Israel continues to forcibly disappear thousands taken from Gaza: Monitor
To mark the international day of the victims of enforced disappearance, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society reports that Israeli authorities continue to forcibly disappear thousands of people abducted from Gaza.
As of early August, the Israeli Prison Service has reported holding 2,378 Gaza detainees classified as “unlawful combatants” who are held without trial or charge, the Palestinian monitor said in a statement.
This figure does not include Gaza detainees held in army camps. Their number last August was 1,584. At least 46 of the Gaza detainees have died in prison, out of a total of 77 killed after the start of the war on the enclave, based only on identified cases.
The Ramallah-based monitor called the enforced disappearances “one of the most defining features of the close to two years of genocide” and said they serve as a “primary cover for widespread torture against Palestinian detainees arrested from Gaza”.
It said the Israeli judiciary and its Supreme Court have been “a key tool in entrenching crimes against Palestinians”.
Palestinian children clamber with pots to receive a rare hot meal
Palestinians try to receive a hot meal in Gaza City
Children pick up the food scraps that have fallen on the floor during meal distribution by charity organisations
‘There’s nothing complicated about fixing the famine’
Israel’s suspension of humanitarian operational pauses in Gaza City “further endangers” any chance of getting supplies into the city, Chris McIntosh, humanitarian response adviser with Oxfam, tells Al Jazeera.
Speaking via videolink from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, he said there is a dire shortage of food and resources across the whole of the Gaza Strip, with goods in the marketplaces simply too expensive for most Palestinians in Gaza.
He said the humanitarian situation can be “reversed as quickly as crossings can be opened and trucks that are already laden with goods ready to come into Gaza are allowed to do so at a steady rate, unfettered”.
“There’s nothing complicated about fixing the famine. The major holding point is the Israeli authorities and their insistence on keeping the blockade in place for ‘security reasons’,” McIntosh said.
People are still being pulled from the rubble after an Israeli strike on an apartment block in Gaza
There’s more harrowing footage coming from the bomb site. In fact, rescue workers arrived at the scene and are still searching under the rubble. This is a five-storey building, located just more than half a mile (about 1km) from the home where we had to take shelter.
Many of the children had to be pulled from under the rubble, under the debris of those apartments, or from the street where the intensity of this bombing threw them out of the building.
This attack happened without any warning whatsoever. What is particularly concerning is that it’s a very densely populated area. As many as seven people were killed, and now the injured are arriving at the hospital with shrapnel wounds and severe bleeding.
