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Monday, October 6, 2025

#Gaza’s war: 2 years too long. 🔴 Over 66,100 people reported killed 🔴 Nearly all of Gaza’s residents have been displaced 🔴 Nearly 80 per cent of structures damaged or destroyed 🔴 Over 370 UNRWA workers killed 🔴 UNRWA continues to provide critical services.

UNRWA

#Gaza’s war: 2 years too long.  
 
Over 66,100 people reported killed  
 
Nearly all of Gaza’s residents have been displaced  
 
Nearly 80 per cent of structures damaged or destroyed  
 
Over 370 UNRWA workers killed 
 
UNRWA continues to provide critical services. 
 

 AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies] 

Destruction in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip © January 2025 UNRWA photo
Sunday, October 5, 2025

Overview

This factsheet presents an overview of the humanitarian consequences of two years of war in the Gaza Strip, as of October 2025. It speaks to the impact of the war on the people of Gaza, with over 66,000 people reported killed and the mass displacement of almost the entire population. The factsheet also provides insights into UNRWA's emergency response and continuous delivery of essential services including healthcare, water and sanitation, psychosocial support, and learning activities throughout the war.

"Today, when Israel talks about creating a "buffer zone," it's actually a buffer zone of the buffer zone, and so imperialism by the inch continues." Susan Abulhawa

MAP 2: GAZA ARMISTICE LINESIsrael has no borders, neither by its own admission nor by any article in international law. In 1948, Israel occupied 20,500 km2  (80% of Palestine), of which only 6% was obtained through the collusion of the British Mandate. The rest was obtained just by military force.
 AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies] 
I want to post a point of historic fact regarding the current "border" of Gaza. 
 
The 1949 armistice line was actually 3 kilometers wider along the full perimeter of the Gaza Strip. 
 
However, Israel declared this area as a "buffer zone," and ultimately absorbed it as de facto Jewish-only territory. 
 
Those lands around the strip, called the Gaza envelop, are technically supposed to be part of the strip itself. 
 
But Israel built settlements and farms there. 
 
Today, when Israel talks about creating a "buffer zone," it's actually a buffer zone of the buffer zone, and so imperialism by the inch continues.     

United Nations Geneva: "The greatest danger to our future is apathy. You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you.” Let her words of love & faith inspire you every day. Together, let’s honour Jane Goodall’s legacy by working towards a better world. #ActNow

"The greatest danger to our future is apathy. You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you.” Let her words of love & faith inspire you every day. Together, let’s honour Jane Goodall’s legacy by working towards a better world. #ActNow

"The value of human life should not depend on nationality, religion, or political alliances...." On this week’s cover of The Lancet, a new letter: “Gaza’s healthocide: medical societies must not stay silent”.

On this week’s cover of The Lancet, a new letter: 
“Gaza’s healthocide: medical societies must not stay silent”. Read the letter and more in our latest issue: hubs.li/Q03LX2fw0

Oct 04, 2025

Gaza's healthocide: medical societies must not stay silent


The catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with the apparent deliberate targeting of health-care infrastructure and personnel, has highlighted a profound challenge to the global medical community. Hospitals are under siege and clinicians are operating without basic supplies, power, or safety. We are all deeply concerned about the suffering civilian population in Gaza and Israeli hostages, who are both living under inhumane conditions after the massacre of Oct 7, 2023.
 
WHO and UN agencies have reported at least 772 attacks on health care, with 94% of hospitals damaged or destroyed and more than 1500 health-care workers killed—the highest toll ever recorded. No independent or neutral organisation has provided evidence that Hamas deliberately used hospitals or other civilian facilities as human shields. Even if proven in the future, such claims could never justify systematic attacks on the health-care system. This is a violation of international humanitarian law and demands explicit condemnation. Most medical and surgical societies worldwide have remained silent or issued vague statements about Gaza's healthocide. A recent analysis found that only 24·5% of US speciality societies commented publicly on the Gaza conflict, in contrast to previous crises in which medical societies mobilised resources and expressed support.
 
The value of human life should not depend on nationality, religion, or political alliances... READ MORE  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01735-0/fulltext
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NOT A TARGET: Babies are #NotATarget. Children are #NotATarget. Civilians are #NotATarget. Hospitals are #NotATarget. Health care workers are #NotATarget. Schools are #NotATarget. Humanitarians are #NotATarget.... & Poets are #NotATarget. Journalists are #NotATarget. Teachers are #NotATarget.

Babies are #NotATarget
Children are #NotATarget
Civilians are #NotATarget
Hospitals are #NotATarget
Health care workers are #NotATarget
Schools are #NotATarget
Humanitarians are #NotATarget.
 
Poets are #NotATarget.
Journalists are #NotATarget. 
Teachers are #NotATarget.
   

‘My poems are part of my flesh’: Palestinian poet Batool Abu Akleen on life in Gaza: At just 20, the poet is one of the most vivid witnesses to the conflict. She talks about dreams of Oxford, the deaths of friends and how tragedy has shaped the person she has become.

‘I’m less timid now’ … Batool Abu Akleen. Photograph: PR -  One of her close friends, the photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike this spring, a month before the Cannes film festival premiere of a documentary about her life, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.

 by Claire Armitstead

Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.

But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US’s role and its history of annihilation... READ MORE    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/05/my-poems-are-part-of-my-flesh-palestinian-poet-batool-abu-akleen-on-life-in-gaza 

 AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies] 

Sunday, October 5, 2025

A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it- For years, I pressed Palestinian interests in peace talks. The response to Trump’s plan proves the international community hasn’t learned from catastrophe. [FACTS] by Diana Buttu in The Guardian

Illustration: Edmon de Haro/The Guardian
Sun 5 Oct 2025

For two years, the world has watched as Israel has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and maiming an untold number more. As dangerously, Israel continues to methodically target the healthcare, education, water and sewage systems to ensure that life cannot resume in the Gaza Strip.

Western governments’ responses to Israel’s actions have ranged from cheerleading and unconditional support in the first year of Israel’s attack on Gaza after 7 October 2023, followed by statements of concern and handwringing, to, more recently, occasional expressions of consternation and empty threats that continued Israeli attacks may, at some unspecified time, lead to an arms embargo or a drop in trade relations. In the last few months, there have also been the greatly celebrated proclamations of conditional recognition of a Palestinian state. The irony cannot be more profound: tepidly recognizing a state as it, and its people, are being erased without mercy.

As I write this, confusion swirls around Donald Trump’s plan to end the war and hope is mounting for a hostage and prisoner swap. While an end to the bombing, the freedom of captives on both sides and allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza would bring some relief in an otherwise unbearably bleak landscape, it would be a mistake to view the plan as a historic breakthrough for Palestine. Trump’s vision is yet another American-Israeli concoction cooked up without any input from Palestinians that would retain Israel’s perpetual control over Gaza’s future.

The world has never listened to Palestinian voices or taken seriously the existential threat Israel poses to Palestinian life, and this has not materially changed despite the increase in performative angst. To the contrary, Palestinians have for three-quarters of a century endured the world telling us that Israeli “security concerns” – however defined by Israel – are more important than our rights and lives. As a result Palestinians live with two omnipresent forms of violence: Israeli violence directly inflicted upon our bodies, land and society, and western violence, where only our erasure prompts the world to notice us and see our humanity – but only barely.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/oct/05/gaza-palestine-israel-trump-peace-plan

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“I'm not scared of Israel. I’m scared of a world that has seemingly lost all sense of humanity" Greta Thunberg

“I'm not scared of Israel. I’m scared of a world that has seemingly lost all sense of humanity" Greta Thunberg
 

Israel has kidnapped Mandla Mandela grandson of Nelson Mendala for standing against apartheid in Palestine

@Globalsumudf 
  Israel has kidnapped Mandla Mandela grandson of Nelson Mendala for standing against apartheid in Palestine

SOUTH AFRICA demands the RELEASE of Nelson Mandela's Grandson Mandla, who was ABDUCTED on the Global Sumud Flotilla