Gaza: ‘She survived the bombing, but not the blockade’- A year into Gaza’s ceasefire, Palestinians continue to die from preventable illnesses, denied medical care and a lack of safe shelter under Israel’s ongoing blockade

Palestinians inspect belongings amid rubble after an Israeli airstrike hit a residential block in al-Zawayda, central Gaza, on 11 October 2026 (Moiz Salhi/APAimages via Reuters)

Maha Hussaini in Gaza City, occupied Palestine 

 Published date: 12 October 2026

After two years of bombardment and forced displacement during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Suhaila al-Mabhouh had one wish: to go home.

The 60-year-old Palestinian longed so desperately to return to her family home in northern Gaza that she turned down an evacuation offer to Italy, submitted by her daughter, who lives there.

When the so-called ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, she and her husband rushed back to their home in Jabalia refugee camp.

She began making small repairs to the badly damaged house, hoping to piece her life back together after two years of bombardment.

But the hope of rebuilding was short-lived, as Israel maintained its siege and continued its daily bombardment.

Within eight months, al-Mabhouh had fallen ill, been diagnosed with cancer and died, unable to find treatment in Gaza or travel abroad for care because of severe restrictions.

She is among thousands of Palestinians still dying from preventable deaths, as Israel’s genocide and ongoing blockade continue to deprive people in Gaza of the means to survive.

The ceasefire, now entering its second year, has done little to change the conditions that make life in Gaza deadly. Materials, essential goods and aid needed to rebuild homes, hospitals and civilian infrastructure remain largely blocked.

“About four months after we returned to our home, her health began to deteriorate rapidly, and we had no idea what was wrong with her,” her husband, Sami al-Mabhouh, 62, told Middle East Eye.

He took his wife from one hospital to another in Gaza City, but overwhelmed medical facilities could not provide the tests she needed. 

The couple eventually travelled to Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, hoping to find treatment at a private hospital.

“The journey was extremely difficult, and transportation was so scarce that by the time we arrived, we were exhausted and unable to go straight to the hospital,” he recalled.

They spent the night at relatives’ home in Bureij refugee camp before going to the hospital the following day.

“After a lengthy series of examinations, which cost us a great deal of money just to obtain a diagnosis, doctors told us she had liver cancer. By then, her health had deteriorated so severely that she could no longer sit up or walk.”

A deadly wait for treatment

Within two weeks, al-Mabhouh had secured a medical referral to travel abroad for treatment. But she was forced to wait alongside more than 20,000 other patients with referrals who were also awaiting Israeli permission to leave Gaza.

With none of Gaza’s 36 hospitals operating at full capacity and only around 20 functioning partially, tens of thousands of patients cannot access the examinations and treatment they urgently need.

Under the ceasefire agreement, Israeli authorities were supposed to allow medical supplies, medicines and materials needed to rebuild hospitals damaged or destroyed during the genocide into Gaza.

But the agreement brought little relief to the devastated health sector. Between October 2025 and July 2026, the number of intensive care unit beds rose by just one, from 103 to 104, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Dialysis unit availability deteriorated further over the same period, falling from 17 percent to 12 percent.

“As we waited for her turn to travel, we contacted doctors in Italy and Egypt and shared her medical records with them. They told us her cancer was treatable but not in Gaza,” Mabhouh said.

“We waited for three months. She didn’t survive long enough to receive treatment. The disease progressed, and on 18 June, she died.

“She survived the bombing, but not the blockade.”

Al-Mabhouh was among at least 1,570 patients who died in Gaza while awaiting medical evacuation between October 2023 and July 2026. They included 505 cancer patients and 264 children, as evacuations remained far below pre-war levels.

Between 10 October 2025 and mid-September 2026, around 3,423 patients were evacuated abroad for treatment, an average of around 10 patients a day, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Before October 2023, between 50 and 100 patients a day were evacuated.

‘No refuge from death’

Illness is only one of the many consequences of Israel’s genocide that continue to claim Palestinian lives.

For those who survive illness and bombardment, the search for shelter presents its own deadly risks.

Around 92 percent of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed or damaged by the Israeli military.

Most of the territory’s 2.2 million people remain in makeshift tents or severely damaged buildings, exposed to the elements and the constant threat of collapse.

Last winter, at least eight children, most of them infants sheltering in makeshift tents, died of hypothermia as temperatures plunged.... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/she-survived-bombing-not-blockade

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"Because, after all, how do you explain to a 12-year-old that one of the world’s most powerful militaries is designating paper kites as “weapons of war” in a completely devastated area?" Maha Hussaini of Palestine

 Maha Hussaini

@MahaGaza

 

Two weeks ago, Nazeeh, my first nephew, flew a kite for the first time in his life. 

 

He is 12, however, and he should have learned how to fly kites years ago. But when he was old enough to learn, the genocide began. For the next three years, the things he learned were how to cut firewood with his father for cooking, collect water, and move from one shelter to another. 

 

Earlier this month, we went to the beach together as a family. 

 

In every break he took from swimming, I noticed him watching boys flying kites. 

 

“Nazeeh,” I called. “Look around. If you see anyone selling kites, let’s get you one.” 

 

His eyes lit up. He jumped up and started asking around. 

 

We couldn’t find anyone selling one. And just as he came back disappointed, I called over a boy flying a black-and-white kite. 

 

“Where did you buy it?” I asked. 

 

“Do you want one?” he asked back. 

 

He told us he made the kites himself from nylon and sticks and sold them to earn a little pocket money. He offered us the kite for very little. So we got it. 

 

For the next few hours, I had to reach back into my own childhood to teach Nazeeh how to fly it. 

 

Every time I let out more string and the kite climbed higher, he would jump and shout: “Higher! Higher!” 

 

I hadn’t seen my little genius this excited in a long time. 

 

Nazeeh isn’t easily impressed by ordinary children’s toys. He is the kind of kid who would rather take things apart and fix them, especially electronics, or sit watching “how-to” videos. 

 

At one point, laughing, he said: “Wow, how beautiful it is to drive something in the sky.”  He knew “drive” wasn’t quite the right word. But I knew exactly what he meant. 

 

As I expected, the kite didn’t stay the way he had bought it. The next day, he asked his mother to show him YouTube videos on how to make kites. Then he rebuilt his own. 

 

He used different nylon. He glued a Palestinian flag onto it. And he wrote “Gaza” on every side, preparing it for our next trip to the beach. 

 

But yesterday, his parents told him he couldn’t fly it outside the house. 

 

“Why?” he asked. 

 

I’m not sure what they told him, but I’m sure they couldn’t put into words how Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister have themselves threatened intensified bombing and forced evacuations of areas in Gaza where children are spotted flying kites. 

 

Because, after all, how do you explain to a 12-year-old that one of the world’s most powerful militaries is designating paper kites as “weapons of war” in a completely devastated area? 

https://x.com/MahaGaza/status/2091823635409346902

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"What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now...." From Nakba to genocide: A Gaza grandmother’s lifetime of loss and resilience. At 95, Fatema Obaid has survived two massive Israeli assaults, lost 70 family members and endured starvation and repeated forced flight - but still refuses to leave her homeland

Fatema Obaid, 95, says the current genocide in Gaza is worse than the 1948 Nakba (Hani Abu Rezeq/MEE)

By Maha Hussaini in Gaza City, occupied Palestine

Published date: 15 May 2026 https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-genocide-gaza-grandmothers-lifetime-loss-and-resilience

At 95, Fatema Obaid has endured daily Israeli bombardment, starvation and the loss of 70 family members.

Yet the Palestinian grandmother, who survived the 1948 Nakba, refused to leave Gaza City when ordered to do so by the Israeli military during the 2023 genocide. 

For her, fleeing again would mark the beginning of a “crueller Nakba” - one she refuses to relive.

“In the first Nakba, it is true that hundreds of thousands lost their land, homes and villages,” Obaid told Middle East Eye.

“But in this Nakba, we have lost an entire history,” she said from an unfinished apartment in western Gaza City, where she is displaced alongside her grandchildren.

“We lost entire families, and entire generations have been destroyed for decades to come. What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now.”

Originally from Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighbourhood, Obaid was temporarily displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias attacked Palestinian towns and villages across historic Palestine, forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to make way for the creation of Israel - an event many scholars describe as ethnic cleansing.

Obaid later returned to Shujaiya, an area that remained outside Israeli control after the 1949 armistice agreement, but lay close to the new de facto border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

More than 75 years later, she relived the same trauma she endured as a teenager - only this time with far greater brutality.

“There is no comparison between the first and the second Nakba,” she said.

New Nakba 

Like many Palestinians in Gaza during the Nakba, Obaid experienced both displacement and giving refuge.

She and her family were forced to flee their home for several months amid the violence and chaos that swept across Palestine in 1948.

At the same time, Gaza was inundated with Palestinians forcibly expelled from towns and villages that later became part of Israel.

'Nothing is more painful than being uprooted from your own land and knowing that, after all these years, you will die in displacement' 

- Fatema Obaid, Palestinian grandmother 

Families arrived with almost nothing after fleeing killings, bombardment and attacks by Zionist militias, believing they would return within days. Instead, Gaza became a place of permanent refuge, overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians uprooted during the Nakba.

Today, around 1.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in the enclave, making up roughly 73 percent of Gaza’s population.

Since October 2023, however, Obaid has been displaced more than 10 ten times after her home and entire neighbourhood were reduced to rubble and absorbed into Israel’s newly imposed no-go zone.

“I have lived in Shujaiya since I was born. Even after marrying my cousin, I moved only a few streets away,” she recalled, adding that they fled for a few months in 1948 but eventually returned.

“Only during this Nakba did we lose our homes, our neighbourhood and all of eastern Gaza,” she added.

“They bombed our house and killed more than 70 members of my family - my sons, grandchildren, nephews, their children and many others from our extended family.”

During the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias and later Israeli forces killed an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 Palestinians and permanently displaced around 750,000 people - roughly 75 percent of the Palestinian population at the time.

In the current genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in two years, while nearly two million residents have been displaced. Around 1.5 million remain uprooted despite the ceasefire agreement, most now living in makeshift tents.

Staying in Gaza

Shortly after Obaid was forced to flee her home for another part of Gaza City in October 2023, the Israeli military issued repeated mass expulsion orders instructing residents to move south.

As hundreds of thousands of residents initially refused to comply, Israel imposed what United Nations experts considered a systematic starvation that was “used as a savage weapon of war” to force Palestinians out.

For months that followed, residents were deprived of basic food items, including wheat flour, and struggled to find drinking water. Famine was officially declared in Gaza City in August 2025 by the UN-backed... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-genocide-gaza-grandmothers-lifetime-loss-and-resilience

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"Almost all of those killed or who die from the cold are forcibly displaced Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israeli bombardment, as the Israeli occupation continues to block the entry of caravans and reconstruction materials." Maha Hussaini

 Maha Hussaini

@MahaGaza

 

As a violent windstorm has battered Gaza since yesterday evening, a wall collapsed on a displaced family in western Gaza City overnight, killing two Palestinians: 72-year-old Muhammad Hamouda and 40-year-old Doaa Hamouda. Several others were injured. 

 

This morning, a one-year-old baby died from the cold in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. 

 

Almost all of those killed or who die from the cold are forcibly displaced Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israeli bombardment, as the Israeli occupation continues to block the entry of caravans and reconstruction materials.

https://x.com/MahaGaza/status/2010989159192711228/photo/2 

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‘Treated as criminals’: Gaza fishermen risk everything at sea Facing starvation, Palestinians turn to the sea to feed their families, risking imprisonment or death

A displaced Palestinian fisherman casts his net on the beach in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on 20 November 2025 (Eyad Baba/AFP)

By Maha Hussaini in Gaza City and Mohammed al-Hajjar in Nuseirat

Published date: 22 December 2025 

 

Even after Israeli bombardments destroyed his fishing boat and equipment, Ismail Farhat returned to the sea. Fishing was not a choice for him; it was how he kept his family fed.

On the morning of 8 October, he set out from the shore of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on a small punt he had built himself. Shortly after, an Israeli naval vessel approached and ordered him to “surrender”.

Farhat was then detained, tortured, and threatened with arrest if he returned to fishing, before being released more than two months later, on Tuesday.

“I was fishing with another fisherman when we were suddenly approached by an Israeli naval vessel. They ordered us to remove our clothes, jump into the sea, and swim towards their vessel,” Farhat told Middle East Eye one day after his release.

“Once we were on board, they began interrogating us, asking where we lived, where we had been before we were displaced, and requesting personal details such as our ID numbers, age and mobile phone numbers. One of the soldiers photographed me with his phone.”

Another vessel then approached, and Farhat was transferred to it, where he was subjected to a second interrogation.

After the interrogation ended, Farhat and the other fisherman were released and instructed to head back toward the shore.

Approximately two minutes later, the naval vessel returned and stopped them again.

“One of the soldiers called me by name and ordered me to jump into the water and swim towards him, while telling the fisherman who was with me to return to shore. They then arrested me, blindfolded me, and handcuffed me,” Farhat said.

A fisherman paddles on a makeshift raft as a child swims behind him in Gaza City's main fishing harbour on 7 September 2024 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP)

“They began insulting and beating me. As usual, they accused every fisherman of being affiliated with Hamas. They told me I was Hamas and pretending to be a fisherman. Every time I raised my head or spoke a word, they beat me and insulted me with obscene language.”

At that moment, Farhat realised he was about to be detained.

He considered himself lucky, however, that he was not shot dead like many of his fellow fishermen.

Detention, torture

Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza on 7 October 2023, the Israeli military has killed at least 230 Palestinian fishermen, according to the Palestinian Fishermen Syndicate.

Farhat was taken to a port he could not identify, before being transferred to Sde Teiman, a notorious Israeli detention facility where Palestinian detainees are subjected to severe torture.

“Throughout this entire period, I was wearing only shorts, without anything else, and the weather was extremely cold. But I wasn’t allowed to say a word,” he added.

When I arrived at Sde Teiman, they forced me to take off the shorts, searched me, and gave me prisoner clothing. There were around 150 Palestinian detainees in the prison with me, including fishermen and truck drivers, some of whom transported aid or goods.”

For the first 50 days of his detention, Farhat was kept in handcuffs at all times.

“You live 24 hours a day with your hands cuffed. We were forbidden from speaking, forbidden from leaning to either side, and forbidden from sleeping. We were not allowed a mattress. I slept on an iron mesh,” he added.

“Sometimes, due to extreme exhaustion, I would fall asleep or lean unintentionally, and they would immediately punish me, forcing me to stand for two or three hours.”

Over more than two months in custody, Farhat said he and his fellow fishermen were “treated as criminals”, despite never being formally charged.

During this period, he encountered numerous fellow fishermen held in the same facility. Many had been detained for fishing amid Israel’s imposed starvation of the Strip since March.

“On some nights, a unit they called the 'commando' would enter the prison and throw stun and smoke grenades on the prisoners. Most of the time, they forced us to remain kneeling,”  ... READ MORE   https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/treated-criminals-gaza-fishermen-risk-everything-at-sea 

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Fishermen pull their nets to retrieve their catch on a beach in the Nuseirat camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on 30 August 2025 (Eyad Baba/AFP)

Cold is not a natural disaster when shelter is denied- After destroying over 85% pf Gaza's homes, Israel is blocking the entry of caravans and reconstruction materials

Euro-Med Monitor

@EuroMedHR

 Maha Hussaini

@MahaGaza

 

At least 17 Palestinians were killed when severely damaged homes collapsed on them during winter storms over the past month. 

 

Five children also died from hypothermia in makeshift tents Israel continues to block the entry of reconstruction materials and emergency shelters

 

https://x.com/MahaGaza/status/2003002839493496846 

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