A Palestinian boy stands in front of a house destroyed by the Israeli offensive in Rafah on Tuesday.ASSOCIATED PRESS/LAPRESSE (APN)
Returning to ruins in Gaza: ‘We have nothing left’
The ceasefire has enabled thousands of people to return to their places of origin, but many are met with nothing more than a mountain of rubble where their homes once stood
LUIS DE VEGA
Jerusalem - JAN 22, 2025 - 08:16
Mohamed al-Najjar, a 24-year-old law student, used the first day of the ceasefire on Sunday to return to his family home in Rafah, located in the southernmost part of Gaza. What he encountered, eight months after fleeing the arrival of Israeli troops, was a heap of rubble. “We have nothing left,” he said in text and video messages sent via phone. Around him, most of the neighborhood looked the same — reduced to ruins — on streets where not even the asphalt remains.
Fadwa al-Masry with her son, Yassin, who lost both his legs and had a finger severed in a missile strike on Khan Younis. Photograph: Courtesy of Fadwa al-Masry
In Gaza we were the happiest family I could imagine. Then came the worst days of my life
Fadwa al-Masry
I am an academic, a mother, no threat to anyone. Yet those I love have been injured and killed, and I have endured indescribable hardships
Wed 1 Jan 2025 06.00 GMT
I am a Palestinian mother with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree, and I am currently a doctoral student. I work as a lecturer at Gaza’s University College of Science and Technology.
A group of Israeli soldiers takes a selfie near the ruins of a Gaza town on the Israeli border on February 19.TSAFRIR ABAYOV (AP)
Selfies of war crimes in Gaza
An Al Jazeera documentary brings together horrific images of the devastation in the Strip, including those recorded and shared on social media by Israeli soldiers demolishing houses, humiliating prisoners, or playing with Palestinian women’s underwear
RICARDO DE QUEROL
NOV 05, 2024 - 04:50 COT
There are reasons to be wary of Al Jazeera: the largest news channel in Arabic, which also broadcasts in English, is owned by the Emirate of Qatar, which is only too happy to deploy its influence in the region. It sparked the Arab Spring, which succeeded in toppling some tyrants but not in consolidating democracies (there is none in Qatar either). There are also reasons, perhaps more, to pay attention to what Al Jazeera has to say: not only as a thermometer of how Arab countries are reacting to the Middle East conflict, but also because it is the global television channel with the greatest presence in Gaza, given that the major international media outlets are denied access. It has first-hand material that it continues to broadcast despite the fact that Israeli forces killed four of its journalists (and the entire family of its local chief, Wael Dahdouh, who continued to work through the heartbreak.) It is no longer present in Israel, where its activities have been banned.
“My life before was full of happiness. I would give anything — money, property, job — to have my family safe and alive. I lost my very dearest ones, and nothing can ever bring them back again.” — Wael Ayesh, 50, who before the war ran a Gaza City beach cafe. His wife and three of his sons, aged 2 to 14, were killed in a bombing in January, after which, their bodies lay under rubble for 35 days
A view of destroyed homes in the city of Khan Younis on April 26, 2024.
A Palestinian Photographer Reflects on One Year of Life and Death in Gaza
By Yasmeen Serhan | Photographs by Saher Alghorra
The first time Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra spoke with TIME about his experience documenting the death and destruction in his native Gaza, Israel’s retaliation for the Oct. 7 massacre had barely begun. The impact already was utter devastation. Alghorra’s earliest images captured plumes of smoke emerging where towering apartment blocks once stood, scenes of grief-stricken parents mourning their children, and entire communities rummaging through the rubble of their neighborhoods, searching for survivors.
A year later, the 28-year-old is still documenting the lived experience of Palestinians in a place with scars visible from space. But for all of the images of physical destruction, Alghorra’s most profound photographs are of the human impact. In one, he found a Palestinian child crying in the rain as she and others wait for food to be distributed outside a refugee camp in the southernmost city of Rafah. Insufficient humanitarian aid reaching the Strip means that for most people, one meal a day is the most they can hope for. Dozens of children have died of starvation.
(Warning: Some of the following images are graphic in nature and might be disturbing to some viewers.)
Palestinians wait to receive food at a donation center in a refugee camp in Rafah on Jan. 27, 2024.
In another photo, a Palestinian family sits in the living room of their dilapidated home in Khan Yunis. The walls are scorched black and the infrastructure is crumbling, but it’s preferable to the alternative—the crowded tents where the vast majority of people in Gaza, including Alghorra, are now living. Since being forced to leave his home in Gaza City in the early days of the war, he now shares a tent with colleagues next to the Nasser Medical Complex, one of Gaza’s last remaining hospitals.
Muhammad Nabil Lulu lives with his wife and children in their destroyed house in the center of the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, July 18, 2024. An injured girl hugs her brother and checks on her injured father at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital after an Israeli bombardment on a residential building in Bureij refugee camp, June 4, 2024.
“Covering this war has been difficult and full of risks,” Alghorra says. At least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed doing so since the war began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists—the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began gathering data in 1992. Alghorra attributes his survival to “God’s kindness and our strong belief that nothing will happen to us except what God has written for us.” Still, he says the fear of death follows him everywhere. “We have become numb.”
Palestinians carry an injured man following the Israeli bombing on Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip on Dec. 1, 2023.
Not all of Alghorra’s photos depict despair, plentiful as it is. In one photograph, captured in September, a Palestinian teacher is seen drawing on a whiteboard in a makeshift classroom built under a tent. The 30 students sitting cross-legged on the floor haven’t received a proper education in a year, and most of Gaza’s schoolsand universities having been destroyed.
Palestinian teacher Israa Abu Mustafa took the initiative to set up a classroom in a tent on the ruins of her destroyed home with the aim of teaching children as the new school year begins, Sept. 12, 2024.
In another image, displaced Palestinians are gathered on Gaza’s seashore, the waves of the Mediterranean a respite from heat and, for many, the only accessible bathing for miles. Another photo shows a young Palestinian boy decorating his family’s tent with fairy lights to mark the holy month of Ramadan. “I am determined to show the beautiful side and stories of success and resilience amid this genocide that my people are facing,” says Alghorra. (In January, the International Court of Justice issued an interim judgment that there is a plausible risk of Israel committing genocide in Gaza. A definitive ruling, however, could be years away. Israel says it is following international law.)
Displaced Palestinians flee to the seashore from the high temperatures inside the displacement tents on April 17, 2024. Abdul Rahman Al-Helou, 11, decorates his tent for Ramadan on March 10, 2024.Daily life on the sea in the city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip on Sept. 4, 2024.
Steadfastness, sumud in Arabic, has long been considered a Palestinian cultural trait. But for Alghorra, the images show more than that. “We are a people who love life and are holding onto it,” he says, “because we are a people who deserve to live in peace.”
People bid farewell to their relatives after the home of the Abu Rakab family was bombed, July 18, 2024.A mother mourns her son in Gaza on May 11, 2024.
As the war enters its second year, Alghorra says his work has changed. “Finding stories of suffering is easy and present on every street,” he says, although not everyone wants their suffering to be captured. At the beginning, many Palestinians may have believed that such images could compel the world to act—to help bring an end to their suffering. But no longer. “We see and feel that the outside world is no longer as concerned as before,” Alghorra says. “Sadly, Gaza and its people have been left to live in hardship and suffering, unnoticed by anyone. I fear that life will remain as it is now, with forced adaptation to life in camps.”
But these images will stay with Alghorra forever. Of the thousands he’s made over the 12th months, he says the most impactful was from the emergency room at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, where a woman bid farewell to her young daughter who was killed in a nighttime bombing of their home.
“The mother’s scream,” he says, “still rings in my ears to this day.”
Photojournalist Saher Alghorra while working on the Netzarim corridor.Courtesy
Eight hundred dead Palestinians. But Israel has impunity
There’s something very odd about our reactions to these two outrageous death tolls
by Robert Fisk
Saturday 26 July 2014
Impunity is the word that comes to mind. Eight hundred dead Palestinians. Eight hundred. That’s infinitely more than twice the total dead of flight MH17 over Ukraine. And if you refer only to the “innocent” dead – ie no Hamas fighters, young sympathisers or corrupt Hamas officials, with whom the Israelis will, in due course, have to talk – then the women and children and elderly who have been slaughtered in Gaza are still well over the total number of MH17 victims.
And there’s something very odd, isn’t there, about our reactions to these two outrageous death tolls. In Gaza, we plead for a ceasefire but let them bury their dead in the sweltering slums of Gaza and cannot even open a humanitarian route for the wounded. For the passengers on MH17, we demand – immediately – proper burial and care for the relatives of the dead. We curse those who left bodies lying in the fields of eastern Ukraine – as many bodies have been lying, for a shorter time, perhaps, but under an equally oven-like sky, in Gaza.
Because – and this has been creeping up on me for years – we don’t care so much about the Palestinians, do we? We care neither about Israeli culpability, which is far greater because of the larger number of civilians the Israeli army have killed. Nor, for that matter, Hamas’s capability. Of course, God forbid that the figures should have been the other way round. If 800 Israelis had died and only 35 Palestinians, I think I know our reaction.
We would call it – rightly – a slaughter, an atrocity, a crime for which the killers must be made accountable. Yes, Hamas should be made accountable, too. But why is it that the only criminals we are searching for today are the men who fired one – perhaps two – missiles at an airliner over Ukraine? If Israel’s dead equalled those of the Palestinians – and let me repeat, thank heavens this is not the case – I suspect that the Americans would be offering all military support to an Israel endangered by “Iranian-backed terrorists”. We would be demanding that Hamas hand over the monsters who fired rockets at Israel and who are, by the way, trying to hit aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. But we are not doing this. Because those who have died are mostly Palestinians.
More questions. What’s the limit for Palestinian deaths before we have a ceasefire? Eight hundred? Or 8,000? Could we have a scorecard? The exchange rate for dead? Or would we just wait until our gorge rises at the blood and say enough – even for Israel’s war, enough is enough. It’s not as if we have not been through all this before.
From the massacre of Arab villagers by Israel’s new army in 1948, as it is set down by Israeli historians, to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Lebanese Christian allies of Israel murdered up to 1,700 people in 1982 while Israeli troops watched; from the Qana massacre of Lebanese Arabs at the UN base – yes, the UN again – in 1996, to another, smaller terrible killing at Qana (again) 10 years later. And so to the mass killing of civilians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. And after Sabra and Shatila, there were inquiries, and after Qana there was an inquiry and after Gaza in 2008-9, there was an inquiry and don’t we remember the weight of it, somewhat lightened of course when Judge Goldstone did his best to disown it, when – according to my Israeli friends – he came under intense personal pressure.
In other words, we have been here before. The claim that only “terrorists” are to blame for those whom Hamas kills and only “terrorists” are to blame for those whom Israel kills (Hamas “terrorists”, of course). And the constant claim, repeated over and over and over, that Israel has the highest standards of any army in the world and would never hurt civilians. I recall here the 17,500 dead of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, most of whom were civilians. Have we forgotten all this?
And apart from impunity, the word stupidity comes to mind. I will forget here the corrupt Arabs and the killers of Isis and the wholesale mass murders of Iraq and Syria. Perhaps their indifference to “Palestine” is to be expected. They do not claim to represent our values. But what do we make of John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State, who told us last week that the “underlying issues” of the Israeli-Palestinian war need to be addressed? What on earth was he doing all last year when he claimed he was going to produce a Middle East peace in 12 months? Doesn’t he realise why the Palestinians are in Gaza?
The truth is that many hundreds of thousands of people around the world – I wish I could say millions – want an end to this impunity, an end to phrases such as “disproportionate casualties”. Disproportionate to what? Brave Israelis also feel this way. They write about it. Long live the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. Meanwhile, the Arab, Muslim world becomes wilder with anger. And we will pay the price.
Palestinians carry an injured man following the Israeli bo
Palestinian teacher Israa Abu Mustafa took the initiative to set up a classroom in a tent on the ruins of her destroyed home with the aim of teaching children as the new school year begin
Displaced Palestinians flee to the seashore from the high temperatures inside the displacement tents on April 17, 2024. 
Abdul Rahman Al-Helou, 11, decorates his tent for Ramadan on March 10, 2024.
Daily life on the sea in the city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip on Sept. 4, 2024.
