Death, displacement and military duties: children plunged into crisis by Middle East war. The US-Israeli war will have a lifelong impact on millions of children across the Middle East

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/children-us-israel-iran-war-middle-east 

Displaced children arrange a bouquet of flowers outside their tent in a carpark in Beirut’s waterfront area. Photograph: Ibrahim Amro/AFP/Getty Images

Unicef’s representative to Lebanon, Marcoluigi Corsi, warned last month that displacement would have lasting effects on the children. “This relentless cycle of bombardment and displacement is severely compounding their psychological scars, embedding deep-seated fear and threatening profound, long-term emotional harm,” said Corsi.

Ahmed said he has already seen some of these effects in his own children. When Israeli jets break the sound barrier or bomb Beirut, his son starts to run, trying to hide from a bomb he thinks will land on him.

Ahmed himself is exhausted. He had to leave his wife and 17-year-old daughter in the hospital in Tyre after they were injured in the bombing of their house. He shows a picture of his comatose wife in a hospital bed, counting her ailments: Skull fractured in 33 places, internal bleeding, spinal injuries.

“They say she won’t make it,” Ahmed said, looking at his children. “The children are kept busy now, they’re playing. But when they come home and don’t find their mother there, it will be a disaster.”

Deaths, injuries and mourning in Palestine

Despite a ceasefire which is now more than five months old, health officials in Gaza say at least 50 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Iran conflict began more than a month ago. The number of child fatalities is unclear but on 29 March Israeli airstrikes on checkpoints killed at least six Palestinians, including a girl, according to local rescue services.

The Gaza Strip has not recovered from 23 months of Israeli bombardment, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed hospitals and schools in what a UN investigation found to be a genocide. Up until October last year, an average of at least one Palestinian child was being killed every hour. The number of children killed by Israeli forces in its war on Gaza surpassed 20,000 late last year, according to Save the Children.

While the Iran war did not open a new front in Gaza, it has deepened insecurity and resulted in an intensification of ongoing Israeli military operations... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/children-us-israel-iran-war-middle-east

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO see art or 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]

Israeli settlers carry out series of West Bank attacks as security forces stand by

Witnesses describe coordinated raids in which homes and vehicles were set on fire and several Palestinians injured

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates 

A Palestinian woman takes a photo of a damaged house after Israeli settlers attacked three West Bank communities Photograph: Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images

Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem 

Sun 22 Mar 2026 

Israeli settlers have carried out a series of attacks across the occupied West Bank, setting homes and vehicles on fire and wounding several Palestinians in what witnesses described as coordinated raids on communities.

The violence, reported across at least half a dozen locations overnight from Saturday into Sunday, comes amid a wider surge in tensions in the territory. The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, cited local sources as saying settlers had entered al-Fandaqumiya and the nearby town of Seilat al-Dahr, south of Jenin, late on Saturday.

In al-Fandaqumiya, settlers set fire to houses and cars and smashed windows of other homes as residents “attempted to confront them and put out the fires”, according to Wafa. In Seilat al-Dahr, several homes were targeted and a resident was beaten, leaving him injured.

Further attacks were... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/22/israeli-settlers-carry-out-series-of-west-bank-attacks-as-security-forces-stand-by 

[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]

‘A gift that cannot be sold’: the Palestinian family fighting to save their West Bank farm- For more than three decades, the Nassars have battled Israeli efforts to reclassify their property as ‘state land’

Daoud Nassar walks on his family’s farm near Nahalin in the occupied West Bank, with Israeli settlements in the background. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/palestinian-family-fighting-save-west-bank-farm-israel-settlers

Lorenzo Tondo and Sufian Taha in Wadi Salem

Mon 29 Dec 2025

In 1916, Daher Nassar, a Christian Palestinian farmer living south of Bethlehem, made a move considered more than unusual at the time. He bought a 42-hectare stretch of farmland on the slopes and valleys of Wadi Salem, and formally registered the purchase with the Ottoman authorities, who then ruled the region.

A few years later, after transferring the title to his son, Nassar did something even more extraordinary. He re-registered the deed under each successive administration – the British mandate, then the Jordanian government, and finally, after 1967, under Israeli occupation.

Today, that ageing, yellowing document is one of the family’s few shields against the loss of their land – a plot that lies near the town of Nahalin in the so-called Area C of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, coveted by settlers and by far-right Israeli ministers eager to see it annexed. In 1991, the Israeli authorities began a legal battle to declare the Nassar family’s farm Israeli “state land”, a precursor to claiming it for occupation.

“I received this land as a gift,” says Daoud Nassar, 55, Daher’s grandchild, who now owns the farm with his family. “My grandfather gave it to my father, who gave it to me and to my brothers and sisters, and we intend to pass it on to our children, and to their children after them. For us Palestinians, the land is a gift – and a gift cannot be sold or given away.”

Nestled in the olive-clad hills of the Judean desert, the Nassar farm survives without direct access to water or electricity – both were cut off by Israeli settlers in 1991 – with the family living partly in underground natural caves. It is the only place they are able to live, because since 1967 when the land was designed part of Area C, under full Israeli military and civil control, any structure – permanent or temporary – requires an Israeli permit. Almost none are granted.

In this way, the family resists Israeli occupation while hemmed in by five illegal settler outposts – one built right up against its boundary – and locked in a 34-year legal battle with the army, forced to water each olive tree by hand, carrying two glasses of water at a time.

To date, the legal battle between the Nassar family and the Israeli government is one of the longest-running cases in the history of the West Bank, and the longest among those still pending.

“Under Ottoman reign, Palestinian farmers and land owners did not register many of the lands, or reported reduced areas in order to avoid taxes, relying instead on oral traditions and local village records,” says Sliman Shaheen, a legal expert in land-related and demolition cases in the West Bank... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/palestinian-family-fighting-save-west-bank-farm-israel-settlers

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]

Nassar inside a natural cave on his family’s farm that has been converted into a small chapel, where mass is celebrated every Sunday.

Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

The grim task of recovering thousands of bodies from the rubble of Gaza. Relatives and experts tell of the human and societal need to find and identify the dead, while images and data shed light on the scale of the job

News story in The Guardian

By Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem and Seham Tantesh in Gaza. Graphics by Ana Lucía González Paz, Lucy Swan and Paul Scruton

Sun 2 Nov 2025 06.15 EST

It has been described as one of the most gruelling recovery efforts in modern warfare. 

As negotiations over the fragile Gaza ceasefire continue, Palestinians have started to dig through 61m tonnes of debris, 20 times more than the combined mass of all debris generated by conflicts since 2008. Underneath, at least 10,000 people are thought to be buried.

The Guardian spoke with several families in Gaza desperately searching for the bodies of their missing relatives, as well as members of the Palestinian civil defence, a branch of the security services responsible for emergency services and rescue operations. Photos, video footage and data shed light on the scale of the task ahead.

Widespread destruction across the Gaza Strip has generated more than 61m tonnes of debris

 

77% of the Gaza Strip’s road network has been blocked, damaged or destroyed

 

8m tonnes of debris is potentially hazardous

 

At least 300 injured and 50 killed by unexploded ordnance

Cumulative incidents reported to UNMAS 

Casualties arriving at Gaza's hospital morgues

 

... Still buried a year on

On 29 October 2024, the five-storey house in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, where Aya Abu Nasr’s extended family lived collapsed after an Israeli airstrike.

“Most of my family members had been staying on the ground and first floors,” said Nasr, 26. “I lost five of my siblings – two brothers and three sisters – along with all their families. More than 100 members of my extended family died in that strike, and about 50 of them are still under the rubble to this day, a full year later.”.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/02/the-grim-task-of-recovering-thousands-of-bodies-from-the-rubble-of-gaza 

 AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES & 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]