Rights and Accountability 13 June 2025
Palestinians mourn loved ones killed in Israeli drone attacks on tent shelters in Khan Younis, Gaza, 10 June.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 12 June livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israeli forces carried out massacres across the Gaza Strip this week, killing 497 Palestinians and wounding nearly 2,100 between 5 June and 11 June, targeting Palestinian men, women and children in residential buildings, school shelters, tent shelters, and at so-called aid distribution points.
Israel killed at least 123 Palestinians between Tuesday and Wednesday alone, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
Nearly half of those deaths recorded in those 24 hours were people killed while trying to retrieve meager parcels of aid at the US-Israeli distribution points.
Since the shadowy, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began its operations two weeks ago, the health ministry says that more than 220 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,800 injured while trying to obtain food.
The Red Cross Field Hospital in Rafah has had to activate its mass casualty incident procedure 12 times since the aid scheme began, receiving high numbers of patients with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, reporting that an “overwhelming majority of patients from the recent incidents said they had been trying to reach assistance distribution sites.”
On 5 June, Doctors Without Borders said that physicians began donating their own blood to save their patients after scores of Palestinians were gunned down trying to get food aid.
In northern Gaza, Israel relentlessly pounded areas of Jabaliya and Gaza City this week.
On Saturday, 7 June, 30 people were reported killed in an airstrike on a residential building in Gaza City, according to the Palestinian civil defense, while four new displacement orders were issued for areas in northern Gaza.
According to journalist Ali Abu Harbid, Israeli quadcopter drones targeted anyone who crossed into the arbitrary boundary as Israeli forces prevented rescuers from reaching and evacuating those left behind.Israel cut the last remaining internet access line in northern Gaza this week, plunging the area into a near blackout and preventing people from calling ambulances after massive airstrikes.
On Thursday, 12 June, a total communications blackout was reported across central and southern Gaza as well, collapsing internet and phone services following Israeli airstrikes on telecom infrastructure, according to the Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority.
Journalist Al Hassan Selmi delivered this report on Wednesday, from the besieged north, after the internet connections were severed.
At 3 am on 9 June, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who is in Gaza, recorded himself amidst the sounds of incessant airstrikes, tank fire and drone attacks:
The Gaza government media office stated on 11 June that the Israeli occupation is “deliberately creating chaos in the Gaza Strip by perpetuating a policy of starvation and deliberately targeting and killing starving people seeking food.”This week, images and accounts by Palestinians who have been injured at these humiliating so-called aid points continued to pour in, directly contradicting the public relations campaign touting the “success” of aid distribution by US and Israeli officials, as Israel has prevented actual international aid from entering Gaza for more than three consecutive months.
The Gaza government media office warned the international community that the Israeli government and its US mercenary partners have turned aid centers into “human slaughterhouses.”The office demanded that the world act to allow the flow of real aid into Gaza as people starve or risk death by trying to obtain small boxes of food that are wholly inadequate to meet the basic needs of 2 million hungry people, half of them children.
“The international community must end its bias, end this moral tragedy, and allow the entry of tens of thousands of trucks [belonging to] United Nations agencies, which have been working for decades to provide relief to refugees and civilians, and which are efficient and committed to the principles of humanitarian action.”
Reports from one of the four Gaza Humanitarian Foundation points in the Netzarim corridor, a militarized zone south of Gaza City, this week showed Palestinians lining up before dawn only to be told that there was no aid left to distribute.
Video captured by Palestinians seeking food at one of the private aid points shows crowds of hungry people running under rapid gunfire. “Everything that is happening to us is for flour,” one man in the video says.Phillippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said on 10 June, “This humiliating system continues to force thousands of hungry and desperate people to walk for tens of miles excluding the most vulnerable and those living too far. This system does not intend to address hunger.”
“Our warehouses outside Gaza are full with a volume of assistance equivalent to 6,000 trucks. Letting food rot and medicine deliberately expire would simply be obscene,” Lazzarini stated.Meanwhile, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has officially notified the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation of its potential legal liability for complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Palestinians.
In a 40-page letter to the private corporation’s new CEO, Johnnie Moore, who is a Christian Zionist evangelical and has dismissed the daily killings at the aid points as “fictional massacres,” the civil rights organization warns that if the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) “does not cease its operations in Gaza, they could face civil litigation or criminal prosecution in different countries as well as legal action before international bodies.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights says that its warning comes as the US State Department is considering giving GHF – whose funding remains opaque – $500 million.
Paramedics and journalists killed
Israel killed three paramedics and a journalist on Monday, 9 June, as a medical team was responding to an emergency call in eastern Gaza City.
Drop Site News reported that the team was dispatched to assist casualties from an earlier strike and was itself targeted while attempting the rescue. A second team that tried to reach the wounded paramedics was reportedly attacked by Israeli quadcopters. The three medics, Baraa Afana, who was just 18 years old, Wael al-Attar and Hussein Mohaisen, were all killed in the attack.Mohaisen was reportedly the paramedic who heroically rescued two little girls from a massive firebomb inside a Gaza City school shelter in late May, including the 4-year-old girl Hanin, who was captured on video walking through flames. The other girl, 7-year-old Ward, narrowly escaped the inferno as well.
Journalist Moamen Abualouf was also killed in the 9 June attack, along with the paramedics.He was accompanying the team in the same ambulance to document the rescue. In what turned out to be his final message to colleagues, he wrote: “The army is hitting near me … I don’t think I have much time left,” Drop Site reported.
Abualouf, who was only 19, was the 227th journalist and media worker to be killed since October 2023.
The Palestinian civil defense stated on 11 June that “While we share the grief and heartbreak of the families of our martyred colleagues and all martyrs of the ambulance and humanitarian services, we affirm the sincerity of these heroes’ loyalty and devotion to their humanitarian duty and the noble mission for which they worked. We testify that they did not leave their positions throughout this war, and they continued day and night to fulfill their national and moral duty and serve our people.”
Journalist Anas al-Sharif spoke at the funerals of the paramedics and his colleague, Moamen Abualouf, and posted a video of himself embracing Fares Afana, the father of Baraa Afana. Fares is the director of emergency and ambulance services in northern Gaza.
“Our hearts are broken and our pain is great,” wrote Anas al-Sharif. “May God help you, my brother and beloved Abu Hamza, Fares Afana.”Attacks on hospitals as a means of ethnic purging
Turning to the catastrophic medical situation and the ongoing attacks on hospitals, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry Dr. Munir al-Bursh told Al Jazeera on Saturday, 7 June, “The Israeli occupation is besieging Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in Khan Younis, preventing entry and exit, and demolishing the surrounding buildings – a repetition of the northern scenario that began with the destruction of the area around Al-Awda Hospital in Tal Al-Zaatar, the Indonesian Hospital and Kamal Adwan Hospital, all aimed at forcibly displacing the population.”
“What is happening is the implementation of a premeditated, systematic plan to empty Khan Younis of its residents,” he said.“The occupation is deliberately working to destroy the entire healthcare system as part of its strategy of control and displacement. We are now nearing the fifth stage of famine – the stage of mass death. And the world watches in silence, sipping its coffee while massacres are carried out in Gaza.”
The ministry warned on 11 June that “hospitals are experiencing both severe overcrowding and the near-total depletion of basic medications and essentials. All hospitals in northern Gaza are officially out of service.”Emergency interventions “will be meaningless as health and humanitarian indicators deteriorate to levels and outcomes that are difficult to address,” the ministry said.
Homes demolished in West Bank
Turning to the occupied West Bank, on Tuesday, 9 June, Israeli forces launched an invasion and mass arrest operation in the Old City of Nablus, in the north.
The United Nations’ humanitarian office says that Israeli soldiers imposed a curfew, conducted house-to-house searches, and reportedly used a school as an interrogation center. At least 20 homes have been searched, with reports of damage to Palestinian property.
On Monday in Jenin, the Israeli military announced an imminent plan to demolish nearly 96 structures – most of them residential – in Jenin refugee camp. More than 280 families who stand to be affected had been given 72 hours to retrieve their personal belongings, the UN said.
And In Tulkarm, Israeli raids and demolition orders have intensified in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps since Friday, 6 June. More than three dozen buildings have been demolished so far, according to the UN agency for Palestine refugees, with destruction extending beyond the original orders issued at the beginning of the month.
Mahmoud Khalil wins preliminary injunction against Trump administration
In the US, a major legal victory was won on Wednesday, 11 June, as a federal court judge concluded that Columbia University student leader Mahmoud Khalil would continue to suffer irreparable harm if he remains detained, and granted Khalil’s request for a preliminary injunction.
Khalil is a green card holder and permanent US resident who has been in an ICE detention facility for more than three months over his advocacy for Palestinian rights.
This preliminary injunction blocks the Trump administration from using the provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the INA, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked to detain and attempt to deport Khalil, and other students and scholars, for their speech, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The center says that this is the first federal court to rule that Khalil and other noncitizens cannot be deported based solely on the so-called “foreign policy ground” of the INA, a blow to the Trump administration’s attempt to suppress the speech of those who protest and speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine and around the world.
Last week, we covered the Gaza freedom flotilla, and the Madleen ship which was carrying 12 international activists and humanitarian aid, aiming to break the siege on Gaza.
Early in the morning on 9 June, the boat was hijacked by Israeli forces and the activists were forcibly taken to Israel against their will, where they were either deported or remain detained in Israeli jails.
Thiago Avila, an activist from Brazil, was put in jail and went on a hunger and water strike. He was subsequently placed in solitary confinement because of it.
But that has not stopped the momentum of people in the region and around the world who are repulsed by the inaction of political powers in the face of this genocide, and are compelled to intervene themselves.
This week, a massive land convoy took off from Morocco, with thousands of people aiming to break the siege. Part of the global march to Gaza, the Sumud – “steadfastness” – Convoy is traveling through North Africa, and is hoping to reach Rafah this weekend.
Unlike governments and societies that have grown used to silence, these participants are taking the long road to affirm Gaza is not alone, the activists say.
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the whole picture
Permalink Carol Scheller replied on
Your ability to find the important information, on all fronts, make your reporting precious and unique. You bring your readers where they want to be, to know what exactly is going on, to be able to see and judge. An exceptional journalist, you empower your readers with facts that enable them to explain and advocate for justice and to rejoice when justice is served. I treasure this gift.
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