The killing of civilians in Gaza and Israel: grieving for a lost lost kinematical power and the loss of Internet access
Over 2,300 Israelis and Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the conflict. I am saddened by the killing of all civilians. There is no difference between the pain of a parent in Israel and the pain of a parent in Gaza. Yet I’m not surprised that we have found ourselves at this bloody point of no return.
There is no power. Abuzayda said she can only charge her phone for a few hours a day if her family has fuel left. The sporadic access to communication means they could lose their connection to the outside world at any moment.
The Impact of the Second Intifada Attack on the Community of Gaza: The Case of the Gazan Refugees and the United States
Many of the fighters who breached those walls are probably just a few years older than Ali; many of them were born during the second intifada. Their entire experience has been Israeli military occupation, siege, and devastating military assaults upon assault in an area of 140 square miles, with an annual unemployment rate of 50 percent. The conditions that have shaped so many in Gaza are not a justification. Israel helped create these fighters by starving them of hope, dignity and a future.
Israel has already begun large-scale retaliatory airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of people and laying waste to sections of the territory. That is likely to continue and intensify.
There are no humanitarian corridors to bring badly needed aid inside and no open border crossings. The passage into Egypt has been struck three times. Even aid workers haven’t been spared. Some of the staff were killed in their homes, according to the UN Palestinian refugee agency. Eighteen of their facilities have been damaged, including schools where many of the more than 330,000 people that are displaced are sheltering.
The Biden administration is urging Israel — publicly and privately — to get humanitarian supplies into Gaza. It’s also trying to secure the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas, which include an unknown number of Americans.
He hadn’t been back to Gaza since moving to the US seven years ago. Abuzayda and her husband, who is American, had gone back and forth about when exactly to visit.
“We changed our tickets like three to four times … and then we decided to come to Gaza at this time,” she said. “And our short vacation just turned into a nightmare.”
Abuzayda, her husband Abood and their one-and-a-half year old son Yousef traveled from Massachusetts for what was supposed to be a two-week trip. They don’t know when they can go home, for lack of trying.
Abuzayda told Morning Edition’s Leila Fadel that she called the U.S. embassy for help multiple times a day starting immediately after the attack on Saturday. But they told her repeatedly that they didn’t have any updates. She tried to get in touch with the embassy in Cairo.
“We tell them we’re running out of milk, diapers, we’re not safe, we’re citizens — they’re not doing anything,” she said. They keep posting about U.S. citizens in Israel. They remind Israelis to get out of the country every five minutes.
Major U.S. airlines have stopped flying into and out of the country, which is making it difficult for others to leave. The total number is unknown, but New York Rep. Mike Lawler said his district alone has “hundreds of constituents in Israel trying to get home.”
The U.S. increased the travel advisory for Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday to level three, or “reconsider travel.” The advice for Gaza is not to travel.
Abuzayda claimed her sister-in-law and her three children tried to cross the border under Israeli attack, but they had to turn back.
An american family trapped in Gaza: Is it safe inside or outside? A frustrated mom tells you not to cry, but to protect yourself and your baby
She said it’s not safe inside or outside. The markets themselves are running low on supplies. She is trying to make the most of the milk and baby wipes she has left, so that Yousef can be in good spirits.
She said the hardest thing to do is to hide fear and show that you’re not afraid. He thinks that this is a firework because he doesn’t understand anything. And every time I tell him, while I’m crying, ‘okay mommy, clap clap this is a fireworks, it’s nothing.’ Sometimes he will jump, he will be scared and freaking out if I’m not next to him.”
Bringing the fight to Israel: The Gaza Strip as a case study of the Izz ad-Din al-Qatar brigades
She said that she wanted them to save them. “Please. I have a one-and-a-half years old son, I got him after undergoing six times of infertility treatment. Since Saturday, we’ve been trying to reach the embassy. Nobody is helping, nobody is getting back to us. Please save us.
In an interview with NPR, Ali Barakeh said that the Oct. 7 assault was in response to Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people in Jerusalem and the West Bank. He said it was also meant to free thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
According to Jonathan Panikoff, Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, Hamas’ main reason for existence is opposing Israel. There’s a core constituency in Hamas that likes to live for what they are trained to do.
The organization’s political chief is based in the Middle East. He took over from longtime leader Khaled Meshaal. The Izz ad-Din al-Qatar brigades, a military wing of Hamas, was designated a terrorist by the U.S. State Department.
Well before the latest attack on Israel, Hamas said it wanted to resist Israeli occupation and to seek revenge for Israel’s 2021 raid on Islam’s third-holiest site, Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the Old City of Jerusalem. Conditions in the Gaza Strip have worsened since the blockade was imposed in 2007. Most Gazans live in poverty and are dependent on aid. Unemployment is high.
It may also be a case of Hamas trying to maintain relevance and its leaders looking over their shoulders — concerned that they still need to show they can bring the fight to Israel, says Panikoff, who is a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East. There are more militant jihadist groups in the Gaza Strip. You don’t want [defections] to those groups,” he says.
The strike by Hamas could also serve as a touchstone for others who want to fight against Israel, says C. Ross Anthony, a senior economist at Rand Corp. and co-author of Alternatives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. “They were able to capture people and kill Israelis in a way they never had before,” he says. “So that will inspire people in the Middle East, unfortunately, and probably some of the people on the West Bank.”
Saab thinks it’s likely Hamas itself was largely responsible for planning and carrying out the attack. “They certainly have gotten a lot of advice in terms of how to rehearse. And they certainly got a lot of equipment Over the years, from Iran. But I would say this is [was a] local decision,” he says.
Dennis Jett, a retired U.S. ambassador and professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University, believes that Hamas learned a good lesson after abducting an Israeli soldier. Five years later, Shalit was turned over in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian and Arab-Israeli prisoners held by Israel.
Following the 2021 Israeli-Gaza conflict, an opinion poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank and Gaza Strip showed a dramatic surge in support for Hamas.
Some Israelis are blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for emboldening Hamas by focusing disproportionately on the West Bank and engaging in policies that have served to weaken the Palestinian Authority.
Panikoff says that after the war, Israel thought it had eliminated Hamas and limited its potential for continued violence. Israel, he says, “had a policy colloquially known as mowing the grass. Going after Hamas, getting a lot of the rockets, [going after] their militant leaders, either killing them or capturing them.”
Israel wanted to give Hamas cover for its militancy by giving it more work permits, so it hoped that the Gazans could come back and forth for work, which would give them an incentive to stay away from militancy.
The planning and execution of the battle were kept from the public. “The zero hour was confidential, and no one outside of Hamas knew about it.”
Jett of Pennsylvania State University said that Israel was overly confident offending off a Hamas attack because it turned its focus away from Gaza and toward the West Bank.
“They built this very expensive wall with an Iron Dome missile system, and the wall failed and it was not heavily manned because they have concentrated a lot of effort in suppressing people in the West Bank,” he says. “And the Iron Dome was overwhelmed.”
“It has had relationships with both Hamas and Hezbollah for years and supported them in all sorts of ways,” he says. I don’t think Hamas could have done this without the support and training from Iran.
Panikoff doesn’t have a good feeling about whether Iran would have helped with specific planning for the operation.
Barakeh, the Hamas official, tells NPR, “There are promises from our allies that they will not leave us alone,” but declined to provide details, saying, “There’s no need to reveal all the cards now, so the enemy won’t know.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has said that this is just the start of things to come. The country is getting ready for an invasion. It’s a reaction that the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem is calling a “criminal policy of revenge.” The International Committee of the Red Cross said that Gaza’s lifeline is about to end.
“Then the question is who governs Gaza? What happens to it? Because I think they would want to dislodge Hamas, but not necessarily to govern Gaza themselves,” he says.
The infrastructure, already weakened by a 16-year blockade and four previous wars since 2008, is now being crushed. It’s something that Palestinians have never seen before.
He was stranded outside the main hospital last night. Abu Zarefeh says it was too dark for people to move, and fuel is running out for transportation.
“We are trying to survive,” he said. “The Israeli attacks are at every inch of the Gaza Strip so there are no safe places, nowhere to escape and to run.”
Abu Zuh said that his neighborhood is too dangerous to return to now. He’s lost touch with some of his children because communications were cut off.
“This conflict is between Hamas and Israel. Why is Israel destroying our homes? It is destroying entire neighborhoods? Abu Zarafeh was speaking. “This is collective punishment.”
It’s a nightmare NPR’s producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, is living. As he tries to cover this war for the world, he’s also trying to survive it. He tried to evacuate his family from their home.
I began to think about where I would take them when I took them from the house. Where am I going to hide them? Do you know of a safe place in Gaza? he said over a scratchy phone line.
“Everyone is thinking about how to survive,” he said. “We are human, we are part of this world. This is a civilization that we are part of. Don’t forget us.”
Israel warns more than 1 million people to evacuate northern Gaza, condemning the “violation of the sharia law” and “the war crime of forcible transfer”
The fighting between Israel and Hamas entered a sixth day on Friday with the fear of a ground offensive growing stronger after Israel ordered people in the north of the Gaza Strip to leave.
The U.N. spokesman said that Israel’s military told them that all of the population of northern Gaza should leave to the south. Almost half of Gaza’s population had to leave in 24 hours because of the Israeli order. The Israeli order applied to all U.N. staff and those sheltered in U.N. facilities — including schools, health centers and clinics.
Israel faced opposition within hours from both Hamas and the international community. “The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” the U.N. said.
Human Rights Watch said the roads are rubble, fuel is scarce, and the main hospital is in the evacuation zone, making it difficult for people to leave and head south.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the Israeli military demanding that over 1 million civilians in northern Gaza relocate to its south, “absent of any guarantees of safety or return, would amount to the war crime of forcible transfer.”
The Hamas leadership was calling on the Palestinians to ignore the Israeli order. Hamas’ interior ministry spokesman Iyad Al-Bozom told citizens of Gaza City and northern Gaza to remain in their homes, because Israel wanted to forcibly remove them from their land.
Source: Israel warns more than 1 million people to evacuate northern Gaza
The U.S. Response to the Hamas Warfare: “Second Gaza, Jordan and the Middle East,” tweeted the UNRWA spokesman
UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said early Friday on the social media site X that it had moved its operations center and international staff to the southern part of Gaza.
It remains unclear how hospitals and clinics in northern Gaza, treating the a stream of wounded victims from near-constant bombings, could be evacuated. Hospitals are already at full capacity across Gaza.
The order also comes as the U.S. ramps up its diplomatic and military support for Israel in the wake of the unprecedented attacks by Hamas that killed at least 1,300 people over the weekend.
Lloyd Austin is expected to arrive in Israel on Friday, just one day after the US Secretary of State arrived in the country. King Abdullah II of Jordan and the president of the Palestinian Authority were in Amman for the same time period. Blinken is visiting five Arab states over the next few days, as he tries to contain the conflict in Gaza.
The chaos in Gaza and Israel is causing concern that it could spread to the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East.
At least 27 U.S. citizens were killed in the Hamas attacks and 15 Americans are currently unaccounted for, a White House spokesperson said Thursday. Charter flights to evacuate Americans from Israel will begin on Friday. Other countries, such as China, France and the United Kingdom, have also reported citizens killed or missing in the conflict.