The real function of the so-called Board of Peace was not to stop the genocide, but to manage perceptions while it continues

A Palestinian boy stands by the rubble of a residential building targeted overnight by an Israeli strike in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on 24 May, 2026 (AFP)

 Eid in Gaza was another bloodbath. The ceasefire is a lie

Soumaya Ghannoushi

3 June 2026

 

Eid has just ended. Across much of the Muslim world, families gathered around tables, children wore new clothes, and homes echoed with laughter and celebration.

 

While communities elsewhere marked the occasion with joy and togetherness, Gaza endured another season of grief, displacement and death.

The images that emerged from Gaza during Eid al-Adha were not isolated tragedies. They were a glimpse into the reality that continues every day behind the convenient fiction that the war has somehow ended.

One image showed a mother, Hidayah, taking her daughters shopping for Eid clothes. The girls entered the shop while she remained outside. Moments later, an Israeli strike hit. They rushed back out in panic only to find their mother lying dead in the street, soaked in blood.

Another clip lasted only seconds. Amid the ruins of a building destroyed by an Israeli air strike, a man held the body of a small girl in his hands. Her body was shattered, charred and covered in blood. As he lifted her from the rubble, he screamed: "This is the first day of Eid!"

A third image showed tents burning in the darkness of an Eid night. Even the makeshift shelters of the displaced are not spared. It is no longer enough that Palestinians have been driven from their homes; even the scraps of canvas under which they seek refuge have become targets.

A meaningless ceasefire

These scenes were not anomalies. According to the United Nations and humanitarian organisations, more than 26 Palestinians, largely women and children, were killed during the first days of Eid alone. 

On the first day of Eid al-Adha, an Israeli strike in central Gaza City reportedly killed at least 10 people, including four girls, one boy and three women.

For the victims, the debate over whether there is a ceasefire is meaningless. They are dead either way.

That is the great deception at the heart of the current discourse on Gaza. 

The United Nations reports that Israeli forces have killed around 1000 Palestinians since the October ceasefire was announced, bringing the overall death toll since October 2023 to nearly 73,000. Thousands more are missing and presumed dead under the rubble.

The reality is stark. Palestinians largely adhered to the ceasefire. Israel did not. Yet, Western governments, media organisations and political establishments continue to speak as though a ceasefire exists. 

The new definition appears to be that Israel may continue carrying out air strikes, shooting civilians, demolishing homes and killing Palestinians on a near-daily basis, and the world will still describe the situation as a ceasefire. The moment a single bullet is fired from Gaza, however, headlines fill with accusations of violations and escalation.

This fiction serves an obvious purpose. It removes Gaza from the headlines, lowers public scrutiny and allows Israel to continue its assault while political leaders present themselves as peacemakers... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-eid-bloodbath-ceasefire-lie

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How a New Israeli Policy Cuts Off Humanitarian Aid in Gaza- Months into the ceasefire ["ceasefire"], Israeli officials barred thirty-seven international N.G.O.s. A Doctors Without Borders clinic is carrying on without antibiotics, or even chairs for patients.

The Jabalia neighborhood of northern Gaza, where Doctors Without Borders set up a clinic, was heavily damaged by Israeli air strikes.Photograph by Mahmoud Issa / Reuters

By Clayton Dalton

May 15, 2026

On a hazy morning in November, a group of aid workers with Médecins Sans Frontières (M.S.F.), known in English as Doctors Without Borders, crossed into Gaza for a two-month mission. Jennifer Hulse, an emergency physician from the U.K., led a medical team. “We all had as many bags as we could physically carry,” Hulse said. Inside were essential supplies such as surgical tools and engine oil for generators. Her assignment was to help the Gaza Health Ministry restore access to health care in the north, where Israeli attacks had flattened nearly every building in sight.

The team first spent several days at Gaza’s sole remaining hospital focussed on pediatrics—Al-Rantisi, in Gaza City, which was barely operational after Israeli air strikes. The roof had collapsed in places. Doctors were seeing patients in a waiting room with only a few cots. “It was very cold, even inside the buildings,” Hulse told me. When a storm blew through, she mistook thunderclaps for explosions. She learned that parents sometimes arrived with the bodies of infants who seemed to have died of hypothermia. Her team quickly put together a plan to help coördinate repairs, secure new electrical generators, implement a triage system, and organize trainings for staff. “We were just trying to get it functional again,” she said.

Next, Hulse travelled to Jabalia, in the northern reaches of the Gaza Strip, where the situation was even worse. She was driven through rutted streets in which not a single building remained intact. The area had previously been served by several health-care facilities, including a primary-care center—now destroyed—and... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/how-a-new-israeli-policy-cuts-off-humanitarian-aid-in-gaza

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Children shot, stabbed and pepper-sprayed in occupied West Bank - United Nations news 12 May 2026 ... Israeli military operations and surging settler attacks in the occupied West Bank are killing and maiming a growing number of Palestinian children, while in Gaza tens of thousands with life-changing injuries lack access to treatment and rehabilitation, UN agencies warned on Tuesday.

© UNOCHA Children stand on a home demolished in Beit Sira, a Palestinian village in central occupied West Bank. (file)

 

By Dominika Tomaszewska-Mortimer in Geneva

 

12 May 2026 Peace and Security

“We're seeing attacks become increasingly coordinated,” UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson James Elder told reporters in Geneva. “Documented incidents include children shot, stabbed, children beaten, and children pepper-sprayed.”

Some 70 children have been killed since January 2025 – at least one on average every week – and a further 850 injured, mostly by live ammunition, UNICEF says.

“All this comes amid historic levels of settler attacks,” Mr. Elder continued, explaining that March 2026 saw the highest number of Palestinians injured by settler attacks in the last 20 years.

Bludgeoned by attackers

Following a recent West Bank visit, the UNICEF spokesperson described meeting an eight-year-old who had been beaten with a piece of wood in a settler attack and hospitalized for head injuries.

The boy’s mother “had both her arms broken when she reached across to protect her four-month-old baby, putting therefore her arms between her baby and the attacker's club”.

Mr. Elder also highlighted the prevalence of education-related attacks, including the killing, injury and detention of students, as well as the demolition of schools.

“Schools, which should be places of safety and stability, are increasingly becoming places of panic,” he stressed.

“I walked with schoolchildren through the West Bank so as to try and help them avoid any attacks,” the UNICEF spokesperson recounted. “It's interesting to watch them walk...They don't walk in a straight line because they're constantly looking over their shoulder.”

“This is a walk to school. It's become a walk through fear,” he insisted.

Record detention numbers

Mr. Elder also reported on a “sharp rise” in the arrest and the detention of Palestinian children from the occupied territory, saying that 347 of them are being held in Israeli military detention “for alleged security-related offences” – the highest number in eight years.

“Alarmingly, more than half of these children, 180, are held under administrative detention and without the procedural safeguards, including detention without regular access to legal counsel and the right to challenge detention,” he said.

Gaza children killed and maimed

Meanwhile in Gaza, Mr. Elder said that since the October 2025 ceasefire, the UN has documented at least 229 children killed and 260 injured.

Dr Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the UN World Health Organization (WHO)’s representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told reporters that some 10,000 children in the devastated Strip live with life-changing injuries.

Overall, an estimated 43,000 of the 172,000 people injured in Gaza since October 2023 have sustained such trauma, affecting limbs, the spinal cord or brain. Almost 2,500 people have been injured since the October 2025 ceasefire.

“Of the 2,277 people that have had a limb amputated, less than 25 per cent have been fitted with permanent prosthetics,” Dr Van de Weerdt said, due to a severe shortage of prosthetics in Gaza.

Amputees denied prosthetic limbs

Speaking from Jerusalem, the WHO representative explained that no less than 18 shipments of rehabilitation-related supplies such as wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs are pending clearance to enter Gaza, with waiting times ranging from 130 days to more than a year.

In total, more than 50,000 conflict-related injuries require long-term rehabilitation; no rehabilitation facilities are functional in the enclave.

“Every day that rehabilitation services in Gaza remain under-resourced is a day that preventable disability risks become permanent,” she concluded.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/05/1167488

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In #EastJerusalem, Palestinians issued demolition orders for structures built without rarely granted permits, are often forced to demolish their own homes to avoid the payment of additional fines and fees. Read more in our latest report: http://ochaopt.org/content/humani

"My suffering, though severe, was never compounded by denial. The world around me was structured to keep me alive. That distinction matters. Because elsewhere, at this very moment, there are people whose hunger is not the byproduct of illness—but the result of policy. Of decision. Of design. In Gaza, and within the walls of Israeli prisons, hunger is not incidental. It is imposed..." Hunger, By Design By Mike Odetalla

Mike Hanini Odetalla

Hunger, By Design
By Mike Odetalla

At the height of my cancer treatment, I lost 60 pounds in less than two months.
Not by choice. Not by neglect. But because I simply could not eat.

Every swallow felt like fire. Every attempt at nourishment became a negotiation with pain. My body, once familiar, began to disappear before my own eyes—reduced not by lack of food, but by my inability to take it in. I didn't recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.

And yet, even in that darkest stretch, one truth remained constant:

Food was there.

It sat within reach. Prepared. Available. Waiting for me, even when I could not accept it. Doctors urged me. Nurses monitored me. My suffering, though severe, was never compounded by denial. The world around me was structured to keep me alive.

That distinction matters.

Because elsewhere, at this very moment, there are people whose hunger is not the byproduct of illness—but the result of policy. Of decision. Of design.

In Gaza, and within the walls of Israeli prisons, hunger is not incidental. It is imposed.

There, food is not something a patient struggles to swallow—it is something withheld. Rations are restricted. Access is controlled. Malnutrition spreads not because bodies fail, but because systems ensure they do.

I know what it feels like to weaken. To feel your strength slip quietly away. To measure your days not in hours, but in ounces lost and energy drained.

But I also know this: My suffering existed within a system trying—however imperfectly—to save me.

Theirs exists within a system that does not. 

That is the difference between illness and injustice.

Between misfortune and intention.

Between hunger… and hunger used as a weapon.

And once you understand that distinction, you cannot unsee it.

 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10165923688376977&set=a.10150390714236977

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"All they will find is sand" Eyal Weizman on the demolition of Gaza in The London Review of Books April 2026

Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026

 Eyal Weizman   

The​ UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems, power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower and more tortuous form of annihilation.

The idea that the built environment determines a group’s conditions of life recalls the modernist conception of architecture, prevalent when the word ‘genocide’ was first conceived and defined by the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Modern architecture offered to calculate and improve the conditions of life. Cities were to be laid out in accordance with public health principles, and homes, in Le Corbusier’s famous definition, were to be ‘machines for living in’, calibrated to maximise the supply of biological necessities – heat, hygiene, air circulation, food and even sexual reproduction.

Architects’ Data (1936) by the German modernist architect Ernst Neufert is still used by architects looking for the most efficient dimensions for kitchens, bedrooms or even park benches. In the 1920s Neufert was an assistant to Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Later, on behalf of the Nazi Party, he oversaw the standardisation of Germany’s building industry, which was largely powered by enslaved labour. Several Bauhaus graduates designed concentration camps. The deliberate degradation of living conditions inverted the task of modern architecture from the enhancement of life to the production of death.

Lemkin defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement.

Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide of destruction... READ MORE 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n07/eyal-weizman/all-they-will-find-is-sand 

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/776402/ungrounding-by-eyal-weizman/

Eyal Weizman’s new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, will be published next month. 

News is propaganda everywhere with America duped, taxpayers robbed, & international law ignored while war mongering Israel aggressively gains endless power and resources.

Israel VS Palestine & Israel VS Iran & Israel VS US ... Western mainstream media's blockade of the actual facts 

"Israel created the largest group of child amputees in modern history and now blocks prostheses... The cruelty is always the point." Assal Rad

 

 Assal Rad

@AssalRad

Israel created the largest group of child amputees in modern history and now blocks prostheses.

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045621575605686401 

 

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Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

So, Israel wants to occupy and attack Lebanon. Yeah, that’s not a ceasefire.

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045752659463053551 

Assal Rad

 

@AssalRad

Notice the euphemisms? 

 

“Retain buffer zone” = Illegally occupy Lebanese territory 

 

 “Freedom of action” = Attack whenever they want

 

 

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

“Whether people like Israel or not, they have proven to be a great ally…” 

 

By lying and leading us into reckless wars? Or taking billions of taxpayer dollars away from Americans in need to slaughter children? Or is it the foreign influence in our politics that makes it great?

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045675848947409167/photo/1 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

This discussion is completely absent in Western media.

 https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045349407579836646

 

 

& 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Name the killer and the crime  

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045399038930153742 

 

 

Statement by UNICEF on the killing of two water truck drivers in the Gaza Strip: UNICEF is outraged by the killing of two drivers of trucks contracted by UNICEF to provide clean water to families in the Gaza Strip. The victims were killed by Israeli fire -17 April 2026  https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-killing-two-water-truck-drivers-gaza-strip-0

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Israel killed two UNICEF drivers trying to get WATER to families in Gaza. Is this story going to get any coverage? Or is the ongoing genocide not newsworthy? 

 

 https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045301464978075788

 

 

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