Rights and Accountability 26 September 2025
Civil defense teams and residents conduct search and rescue operations after Israel bombed a house in Gaza City, 22 September.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 25 September livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel has killed at least 357 Palestinians and injured at least 1,500 between 17 and 24 September, according to official records from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Most of the attacks are still concentrated in Gaza City, where Israel has been bombing high-rise residential towers, hospitals, refugee camps and tent shelters for weeks as its ground forces advance.
Journalist Abed Dawas recorded this footage after an airstrike on the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City on 22 September.
Reporter Mohammad Qita documented an Israeli tank on a road in Gaza City on Tuesday. After a few moments of filming, the tank’s gun rotates toward the reporter.
Israel continues to use remote-controlled vehicles to destroy entire residential buildings across the city. Photojournalist Ahmed Alsawafiri recorded such an attack on 20 September.
The UN human rights office says that between 19 and 20 September, there were at least 18 recorded attacks on residential buildings in Gaza City, with dozens killed and more remaining buried under the rubble.
One of the deadliest attacks, the human rights office says, was a strike on 20 September on three inhabited residential buildings on one single block in the Sabra neighborhood in southern Gaza City.
The Israeli attack killed at least 20 members of the Daghmash family, including 12 children, with dozens reported missing under the rubble. This came just a day after another residential building housing other members of the Daghmash family in the same area had been struck, killing eight family members, including at least four girls.
Fares Afanah, the director of emergency and medical services in Gaza, told reporter Mohammed Abusalama that ambulance and rescue crews worked nonstop to recover bodies from under the rubble after the 20 September attacks.
Afanah said that emergency workers “continue to provide this service despite this danger.”
The next day, relatives searched local morgues for the remains of their loved ones, while dozens more remained trapped under the concrete.
Journalist Saed Hezballah filmed an injured young man breaking down after losing his uncle, his cousins, and other relatives in the attack. He sits on the bed of a truck loaded with the bodies of his relatives wrapped in blankets.
Israel continued to attack the Beach refugee camp in western Gaza City this week. Reporter Hussein Kersoa filmed a distraught father searching for his children buried under the rubble on 23 September after an airstrike on homes in the camp.On Wednesday, 24 September, Israel bombed a residential building where mutual aid workers with the Sameer Project organize food for distribution in northern Gaza. A fire quickly spread inside the building.
Rescue workers say that they searched for people buried in the rubble and retrieved a number of bodies.
The Sameer Project stated, “As food packages were being organized for a distribution, the occupation bombed a residential building, leveling the area around where our team was working. Nearly half a million people remain in the North of Gaza. Whether because they refuse to leave their land or because they are unable to find costly transport south, thousands and thousands of families still need food, still need water, still need our help as they are being bombed without mercy.”And on Tuesday, civil defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal captured a wrenching moment when a small boy carried the body of his 4-year-old cousin Zain, wrapped in a shroud, to a cemetery. Basal says that Zain was killed in an airstrike that claimed the lives of 33 people.
Israel “inflicting terror” in Gaza City
The UN human rights office said that these relentless attacks, “in addition to the steady advance of the Israeli ground forces towards western Gaza City, demolishing residential buildings under its control on the way, appear to have resulted in renewed waves of mass forced displacement to the south of Gaza where there is no space, infrastructure or basic necessities to support the influx of internally displaced persons and where the Israeli military continues to strike shelters.”
Israel’s sharp increase in the number of civilians being slaughtered in Gaza City seems intended to inflict terror on the Palestinian population of Gaza City, forcing tens of thousands to flee, the UN human rights office said.
Between 17 and 20 September, nearly 82,000 Palestinians were displaced from northern to southern Gaza.
Photojournalist Moaz Hosni filmed families crammed onto trucks, as he says, “united not by a road or a destination, but by the inability to afford the journey,” like a temporary ark of collective survival.
Hospitals bombed
Israel continues to bomb hospitals and the areas surrounding them.
On 22 September, the Israeli army struck the Palestinian Medical Relief Society’s building in Gaza City, sending an enormous plume of smoke into the sky. Hasan Almoghain captured the bombing on video.
Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), a British charity that works with the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, stated that an Israeli military airstrike destroyed the society’s Al Samer clinic, “which had been providing healthcare services since 2006. The clinic has been reduced to rubble and its services shut down.”
“The clinic was a cornerstone of community health and provided vital primary healthcare, mental health support, cancer care, blood donation, physiotherapy and women’s services,” MAP stated.
Dozens of staff members, “including cardiologists and nutritionists, have lost their place of work and their patients have been left without care.”
Staff “were given just 10 minutes to evacuate before the clinic was struck. The attack has left the clinic completely destroyed and unusable, including its laboratories and its assistive devices center.”
In the past three weeks alone, the Palestinian Medical Relief Society reports that three of its clinics across Gaza have been targeted in Israeli military attacks. Two have been completely destroyed and one clinic has been partially damaged.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported on 22 September that after bombing Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital last week, it is now completely out of service due to the Israeli army continuing to target the hospital’s surroundings.
Along with the only children’s hospital, the last remaining clinic providing ophthalmological services in Gaza is also closed, the ministry said, as there are no safe roads to either facility that will allow patients to reach them.
Australian doctor Nada Abu Al-Rub, who is working at various Gaza hospitals, described the state of the accelerating medical catastrophe for patients and doctors, especially as mass casualty events remain relentless.
She says that in addition to the slaughter by airstrikes and tanks, every few hours children arrive at the hospitals malnourished and suffering from infections, leading to cardiac arrests.
And doctors are still being targeted.On 20 September, Israel bombed the home of Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital who was abducted by Israeli forces in November 2023, and detained and tortured for seven months.
He says he left his home in the Beach refugee camp to go to work at Al-Shifa, and the bodies of six of his relatives arrived while he was on duty.
Reporter Nahed Hajjaj filmed Abu Salmiya mourning over the bodies of his brother, two nephews, his nephew’s wife, and two of their children.
Settlers kill youth in West Bank
Turning to the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers, backed by Israeli soldiers, shot and killed 20-year-old Saeed Murad Nasan on Tuesday in the village of al-Mughayir, near Ramallah.
On Wednesday, Israeli settlers then attacked the funeral of the young man, firing live ammunition at the mourners, Wafa news agency reported.
Meanwhile, Israel closed the Allenby Bridge crossing between the West Bank and Jordan indefinitely, just three days after reopening it following a shooting by a Jordanian national that killed two Israeli soldiers.
The crossing in the Jordan Valley, known as Karama on the Palestinian side, is the only crossing point between Jordan and the West Bank.
Most of the West Bank’s 3.3 million residents depend on the bridge for travel abroad.
This week, The Electronic Intifada’s contributor Bothaina Hamdan, who is based in Ramallah, wrote in her feature article that as the genocide continues in Gaza, “We are living under a slow genocide in the West Bank, with Israel’s annexation of more land, daily killings at the hands of settlers and soldiers, and constant financial strain.”
Highlighting resilience
Finally, we highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Gaza and around the world.
Workers and union members across Italy engaged in a general strike on 22 September, shutting down the country to demand an end to Israel’s genocide.
The Associated Press stated that Italy’s grassroots unions, which represent hundreds of thousands of people ranging from schoolteachers to metalworkers, called for a 24-hour general strike in both public and private sectors, including public transportation, trains, schools and ports. Roads and highways were also shut down.
Ten thousand people blocked the main highway between Florence and Bologna alone. The Italian Palestinian youth organization, Giovani Palestinesi d’Italia, uploaded footage of the massive highway blockade.
The transit of goods was slowed or partially blocked by workers’ sit-ins and rallies in Italy’s main ports of Genoa and Livorno. More than 20,000 people gathered in front of Rome’s central station to protest the genocide.
Unions and student organizations denounced “the inertia of the Italian and EU governments,” the AP reported. Walter Montagnoli, the national secretary of the CUB union, said at the protest in Milan, “If we don’t block what Israel is doing, if we don’t block trade, the distribution of weapons and everything else with Israel, we will not ever achieve anything.”
The Italian news site Genova24 compiled clips of some of the protests.
Students declared “we are all anti-Zionists” and marched in the streets of Genoa.
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