Rights and Accountability 24 January 2025
A rainbow arches across the sky above the tents of displaced families in Deir al-Balah, 23 January. (Omar Ashtawy / APA Images)
Israel has carried out several attacks on Palestinians despite the ceasefire in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, assisted by the Palestinian Authority, are entrenching a deadly siege on Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp.
In Gaza on 20 January, a 15-year-old child, Zakaria Humaid Barbakh, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper as he was returning to his home in Rafah.
According to video footage, the sniper then shot a man who attempted to rescue the child.
On 22 January, Israeli naval forces reportedly fired shells onto the beach near Gaza City. The Israeli army also attacked Rafah again, killing one person and injuring several others, according to the Wafa news agency.
An Israeli quadcopter fired rounds at a group of Palestinians clearing wreckage from their destroyed homes in the Shaboura camp.
Since the ceasefire was implemented on 19 January in Gaza, Palestinians have been returning to their neighborhoods, while municipal, security and civil defense workers have started to restore infrastructure.
And more evidence of Israel’s 15 months of continuous war crimes are being revealed.
Gaza’s civil defense agency says that the bodies of about 10,000 Palestinians who were killed in the genocide are yet to be found and given proper burials.Along with the civil defense’s medical staff, the head of the agency, Mahmoud Basal, said that they have so far recovered approximately 200 bodies since the ceasefire began.
Basal said that the lack of heavy machinery has challenged extraction operations, adding that Israel had destroyed several of their vehicles and killed at least 100 of their staff.
The Reuters news agency spoke to a man, Mahmoud Abu Dalfa, whose wife and children “were among 35 of his extended family who were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the building” in Gaza City’s Shujaiya suburb in December 2023. “As bombs continued to fall, only three bodies were retrieved.”
The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called on the international community to pressure Israel to “promptly guarantee the unconditional entry of technical teams, forensic specialists and criminal investigators into the Gaza Strip, along with the required tools.”
This pressure “will help Palestinians in the Strip recover the bodies of victims from beneath debris and in areas where Israeli forces invaded, identify the victims and provide information about the whereabouts of those who have not been found,” Euro-Med stated.
“These actions are essential, not only to safeguard families’ rights to know the fate of their loved ones and to bury those who have been killed with dignity and respect, but to ensure accountability for the perpetrators of the genocide that Israel has committed in the Gaza Strip for 15 months,” the rights group added.
Euro-Med says that during the first few days into the ceasefire, their field teams have documented “vast numbers” of Palestinian bodies killed by Israeli shelling over the past few months, many of which have almost completely decomposed.
“The bodies of 79 people, including 21 unidentified individuals, were recovered in Rafah neighborhoods by ambulance and civil defense crews following the withdrawal of Israeli army forces. Their team found severely decomposed remains of additional victims.”
The victims’ “skulls and a few bones were all that was left.”
Nearly 40,000 orphans
In October 2024, the United Nations estimated that there were approximately 18,000 children who had lost either one or both parents since the genocide began a year before.
The Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza released new statistics on Thursday, revealing that there are more than 38,000 newly-orphaned children since the genocide began.
Speaking to the news publication Drop Site this week, Ismail al-Thawabta, the director general of the Gaza government media office, said that more than 40 percent of families across Gaza are caring for orphaned children.
“Even before the current Israeli war, there were a staggering number of orphans in Gaza – 33,000 children – as a result of five previous wars since 2008,” al-Thawabta said.
Israel extends ban on lawyer meeting with Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya
In a haunting video, the journalist AbdalQader Sabbah documented the scene around the wreckage of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
On 27 December, as we have reported, Israeli forces laid siege to the hospital and abducted its medical staff and patients, including the director of the hospital, pediatrician Hussam Abu Safiya. Abu Safiya is still in Israeli detention at Ofer military prison.Israeli forces had stripped the doctors, patients, their companions and medical staff of their clothing and marched them to a nearby school that Israel had turned into an interrogation center.
Now, nearly four weeks later, the clothing and belongings of those people – many of whom are still abducted – remain strewn on the ground.
“These clothes are a testimony to what the Israeli occupation forces did to the residents of the northern Gaza Strip,” Sabbah says in his video.
On 22 January, the Palestinian rights group Al Mezan said that Israeli authorities once again extended the ban prohibiting Abu Safiya from meeting with his legal representative until 6 February.
“We strongly condemn this unlawful decision and urgently demand immediate access for Al Mezan’s lawyer to assess his condition,” the organization stated.Rebuilding initiatives begin
The United Nations released a damage assessment report this week that shows that after 15 months of Israel’s campaigns of destruction and genocide, more than 50 million tons of rubble will need to be cleared.
New footage of the extent of Israel’s destruction across the Gaza Strip is staggering.
But workers and staff of the various municipal bodies and ministries stated over the past few days that they are gearing up to restore, repair and rebuild.The mayor of Gaza City, Yahya al-Sarraj, who is also the head of the union of municipalities in the Gaza Strip, announced the launch of the “Phoenix framework for the reconstruction of Gaza,” which he says is a roadmap aimed at the reconstruction and sustainable development of Gaza after the war of extermination and aggression.
The initiative, he said “represents a glimmer of hope and a practical plan aimed at addressing current challenges, and combines a rapid response to urgent humanitarian needs with laying the foundations for sustainable reconstruction that enhances Gaza’s resilience in the long term.”
Gaza’s interior ministry released a similar statement on 19 January, announcing that the deployment of police and security forces in the streets across Gaza has begun “in order to support citizens and provide them with aid, secure public and private property, and deal with the remnants of the occupation that pose a threat to the lives of citizens.”Aid arrives
Some of those security officers deployed by the Gaza government secured the delivery of more than 2,000 aid trucks entering southern Gaza since the ceasefire.
According to the United Nations, 915 aid trucks drove into Gaza on Monday, 20 January.Wednesday saw the delivery of more than 800 trucks. The UN and its partners are dispatching incoming supplies to designated emergency shelters and distribution centers across the Gaza Strip, distributing food parcels and flour and working to reopen bakeries.
The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), which the Israeli government is attempting to ban, distributed aid from nearly 120 trucks. The aid consisted of more than 53,000 parcels of food and was provided to communities sheltering in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.
The UN agency for sexual and reproductive health said that “20 trucks carrying critical supplies – including for safe births, emergency obstetric care, postpartum kits, contraceptives and winter items – were offloaded in Deir al-Balah” on Tuesday.Twenty more trucks carrying similar supplies entered northern Gaza on Wednesday.
Reporting from Rafah on Wednesday, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said that “over the past few hours, there has been a continuous, smooth flow of humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza.Since the ceasefire began, it’s understood that more than 2,400 aid trucks have been allowed to pass into Gaza. The trucks are carrying food, water, aid supplies and fuel.”
“More are on the way into Gaza right now,” Abu Azzoum added. “They are being secured by Hamas’ police, whose presence has helped mitigate looting. The aid supplies are desperately needed to prevent living conditions from deteriorating further. Their entry has led to a big drop in prices in the markets, helping ensure people can receive necessities.”Siege of Jenin
Turning to the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces and settlers have been accelerating their attacks on Palestinians over the past week.
Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 14-year-old boy in Sabastiya, northwest of Nablus, on 19 January.
Defense for Children International-Palestine reported that Ahmad Rashid Rushdi Jazar was shot while he and his friends were sitting together. Israeli forces, concealed and positioned among the trees, opened fire on the children from a distance of 650 meters.
Ahmad was struck with a bullet in the chest, falling onto the ground and bleeding severely. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
In Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, Israeli forces have killed at least 10 Palestinians and wounded 40 since the military launched a new raid on 21 January.
The raid appears to be in coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The Israeli raid follows a 48-day siege on Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp by the Palestinian Authority.
US-backed PA forces besieged the city and refugee camp, shot at unarmed civilians and killed residents in an attempt to undermine the Palestinian armed resistance groups’ defenses against Israel.
The PA forces joined the Israeli military in a raid on al-Razi Hospital on Wednesday, according to a report by Fayha’ Shalash writing in Middle East Eye.
Shalash added that PA forces arrested a wounded man inside the hospital who was accused of being a member of the Jenin battalion and was wanted by the Israeli army.
“The PA raid appeared to be the first time Palestinian forces publicly participated in an Israeli military assault in the West Bank,” Shalash reported.
The Hamas political party condemned the Palestinian Authority’s raid on al-Razi Hospital, saying that it was a move that “crosses all red lines and national ethics.”
Islamic Jihad also condemned the PA, saying, “We hold the authority in Ramallah and its security services responsible for participating and colluding in this aggression after they provided [Israel] with [assistance] in imposing a siege on the Jenin camp.”
Israeli military bulldozers and other vehicles destroyed vital infrastructure and streets in Jenin as part of the raid.
On 21 January, three Palestinian doctors and two nurses were injured by Israeli fire in Jenin, according to Wafa news agency.That same day, Israeli forces shot and killed another teenage boy, 16-year-old Motaz Imad Mousa Abu Tabeekh during the attack on Jenin.
“As a fragile ceasefire takes hold in Gaza, the Israeli military now turns its attention to Jenin, whose residents have been targeted with lethal force again and again,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at Defense for Children International-Palestine.“Palestinian children are still not safe as Israeli forces continue to target Palestinian childhood with impunity.”
Israeli forces have killed seven Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of January, according to documentation collected by DCIP.
Four children were killed by Israeli drone strikes and three children were shot and killed with live ammunition.
Nearly 2,000 families in Jenin and the refugee camp have been displaced over the last month due to the concurrent sieges by the PA and Israel.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military has been scaling up its arrests and abductions of Palestinians in the West Bank, and raiding homes of prisoners who are scheduled to be released starting this coming weekend in the first phase of the prisoner swap under the terms of the Gaza ceasefire.
Israeli forces abducted dozens of Palestinians in the town of Azzoun in the northern West Bank on 20 January.
Al Jazeera reported that Israeli forces also stormed the town of Deir Sammit, west of Hebron, raiding homes of prisoners. The military also stormed the Aida camp in Bethlehem, launching a wide-scale arrest campaign.The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on Wednesday that Israeli forces tightened security for the third consecutive day at most entrances and exits of the governorates in the West Bank.
Settler attacks expand
Israeli settlers carried out several attacks across the occupied West Bank this week, including setting fire to homes and shops in towns west of Qalqiliya. The Palestine Red Crescent Society reports that at least 12 people were injured.
The United Nations stated that there has been a surge in access restrictions and attacks in the wake of the establishment of new settler-colonial outposts.
Last week, Israeli settlers carried out multiple attacks across the Nablus governorate, targeting homes and other properties in Huwwara, Qusra, Madama and Burin villages. In Huwwara, settlers injured four Palestinians and damaged a commercial shop by stone-throwing, and in Burin, settlers set fire to a Palestinian-owned vehicle and an under-construction, livelihood structure, the UN stated.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that settlers, backed by the Israeli army, threw molotov cocktails and rioted, injuring six Palestinians in the town of Sinjil.
On Wednesday, the Wafa news agency reported that five Palestinians were injured in settler attacks in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron.An activist told Wafa that dozens of Israeli settlers attacked residents in Masafer Yatta, assaulted them and sprayed tear gas in their faces, which led to the injury of an elderly man.
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to share images of people expressing determination and resilience in the aftermath of Israel’s 15-month campaign of destruction.
This photo of Palestinians laying out the measurements for a home on the ground cleared of rubble was posted by Tamer Nahed in Gaza, with the caption “we will rebuild it.”
Journalist Yousef Fares took this video of Palestinians returning to Jabaliya refugee camp and clearing rubble. And finally, the Sameer Project, an aid organization in Gaza, posted this video of Palestinians singing and playing traditional folk songs.
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