The Electronic Intifada Podcast 13 November 2025
The Gaza government media office stated on 6 November that 28 percent of the expected and needed aid has entered Gaza since the 10 October “ceasefire,” confirming, they say, that “the occupation continues its policy of strangulation, starvation, humanitarian pressure and political blackmail against more than 2.4 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Meanwhile, the winter months are approaching, and Israel is still blocking the entry of shelter materials, construction items and heavy machinery to clear the millions of tons of rubble.
Gucciardo, who speaks to us from Gaza, says that she was supposed to return to Gaza earlier this year, but was denied twice before being allowed in. The experience, she explains, “was emblematic of the experience of a lot of health workers trying to come in to provide aid, where the Israelis are rejecting about 50 percent of applicants at any given time.”
She hired a lawyer and filed an appeal to request a reason for her denials, “because that denial was also a microcosm of the impunity with which Israel breaks international humanitarian law,” she adds.
“They’re not supposed to obstruct aid, nor aid workers. They didn’t give me a reason, but … back in September, they said, okay, she can come to the border, be interrogated, and then we’ll decide if she can go in. So that’s what I did.”
After her interrogation, Gucciardo entered through the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) boundary crossing in the south, through the Philadelphi corridor and into Rafah.
“I got a view of Rafah as I was coming in, or at least what Rafah once was,” she says.
“Rafah is gone. It is completely erased. It is eliminated from the map. And so that was my reintroduction to the Gaza Strip, both the severity of the occupation in terms of how it’s treating the international aid workers, and also the evidence of the destruction that it is causing in the Gaza Strip.”
Gucciardo describes the vast erasure of all landmarks and skylines, replaced by rubble or rubble that has been cleared away.
Many years ago, and for a long time, she says, Gaza had significant organic agricultural production and was a self-sustaining industry that lifted the economy, filling the gaps of Israel’s 17-year siege. Israel has systematically destroyed the fertile lands in southern Gaza over the last two years.
She recounts her travels in the central and northern areas as well, to understand the level of destruction Israel has created and find ways to articulate it with appropriate language.
“It’s sheer annihilation,” she says.
“That is the word that keeps coming to my mind. It is a strip that has been completely annihilated by the Israelis. And one of the ways that I’m processing it in my head is, to me, it seems very much like a living necropolis.”
She adds: “You have the Israelis who have tried to turn the Gaza Strip into this place of death. Every single building is destroyed – homes, bakeries, supermarkets, neighborhoods, schools, all are completely gone.”
Nothing has been left unscathed, she adds, “and yet it’s also remaining a place of the living, right? We have Palestinians who are trying to sustain themselves and their lives under these absolutely terrible and horrific conditions.”
Rehabilitation of clinics
Part of her work with Glia is to support healthcare workers and medical staff who are struggling to keep the medical system afloat despite Israel’s ongoing blockade of essential medications, equipment and basic supplies.
“The reason why that system exists is through the sheer perseverance of the healthcare staff in Gaza who, despite deliberate attacks on hospitals, despite the abduction and torture and murder of their colleagues, continue to show up to work every day in order to provide health care to the population,” she notes.
There are efforts in several hospitals to rehabilitate clinics – such as a dialysis center at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis – that were deliberately destroyed in Israeli attacks.
But Israel’s siege remains, and medical supplies are still being blocked – or are arriving in Gaza already expired and unusable.
Gucciardo says that she and her colleagues at Glia are working with Palestinian surgeons on the ground to co-create medical devices to meet the specific needs of Palestinians inside Gaza.
One of those devices are 3D printed external fixators, which stabilize fractured bones and joints, designed by Palestinian experts.
“They have installed it on our first patient, who is healing beautifully,” she says. “And so we’re going to move forward with testing it on another five patients, and hopefully just keep perfecting the device so that way, there doesn’t need to be this reliance on Israel to decide whether life-saving medical hardware can come in.”
Gucciardo is working on a book about how Gaza has become a place where life and death coexist.
Produced by Tamara Nassar
Photo by Omar Ashtawy / APA images
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