Right now, the United States and Israel are continuing their bombardment of Iran.

As the confirmed death toll climbs past 1330 and hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods are hit daily, the media apparatus that sold you the Iraq war and denied Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians for the last two years is now running the same playbook.

The Atlantic is laundering Netanyahu’s reputation as a “conflict-averse” leader while he tells the world this war lets him do what he’s “yearned for” for 40 years.

Bari Weiss is tweeting fire emojis at pro-war clips, falsely suggesting Iran has nuclear weapons, and devoting journalistic resources to tracking the Instagram likes of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife.

CNN is giving unchallenged airtime to International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Israeli officials claiming American soldiers have an “obligation” to die for Israel.

And that’s before the cable news network is taken over by Paramount, the Weiss operation run by the nepo-son of Larry Ellison, the single largest donor to Friends of the IDF.

The BBC, meanwhile, leads with nine dead in Israel while relegating some 180 children killed by the U.S. in a girls’ school in Minab to a footnote.

This is what the legacy media machine looks like in wartime. It has always looked like this.

And it is exactly why we launched Drop Site less than two years ago.

While Weiss and CBS were manufacturing consent for this war, Drop Site has had reporters on the ground reporting the facts.

In just the last week:

• Reza Sayah reported from Tehran on a double-tap bombing that killed over 20 people at a popular square during Ramadan, connecting the tactic to US strikes in Afghanistan, and Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
• Drop Site correspondent reported from Minab, where a missile struck a girls’ elementary school and killed 180 children, and from Lamerd, where a sports hall full of teenage girls was bombed during practice.
• We were among the first outlets on the ground verifying the strike in Minab as US and Israeli propagandists sought to deny and deflect.
• We have consistently obtained exclusive information from senior Iranian officials who have contradicted claims by Trump, claims that have just as consistently fallen apart under scrutiny.
• We exposed the fabricated CIA narrative about “tracking Khamenei for months” to his “secret location” — his secret location was his office, and he had refused to relocate.

Republished from Drop Site News.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Dozens of teenage girls were attending their regular training sessions of volleyball, basketball, and gymnastics in the main sports hall in Lamerd, a city near the Persian coast, when a missile slammed into the building at 5pm on Saturday.

Additional strikes hit two nearby residential areas and a hall adjacent to a school, as the US and Israel pounded targets across Iran on the first day of what President Donald Trump declared as a “regime change” war.

According to local officials cited in Iranian state media, the strikes on Lamerd killed at least 18 civilians and wounded scores more.

“Within seconds of the missile strike, the windows shattered into thousands of fragments. Sports equipment, balls, tables, barriers flew through the air. Black smoke filled the space,” Mohammed Saed Khorshedy, a 29-year-old worker at the gym who witnessed the attack, told Drop Site News.

“The smell of gunpowder made breathing almost impossible. The screaming began immediately, layered with the sound of debris collapsing and concrete falling from the ceiling.”

The facility sits on the outskirts of Lamerd, a quiet city in Fars province, near the surrounding Zagros mountain range, giving the natural landscape an uneven, rugged character.

Gym building at crossroads
The rectangular building is at a crossroads connecting the city center to Bandar Assaluyeh, an industrial port and energy hub on the Persian Gulf.

The sports hall was poorly maintained, with deteriorating walls surrounded by a low perimeter fence. A high arched metal roof sat atop a reinforced concrete frame and a rubber floor for volleyball and other sports.

The missile struck the middle of the roof, destroying a large part of the building. The main court, small spectator stands, changing rooms, and coach’s office were all reduced to rubble.

Hossein Gholami, a 50-year-old elementary school teacher, was returning from work when he heard the blast. His 16-year-old daughter, Zahra, was training in the hall.

“I noticed a strange gathering of people at the corner of the street leading to the sports hall,” Gholami told Drop Site.

“The screaming was rising from a distance. A colleague ran toward me, waving his arm, and said in a shaken voice: ‘Zahra, the hall, there has been an explosion.’

“I felt as though the ground had split beneath my feet. Everything around me became hazy,” he said. “I ran immediately, and with every step the columns of black smoke rose higher, while the smell of fire and flames entered my nose with force.”

Scene of horror
When he reached the site, he came upon a scene of horror.

“The continuous screaming of the injured mixed with the sounds of secondary explosions. The ground was covered in debris and shattered glass. It was difficult to move with all the rubble. Ambulances arrived after about twenty minutes, but most of the injured were in critical condition,” he said.

“The smell of blood and burns covered everything…the survivors were injured with fractures and burns from the shrapnel.”

Later, he learned that Zahra was among the dead.

“Every time I close my eyes I see her face, her smile, and I hear the sound of the explosion,” Gholami said.

There has been no public statement by the US or Israeli on the Lamerd strikes.

CENTCOM and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

165 killed – many schoolgirls
The bombing of the sports hall in Lamerd came hours after a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, another small city on the Persian Gulf, further east near the Strait of Hormuz, that, according to the state-run IRNA news agency, killed 165 people, many of them schoolgirls.

Neither the US nor Israel claimed that strike. The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in the area of Minab; CENTCOM’s spokesperson said they were “looking into” reports.

Another strike hit an adjacent IRGC naval base and the USS Abraham Lincoln is stationed nearby.

The governor of Lamerd said “The United States and the Zionist regime fired missiles at the sports hall while female students were playing inside,” according to the Fars news agency.

As of Sunday morning, the Iranian Red Crescent and state-linked media have reported preliminary casualty figures of more than 200 people killed and more than 740 injured across Iran, though the actual toll is expected to be significantly higher.

Iran launched retaliatory strikes across nine countries in the region: Israel, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with a total of 18 killed, including three US servicemen, according to a tally by Al Jazeera.

Mir Dehdasht, an administrative officer at Azad university whose 15-year-old daughter Rabab Dehdasht was training at the sports hall, was at home when a neighbour knocked on his door to tell him the facility had been attacked.

‘Their voices were deafening’
“I ran immediately toward the place, and when I arrived, I found burning cars and rubble scattered everywhere,” Dehdasht told Drop Site. “The injured were bleeding heavily, some had lost consciousness on the ground, others were screaming without stopping.

“Their voices were deafening.”

He continued: “Blood and dust covered everything, and the rubble blocked quick access to the building. Rescue teams were working with extreme care to bring out the injured athletes and the bodies of the victims.

“The screaming filled everything,” he said. “Robab did not survive the force of the explosion, while others survived but with life-threatening injuries. I felt complete helplessness.”

Farhad Za’eri, a retired Ministry of Health employee, received the news of the strike by phone. His 16-year-old daughter Elahe, was also there.

“I left immediately with some neighbors. The roads were unusually congested and there was a sense of anxiety throughout the neighborhood,” Za’eri told Drop Site. “When we arrived, the rescue teams were already there and they had begun bringing out the bodies one by one.”

“I did not know what I would see,” he continued, “but when I got close to the place where they were bringing out the victims, I felt a heaviness in my chest.

‘Mark of pain’
“Every body that was lifted carried the mark of pain, and the rescue effort was trying to distinguish between those who could still be saved and those whose lives had ended,” he said.

“There were voices from every direction, everyone was trying to understand what had happened. In that moment, everything inside me was silent, and I was waiting for them to tell me about my daughter Elahe.”

Elahe’s body was eventually brought out. “My daughter’s body was completely destroyed. It appears she was directly hit by the strike. The lower part of her body was completely destroyed,” Za’eri said.

“How can a father describe what he feels when he sees his child like this? All my memories of her, her laugh, her training, her dreams, collapsed before my eyes in a single moment.”

This articles was published first by Drop Site News in collaboration with Egab.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

If you struggle to cope with the endless pressure to communicate in an ever-more connected world, spare a thought for the late serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice last weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed.

Emailing alone looks to have been almost a full-time job for him — and in a real sense, it was.

The personal attention he devoted to billionaires, royalty, political leaders, statesmen, celebrities, academics and media elites was how he kept himself at the heart of this vast network of power.

His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island.

Apparently there are another three million documents still being withheld. Their contents, we must presume, are even more damning to the global elite cultivated by Epstein.

The more documents that come to light, the more a picture emerges of how Epstein was shielded from the consequences of his own depravity by this network of allies who either indulged his crimes, or actively participated in them.

Epstein’s modus operandi looked suspiciously like that of a gangland boss, who requires initiates to take part in a hit before they become fully fledged members of the mob. Complicity is the safest way to guarantee a conspiracy of silence.

Network of power
It is not just that the late paedophile financier was for decades hiding in plain sight. His network of friends and acquaintances were hiding with him, all assuming they were untouchable.

His abuse of young women and girls was not just a personal crime. After all, for whom were he and his procurer-in-chief, Ghislaine Maxwell, doing all this sex trafficking?

This is precisely why so many of the millions of documents released have been carefully redacted — not chiefly to protect his victims, who are apparently too often identified, but to protect the predatory circles he serviced.

What is notable about the latest tranche of Epstein files is how suggestive they are of a worldview associated with “conspiracy theorists”. Epstein was at the centre of a global network of powerful figures from both sides of a supposed — but in reality, largely performative — political divide between the left and right.

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes

The glue that appears to have bound many of these figures together was their abusive treatment of vulnerable young women and girls.

Similarly, the photos of rich men with young women suggest that Epstein accumulated, either formally or informally, kompromat — incriminating evidence — that presumably served as potential leverage over them.

In true Masonic style, his circle of peers appear to have protected each other. Epstein himself certainly benefited from a “sweetheart deal” in Florida in 2008. He ended up being jailed on only two charges of soliciting prostitution — the least serious among a raft of sex trafficking charges — and served a short term, much of it on work release.

And the mystery of how Epstein, a glorified accountant, financed his fantastically lavish lifestyle — when his schedule seems to have been dominated by emailing chores and hosting sex parties — grows a little less mysterious with every fresh disclosure.

His cultivation of the super-wealthy and their hangers-on, and the invitations to come to his island to spend time with young women, all smack of the traditional honeytrap famously employed by spy agencies.

Most likely, Epstein wasn’t financing all of this himself.

Israel’s fingerprints
That should be no surprise. Once again, the fingerprints of intelligence services — particularly Israel’s — are to be found in the latest dump of files. But the clues were there long before.

There was, of course, his intimate, preternatural bond with Maxwell, whose media tycoon father was exposed after his death as an Israeli agent. And Epstein’s long-standing best buddy, Ehud Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who later served as prime minister, should have been another red flag.

That partnership featured prominently in a flurry of stories published by Drop Site News last autumn, from an earlier release of the Epstein files. They showed Epstein helping Israel to broker security deals with countries such as Mongolia, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia.

An active Israeli military intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, was a repeated houseguest at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment between 2013 and 2015. An email also shows Barak asking Epstein to wire funds to Koren’s account.

But the latest release offers additional clues. A declassified FBI document quotes a confidential source as saying Epstein was “close” to Barak and “trained as a spy under him”.

In an email exchange between the pair in 2018, ahead of a meeting with a Qatari investment fund, Epstein asks Barak to allay potential concerns about their relationship: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad (sic).”

And in newly released, undated audio, Epstein advises Barak to find out more about US data analysis firm Palantir and meet its founder, Peter Thiel. In 2024, Israel signed a deal with Palantir for AI services to help the Israeli military select targets in Gaza.

Predictably, these revelations are gaining almost no traction in the establishment media — the very same media whose billionaire owners and career-minded editors once courted Epstein.

Instead, the media seem much more engrossed by weaker leads that suggest Epstein might have also had connections with Russian security services.

Faustian pact
There is a reason why the demand for the Epstein files has been so clamorous that even US President Donald Trump had to give in, despite embarrassing revelations for him too. Much of what we see happening in our ever-more debased, corrupt politics appears to defy rational, let alone moral, explanation.

Western elites have spent two years actively colluding in mass slaughter in Gaza — widely identified by experts as a genocide — and then labelling any opposition to it as antisemitism or terrorism.

Those same elites twiddle their thumbs as the planet burns, refusing to give up their enriching addiction to fossil fuels, even as survey after survey shows global temperatures relentlessly climbing to the point where climate breakdown is inevitable.

A series of reckless, illegal Western wars of aggression in the Middle East, as well as Nato’s long-term goading of Russia into invading Ukraine, have not only destabilised the world, but risk provoking nuclear conflagration.

And despite expert warnings, artificial intelligence is being rushed out with apparently barely a thought given to the unpredictable and likely massive costs to our societies, from eviscerating much of the job market to upending our ability to assess truth.

The Epstein files proffer an answer. What feels like a conspiracy, they suggest, is indeed a conspiracy — one driven by greed.

What was always staring us in the face might actually be correct: there is a steep entry price for being accepted into the West’s tiny power elite, and it involves putting to one side any sense of morality. It requires discarding empathy for anyone outside the in-group.

Maybe a soulless, flesh-eating elite in charge of our societies is less of a caricature than it appears. Maybe the Epstein files have such purchase on our imaginations because they teach us a lesson we already knew, confirming a cautionary tale that predates even the West’s literary canon.

More than 400 years ago, English writer Christopher Marlowe — a contemporary of William Shakespeare — drew on German folk stories to write his play Doctor Faustus, about a scholar who, through the intermediary Mephistopheles, agrees to sell his soul to the devil in return for magical powers.

Thus was born the Faustian pact, mediated by the Epstein-like figure of Mephistopheles. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would revisit this tale 200 years later in his two-part masterwork Faust.

Degenerate logic
Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the media noise over the Epstein files is serving chiefly to drown out a more truthful story struggling to emerge.

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes, to direct it to a few select individuals — notably in the UK, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson.

The pair hardly count as sacrificial lambs. Nonetheless, they serve the same purpose: to satiate the growing public appetite for retribution.

Meanwhile, the rest of his circle either deny the well-established evidence of their friendships with Epstein or, if cornered, hastily apologise for a brief lapse in judgment — before scurrying for cover.

Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire?

This is a false reckoning. The Epstein files don’t just show us the dark choices of a few powerful individuals. More significantly, they highlight the degenerate logic of the power structures behind these individuals.

The powerful figures who took Epstein’s Lolita Express to his island; who got “massages” from young, trafficked women and girls; and who casually joked about the abuse these youngsters suffered, are the very same people who quietly helped Israel commit mass slaughter in Gaza — and in some cases, noisily defended its right to do so.

Are we surprised that those who raised not a whisper of opposition to the murder and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more, were also those who connived in rituals of abuse against children — or condoned such rituals — far closer to home?

These are the people who required anyone hoping to raise their voice in defence of Gaza’s children to spend their time instead condemning Hamas. These are the people who sought at every turn to discredit the mounting death toll of children by attributing it to Gaza’s “Hamas-run Health Ministry”.

These are the people who denied Israel’s targeting of hospitals needed to treat Gaza’s wounded and sick children — and ignored Israel’s mass starvation of the entire population. And these are the people now pretending that Israel’s continuing murder and torture of Gaza’s children amounts to a “peace plan”.

Neoliberalism and Zionism
Set aside his paedophilia for a moment. Epstein was the ultimate personification of the twin corrupting ideologies of neoliberalism and Zionism, which dominate Western societies. That is reason enough why he excelled for so long in their upper reaches.

The ultimate destinations of those ideologies were always going to lead to a genocide in Gaza, and in the years or decades ahead — unless stopped — to a planet-wide nuclear holocaust or climate collapse.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats

Epstein could serve as a salutary warning of what is so deeply amiss with the West’s political and financial culture. But the wake-up call he represents is now being smothered in his absence as much as it was in his lifetime.

Neoliberalism is the pursuit of money and power for its own sake, divorced from any higher purpose or social good. Over the last half century, Western societies have been encouraged to venerate the billionaire — soon to be trillionaire — class as the ultimate signifier of economic growth and progress, rather than the ultimate marker of a system that has rotted from within.

Predictably, the super-rich and their hangers-on have been drawn to the advocates of “longtermism”, a movement that justifies the world’s current gross inequalities and injustices — and is resigned to a coming climate and environmental apocalypse as the world’s resources are used up.

Longtermism argues that humanity’s salvation lies not with reorganising our societies politically and economically in the here and now, but with intensifying those inequalities to achieve longer-term success via a class of Nietzschean Ubermensch, or superior beings.

A tiny financial elite needs absolute freedom to amass more wealth in search of the solutions — via tech innovations, of course — to overcome the difficulties of surviving on our fragile planet. The rest of us are an impediment to the super-rich’s ability to steer a course to safety.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats. In the words of one of longtermism’s gurus, Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, what lies ahead is “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind”.

To borrow a term from video-gaming, members of the neoliberal elite view the rest of us as non-player characters, or NPCs — the filler characters generated in a game to serve as the background for the actual players. Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire?

No moral outlier
If this sounds a lot like traditional, “white man’s burden” colonialism, updated for a supposedly post-colonial era, that’s because it is. This helps to explain why neoliberalism pairs so comfortably with another depraved colonial ideology, Zionism.

Zionism gained ever-more legitimacy in the aftermath of the Second World War, even as it brashly preserved through the postwar era the depraved logic of the very European ethnic nationalisms that had earlier culminated in Nazism.

Israel, Zionism’s bastard child, not only mirrored Aryan supremacy, but made its own version — Jewish supremacy — respectable. Zionism, like other ugly ethnic nationalisms, demands tribal unity against the Other, values militarism above all else, and constantly seeks territorial expansion, or Lebensraum.

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that, over many decades, reversed the advances of an international legal system set up precisely to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War?

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that carried out a genocide in full view of the world — and that the West not only failed to stop it, but actively colluded in the mass slaughter?

Is it any surprise that, as Israel has found it harder to conceal the criminal nature of its enterprise, the West has grown more repressive, more authoritarian in crushing opposition to its project?

Is it any surprise that the weapons systems, surveillance innovations and population-control mechanisms that Israel developed and refined for use against Palestinians make it such a prized ally for a Western billionaire class looking to use the same technological innovations at home?

That is why the Home Secretary of a UK government that threw its weight behind the genocide in Gaza, and defined opposition to it as terrorism, now wants to revive the 18th-century idea of the Panopticon prison, an all-seeing form of incarceration, but in an AI version.

In Shabana Mahmood’s words, her Panopticon would ensure that “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”.

Nearly two decades ago, it became clear that Jeffrey Epstein was a predator. In recent years, it has become impossible to maintain the idea that he was a moral outlier. He distilled and channelled — through depraved forms of sexual gratification — a wider corrupt culture that believes rules don’t apply to special people, to the chosen, to the Ubermensch.

A handful of his most disposable allies will now be sacrificed to satisfy our hunger for accountability. But don’t be fooled: the Epstein culture is still going strong.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the Middle East Eye with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

By Abubaker Abed in Deil Al-Balah, Gaza, and Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News

The US-backed Israeli government resumed its intense genocidal attacks on Gaza early yesterday morning, unleashing a massive wave of indiscriminate military strikes across the Strip and killing more than 410 people, including scores of children and women, according to local health officials.

The massacre resulted in one of the largest single-day death tolls of the past 17 months, and also killed several members of Gaza’s government and a member of Hamas’s political bureau.

The Trump administration said it was briefed ahead of the strikes, which began at approximately 2 am local time, and that the US fully supported Israel’s attacks.

“The sky was filled with drones, quadcopters, helicopters, F-16 and F-35 warplanes. The firing from the tanks and vehicles didn’t stop,” said Abubaker Abed, a contributing journalist for Drop Site News who reports from Deir al-Balah, Gaza.

“I didn’t sleep last night. I had a pang in my heart that something awful would happen. At 2 am, I tried to close my eyes. Once it happened, four explosions shook my home. The sky turned red and became heavily shrouded with plumes of smoke.”

Abubaker said Israel’s attacks began with four strikes in Deir al-Balah.

“Mothers’ wails and children’s screams echoed painfully in my ears. They struck a house near us. I didn’t know who to call. I couldn’t feel my knees. I was shivering with fear, and my family were harshly awakened,” he said.

‘My mother couldn’t breathe’
“My mother couldn’t take a breath. My father searched around for me. We gathered in the middle of our home, knowing our end may be near. That’s the same feeling we have had for the 16 months of intense bombings and attacks.

“The nightmare has chased us again.”

The Israeli attacks pummeled cities across Gaza — from Rafah and Khan Younis in the south to Deir al-Balah in the center, and Gaza City in the north, where Israel carried out some of the heaviest bombing in areas already reduced to an apocalyptic landscape.

Since the “ceasefire” took effect in January, more than half a million Palestinians returned to the north and many of them have been living in makeshift shelters or on the rubble of their former homes.

Hospitals that already suffer from catastrophic damage from 16 months of relentless Israeli attacks and a dire lack of medical supplies struggled to handle the influx of wounded people, and local authorities issued an emergency call for blood donations.

Late Tuesday morning, Dr Abdul-Qader Weshah, a senior emergency doctor at Al-Awda Hospital in Al-Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, described the situation.

“We’ve just received another influx of injuries following a nearby strike. We’ve dealt with them. We are just preparing ourselves for more casualties as more bombings are expected to happen,” he told Drop Site News.

‘Horrified . . . awoke to screams’
“Since the morning, we were horrified and awoke to the screams and pain of people. We’ve been treating many people, children and women in particular.”

Weshah said they have had to transfer some of the wounded to other hospitals because of a lack of medical supplies.

“We don’t have the means. Gaza’s hospitals are devoid of everything. Here at the hospital, we lack everything, including basic necessities like disinfectants and gauze. We don’t have enough beds for the casualties.

We don’t have the capacity to treat the wounded. X-ray devices, magnetic resonance imaging, and simple things like stitches are not available. The hospital is in an unprecedented state of chaos.

“The number of medical crews is not enough. Overwhelmed with injuries, we’re horrified and we don’t know why we are speaking to the world.

“We’re working with less than the bare minimum in our hands. We need doctors, devices and supplies, and circumstances to do our job.”

Al-Shifa hospital director Muhammad Abu Salmiya told Al Jazeera Arabic: “Every minute, a wounded person dies due to a lack of resources.”

Rising death toll
Dr Zaher Al-Wahidi, the Director of the Information Unit at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, told Drop Site Tuesday afternoon that 174 children and 89 women were killed in the Israeli attacks. [Editors: Latest figures are 404 killed, including many children, and the toll is expected to rise as many are still buried beneath rubble.]

Local health officials and witnesses said that the death toll was expected to rise dramatically because dozens of people are believed to be buried under the rubble of the structures where they were sleeping when the bombing began.

“We can hear the voices of the victims under the rubble, but we can’t save them,” said a medical official at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Video posted on social media by Palestinians inside Gaza portrayed unspeakable scenes of the lifeless bodies of infants and small children killed in the bombings.

Zinh Dahdooh, a dental student from Gaza City, posted an audio recording she said was of her neighbours screaming as their shelter was bombed, trapping them in the destruction.

“Tonight, they bombed our neighbors,” she wrote on the social media site X. “They kept screaming until they died, and no ambulance came for them. How long are we supposed to live in this fear? How long!”

According to local health officials, many strikes hit buildings or homes housing multiple generations of families.

‘Wiped out six families’
“Israel in its strikes has wiped out at least six families. One in my hometown. The others are from Khan Younis, Rafah, and Gaza City. Some families have lost five or 10 members. Others have lost around 20,” Abubaker reported.

“We talk about families killed from the children to the old. The Gharghoon family was bombed today in Rafah. The strikes have killed the father and his two daughters. Their mom and grandparents along with their uncles and aunts were also murdered, erasing the entire family from the civil registry.

“We are talking about the erasure of entire families. Among Israel’s attacks in Deir al-Balah, Israel bombed the homes of the Mesmeh, Daher, and Sloot families.

“More than 10 people, including seven women, from the Sloot family were killed, wiping them out entirely. The same has happened to the Abu-Teer, Barhoom, and other families.

“This is extermination by design. This is genocide.”

On Tuesday, Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirmed that “Abu Hamza,” the spokesman of its military wing, Al Quds Brigades, had been killed along with his wife and other family members.

A hellish scene
Israeli officials said they had been given a “green light” by President Donald Trump to resume heavy bombing of Gaza because of Hamas’s refusal to obey Trump’s directive to release all Israeli captives immediately.

“All those who seek to terrorise not just Israel but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News.

“All hell will break loose.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement asserting that “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength”.

Israeli media reported that the decision to resume heavy strikes against Gaza was made a week ago and was not in response to any imminent threat posed by Hamas.

Israel, which has repeatedly violated the ceasefire that went into effect January 19, has sought to create new terms in a transparent effort to justify blowing up the deal entirely.

“This is unconscionable,” said Muhannad Hadi, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

“A cease-fire must be reinstated immediately. People in Gaza have endured unimaginable suffering.”

Compounding the crisis in Gaza’s hospitals, Israel recently began blocking the entry of international medical workers to the Strip at unprecedented rates as part of a sweeping new policy that severely limits the number of aid organisations Israel will permit to operate in Gaza.

Editor’s note: Due to the ongoing Israeli attacks, Abubaker Abed relayed his reporting and eyewitness account to Jeremy Scahill by phone and text messages. This article is republished from Drop Site News under Creative Commons.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz