New Zealand advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has “cautiously welcomed” the Gaza ceasefire and proposed exchange of hostages between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas.

At least 7000 Palestinians are being held in detention without trial by Israel while about 20 Israeli soldiers are held by Hamas.

PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said the deal was a reprieve from Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

“It’s been two years of mass bombing and starvation. It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century,” he said in a statement.

“The real tragedy is that the main elements of this ceasefire deal were already agreed to nine months ago in January. Israel was forced to let Palestinians return to Gaza City, and lower the intensity of its attacks.

“Within a few weeks, the Israelis scuttled the agreement, shut off all food and intensified their attacks and are now ethnically re-cleansing Gaza City.

“Expulsion is still the Israeli government’s aim. Netanyahu must be disappointed that Trump is no longer advocating for removal of Palestinians from Gaza, but Netanyahu usually gets his way with Trump in the end.”

Called on support
Nazal said PSNA especially noted that the Hamas acceptance statement called on countries supporting the deal — New Zealand included — to make sure Israel abided by the few specific conditions imposed on the Zionist state in the agreement.

“Israel has broken every peace deal it has ever signed on Palestine, right from occupying more than half of what was allocated by the United Nations as a Palestinian state in 1948,” Nazzal said.

“In the 1993 Oslo peace deal, which the US also brokered, there was meant to be a Palestinian state within five years. Israel made sure this never happened.

“This time, there is no mention of the Occupied West Bank. Nothing about return of refugees. There is no commitment in the Trump deal for a Palestinian state, for Winston Peters to eventually recognise.

“There’s just a vague pathway with no timelines and it’s all conditional on Israeli approval,” Nazzal said.

“So we have a message for Winston Peters, who is demanding PSNA and other protesters applaud the Trump deal as ‘case solved’.

“Ceasefire or not, our campaign to isolate the apartheid state of Israel will continue to grow until all Palestinians are liberated.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

If you thought Western capitals were finally losing patience with Israel’s engineering of a famine in Gaza nearly two years into the genocide, you may be disappointed.

As ever, events have moved on — even if the extreme hunger and malnourishment of the two million people of Gaza have not abated.

Western leaders are now expressing “outrage”, as the media call it, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to “take full control” of Gaza and “occupy” it.

At some point in the future, Israel is apparently ready to hand the enclave over to outside forces unconnected to the Palestinian people.

The Israeli cabinet agreed last Friday on the first step: a takeover of Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are huddled in the ruins, being starved to death. The city will be encircled, systematically depopulated and destroyed, with survivors presumably herded southwards to a “humanitarian city” — Israel’s new term for a concentration camp — where they will be penned up, awaiting death or expulsion.

At the weekend, foreign ministers from the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia and other Western nations issued a joint statement decrying the move, warning it would “aggravate the catastrophic humanitarian situation, endanger the lives of the hostages, and further risk the mass displacement of civilians”.

Germany, Israel’s most fervent backer in Europe and its second-biggest arms supplier, is apparently so dismayed that it has vowed to “suspend” — that is, delay — weapons shipments that have helped Israel to murder and maim hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the past 22 months.

Netanyahu is not likely to be too perturbed. Doubtless, Washington will step in and pick up any slack for its main client state in the oil-rich Middle East.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has once again shifted the West’s all-too-belated focus on the indisputable proof of Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions — evidenced by Gaza’s skeletal children — to an entirely different story.

Now, the front pages are all about the Israeli prime minister’s strategy in launching another “ground operation”, how much pushback he is getting from his military commanders, what the implications will be for the Israelis still held captive in the enclave, whether the Israeli army is now overstretched, and whether Hamas can ever be “defeated” and the enclave “demilitarised”.

We are returning once again to logistical analyses of the genocide — analyses whose premises ignore the genocide itself. Might that not be integral to Netanyahu’s strategy?

Life and death
It ought to be shocking that Germany has been provoked into stopping its arming of Israel — assuming it follows through — not because of months of images of Gaza’s skin-and-bones children that echo those from Auschwitz, but only because Israel has declared that it wants to “take control” of Gaza.

It should be noted, of course, that Israel never stopped controlling Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories — in contravention of the fundamentals of international law, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled last year. Israel has had absolute control over the lives and deaths of Gaza’s people every day — bar one — since its occupation of the tiny coastal enclave many decades ago.

On 7 October 2023, thousands of Palestinian fighters briefly broke out of the besieged prison camp they and their families had endured after Israel momentarily dropped its guard.

Gaza has long been a prison that the Israeli military illegally controlled by land, sea and air, determining who could enter and leave. It kept Gaza’s economy throttled, and put the enclave’s population “on a diet” that saw rocketing malnourishment among its children long before the current starvation campaign.

Trapped behind a highly militarised fence since the early 1990s, unable to access their own coastal waters, and with Israeli drones constantly surveilling them and raining down death from the air, the people of Gaza viewed it more as a modernised concentration camp.

But Germany and the rest of the West were fine supporting all that. They have continued selling Israel arms, providing it with special trading status, and offering diplomatic cover.

Only as Israel carries through to a logical conclusion its settler-colonial agenda of replacing the native Palestinian people with Jews, is it apparently time for the West to vent its rhetorical “outrage”.

Two-state trickery
Why the pushback now? In part, it is because Netanyahu is pulling the rug out from under their cherished, decades-long pretext for supporting Israel’s ever-greater criminality: the fabled two-state solution.

Israel conspired in that trickery with the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s.

The goal was never the realisation of a two-state solution. Rather, Oslo created a “diplomatic horizon” for “final status issues” — which, like the physical horizon, always remained equally distant, however much ostensible movement there was on the ground.

Lisa Nandy, Britain’s Culture Secretary, peddled precisely this same deceit last week as she extolled the virtues of the two-state solution. She told Sky News: “Our message to the Palestinian people is very, very clear: There is hope on the horizon.”

UK Government Minister Lisa Nandy:

‘Our message to the Palestinian people is very clear. There is hope on the horizon.’

Palestinians are expected to believe words of ‘hope’ from a Minister of a government that has aided and supported Israel’s genocide against them pic.twitter.com/appizVm0QY

— Going Underground (@GUnderground_TV) August 6, 2025

Every Palestinian understood her real message, which could be paraphrased as: “We’ve lied to you about a Palestinian state for decades, and we’ve allowed a genocide to unfold before the world’s eyes for the past two years. But hey, trust us this time. We’re on your side.”

In truth, the promise of Palestinian statehood was always treated by the West as little more than a threat — and one directed at Palestinian leaders. Palestinian officials must be more obedient, quieter. They had to first prove their willingness to police Israel’s occupation on Israel’s behalf by repressing their own people.

Hamas, of course, failed that test in Gaza. But Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, bent over backwards to reassure his examiners, casting as “sacred” his lightly armed security forces’ so-called “cooperation” with Israel. In reality, they are there to do its dirty work.

Nonetheless, despite the PA’s endless good behaviour, Israel has continued to expel ordinary Palestinians from their land, then steal that land — which was supposed to form the basis of a Palestinian state — and hand it over to extremist Jewish settlers backed by the Israeli army.

Former US President Barack Obama briefly and feebly tried to halt what the West misleadingly calls Jewish “settlement expansion” — in reality, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — but rolled over at the first sign of intransigence from Netanyahu.

Israel has stepped up the process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank even more aggressively over the past two years, while global attention has been on Gaza — with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz warning this week that settlers have been given “free rein”.

A small window into the impunity granted to settlers as they wage their campaign of violence to depopulate Palestinian communities was highlighted at the weekend, when B’Tselem released footage of a Palestinian activist, Awdah Hathaleen, inadvertently filming his own killing.

Extremist settler Yinon Levi was released on grounds of self-defence, even though the video shows him singling out Hathaleen from afar, taking aim and shooting.

Alibi gone
It is noticeable that, having stopped making reference to Palestinian statehood for many years, Western leaders have revived their interest only now — as Israel is making a two-state solution unrealisable.

That was graphically illustrated by footage broadcast this month by ITV. Shot from an aid plane, it showed the wholesale destruction of Gaza — its homes, schools, hospitals, universities, bakeries, shops, mosques and churches gone.

Apocalyptic scenes in Gaza               Video: ITV News

Gaza is in ruins. Its reconstruction will take decades. Occupied East Jerusalem and its holy sites were long ago seized and Judaised by Israel, with Western assent.

Suddenly, Western capitals are noticing that the last remnants of the proposed Palestinian state are about to be swallowed whole by Israel, too. Germany recently warned Israel that it must not take “any further steps toward annexing the West Bank”.

US President Donald Trump is on his own path. But this is the moment when other major Western powers — led by France, Britain and Canada — have started threatening to recognise a Palestinian state, even as the possibility of such a state has been obliterated by Israel.

Australia announced it would join them this week after its foreign minister, a few days earlier, said the quiet part out loud, warning: “There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise if the international community don’t move to create that pathway to a two-state solution.”

That is something they dare not countenance, because with it goes their alibi for supporting all these years the apartheid state of Israel, now deep into the final stages of a genocide in Gaza.

That was why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer desperately switched tack recently. Instead of dangling recognition of Palestinian statehood as a carrot encouraging Palestinians to be more obedient — British policy for decades — he wielded it as a threat, and a largely hollow one, against Israel.

He would recognise a Palestinian state if Israel refused to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and proceeded with the West Bank’s annexation. In other words, Starmer backed recognising a state of Palestine – after Israel has gone ahead with its complete erasure.

Extracting concessions
Still, France and Britain’s recognition threat is not simply too late. It serves two other purposes.

Firstly, it provides a new alibi for inaction. There are plenty of far more effective ways for the West to halt Israel’s genocide. Western capitals could embargo arms sales, stop intelligence sharing, impose economic sanctions, sever ties with Israeli institutions, expel Israeli ambassadors, and downgrade diplomatic relations. They are choosing to do none of those things.

And secondly, recognition is designed to extract from the Palestinians “concessions” that will make them even more vulnerable to Israeli violence.

According to France’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot: “Recognising a State of Palestine today means standing with the Palestinians who have chosen non-violence, who have renounced terrorism, and are prepared to recognise Israel.”

In other words, in the West’s view, the “good Palestinians” are those who recognise and lay down before the state committing genocide against them.

Western leaders have long envisioned a Palestinian state only on condition that it is demilitarised. Recognition this time is premised on Hamas agreeing to disarm and its departure from Gaza, leaving Abbas to take on the enclave and presumably continue the “sacred” mission of “cooperating” with a genocidal Israeli army.

As part of the price for recognition, all 22 members of the Arab League publicly condemned Hamas and demanded its removal from Gaza.

Boot on Gaza’s neck
How does all of this fit with Netanyahu’s “ground offensive”? Israel isn’t “taking over” Gaza, as he claims. Its boot has been on the enclave’s neck for decades.

While Western capitals contemplate a two-state solution, Israel is preparing a final mass ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

Starmer’s government, for one, knew this was coming. Flight data shows that the UK has been constantly operating surveillance missions over Gaza on Israel’s behalf from the Royal Air Force base Akrotiri on Cyprus. Downing Street has been following the enclave’s erasure step by step.

Netanyahu’s plan is to encircle, besiege and bomb the last remaining populated areas in northern and central Gaza, and drive Palestinians towards a giant holding pen — misnamed a “humanitarian city” — alongside the enclave’s short border with Egypt. Israel will then probably employ the same contractors it has been using elsewhere in Gaza to go street to street to bulldoze or blow up any surviving buildings.

The next stage, given the trajectory of the last two years, is not difficult to predict. Locked up in their dystopian “humanitarian city”, the people of Gaza will continue to be starved and bombed whenever Israel claims it has identified a Hamas fighter in their midst, until Egypt or other Arab states can be persuaded to take them in, as a further “humanitarian” gesture.

Then, the only matter to be settled will be what happens to the real estate: build some version of Trump’s gleaming “Riviera” scheme, or construct another tawdry patchwork of Jewish settlements of the kind envisioned by Netanyahu’s openly fascist allies, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.

There is a well-established template to be drawn on, one that was used in 1948 during Israel’s violent creation. Palestinians were driven from their cities and villages, in what was then called Palestine, across the borders into neighbouring states. The new state of Israel, backed by Western powers, then set about methodically destroying every home in those hundreds of villages.

Over subsequent years, they were landscaped either with forests or exclusive Jewish communities, often engaged in farming, to make Palestinian return impossible and stifle any memory of Israel’s crimes. Generations of Western politicians, intellectuals and cultural figures have celebrated all of this.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Austrian President Heinz Fischer are among those who went to Israel in their youth to work on these farming communities. Most came back as emissaries for a Jewish state built on the ruins of a Palestinian homeland.

An emptied Gaza can be similarly re-landscaped. But it is much harder to imagine that this time the world will forget or forgive the crimes committed by Israel — or those who enabled them.

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. This article was first published Middle East Eye and republished from the author’s blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Together with former Irish president Mary Robinson, Clark visited the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Palestinian territory this week.

The two former world leaders are part of The Elders, an independent, non-government organisation of global leaders working together for peace, justice, human rights and sustainability.

The group has regularly spoken out about the situation in Gaza since Israel announced war on Hamas in October 2023.

“A significant proportion of manifested trucks are turned away with vital supplies. The world needs to know… This has to stop.”

Mary Robinson and @HelenClarkNZ witness the devastating reality at the closed Rafah border with Gaza. pic.twitter.com/ocDlg5lUfa

— The Elders (@TheElders) August 12, 2025

Their joint statement said they saw evidence of food and medical aid being denied entry to Gaza, “causing mass starvation to spread”.

“What we saw and heard underlines our personal conviction that there is not only an unfolding, human-caused famine in Gaza, there is an unfolding genocide,” the statement said.

“The deliberate destruction of health facilities in Gaza means children facing acute malnutrition cannot be treated effectively.”

At least 36 Palestinian children starved to death last month, they said.

Israel has repeatedly denied famine and genocide were happening in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week that if his army had a policy of starvation “no one would be alive two years into the war”.

Figures disputed
Israel also disputed the figures provided by authorities in the Palestinian territory, but had not provided its own.

No shelter materials had entered Gaza since March this year, the statement said, leaving families already displaced multiple times without protection.

“Many new mothers are unable to feed themselves or their new-born babies adequately, and the health system is collapsing,” Clark said.

“All of this threatens the very survival of an entire generation,” she said.

‘Truth matters’
“The uncomfortable truth is that many states are prioritising their own economic and security interests, even as the world is reeling from the images of Gazan children starving to death,” Robinson said.

“Political leaders have the power and the legal obligation to apply measures to pressure this Israeli government to end its atrocity crimes.”

“This is all the more urgent in light of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Gaza City takeover plan. President Trump has the leverage to compel a change of course. He must use it now,” she said.

Hamas authorities said Israeli air attacks had increased in recent days as the Israel Defence Force (IDF) prepared to take over Gaza City, home to some one million Palestinians.

Netanyahu had defended his plan, saying the best option to defeat Hamas was to take the city by force.

The plan has been heavily criticised by Israelis, Palestinians, international organisations and other countries.

‘Re-engage’ ceasefire talks
Robinson and Clark urged Hamas and Israel to re-engage in ceasefire talks and immediately release Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinian prisoners, and for Israel to immediately open all border crossings into Gaza.

They also called for states to suspend existing and future trade agreements with Israel, as well as the transfer of arms and weapons to Israel, urging the world to follow the lead of Germany and Norway.

Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund divested from Israeli firms linked to violations of international law this week, while Germany’s chancellor suspended exports of arms to Israel.

“We call for recognition of the State of Palestine by at least 20 more states by September, including G7 members, EU member states and others,” their joint statement said.

Australia was the latest to announce it would made the decree at a UN General Assembly next month if its conditions were met, following in the footsteps of Canada, France and the UK.

At least 20 countries had on Wednesday called for aid to urgently be released into Gaza, saying suffering in the Palestinian territory had reached “unimaginable” levels.

New Zealand was not among them, and had not yet made any pledge to recognise a Palestinian state, but the government said it was a matter of “when not if” it would.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A leading advocacy group supporting Palerstine has called on the government to follow Germany’s lead and suspend New Zealand military support for Israel to continue its mass killing and mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

Germany and New Zealand were two of the countries to sign a letter yesterday condemning Israel’s plans to extend its war to Gaza City, displacing another million Palestinians.

However, one of the other signatories, Australia, announced that it would go a step further by moving to recognise a state of Palestine at the UN General Assembly next month.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia would work with the international community to make recognition a reality.

“I have said it publicly and I said it directly to Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu: the situation in Gaza has gone beyond the world’s worst fears,” he said.

“Far too many innocent lives have been lost. The Israeli government continues to defy international law and deny sufficient aid, food and water to desperate people, including children.”

The decision rides on a condition that the Palestinian resistance group Hamas plays no role in its future governance.

Letter condemns Israel
New Zealand joined Australia, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy in signing a letter that said:

“The plans that the government of Israel has announced risk violating international humanitarian law. Any attempts at annexation or of settlement extension violate international law.

It will aggravate the catastrophic humanitarian situation, endanger the lives of the hostages, and further risk the mass displacement of civilians.”

PSNA co-chair John Minto said in a statement that Israel had a long history of ignoring outside opinion because they never included accountabilities.

“However, Germany has followed its condemnation with action. New Zealand needs to do the same,” he said.

Minto says New Zealand should:

• End approval for Rakon to export crystal oscillators to the US which are used in guided bombs sent to Israel for bombing Gaza;
• Ban all Rocket Lab launches from Mahia which are used for Israel reconnaissance in Gaza; and
• Launch an investigation by the Inspector-General of Security and Intelligence into the sharing of intelligence with the US and Israel which can be used for targeting Palestinians.

“New Zealanders expect our government to end its empty condemnations of Israel and act to sanction this rogue, genocidal state,” Minto said.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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

Abdulaal said they and their husbands — all teachers — could have left at the start of the bombing but refused to abandon their land — and they would not be leaving now.

“After the ceasefire and with Trump’s statements, they are definitely not going to leave Gaza, regardless of what he says and what [the US] does. It’s their land.”

He said New Zealand should recognise Palestine as a state and sanction Israel in accordance with international law.

It should also call for more funding for international aid to Gaza, he added.

‘Two-state solution’
“New Zealand voted for a two-state solution and we have been asking the government to enforce that. Many countries during the genocide already recognise Palestine as a state but our government sees it as ‘not the right time’.

“I think it is the right time, and New Zealand should recognise Palestine immediately.”

Abdulaal said he reached a moment during the war where he could not bring himself to call his sisters.

“I didn’t know what to say, remotely, from New Zealand.

“It’s a really hard time for everyone, they’ve been in tents for more than eight months, both [my sisters’] houses have gone, they are completely rubble.

“They are still in tents despite the ceasefire because they have no other place to go to.”

But he has talked to the pair since the ceasefire began.

Israeli tanks in area
“One of my sisters can’t even go and see her house as there is still Israeli tanks in that area [the Philadelphia corridor]. But we know from footage — as she says — the height of my house now is half a metre, it was two levels but now it’s half a metre.

“It’s mixed emotions. The killing and bloodshed has stopped, but I have lost 55 [relatives] in the airstrikes, most of them women and children.

“They haven’t even had a proper funeral . . .  it’s really hard, people are just trying to get food for their kids, those basic human rights for people which they don’t have.

“They are happy with the ceasefire, and we hope it will be a permanent ceasefire, but we have also lost lots of people . . .  [the rest] have lost their houses, their jobs, everything.

Families returning to northern #Gaza are shocked by the scale of destruction.

UNICEF’s Tess Ingram shares the reality on the ground and the immense challenges people are facing. pic.twitter.com/IRYrN9AsNM

— UNICEF MENA – يونيسف الشرق الأوسط وشمال إفريقيا (@UNICEFmena) February 9, 2025

“When I close my eyes and I think about losing 55 people, and that’s just the ones we know about. It’s horrific, I can’t believe it . . .  they’re all relatives: cousins, uncles, extended family.”

Trump’s proposal was a “dangerous statement and outrageous”, Abdulaal said, likening it to “a reward to Netanyahu and the Israeli government who have been bombing everything in Gaza, killing everyone, committing genocide”.

“[President Trump] says he wants to drive the people out of Gaza, meaning he wants to ethnically cleanse the people from Gaza, which is another war crime,” said Abdulaal.

“This is our land and we are rooted to this land and we’ll never leave it.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz