Rights and Accountability 9 May 2025
More than 30 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on one of the only restaurants still operating in Gaza City, 7 May.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 8 May livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel carried out a series of massacres this week across the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds in massive airstrikes and drone attacks on residential buildings, tent shelters and crowded areas.
These attacks come as the Israeli government said it was conducting a severe escalation in its assaults on Gaza.
War crimes suspect and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that it was “time to launch the concluding moves,” or, in other words, a final solution for Palestinians in Gaza, after two months of a complete siege, 18 months of an unyielding genocide and 77 years of the settler-colonial ethnic cleansing operations in Palestine.
According to the United Nations, as of 6 May, more than 428,000 people have been displaced again since Israel’s resumption of full-scale attacks on 18 March, with no safe place to go.
On Wednesday, 7 May, Israeli forces bombed a crowded restaurant in Gaza City, one of the last remaining places where people could have a meal, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza. More than 30 Palestinians were killed.
Al Jazeera reported that two missiles were fired at two locations, 100 meters apart, at the same time.
Reporter Hani Mahmoud stated, “The tables and chairs are all thrown around and blood stains the ground as a result of severe bleeding [due to the attack].” Nearby, he said, bodies were on the ground, “soaked in blood and shredded into pieces.”
Also in Gaza City on 7 May, 13 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the al-Tuffah neighborhood, three were killed in Jabaliya in the north, eight people were killed in Khan Younis in the south, and three people, including a child, were killed in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip after Israeli forces attacked families sheltering in tents.
The death toll from Wednesday alone reached at least 102, with nearly 200 wounded across Gaza, according to the Gaza government media office.
Wednesday’s massacres came a day after the Israeli army targeted the Abu Hamisa school in al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, killing at least 33 people in two attacks just hours apart.
The government media office in Gaza stated that Israel continues to “deliberately and systematically target shelters and displacement centers. The number of these centers bombed has reached 234 so far, in flagrant violation of all international and humanitarian laws, and in a blatant attempt to inflict the largest possible number of civilian casualties.”These massacres, the media office added, “come amid the Israeli occupation’s collapse of the health system, the destruction of hospitals, and the denial of their services. Medical staff are under tremendous pressure, face a severe shortage of medical supplies, the closure of crossings to the wounded, and the prevention of fuel imports, exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip.”
Palestinians in Jabaliya, in the north, used their hands and small tools to try and recover their loved ones in the rubble after an Israeli attack on residential buildings on 2 May.
Reporter Mahmoud Abusalama said that the attack destroyed the entire neighborhood, and that people were hammering away at the rubble, trying to extract the bodies of the dead and injured.
Attacks on eastern Gaza City were also reported on 2 May, killing nine Palestinians in an attack on a residential building.
Eleven people were killed, including three infants and a child, in an Israeli strike on a building in Khan Younis on 3 May.
Israeli forces continue to attack the tent shelters of displaced families.
On 4 May, journalist Ahmed al-Najjar reported from al-Mawasi, where Israeli forces had bombed Palestinian families sheltering in tents. He said that 10 people, including a child, seven women and two elderly men, were killed.
A strike on a residential building in eastern Gaza City killed 15 Palestinians that same day, according to the UN’s humanitarian office. Shooting was reported at people attempting to rescue those trapped under the rubble of the struck building.In Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, journalist Hussein Khreis spoke to an 88-year-old woman who was reportedly assaulted and punched in the face by Israeli soldiers earlier in the week.
Hisen Alayan says she was taken to an Israeli military site where she was interrogated by an Israeli soldier. She was then transferred to a hospital for medical treatment.
Sulaiman Hejji, a photojournalist, took aerial footage over the ruins of Rafah, in the south, earlier this week.Dozens of deaths from starvation
As Israel’s total closure of all crossings enters the third month, Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to starvation in catastrophic proportions, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
The rights group reported this week that “a sharp rise in adult death rates was documented among residents of the Gaza Strip, alongside alarming levels of child mortality, during the longest continuous total siege imposed by Israel since the beginning of its genocide campaign.”
Dozens of deaths have been reported from malnutrition or lack of medical care, the group added.
“The latest is a 4-month-old infant, Jenan Saleh al-Skafi, who died of severe malnutrition at Al-Rantisi Hospital in western Gaza City – amid what is called the worst campaign of systematic starvation in modern history.”
Lima Bastami, the director of the legal department at Euro-Med, stated, “The crime of starvation in Gaza is fully-fledged and committed in broad daylight; it requires no investigation committees or judicial rulings to prove it.”
Approximately 60,000 children in Gaza are malnourished and in urgent need for treatment, and 16,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are in desperate need of healthcare, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, a physician and a writer in Gaza, has been documenting the plight of the malnourished and starving patients he’s treating, many of them infants and young children. He says he is also witnessing a rise in birth defects.
He wrote the following on his X page on 3 May:
Journalists killed
Israeli forces killed two journalists this week in Gaza. A total of 214 reporters and media workers have been killed since October 2023, according to the Gaza government media office.
On Wednesday, 7 May, Nour el-Din Matar Abdu, who worked as a broadcaster and reporter, was killed in a missile strike east of Gaza City.
Just hours later, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sobeih, a reporter for several news outlets and whose footage of two girls eating a meal we showed last week on this livestream.Sobieh was killed in the Gaza City massacre on Wednesday, just five hours after the birth of his daughter.
Sobieh’s last Instagram post documented a mother trying to feed her family.It was World Press Freedom Day on 3 May. Every year around the globe, governments and media leaders congratulate themselves in celebration of press freedom and the heroic work of journalists.
The Gaza government media office stated, “However, Gaza, and at its heart, its heroic journalists, celebrates this day in a different language: the language of blood, hunger, tears and ashes.”
“While the world celebrates press freedom, the blood of Palestinian journalists is flowing in the streets of Gaza, their headquarters and cars are being bombed, their pens and cameras are being smashed, their homes and property are being targeted, and they are sometimes buried with their families under the rubble, simply because they decided to report the truth,” the media office added.
Reporter Ahmed al-Najjar delivered this message to the world from Gaza:
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine.
The Sameer Project, a local mutual aid organization in Gaza, produced this video of the children in the Refaat Alareer camp for displaced families. The children, the organization says, took a field trip to purchase plants, decorating the camp with mint, basil, jasmine, camomile, peppers and flowers.
Add new comment