‘Have Mercy on The Starving People of Gaza’

• CrossFireArabia
• July 19, 2025

The starving people of Gaza no longer count the days, but the hours, minutes before they collapse from hunger.

Hunger is ravaging more than 2.5 million people living in a small coastal area of Gaza subjected to a genocidal war for nearly two years.

The elderly say they never experienced such famine in their lives, not even in the wars of 1948-1967, when they ate dry bread which is currently not available.

Hanadi Ismail says: “It’s true the first famine in this war a year ago was very difficult, especially for us in the northern Gaza but there was a little flour, rice, and lentils. Now, there is nothing, and even if there is, we cannot buy it because of the high prices.”

Ismail, a mother of six, told Quds Press: “Yesterday, my children went to bed hungry, and I tried to comfort them. This morning, I cooked some lentils for them, but they weren’t full. I hope we would get some food in the coming hours.”

Ms. Ismail’s situation is similar to that of thousands of women who cannot provide for their children, while men are helpless due to the famine plaguing the besieged Gaza Strip.

Palestinian activists launched a campaign, Friday, against merchants who sell essential goods at exorbitant prices despite the fact that many of these markets were destroyed because of the Israeli genocide.

The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip warned on Friday of a worsening health disaster as a result of the escalating hunger crisis.

It confirmed in a press statement that hospitals and emergency departments are receiving unprecedented numbers of citizens of all ages suffering from severe stress caused by hunger and malnutrition.

It explained hundreds of patients whose bodies have became emasculated and are at risk of death because of the severe food shortage and the lack of any effective humanitarian solutions.

The director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza has also confirmed that the medical staff deal daily with hundreds of cases showing severe symptoms of famine, most notably severe emaciation, loss of consciousness, poor concentration, and a sharp decline in vital functions.

These cases include children, women, and the elderly, and that a large number of patients suffer from temporary memory loss and general fatigue as a result of chronic hunger.

He added approximately 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip are suffering from severe malnutrition, amid a shortage of basic food supplies and the absence of ongoing aid, which could well to a complete health collapse.

Meanwhile, Suhaib al-Hams, director of the Kuwait Specialized Field Hospital in Mawasi Khan Younis, said the hospital is currently witnessing an unprecedented influx of displaced people there. “We are receiving cases suffering from extreme exhaustion and complete fatigue, along with signs of severe emaciation and acute malnutrition due to the prolonged lack of food.”

“We confirm that all the cases we are receiving now are in dire need of food before medicine, and we warn that hundreds of those whose bodies have completely emaciated are now threatened with death after their bodies have exceeded their ability to withstand.”

Al-Hams called on the international community and humanitarian organizations to take immediate and urgent action to stop the Palestinian bloodshed, fully open the crossings, provide essential food and medicine supplies, and ensure that humanitarian aid reaches those in need without any obstacles.

For its part, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) warned of what it called an “imminent humanitarian catastrophe” in the coming hours.

In a press statement, the PFLP indicated that the coming hours could witness mass deaths of the most vulnerable groups, primarily children, the sick, and the elderly, amid the dangerous deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. This is a result of the escalating aggression and the continued systematic starvation policy practiced by the occupation, with American partnership, international silence, and the blatant complicity of the European Union.

The PFLP added: “Our steadfast people in Gaza do not need hollow speeches, but bold political positions that halts the comprehensive war of extermination, foremost among which is the immediate lifting of the blockade and holding the occupation accountable for its crimes against humanity.”

It held the European Union politically and morally responsible for the worsening famine, considering it a partner in the starvation crime being perpetrated against our people through its inaction and providing diplomatic cover for the occupation. We call on the countries of the European Union to stop their policy of camouflage and manipulation of public opinion and to abandon their blatant bias toward the occupation.

The Front stated: “Despite escalating warnings about the threat of famine and the use of food as a weapon against more than two million besieged Palestinians, the European Union has chosen to cover up the occupation’s crimes through false diplomatic promises that have not translated into any tangible steps. The recent bargaining between some EU countries and the occupation’s foreign minister clearly reflects the EU’s policy of deception and complicity.”

Israelis Cry For Help on The Gaza Battlefield

• CrossFireArabia
• July 17, 2025

By Dr Marwan Asmar

More Israeli soldiers are committing suicide than ever before. The answer for that is simple: They don’t want to be in Gaza.

But it’s tough luck! Their political masters led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say they must continue to fight, even if they lose their life in order to beat Hamas and quash the Palestinian resistance but this is not happening.

The road is long and murderous for both sides.

Today, it is the Palestinian factions who are taking up the military, bloody fight. Since Israel’s war with Iran ended towards the end of June, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters stepped up their operations against Israeli soldiers in the different areas of Gaza. The military operations have become immense and with a sense of vigor in towns, cities, conurbations and neighborhoods the Israeli army said it had teeth-combed from any Palestinian fighters.

These operations, initially mainly involving sniping Israeli soldiers, but more importantly developed into ambushes, booby-trapping destroyed houses and bombs daringly carried by Palestine fighters and strung on Israeli tanks and troop carriers, are today stronger than ever happenings in this 21-month-war that started soon after 7 October, 2023. 

Today, they stand as a symbol of resistance despite the utterances constantly made by Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Israel Katz who keep saying that the Israeli army is systematically dismantling Hamas and its military wing of fighters. But this is just fanciful imagination designed for the disoriented Israeli street that longer wants war but can’t muster enough courage to till Netanyahu and his extremist government to end the conflict.

After the war with Iran, Netanyahu stepped up his hawkish stances, mainly for domestic purposes, ie to stay in power and not go to jail regardless of what is happening on the Gaza war front and despite his peace claims for a ceasefire instigated by US president Donald Trump and the Israeli negotiating team sitting in the Qatari capital of Doha.

The team of men appear to be there as match-stick dolls waiting at the beck-and-call of Netanyahu and certainly not for the first time, and used time-and-again in this genocide and incessantly during the former Joe Biden administration era, which attempted to reach a ceasefire over the whole of 2024 but to no avail. 

In this war Netanyahu had over-ridden all objectives and ultimatums to reach a peace deal and now being incessantly made by Trump, the last during his visit and the third since Trump entered the White House in January 2025. Today despite the character and push geared by Trump, Netanyahu’s will is still stronger and forceful. 

But that may partly be because of the Zionist lobby in Washington that is today stronger than ever because of the purse-strings. Meanwhile Washington continues to be the financier of this genocide by providing Israel with mass weapons.

Netanyahu is on a crusade to end Hamas, and anyone who says ‘no’ to Israel. He is ignoring the voices of his top military men in the army that started to be made in the early days of this onslaught. And he continues to ignore them even today regardless of the fact the Israelis know that “you can’t beat Hamas and the other Palestinian factions” regardless of what literally was done to Gaza, turning it into rubble and eyesore wreckage.

Figures are mind-boggling. 100,000 tons of TNT thrown on Gaza in this genocide creating huge mounts of rubble – an unbelievable 50 million tons of wreckage – that would take 15 years to clear-out through 100 trucks working full time. This is not to say anything about the human factor where more than 60,000 men, women and children were slaughtered at a very conservative estimate.

Despite the killing and destruction today, the Palestinian resistance groups and fighters are regrouping and thinking and conjuring up new armed strategies and think tanks to beat the Israeli army with. In turn, the army is barely standing up according to Israeli experts with the military in a flaccid state of command and action from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip and in areas that have been brought to the ground over late 2023, 3024 and 2025 with the Israeli force complaining that they have “run out of places” to bomb in Gaza.

In this genocide, the Israeli airforce and tanks repeatedly missiled and bombed areas – homes, schools hospitals in different stages in a sense of heightened vengence that was displayed time and again. There were no fighters here but ordinary civilians made to move countless times and turned into domestic refugees living in tents and ramshackled UNRWA schools.

The Israeli military top brass, including generals, majors and rank-and-file soldiers have long complained through protests and petitions but these have fallen on the deaf ears of many in the political echelons of power like Netanyahu who refused to listen to them.

Meanwhile the shocks of the Gaza battlefields continue to bite. Israeli soldiers are today desperately taking their lives because of the psychological tremors they have been subjected to Gaza. One of the soldiers who killed himself recently, three in less than a week and a half, was responsible for carrying the dead bodies of soldiers killed in Gaza and Israel’s last war on Lebanon. Before committing suicide he applied to be committed to a psychiatric ward but needed to wait. On the fatal day, he set his car on fire with him inside.

Israel’s army is falling apart at a soundbyte speed but nobody is listening. On 25 June seven Israeli soldiers were burned alive in their tank in southern Gaza, in an area where the Israeli army was supposed to be in total control. This was particularly gruesome since the army admitted it took time to identify their charred bodies.

Their death set the ball-rolling for more. Almost every since then there has been reported daily deaths of soldiers killed in a fierce war involving Palestinian fighters. Sometimes the numbers go up from one to five and more. This is not to say anything about those that are injured in direct clashes.

The Israelis are forced to admit this because of their helicopters that arrive at the scene to pick the dead and injured and take back to nearby Israeli hospitals which has become an all-too familiar sight in this genocide.

Three Israeli Soldiers Kill Themselves in Under 2 Weeks

• CrossFireArabia
• July 15, 2025

Three Israeli soldiers committed suicide in under two weeks after serving in the war Gaza.

This is a harrowing made increasingly so after Israel’s Channel 12 stated that an Israeli soldier took his life after serving in the war in Gaza that in now reaching its second year. 

Meanwhile the Israeli Haaretz daily stated that 15 Israeli soldiers have killed themselves since the beginning of 2025. 

This is an unprecedented for the Israeli army and well above in the previous years. For in 2024, 21 soldiers committed suicide after serving in the Gaza war which started soon after 7 October, 2023. 

The Israeli newspaper stated most of those that took their lives were reserve soldiers that entered the army recently and after the horrors they saw in the Gaza battlefield and which is increasingly affecting their psychological state of mind. 

The Israeli Institute for Security Affairs is warning the Israeli soldiers are facing the toughest battles in the different areas of Gaza and who are facing strenuous resistance not only from Hamas fighters but those from different Palestinian factions.

The Institute states the Israeli army in Gaza is facing the biggest crisis in human resources in its history and needs tens of thousands of extra soldiers because of the intensity of fighting on the Gaza battlefields.

Weaponizing Food in Gaza

• CrossFireArabia
• July 2, 2025

More than 130 international governmental agencies have issued a demand for the immediate end of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the deadly US-Israeli mechanism for delivering food to starving Gaza. They called for a return to the Israel disrupted United Nations-led system which, combined international aid agencies with commercial supplies to serve the strip’s families who are struggling to survive Israel’s bombs, military ground offensive, and forced displacement.

It is impossible to see why an anti-humanitarian enterprise such as the GHF should, instead, attract $30 million in funding from the US which claims to be the global exemplar of morality and integrity. The GHF demonstrates, once again, that this is far from the truth. Since May 27, when GHF began operations, more than 550 people have been killed and over 4,000 wounded among the desperate thousands waiting for the delivery of food parcels at one or other of the four hubs, three in the south and one near the centre. UN relief agency UNRWA condemns GHF for being a vehicle for “weaponising” food aid.

GHF officials deny this accusation and dismiss reports of Israeli shootings and drone and tank attacks against Palestinians approaching militarised GHF hub zones. While killings of Palestinians have been reliably reported since day one, the US and Israel, which co-sponsor GHF, had shrugged off these reports until last week.

Israeli liberal daily Haaretz published statements from anonymous Israeli soldiers deployed near the hubs. According to Haaretz, Israeli officers and soldiers were ordered to fire on Palestinians “when no threat was present.” One soldier told Haaretz, “It’s a killing field. Where I was stationed between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. .. Our form of communication is gunfire.” He added, “I’m not aware if a single instance of return fire. There is no enemy, no weapons.” There have been no Israeli casualties during distributions is proof positive of what he said.

Until Haaretz published its interviews, the Israeli military claimed falsely that troops fired in the air when Palestinians approached them. In response to the Haaretz reports, the military prosecutor demanded an investigation into possible war crimes. Israeli human rights organisations Yesh Din and B’Tselem have pointed out for decades that military investigations are rarely launched and even more rarely result in prosecutions of Israeli officers or soldiers. Consequently, the military enjoys impunity and continues to act with impunity.

The modus operandi of GHF centres also contributes to chaos and Palestinian deaths. Aid seekers are not informed which of the centres will open. Times vary for distributions which can last one hour or until all the prepacked parcels disappear. Palestinians have to turn up many hours early – usually in the dead of night – to reach the distribution centres. Those who succeed have been on the scene first. Most are fit young men who can survive the wait and the scrum which always eventuates the minute the distributions begin. Women, children and the elderly face exclusion, bullets or trampling.

The parcels, which contain rations, hygiene kits, and simple medicines, can weigh 40 kilograms and cannot be easily transported by one person. The bulky cardboard boxes often break, spilling their contents onto the ground. Fights ensue. Palestinians carry plastic bags when going to collect aid in order to return home with something if not an entire package. When a distribution ends, grenades emitting red smoke are fired by the Israeli army to order Palestinians to evacuate the area immediately.

Medecins San Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders has said GHF “must be dismantled.” It is “forcing Palestinians “to choose between starvation or risking their lives for minimal supplies.” MSF said, “Every day [its] teams see patients who been killed or wounded trying to get food at one of these sites.” MSF called on Israel to “lift the siege on food, fuel, medical and humanitarian supplies.”

The UN has refused to cooperate with GHF, after expressing doubts about its neutrality, accusing it of militarising relief and of contributing to the displacement of civilians, particularly those from the north who must travel long distances in the sweltering heat to access existential aid.

Before Israel imposed its March 2nd blockade on Gaza, the UNRWA, the UN children’s fund, and the World Food Programme had provided Gaza’s 2.3 million residents with their needs via 400 (not 4) distribution mechanisms where Palestinians had registered. They were notified by text or call when to collect their aid. There were no desperate crowds forming hours before aid distributions, no scrambles to receive parcels, and no Israeli shooters or tank commanders to fire on recipients. Food was treated as a right and its distribution did not cost lives or involve the Israeli military.

Michael Jansen contributed this piece to The Jordan Times

Gaza: A Death Trap For Israeli Soldiers

• CrossFireArabia
• July 2, 2025

One Israeli soldier was killed and five others were wounded in three resistance operations in the Gaza Strip, Wednesday. The Israeli army later confirmed the death of another soldier, the Hebrew media reported.

The soldier, a member of the Egoz Unit was killed in a sniper attack in the Gaza Strip while four soldiers were seriously wounded when an explosive device exploded targeting a tank in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army also confirmed that another soldier, a sergeant from the 82nd Armored Battalion, was killed in battles north of the Gaza Strip. A tank commander and an armored corps soldier were also seriously wounded in the same operation.

An Egoz soldier was seriously wounded in a separate operation north of the Gaza Strip.

Some Israeli news outlets reported that several soldiers were wounded by RPG rockets, while military censorship still prevents publication and disclosure of the other two locations.

Earlier, the Israeli media reported the killing and wounding of soldiers today in “two difficult security incidents” in Gaza. Meanwhile, the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, announced it had carried out a complex operation Wednesday morning targeting dozens of soldiers in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood.

Complex Ambush

According to the details provided by the Brigades, dozens of soldiers and a convoy of occupation vehicles were targeted in the “Al-Huda Square,” east of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. The Brigades explained that the complex operation began with the detonation of a minefield by the invading vehicles, forcing soldiers and officers to frantically enter nearby houses.

It indicated that its fighters targeted the forces entrenched inside the houses with a guided missile, followed by an anti-fortification “TPG” shell. They then engaged them at very close range with light and medium weapons, killing and wounding the crews of the vehicles, as well as the targeted officers and soldiers.

In the same context, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), announced it had targeted a Merkava tank, Tuesday, with an explosive device on an enemy supply line in the al-Zana area east of Khan Yunis.

Regarding the resistance’s operational mechanism and the heavy losses inflicted on the occupation over the past period, the Hadashot Bezaman news website reported that the resistance “penetrated the modus operandi” and movements of the occupation army in Gaza, enabling it to “violently strike soldiers and armored forces on the firing range.”

According to military analysts, the resistance is carrying out precise attrition operations against occupation forces at their positions inside the Gaza Strip, contributing to the fragmentation of the occupation’s combat capabilities and maintaining a constant state of depletion without a clear line of contact.