‘Bombs won’t bring quiet’
The parents of 49-year-old Israeli entrepreneur and activist Maoz Inon were killed in the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
He shared with Al Jazeera his views on the war, the Israeli government and the future of what he calls the Palestinian-Israeli peace movement.
“I was among the first ones to call to stop the war even before we started. And I was crying publicly for all the life that was lost. What we see now, it’s not Judaism. It’s not Zionism. It’s a mutation. It’s a mutation that took over,” he said.
“And it’s a mutation that is creating destruction within Judaism and Jewish people.”
In one year, at least 563 people killed sheltering in UNRWA facilities
The UN agency providing relief to Palestinian refugees says nearly 200 of its facilities have been hit during Israel’s yearlong war on Gaza:
It also said in a statement:
- About 1.9 million people have been displaced, on average at least once a month.
- Across the Gaza Strip, 66 percent of structures have been damaged or destroyed.
- During the war, 230 UN workers have been killed, including 226 UNRWA team members.
- Nearly 660,000 children have been forced out of school, half of whom used to attend UNRWA schools.
- More than 87 percent of school buildings will either need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation work to be functional again.
- More than 85 percent of UNRWA schools have been hit or damaged, many while sheltering displaced families.
- Up to one million people have been sheltering in UNRWA facilities during the war.
- There have been more than 500 attacks on healthcare workers, patients, hospitals and other medical infrastructure in Gaza.
- Only eight out of 27 UNRWA health centres are operational.
Doctors Without Borders shares harrowing messages by medics in Gaza
The medical aid and relief organisation has released several voice notes from staff in Gaza.
In one voice note dating back to October 20, 2023, Dr Obeid, a surgeon, said: “We amputated him, in front of his mother and sister, because there was no space. You cannot imagine this. This is our best. We cannot do more.”
In a post on X, Doctors Without Borders said, “It’s been a year of unrelenting horror, and an immediate and sustained ceasefire is needed more than ever.”
Messages during war: These are just some of the harrowing voice notes we have received from our staff in Gaza.
It's been a year of unrelenting horror, and an immediate and sustained ceasefire is needed more than ever. #ceasefirenow pic.twitter.com/Suapj1w6Sa
— Doctors w/o Borders (@MSF_USA) October 9, 2024
Israel keeps pushing debunked ‘colonial tropes’
Noura Erakat, a human rights lawyer and an associate professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, says Israel has made obvious since day one of the war on Gaza that its objective is to depopulate and resettle it.
“This is a condundrum that only the Zionists can create, an argument that only through ethnic cleansing and genocidal removal of a people they can establish long-term stability,” she told Al Jazeera from Philadelphia in the US.
“They have framed that as an attack on Hamas and sold it to a primarily Western audience that is already cloaked in Islamophobic tropes and anti-Palestinian racism, in order to understand Palestinians and Muslims as latent threats, who in their mind already did something wrong and deserve to die.”
She said those “tropes” have been repeatedly debunked in the past year.
“No settler colony has the right to use force in order to maintain its territorial holdings and that is precisely what we’re seeing right now. The problem is that colonialism has been made invisible to people so that they don’t understand what it is and don’t have the language to use against it,” Erakat said.
Israeli female soldiers pose for a photo on a position on the Gaza Strip border, in southern Israel, February 19
