May 31, 2025
Meanwhile, the military issues new forced displacement orders across northern Gaza
Key Points:
A widely circulated image of starving Palestinians in Rafah at an aid distribution site run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, May 27, 2025. (Photo: Social Media)Arab Israeli MP says Gaza ‘won’
as he slams war and occupation
1 minute ago
Addressing a protest in Haifa on Saturday, Ayman Odeh, a prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker and head of the Hadash movement, called for an immediate end to the war and the creation of a Palestinian state.
“Gaza won, and Gaza will win,” he told the crowd, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
Odeh described the ongoing war as “a historic loss for right-wing ideology,” arguing it had exposed deep contradictions within Israeli politics.
He also praised anti-government protesters in Tel Aviv — most of them Jewish — for taking a stand. But he criticised those who oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government while ignoring what he called the core issue: the occupation.
“We value you and your persistence, but we cannot accept that you don't see the crux of it all. The judicial coup came from the occupation, and there is no democracy with occupation,” Odeh said.
Israeli Parliament members Ayman Odeh (L) and Israeli left-wing activists hold placards during a demonstration against the war with Gaza in Tel Aviv on November 4, 2023. (AFP)Israeli
Parliament members Ayman Odeh (L) and Israeli left-wing activists hold placards
during a demonstration against the war with Gaza in Tel Aviv on November 4,
2023. (AFP)
Hamas responds positively to Gaza truce plan, seeks changes
18 minutes ago
Hamas has welcomed a ceasefire proposal for Gaza put forward by US President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, but is requesting modifications, a senior official told Reuters on Saturday.
The official confirmed the group responded “positively” to the initiative, though discussions remain ongoing.
He declined to specify what changes Hamas is demanding in the current version of the proposal.
Gaza hospital warns Israeli attacks on power generators threaten patients' lives
54 minutes ago
A spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israeli forces are “systematically targeting” Gaza’s already fragile healthcare sector by striking power sources that keep hospitals running.
“The occupation targets the electric generators that supply hospitals,” he said, adding that the army has destroyed “the three largest power generators supplying hospitals in the Gaza Strip.”
Without power, hospital departments are shutting down, forcing staff to ration electricity where possible to keep essential services operating.
“The occupation’s targeting of electricity generators means a death sentence for patients,” the spokesman warned, highlighting that Israeli authorities are also blocking the entry of critical spare parts needed for repairs.
“Various hospital departments cannot continue operating without electricity,” he said.
Gaza’s hospitals have faced relentless bombardment since Israel launched its war on the besieged enclave nearly eight months ago. Medical teams now find themselves scrambling to save lives with dwindling resources, no fuel, and no reliable power.
“The international community must intervene to pressure the occupation to protect the health system,” the spokesman urged.
Hamas submits response to US-drafted Gaza ceasefire proposal
1 hour ago
Hamas announced on Saturday that it has officially responded to the latest Gaza ceasefire proposal brokered by the United States, a plan that has drawn criticism for allegedly favouring Israel.
“After conducting a round of national consultations, and stemming from our deep responsibility towards our people and their suffering, we have delivered our response to the proposal by US envoy Steve Witkoff to the brotherly mediators,” Hamas said in a brief statement.
The group said its response aims to secure a permanent ceasefire, ensure a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, and guarantee the sustained delivery of humanitarian aid to the territory.
As part of the proposed agreement, Hamas stated it is prepared to release 10 living Israeli captives and hand over the remains of 18 others, in exchange for an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.
Cambridge students relaunch pro-Palestine encampment
2 hours ago
Students at the UK’s University of Cambridge have relaunched a protest encampment outside Trinity College, one of its largest and wealthiest colleges, calling on the institution to disclose and divest from companies complicit in Israel’s war on Gaza.
The group behind the protest, Cambridge for Palestine (C4P), is demanding the University “take urgent steps” to end what it calls its “moral and material complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.”
C4P says Trinity College holds investments in companies such as Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, L3Harris Technologies, and Barclays - despite the university's previous commitment to review its “responsible investment” policy following a similar months-long encampment last year.
In a statement, C4P said the renewed protest came after “months of student, faculty, and community frustration” over the University’s failure to honour those pledges.
Israel kills 60 in past day, brining Gaza death toll to over 54,380
3 hours ago
Israeli forces killed at least 60 Palestinians and wounded 284 in the past 24 hours, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
This brings the death toll in the besieged enclave since 7 October 2023 to 54,381, including 4,117 killed since Israel broke the ceasefire on 18 March.
More than 124,054 Palestinians have been wounded overall. At least 10,000 people are still missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.
Health officials report that over 60 percent of the victims are women and children.
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister delays West Bank visit after Israel blocks it
4 hours ago
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud, has postponed his planned visit to the occupied West Bank after Israel blocked the trip, a Saudi source told Reuters.
According to Palestinian sources, the visit was arranged at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to host a Saudi-led delegation of Arab foreign ministers in Ramallah.
Reporting by Reuters
Palestinian buries husband alone after two months trapped under Israeli siege
5 hours ago
In a garden in southern Gaza under Israeli attacks, Aziza Qishta dug a grave with her bare hands.
With no shroud, the 65-year-old Palestinian wrapped her husband’s body in a window curtain and buried him alone.
Ibrahim Qishta, 70, had died after being struck in the neck by shrapnel during Israel’s military incursion into Rafah earlier this year.
For two months, the couple remained trapped in their home in Khirbet al-Adas, surviving off dwindling supplies as air strikes and shelling pounded the city.
When neighbours fled, Ibrahim refused to be displaced, and his wife refused to leave him behind.
Since Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire in March, the army has killed nearly 4,000 Palestinians, bringing the death toll since October 2023 to over 54,000.
In the following account, Aziza tells her story to the Middle East Eye.
At least 60 Palestinians killed in 24 hours
6 hours ago
At least 60 Palestinians have been killed and another 284 injured in Israeli attacks across Gaza in the last 24 hours, the enclave's health ministry is reporting.
The latest casualties have brought the overall toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023 to 54,381, with another 124,381 people injured.
Entire family wiped out in Israeli attack
7 hours ago
We reported earlier that 14 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since dawn on Saturday.
Wafa news agency is reporting, citing local sources, that seven Palestinians, including an entire family, in Israeli air strikes targeting Gaza City and Khan Younis.
According to the report, Arafat Deeb was killed along with his wife and three children in an Israeli attack on their tent near the Omar Mosque in the Al-Shanti area of Gaza City.
Israel bars Arab ministers from Ramallah meeting
7 hours ago
Israel has blocked the entry of a delegation of Arab foreign ministers planning to hold a meeting in the Palestinian administrative capital of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Israeli media is reporting.
The Israeli authorities refused entry to the delegation, which included ministers from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, on the grounds that they intended to participate in “a provocative meeting” to discuss promoting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Such a state would undoubtedly become a terrorist state in the heart of the land of Israel,” an Israeli official said. “Israel will not cooperate with such moves aimed at harming it and its security.”
Israeli forces kill 14 in Gaza morning strikes
7 hours ago
Israeli strikes killed at least 14 Palestinian since dawn on Saturday, according to media report.
Morning updates on the Israeli war on Gaza – Day 603
9 hours ago
Good morning Middle East Eye readers,
Here are the latest updates from the Israeli war on Gaza, now in its 603rd day:
Israeli forces have once again opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid at the US-run distribution point in central Gaza.
On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike killed an entire family in Gaza City, including two parents and their three children.
Meanwhile, Israeli media reported that Israel intends to bar the entry of Arab foreign ministers who plan to hold a meeting on Palestinian statehood in the occupied West Bank.
Evening recap
17 hours ago
Good evening Middle East Eye readers,
The UN said on Friday that 100 percent of Gaza is at risk of famine, as the head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, Unrwa, said the level of aid being allowed into Gaza is a "mockery to the mass tragedy unfolding" there.
We will be pausing our coverage for the evening. Here is everything you need to know:
Israel in an escalation has decided to block a delegation of Middle Eastern foreign ministers led by Saudi Arabia’s top diplomat to the occupied West Bank on Sunday, several Israeli media outlets reported
US President Donald Trump said he believes his administration is close to a Gaza ceasefire and may have an announcement later today “or maybe tomorrow”
Hamas's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said it carried out a joint military operation against Israeli forces with the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Quds Brigades
A new poll found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, while an additional 56 percent support expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel
UN special rapporteur says there is famine in Gaza: Report
19 hours ago
Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told Al Jazeera that it was "safe to say" there is famine in Gaza, noting that it's impossible to reach a formal conclusion because Israel has totally besieged the enclave, with experts unable to access the population.
He also said that Israel and the US were using the trickle of aid entering the enclave “as bait to corral people” into military zones.
“It’s about humiliating people, and it’s about controlling the population. This has nothing to do with stopping starvation,” he said.
May 30, 2025
Abdaljawad Omar
We are not witnessing a rupture with how things used to be.
What is unfolding today in Gaza, where food aid falls from the sky like ordinance and “humanitarian corridors” double as kill zones, is not the collapse of humanitarianism, but its logical consummation under conditions of settler-colonial necropolitics.
It is tempting to read these scenes — the parachute that failed, the sacks of flour soaked in blood — as tragic malfunctions. They are not.
They are the grammar of a system that has long sutured humanitarian concern to military logistics, relief to surveillance, and aid to domination.
But something has shifted — not in content, but in form.
For decades, Israel maintained an uneasy but instrumental alliance with the architecture of humanitarianism. In the long expanse between the years following the Nakba and the siege and destruction of Gaza, this alliance operated as a double gesture: securing international legitimacy through the performance of restraint, while choreographing violence within the idiom of “security” and “self-defense.” The Red Cross, UNRWA, and a chorus of NGOs served as both witnesses and enablers, simultaneously limiting and legitimizing the occupation’s machinery.
In this war, humanitarianism is no longer simply absorbed and weaponized. It is being bypassed, discarded, and cannibalized.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Israel’s new model for aid delivery, signals this shift with brutal clarity: aid is no longer mediated through international law or the optics of neutrality, but flows through private American contractors under military command.
The new aid plan is being used by Israel as part of its demographic war in Gaza: by orchestrating aid flows into selected zones, primarily in the south, Israel is working to condense the population into increasingly narrow and governable enclaves. This forced concentration is not a consequence of war — it is the war’s strategic aim.
In other words, aid is a tool for soft transfer, pushing Palestinians into regions that can be more easily monitored, controlled, and eventually severed from any claim to the land. Starvation and desperation are not side effects, but intended effects, forcing displacement through need.
Israel simply cannot do this with the existing humanitarian infrastructure of UNRWA and the WFP. It has tried to do so over 19 months of genocide and fallen short. This is why the removal of international aid organizations signals a shift toward the unilateral management of the Strip under a new apparatus of military-humanitarian control. By sidelining these bodies, Israel makes room for a more compliant infrastructure: private contractors, militarized aid programs, and internally cultivated Palestinian collaborators who can administer local populations without challenging the broader regime of occupation and erasure.
These aid distribution sites, under the guise of relief, are also choreographed spaces of entrapment, where the architecture of chaos, desperation, and humiliation is meticulously staged. People wait for hours in the scorching sun, under drones, under guns, under the gaze of an occupying army that controls what enters, who lives, and who dies. The crowd surges, the fences collapse, shots are fired, and Palestinians are killed.
The Palestinian is made visible only in hunger and at the edge of riot. In these moments, dignity is not just deferred, but is systematically stripped, replaced with the performance of disorder that justifies further killings and further control. The aid site becomes the set-piece where Israel can lure the starving into kill zones and use a loaf of bread as a pretext for a bullet.
The new humanitarianism
This inaugurates a new paradigm in which humanitarianism is no longer mediated through international law or multilateral consensus, but is now militarized, privatized, and securitized. It is disaster capitalism taken to the extreme, eroding liberal humanitarian institutions in favor of militarized neoliberal corporations.
The time is ripe for this because Israel has grown weary of performance. It no longer needs the restraint rituals, with the carefully measured body counts, the proportional language of conflict resolution, and the legal architectures erected after World War II. In their place, we find a new modality of power that openly transgresses, dares the world to respond, and thrives not on legitimacy, but impunity.
What happened in Tal al-Sultan on May 27 offered the world yet another glimpse into this emerging logic. At the launch of the GHF’s first aid distribution center, thousands of Palestinians gathered, driven by the extremity of hunger. As fences broke under the weight of the crowd, Israeli forces responded with what they called “warning shots.” By the end of the day, three Palestinians lay dead, 48 were injured, and seven others were missing. This was not the failure of humanitarian logistics; it was the logic fulfilled. The aid site became the set-piece where Israel can lure the starving into kill zones and use a loaf of bread as a pretext for a bullet.
This is not merely a new war on Gaza. It is a war on the very category of the “human” as it applies to Palestinians, and eventually a remaking that will impact the whole world. Where once humanitarian discourse functioned as the frame through which violence could be rendered legible, disciplined by legalese, and tempered by press releases, humanitarianism itself is being disposed of as a limiting condition.
This reconfiguration also entails a war against memory. International organizations, however limited, often function as record-keepers of hunger, of attacks, of displacement, and of death. With their expulsion comes the erasure of witnesses and the silencing of documentation. The absence of institutional observers allows Israel to proceed with its campaign of annihilation without the burdens of image, number, or name. This is because the presence of the UN and other aid organizations, even if partly complicit, implied that the world was still watching and that aid was still being distributed in a manner not conducive to ethnic cleansing.
Inequality of hunger
Beyond achieving its demographic aims, Israel is also utilizing the GHF as part of its policy of what could effectively be termed “inequality of hunger”: the aid provided by the GHF is woefully insufficient to meet the vast and urgent needs of Gaza’s besieged population, with the UN estimating that a minimum of 500 aid trucks per day are required to sustain basic life, while fewer than 100 are permitted entry. The deliberate reduction of aid so far below the minimum threshold of survival isn’t just arbitrary cruelty; it is meant to create the conditions for social collapse.
It’s already been pointed out that this is the use of manufactured scarcity as a bargaining chip to extract political concessions from the Palestinian resistance. But it should also be stressed that the deprivation is an instrument of social disintegration: by distributing just enough food to kindle desperation, but never enough to sustain dignity, the system manufactures moral collapse. The social fabric fractures, resulting in the slow erosion of solidarity — the final battlefield of any collective struggle.
It is one thing to have a famine, which at least means equality in hunger. It’s quite another to trickle in just enough resources to create an internal struggle that results in the cannibalization of social relations, hitting harder than any massacre.
The criminality of aid
There are, one might say, two criminalities at work in Gaza’s hunger corridors. The first is sanitized, institutional, and entirely rational, what we might call the criminality of logistics perpetrated by the colonizer. Deliberate starvation is achieved through border control, using aid as spectacle, the sealing of exits, and then the airdropping of salvation in neatly packaged boxes. This is not merely a failure of ethics but a success of policy. It is the criminality of biometric scans, of the humanitarian mask concealing the military boot, made possible by both Netanyahu’s cabinet and the likes of Trump Inc., that curious synthesis of gangster capitalism and state violence performing massacres in the name of order.
But this is not all. The organized internal collaborators, the micro-warlords who “tax” the aid and divert it before it reaches the starved, form a local apparatus of distribution grounded in theft-as-policy. This is the internalized supplement to the occupation — the colonized enforcer recruited in the midst of war to serve further social disintegration.
In this setting, the crime is everywhere: in the massacre itself, in the very architecture of aid that creates the need for it. Israel is not the sole criminal; the entire configuration is criminal, including the aid agencies, the paperwork, the silence, the drone overhead, and the collaborator on the ground.
The other “criminality” unfolds when the crowd surges, breaching the fence and reaching for what was always theirs — bread, oil, rice, the right to live. This is not looting, but the repossession of stolen sustenance. It is the planning of those without a plan, the logistics of a community erupting through the fractures of engineered despair. It is the refusal to die standing in line beneath the drones, dignity deferred.
The people aren’t a mob, but a flood — a living force breaching the containment zone of famine, liberating food from its branded prison. What Israel frames as chaos is, in truth, collective clarity.
This second criminality — the crime of survival — is incomprehensible to the humanitarian and liberal gaze. It remains illegible to institutions conditioned only to distinguish the compliant needy from the dangerous deviant. But this collective act of taking is not a cry for help, but a disruption of the very logic that made help necessary. After 600 days of massacres and destruction, the fences fell, sacks were passed between hands, and colonial time stuttered.
This, too, is what unfolded last week — Palestinians in Gaza surged through the tightly scripted scene of domination, disrupting Israel’s illusion of total control even as it outsourced its sovereignty to American private contractors. The scene itself was torn apart twice: first, when most Palestinians in Gaza did not show up, refusing even the choreography itself, and second, when the crowd surged through the fence.
This, then, is the moment we are left with: one in which Israel no longer bothers to veil its actions behind humanitarian fig leaves, but openly scorns the very language that once masked its violence. And the world is being dared — to intervene, yes, but more precisely, to confront the fact that its interventions and discourses were always part of the problem, always hollow and devoid of substance.
One could ask the liberals what remains of this language, not only in Gaza, but in the futures yet to come?
And amid all this, what remains central is that, despite everything, Palestinians still find a way — whether through deliberate planning or spontaneous rupture — to flood the infrastructure of annihilation.
Free speech is under attack—especially when it comes to Palestine.
From the censorship of student voices to the assassinations of journalists in Gaza, the cost of telling the truth about Palestine has never been higher. At Mondoweiss, we publish fearless reporting and critical analysis that others won’t touch—because we believe the public needs to know the truth about Palestine.
We’re funded by readers who believe in justice, transparency, and freedom of the press.
Meanwhile, the military issues new forced displacement orders across northern Gaza
Key Points:
- Gaza death toll tops 54,300
- US-backed Gaza ceasefire plan proposes 60 day truce
- Macron warns Israel of ‘sanctions’ if Gaza aid access doesn’t improve
Live Updates
1 minute ago
Addressing a protest in Haifa on Saturday, Ayman Odeh, a prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker and head of the Hadash movement, called for an immediate end to the war and the creation of a Palestinian state.
“Gaza won, and Gaza will win,” he told the crowd, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
Odeh described the ongoing war as “a historic loss for right-wing ideology,” arguing it had exposed deep contradictions within Israeli politics.
He also praised anti-government protesters in Tel Aviv — most of them Jewish — for taking a stand. But he criticised those who oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government while ignoring what he called the core issue: the occupation.
“We value you and your persistence, but we cannot accept that you don't see the crux of it all. The judicial coup came from the occupation, and there is no democracy with occupation,” Odeh said.
Israeli Parliament members Ayman Odeh (L) and Israeli left-wing activists hold placards during a demonstration against the war with Gaza in Tel Aviv on November 4, 2023. (AFP)
Hamas responds positively to Gaza truce plan, seeks changes
18 minutes ago
Hamas has welcomed a ceasefire proposal for Gaza put forward by US President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, but is requesting modifications, a senior official told Reuters on Saturday.
The official confirmed the group responded “positively” to the initiative, though discussions remain ongoing.
He declined to specify what changes Hamas is demanding in the current version of the proposal.
Gaza hospital warns Israeli attacks on power generators threaten patients' lives
54 minutes ago
A spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israeli forces are “systematically targeting” Gaza’s already fragile healthcare sector by striking power sources that keep hospitals running.
“The occupation targets the electric generators that supply hospitals,” he said, adding that the army has destroyed “the three largest power generators supplying hospitals in the Gaza Strip.”
Without power, hospital departments are shutting down, forcing staff to ration electricity where possible to keep essential services operating.
“The occupation’s targeting of electricity generators means a death sentence for patients,” the spokesman warned, highlighting that Israeli authorities are also blocking the entry of critical spare parts needed for repairs.
“Various hospital departments cannot continue operating without electricity,” he said.
Gaza’s hospitals have faced relentless bombardment since Israel launched its war on the besieged enclave nearly eight months ago. Medical teams now find themselves scrambling to save lives with dwindling resources, no fuel, and no reliable power.
“The international community must intervene to pressure the occupation to protect the health system,” the spokesman urged.
Hamas submits response to US-drafted Gaza ceasefire proposal
1 hour ago
Hamas announced on Saturday that it has officially responded to the latest Gaza ceasefire proposal brokered by the United States, a plan that has drawn criticism for allegedly favouring Israel.
“After conducting a round of national consultations, and stemming from our deep responsibility towards our people and their suffering, we have delivered our response to the proposal by US envoy Steve Witkoff to the brotherly mediators,” Hamas said in a brief statement.
The group said its response aims to secure a permanent ceasefire, ensure a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, and guarantee the sustained delivery of humanitarian aid to the territory.
As part of the proposed agreement, Hamas stated it is prepared to release 10 living Israeli captives and hand over the remains of 18 others, in exchange for an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.
Cambridge students relaunch pro-Palestine encampment
2 hours ago
Students at the UK’s University of Cambridge have relaunched a protest encampment outside Trinity College, one of its largest and wealthiest colleges, calling on the institution to disclose and divest from companies complicit in Israel’s war on Gaza.
The group behind the protest, Cambridge for Palestine (C4P), is demanding the University “take urgent steps” to end what it calls its “moral and material complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.”
C4P says Trinity College holds investments in companies such as Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, L3Harris Technologies, and Barclays - despite the university's previous commitment to review its “responsible investment” policy following a similar months-long encampment last year.
In a statement, C4P said the renewed protest came after “months of student, faculty, and community frustration” over the University’s failure to honour those pledges.
Israel kills 60 in past day, brining Gaza death toll to over 54,380
3 hours ago
Israeli forces killed at least 60 Palestinians and wounded 284 in the past 24 hours, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
This brings the death toll in the besieged enclave since 7 October 2023 to 54,381, including 4,117 killed since Israel broke the ceasefire on 18 March.
More than 124,054 Palestinians have been wounded overall. At least 10,000 people are still missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.
Health officials report that over 60 percent of the victims are women and children.
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister delays West Bank visit after Israel blocks it
4 hours ago
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud, has postponed his planned visit to the occupied West Bank after Israel blocked the trip, a Saudi source told Reuters.
According to Palestinian sources, the visit was arranged at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to host a Saudi-led delegation of Arab foreign ministers in Ramallah.
Reporting by Reuters
Palestinian buries husband alone after two months trapped under Israeli siege
5 hours ago
In a garden in southern Gaza under Israeli attacks, Aziza Qishta dug a grave with her bare hands.
With no shroud, the 65-year-old Palestinian wrapped her husband’s body in a window curtain and buried him alone.
Ibrahim Qishta, 70, had died after being struck in the neck by shrapnel during Israel’s military incursion into Rafah earlier this year.
For two months, the couple remained trapped in their home in Khirbet al-Adas, surviving off dwindling supplies as air strikes and shelling pounded the city.
When neighbours fled, Ibrahim refused to be displaced, and his wife refused to leave him behind.
Since Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire in March, the army has killed nearly 4,000 Palestinians, bringing the death toll since October 2023 to over 54,000.
In the following account, Aziza tells her story to the Middle East Eye.
At least 60 Palestinians killed in 24 hours
6 hours ago
At least 60 Palestinians have been killed and another 284 injured in Israeli attacks across Gaza in the last 24 hours, the enclave's health ministry is reporting.
The latest casualties have brought the overall toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023 to 54,381, with another 124,381 people injured.
Entire family wiped out in Israeli attack
7 hours ago
We reported earlier that 14 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since dawn on Saturday.
Wafa news agency is reporting, citing local sources, that seven Palestinians, including an entire family, in Israeli air strikes targeting Gaza City and Khan Younis.
According to the report, Arafat Deeb was killed along with his wife and three children in an Israeli attack on their tent near the Omar Mosque in the Al-Shanti area of Gaza City.
Israel bars Arab ministers from Ramallah meeting
7 hours ago
Israel has blocked the entry of a delegation of Arab foreign ministers planning to hold a meeting in the Palestinian administrative capital of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Israeli media is reporting.
The Israeli authorities refused entry to the delegation, which included ministers from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, on the grounds that they intended to participate in “a provocative meeting” to discuss promoting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Such a state would undoubtedly become a terrorist state in the heart of the land of Israel,” an Israeli official said. “Israel will not cooperate with such moves aimed at harming it and its security.”
Israeli forces kill 14 in Gaza morning strikes
7 hours ago
Israeli strikes killed at least 14 Palestinian since dawn on Saturday, according to media report.
Morning updates on the Israeli war on Gaza – Day 603
9 hours ago
Good morning Middle East Eye readers,
Here are the latest updates from the Israeli war on Gaza, now in its 603rd day:
Israeli forces have once again opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid at the US-run distribution point in central Gaza.
On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike killed an entire family in Gaza City, including two parents and their three children.
Meanwhile, Israeli media reported that Israel intends to bar the entry of Arab foreign ministers who plan to hold a meeting on Palestinian statehood in the occupied West Bank.
Evening recap
17 hours ago
Good evening Middle East Eye readers,
The UN said on Friday that 100 percent of Gaza is at risk of famine, as the head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, Unrwa, said the level of aid being allowed into Gaza is a "mockery to the mass tragedy unfolding" there.
We will be pausing our coverage for the evening. Here is everything you need to know:
Israel in an escalation has decided to block a delegation of Middle Eastern foreign ministers led by Saudi Arabia’s top diplomat to the occupied West Bank on Sunday, several Israeli media outlets reported
US President Donald Trump said he believes his administration is close to a Gaza ceasefire and may have an announcement later today “or maybe tomorrow”
Hamas's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said it carried out a joint military operation against Israeli forces with the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Quds Brigades
A new poll found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, while an additional 56 percent support expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel
UN special rapporteur says there is famine in Gaza: Report
19 hours ago
Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told Al Jazeera that it was "safe to say" there is famine in Gaza, noting that it's impossible to reach a formal conclusion because Israel has totally besieged the enclave, with experts unable to access the population.
He also said that Israel and the US were using the trickle of aid entering the enclave “as bait to corral people” into military zones.
“It’s about humiliating people, and it’s about controlling the population. This has nothing to do with stopping starvation,” he said.
May 30, 2025
Abdaljawad Omar
We are not witnessing a rupture with how things used to be.
What is unfolding today in Gaza, where food aid falls from the sky like ordinance and “humanitarian corridors” double as kill zones, is not the collapse of humanitarianism, but its logical consummation under conditions of settler-colonial necropolitics.
It is tempting to read these scenes — the parachute that failed, the sacks of flour soaked in blood — as tragic malfunctions. They are not.
They are the grammar of a system that has long sutured humanitarian concern to military logistics, relief to surveillance, and aid to domination.
But something has shifted — not in content, but in form.
For decades, Israel maintained an uneasy but instrumental alliance with the architecture of humanitarianism. In the long expanse between the years following the Nakba and the siege and destruction of Gaza, this alliance operated as a double gesture: securing international legitimacy through the performance of restraint, while choreographing violence within the idiom of “security” and “self-defense.” The Red Cross, UNRWA, and a chorus of NGOs served as both witnesses and enablers, simultaneously limiting and legitimizing the occupation’s machinery.
In this war, humanitarianism is no longer simply absorbed and weaponized. It is being bypassed, discarded, and cannibalized.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Israel’s new model for aid delivery, signals this shift with brutal clarity: aid is no longer mediated through international law or the optics of neutrality, but flows through private American contractors under military command.
The new aid plan is being used by Israel as part of its demographic war in Gaza: by orchestrating aid flows into selected zones, primarily in the south, Israel is working to condense the population into increasingly narrow and governable enclaves. This forced concentration is not a consequence of war — it is the war’s strategic aim.
In other words, aid is a tool for soft transfer, pushing Palestinians into regions that can be more easily monitored, controlled, and eventually severed from any claim to the land. Starvation and desperation are not side effects, but intended effects, forcing displacement through need.
Israel simply cannot do this with the existing humanitarian infrastructure of UNRWA and the WFP. It has tried to do so over 19 months of genocide and fallen short. This is why the removal of international aid organizations signals a shift toward the unilateral management of the Strip under a new apparatus of military-humanitarian control. By sidelining these bodies, Israel makes room for a more compliant infrastructure: private contractors, militarized aid programs, and internally cultivated Palestinian collaborators who can administer local populations without challenging the broader regime of occupation and erasure.
These aid distribution sites, under the guise of relief, are also choreographed spaces of entrapment, where the architecture of chaos, desperation, and humiliation is meticulously staged. People wait for hours in the scorching sun, under drones, under guns, under the gaze of an occupying army that controls what enters, who lives, and who dies. The crowd surges, the fences collapse, shots are fired, and Palestinians are killed.
The Palestinian is made visible only in hunger and at the edge of riot. In these moments, dignity is not just deferred, but is systematically stripped, replaced with the performance of disorder that justifies further killings and further control. The aid site becomes the set-piece where Israel can lure the starving into kill zones and use a loaf of bread as a pretext for a bullet.
The new humanitarianism
This inaugurates a new paradigm in which humanitarianism is no longer mediated through international law or multilateral consensus, but is now militarized, privatized, and securitized. It is disaster capitalism taken to the extreme, eroding liberal humanitarian institutions in favor of militarized neoliberal corporations.
The time is ripe for this because Israel has grown weary of performance. It no longer needs the restraint rituals, with the carefully measured body counts, the proportional language of conflict resolution, and the legal architectures erected after World War II. In their place, we find a new modality of power that openly transgresses, dares the world to respond, and thrives not on legitimacy, but impunity.
What happened in Tal al-Sultan on May 27 offered the world yet another glimpse into this emerging logic. At the launch of the GHF’s first aid distribution center, thousands of Palestinians gathered, driven by the extremity of hunger. As fences broke under the weight of the crowd, Israeli forces responded with what they called “warning shots.” By the end of the day, three Palestinians lay dead, 48 were injured, and seven others were missing. This was not the failure of humanitarian logistics; it was the logic fulfilled. The aid site became the set-piece where Israel can lure the starving into kill zones and use a loaf of bread as a pretext for a bullet.
This is not merely a new war on Gaza. It is a war on the very category of the “human” as it applies to Palestinians, and eventually a remaking that will impact the whole world. Where once humanitarian discourse functioned as the frame through which violence could be rendered legible, disciplined by legalese, and tempered by press releases, humanitarianism itself is being disposed of as a limiting condition.
This reconfiguration also entails a war against memory. International organizations, however limited, often function as record-keepers of hunger, of attacks, of displacement, and of death. With their expulsion comes the erasure of witnesses and the silencing of documentation. The absence of institutional observers allows Israel to proceed with its campaign of annihilation without the burdens of image, number, or name. This is because the presence of the UN and other aid organizations, even if partly complicit, implied that the world was still watching and that aid was still being distributed in a manner not conducive to ethnic cleansing.
Inequality of hunger
Beyond achieving its demographic aims, Israel is also utilizing the GHF as part of its policy of what could effectively be termed “inequality of hunger”: the aid provided by the GHF is woefully insufficient to meet the vast and urgent needs of Gaza’s besieged population, with the UN estimating that a minimum of 500 aid trucks per day are required to sustain basic life, while fewer than 100 are permitted entry. The deliberate reduction of aid so far below the minimum threshold of survival isn’t just arbitrary cruelty; it is meant to create the conditions for social collapse.
It’s already been pointed out that this is the use of manufactured scarcity as a bargaining chip to extract political concessions from the Palestinian resistance. But it should also be stressed that the deprivation is an instrument of social disintegration: by distributing just enough food to kindle desperation, but never enough to sustain dignity, the system manufactures moral collapse. The social fabric fractures, resulting in the slow erosion of solidarity — the final battlefield of any collective struggle.
It is one thing to have a famine, which at least means equality in hunger. It’s quite another to trickle in just enough resources to create an internal struggle that results in the cannibalization of social relations, hitting harder than any massacre.
The criminality of aid
There are, one might say, two criminalities at work in Gaza’s hunger corridors. The first is sanitized, institutional, and entirely rational, what we might call the criminality of logistics perpetrated by the colonizer. Deliberate starvation is achieved through border control, using aid as spectacle, the sealing of exits, and then the airdropping of salvation in neatly packaged boxes. This is not merely a failure of ethics but a success of policy. It is the criminality of biometric scans, of the humanitarian mask concealing the military boot, made possible by both Netanyahu’s cabinet and the likes of Trump Inc., that curious synthesis of gangster capitalism and state violence performing massacres in the name of order.
But this is not all. The organized internal collaborators, the micro-warlords who “tax” the aid and divert it before it reaches the starved, form a local apparatus of distribution grounded in theft-as-policy. This is the internalized supplement to the occupation — the colonized enforcer recruited in the midst of war to serve further social disintegration.
In this setting, the crime is everywhere: in the massacre itself, in the very architecture of aid that creates the need for it. Israel is not the sole criminal; the entire configuration is criminal, including the aid agencies, the paperwork, the silence, the drone overhead, and the collaborator on the ground.
The other “criminality” unfolds when the crowd surges, breaching the fence and reaching for what was always theirs — bread, oil, rice, the right to live. This is not looting, but the repossession of stolen sustenance. It is the planning of those without a plan, the logistics of a community erupting through the fractures of engineered despair. It is the refusal to die standing in line beneath the drones, dignity deferred.
The people aren’t a mob, but a flood — a living force breaching the containment zone of famine, liberating food from its branded prison. What Israel frames as chaos is, in truth, collective clarity.
This second criminality — the crime of survival — is incomprehensible to the humanitarian and liberal gaze. It remains illegible to institutions conditioned only to distinguish the compliant needy from the dangerous deviant. But this collective act of taking is not a cry for help, but a disruption of the very logic that made help necessary. After 600 days of massacres and destruction, the fences fell, sacks were passed between hands, and colonial time stuttered.
This, too, is what unfolded last week — Palestinians in Gaza surged through the tightly scripted scene of domination, disrupting Israel’s illusion of total control even as it outsourced its sovereignty to American private contractors. The scene itself was torn apart twice: first, when most Palestinians in Gaza did not show up, refusing even the choreography itself, and second, when the crowd surged through the fence.
This, then, is the moment we are left with: one in which Israel no longer bothers to veil its actions behind humanitarian fig leaves, but openly scorns the very language that once masked its violence. And the world is being dared — to intervene, yes, but more precisely, to confront the fact that its interventions and discourses were always part of the problem, always hollow and devoid of substance.
One could ask the liberals what remains of this language, not only in Gaza, but in the futures yet to come?
And amid all this, what remains central is that, despite everything, Palestinians still find a way — whether through deliberate planning or spontaneous rupture — to flood the infrastructure of annihilation.
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