminate attacks using US munitions, that have killed hundreds of civilians and damaged or destroyed virtually all of Gaza’s schools.”
The rights organisation warned of the long-term consequences of the attacks, particularly on civilians and the education system, stating: “The Israeli attacks have denied civilians safe access to shelter and will contribute to the disruption of access to education for many years, as repair and reconstruction of schools can require significant resources and time.
The latest Israeli airstrikes on schools used as shelters form part of the ongoing military offensive, which has destroyed much of Gaza’s remaining civilian infrastructure, displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and further worsened an already dire humanitarian situation, according to the HRW statement.
The organisation demanded that “Governments- including the United States- which has provided weapons used in unlawful attacks, should impose an arms embargo on the Israeli government and take other urgent measures to enforce the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).”
The signatories of the open letter have expressed solidarity with protesters who may face arrest for taking part in a ‘mass action’ on 9 August. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
Exclusive: Naomi Klein and Angela Davis among those demanding stop to ‘attack on fundamental freedoms’ of assembly and protest
Naomi Klein and Angela Davis are among dozens of international scholars and writers who have signed a letter to the Guardian calling on the UK government to reverse the ban on Palestine Action.
The letter applauds what it describes as a “growing campaign of collective defiance” against the ban and commends the hundreds of people who plan to risk arrest by declaring their support for Palestine Action during a mass protest in London on Saturday.
Signatories from major academic institutions around the world also say they are “especially concerned” about the ban’s possible impact on universities across Britain and beyond.
It comes as the pressure group Defend Our Juries plans to hold a “mass action” in London on Saturday where participants have been asked to hold up signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Police have warned they will carry out mass arrests of anyone contravening terrorism laws. A separate Palestine solidarity march is taking place in London on the same day.
Two women and a man have been charged with showing support for proscribed terror group Palestine Action following a protest in central London.
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The charges – the first in England and Wales – come before a planned protest in support of the group on Saturday afternoon in London’s Parliament Square, with organisers expecting more than 500 people to attend.
Protesters calling for the ban on Palestine Action to be lifted are planning to stage a demonstration in London on Saturday that could result in hundreds being arrested.
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Keir “I support Zionism without Qualification” Starmer supporting genocide.Vote Labour for Genocide.UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
