Boys salvaging a destroyed building in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Shareef Sarhan, © UNRWA. CC BY-SA 3.0 igo

The UN found that Israel has averaged 50 attacks on Palestinians in Gaza a day over the last week.

Israel killed at least 12 Palestinians last weekend, including three children. One of the slain children was 14-year-old Mohammed Abu Hammad, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in central Gaza soon after he had returned from school. He was killed while still wearing his school backpack.

Since October 7, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that the official death toll is 74,494, with 175,604 injured and around 10,000 bodies still buried under rubble. Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect on October 11, 2025, Israeli forces have killed at least 1,534 Palestinians in Gaza and injured another 5,486. That works out to around 18 Palestinian casualties a day since the Trump-brokered ceasefire. That compares to around 12 US casualties per day during the height of the Iraq War.

Starving the starving…The UN World Food Program has warned that funding shortages will leave about 500,000 people in the Gaza Strip without vital food aid in a territory where two-thirds of the population remains in a state of acute food insecurity,  including 200,000 experiencing emergency conditions requiring immediate assistance to prevent death from hunger. The WFP said it is reducing its monthly assistance from 1.6 million to 1.1 million people.

The agency is also cutting its food rations in half and reducing daily hot meals from 250,000 to 150,000. Those Palestinians living in hard-to-reach areas of Gaza, including near the Israeli military’s yellow line, will only receive hot meals every other day instead of daily. An estimated 67% of Gaza’s population face acute food insecurity.

Israel’s weeklong closure of the only crossing into Gaza has led to the exhaustion of fuel supplies for Gaza’s hospitals. Unless the fuel supplies are replenished soon, the hospital will be forced to impose power cuts, including for life-saving medical devices such as ventilators and dialysis machines.

Items Israel still bans from entering Gaza, a year after the alleged ceasefire: toilet seats, water and sewage pumps, crutches, wheelchairs, electrical generators, medicines, batteries, lighters, toys, rubber balls, hair clips.

From Marwan Bishara’s new book, Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: “The war on Gaza was not a war. It was a reckoning: a reckoning with civilization itself. As Gaza was reduced to ashes, the whole world watched—and turned away. Gaza wasn’t only destroyed. It was abandoned.”

In the first six months of 2026, UN’s OCHA recorded an average of six settler violence incidents per day, or more than 1,200 in the first half of 2026 alone.

Over the weekend, Haitham Tayseer Abdel Jaber, a Palestinian-American from the Palestinian town of Burqa near Ramallah, was attacked by Israeli settlers while he was harvesting olive trees. In an interview with the Middle East Eye, Jaber recounted being surrounded and attacked by a mob of 50 masked Israeli settlers with bats and rocks before losing consciousness. He was hospitalized........

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