Deadly attacks launched day before border crossing due to open as part of ceasefire deal
Israel has carried out some of its deadliest airstrikes on Gaza in months, killing at least 30 Palestinians, some of whom were sheltering in tent cities for displaced people.
Despite a nominal ceasefire, the Israeli military struck a police station in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood west of Gaza City on Saturday, killing 10 officers and detainees, the civil defence said. It indicated the death toll could rise as emergency responders searched for bodies.
Another strike hit an apartment in Gaza City, killing three children and two women, while seven more people were killed when Israel bombed tents in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
Palestinians inspect damage to a tent hit by an Israeli strike in Khan Younis. Photograph: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP
“We found my three little nieces in the street. They say ‘ceasefire’ and all. What did those children do? What did we do?” Samer al-Atbash, an uncle of the three children killed in Gaza City, told Reuters.
The Israeli military said the attacks were carried out in response to an incident on Friday when eight armed men came out of a tunnel in Rafah, southern Gaza. The area is still under Israeli military control under the terms of the October ceasefire.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir 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.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
A Palestinian boy walks among the rubble of a home destroyed by Israeli bombing in Jabalia, Gaza, Palestine on May 29, 2025. (Photo: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)
“The pattern suggests not an effort to neutralize a threat, but a deliberate campaign to dismantle and depopulate Gaza—a process of forced displacement which is a war crime.”
Israel’s U.S.-backed mass displacement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip “is entirely erasing Gaza,” a leading international charity said Thursday as the United Nations’ Middle East peace envoy warned that ongoing airstrikes, forced starvation, and general despair have plunged the embattled coastal enclave into “an abyss.”
Since unilaterally breaking a cease-fire on March 2, “Israel issued nearly one displacement order every two days, strangling people into isolated areas covering less than 20% of the Gaza Strip,” Nairobi, Kenya-based Oxfam International noted.
“Combined with deliberate deprivation, this reveals a strategy not of targeting militants, but of dismantling and erasing Gaza itself,” Oxfam added. Some Israeli leaders have explicitly called for Gaza’s “erasure” to avenge the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
“People are so exhausted, many would rather face death than flee again.”
“For over 600 days, Israel has been saying it’s targeting Hamas, but it is civilians who have been corralled, bombed, and killed en masse every day,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
“The displacement orders follow a clear and calculated pattern: using the threat of violence to herd civilians into ever-shrinking zones of confinement,” Khalidi added. “This isn’t counterterrorism, as Israel alleges—it’s the systematic clearing of Gaza through militarized force into enclaves of internment.”
📽️ WATCH: This map visualizes #Gaza’s systematic erasure. Since breaking the ceasefire, Israel issued nearly one displacement order every two days, strangling people into isolated areas covering less than 20 percent of the Gaza Strip. Find out more: oxf.am/3Hbshlz
Oxfam analyzed Israel’s more than 30 displacement orders, which, combined with Israel Defense Forces (IDF)-designated “no-go zones,” cover more than 80% of the 141-square mile Gaza Strip.
“The sheer scale and relentless frequency of these orders have made it virtually impossible for people to find refuge,” the charity said. “The pattern suggests not an effort to neutralize a threat, but a deliberate campaign to dismantle and depopulate Gaza—a process of forced displacement which is a war crime.”
As Oxfam noted:
In just the last week (15–20 May), over 160,000 people were displaced—part of a broader total of nearly 600,000 people displaced since March 18, many of them repeatedly. One of the most significant recent orders, issued on 20 May, covered 34.9 square kilometers, roughly 10% of Gaza’s land area, that affected 150,000–200,000 people in North Gaza’s Beit Lahia and Jabalia. The effect of such orders on already-displaced populations has been devastating.
“Imagine trying to move with four children or an elderly parent in the middle of the night, with no transport and nowhere to go,” said Oxfam gender adviser Fidaa Alaraj, who has been displaced with her family several times. “People are so exhausted, many would rather face death than flee again.”
Fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including extermination and forced starvation—recently said that Israel will control all of Gaza after Operation Gideon’s Chariots, a campaign to conquer, ethnically cleanse, and indefinitely occupy the strip.
Far-right members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet and the Israeli Knesset want to permanently seize Gaza and reestablish Jewish-only apartheid colonies in the coastal enclave, which U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed taking over and turning into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“There is one essential condition: We must not reach a situation of famine, both from a practical standpoint and a diplomatic one,” Netanyahu said on May 19. “People simply won’t support us.”
While 82% of Israelis surveyed in a recent poll said they supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—and nearly half backed a biblical genocide of Palestinians—much of the world is aghast at Israel’s annihilation of the strip, which has left more than 191,000 people dead, maimed, or missing and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, often more than once.
Meanwhile, the famine against which Netanyahu warned looms larger than ever as hundreds of Gazans, mostly children and the elderly, have recently died from malnutrition and lack of medical care, according to local officials.
On Thursday, Sigrid Kaag, the interim U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, warned that Gazans are “being starved and denied the very basics” by Israel, which in March tightened an already crippling “complete siege” of Gaza. The blockade has been cited in the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice.
“The entire population of Gaza is facing the risk of famine,” she warned, likening the trickle of aid allowed into the strip by Israel to offering “a lifeboat after the ship has sunk.”
Kaag highlighted the despair pervasive among Gazans, who she said bid farewell not by saying, “Goodbye, see you tomorrow,” but rather with the words “see you in heaven.”
“Death is their companion. It’s not life, it’s not hope,” she said.
“Since the collapse of the ceasefire in March, civilians have constantly come under fire, confined to ever-shrinking spaces, and deprived of lifesaving relief,” Kaag added. “Israel must halt its devastating strikes on civilian life and infrastructure.”
“This annihilation campaign and the bloodshed must end.”
Echoing Kaag’s remarks, Oxfam’s Khalidi said that “this annihilation campaign and the bloodshed must end. It is long past time for Western governments and other influential powers to move beyond statements and apply meaningful pressure on Israel to lift the siege and abandon any designs on annexing Gaza.”
“Peace cannot be brokered on the ruins of Gaza nor the theft of Palestinian land,” she stressed. “Ahead of the Two-State Solution Summit planned in New York next month, world leaders must urge Israel to lift the siege and abandon any annexation plans of Gaza or the West Bank.”
“What’s at stake is not only Palestine’s future,” Khalidi argued, “but the integrity of every nation that claims to uphold international law.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
A wounded man points to photos of civilians killed during an October 16, 2024 Israeli airstrike on the village of Aitou, Lebanon. (Photo: Fathi al-Masri/AFP via Getty Images)
“The latest evidence of unlawful airstrikes during Israel’s most recent offensive in Lebanon underscores the urgent need for all states, especially the United States, to suspend arms transfers,” said one campaigner.
Amnesty International on Thursday called for a war crimes investigation into recent Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon that killed dozens of civilians, as well as a suspension of arms transfers to Israel as it attacks Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria.
In a briefing paper titled The Sky Rained Missiles, Amnesty “documented four illustrative cases in which unlawful Israeli strikes killed at least 49 civilians” in Lebanon in September and October amid an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign of invasion and bombardment that Lebanese officials say has killed or wounded more than 20,000 people.
“Amnesty International found that Israeli forces unlawfully struck residential buildings in the village of al-Ain in northern Bekaa on September 29, the village of Aitou in northern Lebanon on October 14, and in Baalbeck city on October 21,” the rights group said. “Israeli forces also unlawfully attacked the municipal headquarters in Nabatieh in southern Lebanon on October 16.”
Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said in a statement that “these four attacks are emblematic of Israel’s shocking disregard for civilian lives in Lebanon and their willingness to flout international law.”
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The September 29 attack “destroyed the house of the Syrian al-Shaar family, killing all nine members of the family who were sleeping inside,” the report states.
“This is a civilian house, there is no military target in it whatsoever,” village mukhtar, or leader, Youssef Jaafar told Amnesty. “It is full of kids. This family is well-known in town.”
On October 16, Israel bombed the Nabatieh municipal complex, killing Mayor Ahmad Khalil and 10 other people.
“The airstrike took place without warning, just as the municipality’s crisis unit was meeting to coordinate deliveries of aid, including food, water, and medicine, to residents and internally displaced people who had fled bombardment in other parts of southern Lebanon,” Amnesty said, adding that there was no apparent military target in the immediate area.
In the deadliest single strike detailed in the Amnesty report, IDF bombardment believed to be targeting a suspected Hezbollah member killed 23 civilians forcibly displaced from southern Lebanon in Aitou on October 14.
“The youngest casualty was Aline, a 5-month-old baby who was flung from the house into a pickup truck nearby and was found by rescue workers the day after the strike,” Amnesty said.
Survivor Jinane Hijazi told Amnesty: “I’ve lost everything; my entire family, my parents, my siblings, my daughter. I wish I had died that day too.”
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As the report notes:
A fragment of the munition found at the site of the attack was analyzed by an Amnesty International weapons expert and based upon its size, shape, and the scalloped edges of the heavy metal casing, identified as most likely a MK-80 series aerial bomb, which would mean it was at least a 500-pound bomb. The United States is the primary supplier of these types of munitions to Israel.
“The means and method of this attack on a house full of civilians likely would make this an indiscriminate attack and it also may have been disproportionate given the presence of a large number of civilians at the time of the strike,” Amnesty stressed. “It should be investigated as a war crime.”
The October 21 strike destroyed a building housing 13 members of the Othman family, killing two women and four children and wounding seven others.
“My son woke me up; he was thirsty and wanted to drink. I gave him water and he went back to sleep, hugging his brother,” survivor Fatima Drai—who lost her two sons Hassan, 5, and Hussein, 3, in the attack—told Amnesty.
“When he hugged his brother, I smiled and thought, I’ll tell his father how our son is when he comes back,” she added. “I went to pray, and then everything around me exploded. A gas canister exploded, burning my feet, and within seconds, it consumed my kids’ room.”
Guevara Rosas said: “These attacks must be investigated as war crimes. The Lebanese government must urgently call for a special session at the U.N. Human Rights Council to establish an independent investigative mechanism into the alleged violations and crimes committed by all parties in this conflict. It must also grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over Rome Statute crimes committed on Lebanese territory.”
“Israel has an appalling track record of carrying out unlawful airstrikes in Gaza and past wars in Lebanon taking a devastating toll on civilians.”
Last month, the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with Israel’s 433-day Gaza onslaught, which has left more than 162,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the embattled enclave.
The tribunal also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri for alleged crimes committed during and after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which more than 1,100 people were killed and over 240 others were kidnapped.
Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice is weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel. Last week, Amnesty published a report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The United States—which provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover—has also been accused of complicity in Israeli war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon.
“Israel has an appalling track record of carrying out unlawful airstrikes in Gaza and past wars in Lebanon taking a devastating toll on civilians,” Guevara Rosas said. “The latest evidence of unlawful air strikes during Israel’s most recent offensive in Lebanon underscores the urgent need for all states, especially the United States, to suspend arms transfers to Israel due to the risk they will be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.”
