Trucks carrying aid wait in front of the Rafah border crossing on March 2, 2025 in Rafah, Egypt. The flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza has been blocked, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Hamas had not accepted a US-proposed temporary extension to the ceasefire deal, following the expiration of the first phase on Saturday. Photo by Ali Moustafa/Getty Images
“There will be famine and chaos”
Israel has reneged on the existing ceasefire agreement they had agreed to with Hamas. The first phase of the ceasefire expired Saturday and Israel announced on Sunday it is halting all humanitarian aid and fuel deliveries to Gaza and closing the border between Israel and Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he made the decision “in full coordination with President Trump and his people.”
In a statement Hamas called the suspension of aid a “war crime” and a violation of the ceasefire agreement. It said Netanyahu’s “decision to suspend humanitarian aid is cheap blackmail, a war crime and a blatant coup against the [ceasefire] agreement”.
Stephen Zunes, the director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco, says the US’s apparent proposal favoring Israel follows a well-established pattern seen since the beginning of the war.
“This is typical,” he told Al Jazeera. “Hamas and Israel will agree to something. Then Israel will try to revise it in its favor. Then the US will put forward a new proposal that is in Israel’s favor and then the US will blame Hamas for not accepting that proposal.”
Israel’s decision to block all aid going into the Gaza Strip is a war crime under international law, a human rights expert says.
Kenneth Roth – former head of Human Rights Watch who is now a visiting professor at Princeton University – said Israel as an occupying power has an “absolute duty” to facilitate humanitarian aid under the Geneva Conventions.
“Israel’s latest threat to cut off all aid is a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy” that led to the arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court, he said.
Doctors Without Borders said Israel’s decision is “outrageous and will have devastating consequences”, said the group’s emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin.
“Humanitarian aid should never be used as a tool of war,” added the charity, known by its French acronym MSF, in a statement. “Regardless of negotiations between warring parties, people in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies.”
Jeremy Corbyn, who once led the UK Labour Party, said that Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid was a “resumption of genocide”, before adding that the current British government – led by Labour – was “complicit.”
Fayza Nassar, a woman living in the heavily destroyed urban Jabaliya refugee camp, said the closure would exacerbate already dire living conditions.
“There will be famine and chaos,” she said. “Closing the crossings is a heinous crime.”
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 48,388 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It says more than half of those killed were women and children.
Israel’s decision to halt aid into Gaza is alarming.
International humanitarian law is clear: We must be allowed access to deliver vital lifesaving aid.
We can’t roll back the progress of the past 42 days. We need to get aid in and the hostages out.
Israel's new cutoff of humanitarian aid to Gaza as a tactic to pressure Hamas is a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy that led the International Criminal Court to file charges against Netanyahu and Gallant. https://t.co/GcoYeB80GC
BREAKING: MSF strongly denounces Israel’s announcement to block aid into Gaza.
Humanitarian aid should never be used as a tool of war. Regardless of negotiations between warring parties, people in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies.… pic.twitter.com/NhOWoRDbrU
Palestinians sit at a large table surrounded by the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings as they gather for iftar, the fast-breaking meal, on the first day of Ramadan in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, March 1, 2025
THE ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was hanging by a thread today after Israel blockaded all goods and supplies reaching Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli representatives also warned of “additional consequences” if Hamas doesn’t accept a new proposal to extend the fragile ceasefire.
Hamas has accused Israel of trying to derail the existing ceasefire agreement and said its decision to cut off aid was “cheap extortion, a war crime and a blatant attack” on the truce, which began in January after more than a year of negotiations.
Both sides stopped short of saying the ceasefire had ended.
The first phase of the ceasefire, which included a surge in humanitarian assistance, expired on Saturday. The two sides have yet to negotiate the second phase, in which Hamas was to release dozens of remaining hostages in return for an Israeli withdrawal and a lasting ceasefire.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the decision to suspend aid was made in co-ordination with the United States.
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 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
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Israeli soldiers and reservists in Southern Israel on November 13, 2023 [Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images]
Israel’s military has called up reservists in preparation for a possible resumption of its offensive in Gaza if Hamas fails to meet a Saturday deadline to release more Israeli hostages and a nearly month-old ceasefire breaks down, Reuters has reported.
Concern that the ceasefire will collapse is growing as fury mounts in Arab countries over President Donald Trump’s plan for the United States to take over Gaza, displace its Palestinian inhabitants and build an international beach resort.
Under the ceasefire deal in force since 19 January, Hamas agreed to free three more hostages on Saturday. However, the Palestinian resistance movement said this week it was suspending the handover because of what it said were Israeli violations of the ceasefire terms. Trump responded by saying that all hostages must be freed by noon on Saturday or he would “let hell break out”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then warned on Tuesday that his country would resume “intense fighting” if Hamas did not meet the deadline, but he did not say how many hostages should be freed.
Netanyahu added that he had ordered the military to gather forces in and around Gaza, and the military announced it was deploying additional forces to Israel’s south, including mobilising reservists.
The head of Hamas in Gaza, Khalil Al-Hayya, arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for a surprise visit to discuss the fragile ceasefire. A Hamas official told Reuters that mediators Egypt and Qatar had stepped up efforts to end the current impasse.
The standoff threatens to reignite a conflict in which Israel has devastated the Gaza Strip, internally displaced most of its people, caused shortages of food and running water and pushed the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.
Palestinians in Gaza expressed alarm that the ceasefire might collapse and urged Hamas and Israeli leaders to agree on an extension.
“We had barely started believing that a truce would happen and that a solution was on the way, God willing,” said Lotfy Abu Taha, a resident of Rafah in southern Gaza. “The people are suffering. The people are the victims.”
Israeli officials said government ministers had endorsed Trump’s threat to cancel the ceasefire unless all hostages are released on Saturday. Hamas, meanwhile, said it remained committed to the agreement, but that Israel must fulfil what it agreed to do when it signed the deal. Despite the Trump and Netanyahu threats, the movement has not agreed to release the hostages on Saturday.
Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in Dubai that Trump’s vision for Gaza could lead the Middle East into a new cycle of crises with a “damaging effect on peace and stability.”
Trump has said Palestinians in Gaza could settle in countries such as Jordan and Egypt. Both reject the proposal.
Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit on 27 February to discuss “serious” developments for Palestinians.
In a sign of Arab anger over Trump’s vision of Gaza, two Egyptian security sources said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi would not go to Washington for talks if the agenda included Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians. The date for such a visit has not been announced, and the Egyptian presidency and foreign ministry did not comment.
The Gaza war — described by the International Court of Justice as “plausible genocide” — followed the Hamas-led cross-border incursion on 7 October, 2023, in which at least 1,200 people were killed, many of them by the Israel Defence Forces carrying out the controversial “Hannibal Directive”. An estimated 250 Israelis and Thais were taken into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
In response, Israel began its military offensive against Hamas which has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians in small, densely populated Gaza, according to Gaza health officials. Around 112,000 have been wounded, and 11,000 are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by the apartheid state.
Hamas has freed 16 Israeli hostages from an initial group of 33 children, women and older men to be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in the first stage of the ceasefire deal. It also returned five Thai hostages.
Negotiations on a second phase, which mediators hoped would include agreement on releasing the remaining hostages and a full Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza, should be under way in Doha but an Israeli team returned home on Monday.
Palestinians fear a repeat of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), when nearly 800,000 people were driven out by Zionist terrorists when Israel was created in occupied Palestine. Trump has said that Palestinians would lose their legitimate right to return to their homes under his plan for Gaza.
Meanwhile, he wants Saudi Arabia, which wields heavy influence in other Arab and Muslim countries, to normalise ties with Israel. Riyadh has previously said that it will not establish ties with Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state.
Under his first administration in 2017-21, Trump brokered normalisation accords between Israel and some Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates. Asked if the UAE could find common ground with Washington on Gaza, Abu Dhabi’s ambassador to the US, Yousef Al-Otaiba, said the US approach was difficult. “But at the end of the day we’re all in a solution-seeking business, we just don’t know where it’s going to land yet,” he said.
UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday that peace efforts in the region should be on the basis of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, state news agency WAM reported.
Trump’s Gaza plan upended decades of US Middle East policy which called for a Palestinian state co-existing in peace alongside Israel as the solution to one of the world’s most complex and volatile problems.
The Arab League’s Aboul Gheit said that the idea of the Arab Peace Initiative drawn up by Saudi Arabia in 2002 — in which Arab nations offered Israel normalised relations in return for a statehood deal with the Palestinians and full Israeli withdrawal from territory captured during the June 1967 war — would be reintroduced.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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/QILgUHrdWREGenocide 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/O74hZCKKdpA
Displaced Palestinian children sit on a sand mound overlooking tents set up amid destroyed buildings in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on February 6, 2025. (Photo: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)
“Palestine is not just an idea—it is a place. It is a homeland to the Palestinian people,” the coalition wrote.
A coalition of over 100 organizations on Monday forcefully denounced U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and take over the coastal enclave recently decimated by an Israeli military campaign conducted with American weapons.
Led by A New Policy—a group founded by Biden administration officials who resigned in protest—and the Quaker organization Friends Committee on National Legislation, the coalition said that “we are deeply alarmed by President Trump’s recent statements, tracing them back to January 25, just days after the Republican returned to power.
“We, the undersigned organizations, decry and oppose any effort or initiative, and any calls for, the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and support the joint statement of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab League that similarly rejected any such steps, the coalition wrote, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The letter highlights the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1940s during the formation of the modern state of Israel, which Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe; that since 2006, Gaza “has been in a state of siege,” with residents enduring repeated bombardment and restrictions on necessities; and that since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, they have faced what various experts have found to be a plausible case of genocide, with over 48,000 people killed.
“Through this all, the Palestinians in Gaza have stood with remarkable dignity and perseverance, insisting throughout the immense suffering and loss that they will never abandon their homeland,” the letter continues, echoing recent remarks from residents. “We are deeply concerned by clear statements of intent from Israeli government officials over the past year concerning the creation of new Israeli settlements within the Gaza Strip, which further reinforce the intent of ethnic cleansing.”
“The United States has no right to dictate to the Palestinian people in Gaza to leave, and direct other countries to participate in their displacement. We are also aware that even a temporary external displacement could be used by Israel to enact permanent exile,” the letter says. “While we agree that the short and medium-term humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza may be difficult to meet given the nearly complete destruction that Israel has wrought, if the necessary services cannot be provided in Gaza, the people of Gaza must be able to access them elsewhere within the historic borders of Palestine and must be able to return.”
The coalition also expressed alarm over “an uptick in settler violence” and deadly Israel Defense Forces operations in the illegally occupied West Bank, writing that “these actions are part and parcel of a strategy that seeks to make not just Gaza, but all Palestinian areas across historic Palestine, unlivable for the Palestinian people, and are thus contributory to a process of ethnic cleansing.”
“Palestine is not just an idea—it is a place. It is a homeland to the Palestinian people,” the groups stressed. “To participate in, facilitate, or endorse their removal from it would violate every precept of international law, devastate the rules-based international order that protects us all, do irreversible harm to America’s global influence, and be an act of unconscionable immorality.”
The letter concludes with a poem from Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote:
My country is not a suitcase I am not a traveler I am the lover and the land is the beloved. The archaeologist is busy analyzing stones. In the rubble of legends he searches for his own eyes to show that I am a sightless vagrant on the road with not one letter in civilization’s alphabet. Meanwhile in my own time I plant my trees. I sing of my love.
In addition to the coalition leaders, signatories to the letter include ActionAid USA, CodePink, Democracy for the Arab World Now, Demand Progress Education Fund, Democratic Socialists of America, IfNotNow Movement, Just Foreign Policy, Madre, National Iranian American Council, Oil Change International, Peace Action, Progressive Democrats of America, and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
The letter came amid a fresh wave of alarm over Trump’s latest comments about Gaza and Palestinians, which aired Monday morning on “Fox & Friends.” He said: “We’ll build safe communities a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is. In the meantime, I would own this—think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land.”
Asked by Fox News‘ Bret Baier whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza, the president said, “No, they wouldn’t.”
The letter also came as Hamas on Monday suspended its next planned release of hostages taken in October 2023, citing Israel’s deadly violations of a fragile cease-fire deal that took effect last month.
The mother of 5-year-old Neda Muhammed al-Amudi, who was killed in the Israeli army’s January 27, 2025 attack on a horse carriage in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp—a violation of the cease-fire with Hamas—mourns over her body at Awda Hospital in Gaza City, Palestine. (Photo: Fadel A. A. Almaghari/Anadolu via Getty Images.
One group says that Israeli forces have killed at least 110 Palestinians since the cease-fire took effect last month. Among the victims are multiple children, including a 5-year-old girl.
Hamas on Monday announced the suspension of its next planned release of hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, accusing that country of violating the fragile cease-fire agreement it signed last month.
Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades—Hamas’ armed wing— said in a statement that hostages will “remain in place until the occupying entity complies with past obligations and compensates retroactively.”
“Over the past three weeks, the resistance leadership monitored the enemy’s violations and their noncompliance with the terms of the agreement,” Obeida explained. “These violations include delaying the return of displaced persons to northern Gaza, targeting them with shelling and gunfire in various areas of the Gaza Strip, and failing to allow the entry of relief materials in all forms as agreed upon. Meanwhile, the resistance has fulfilled all its obligations.”
Since the cease-fire took effect on January 19, Israeli forces have bombed and shot civilians in Gaza, killing at least 110 Palestinians, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Palestinian civilians killed over the past few weeks reportedly include multiple children—one of them a 5-year-old girl—and an elderly woman.
“Israel continues to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip by denying Palestinians the basic necessities for survival and imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction,” the group alleged on Friday.
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor continued:
Since the cease-fire, only a handful of injured and ill Palestinians from Gaza have been permitted to travel abroad for treatment, leaving thousands at risk of death due to Israel’s ongoing denial of their right to receive treatment. In addition to ensuring a severe shortage of specialized medical personnel, generators, fuel, and oxygen stations, Israel has obstructed the rehabilitation of destroyed hospitals and blocked the entry of medical supplies, medications, and equipment.
Further, in addition to blocking equipment needed for maintenance and restoration, the ongoing and illegal restrictions by Israel are preventing the entry of temporary shelters, tents, and basic supplies for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes it has destroyed…
Israel is deliberately obstructing the restoration of essential infrastructure, including water and sewage systems, endangering civilian lives and worsening environmental and health crises.
This, after over 15 months of Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and international humanitarian agencies.
U.S. President Donald Trump—whose proposal for an American takeover and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East” has sparked international condemnation—said Monday that the cease-fire should end, letting “all hell break loose,” if all the remaining 40 or so Israeli and international hostages are not released by noon on Saturday.
The Qassam Brigades on Monday reaffirmed Hamas’ “commitment to the terms of the agreement as long as the occupation adheres to them.”
