Rights and Accountability 10 October 2025
Palestinians celebrate in Nuseirat refugee camp following the announcement of the ceasefire deal, 9 October.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 9 October livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Early Thursday morning, news of a possible end to the slaughter began to circulate across Gaza.
Journalist Salah al-Jafarawi and his colleagues, along with recording their own updates, informed people by walking in the streets and shouting that there was an end to the war and a hopeful truce. Reporter Anas Ayyad captured this clip.
Later in the day, al-Jafarawi filmed celebrations in the streets. Members of Gaza’s heroic civil defense, he says, share in the joy of the news of a ceasefire.
Palestinians on the ground in Gaza City say that since the ceasefire talks in Egypt began earlier this week, Israel only continued to escalate its attacks.The Gaza government media office stated on Wednesday that in the four days since the announcement of a potential truce, Israel carried out 271 separate attacks, killing approximately 126 people, 80 of whom were killed in Gaza City.
Our longtime contributor Mohammad Asad uploaded images and video after the Israeli army destroyed his home earlier this week, on 7 October, in Gaza City, forcing his family to seek shelter once again.
His home was damaged in previous attacks, and his family worked to clean it up and repair it, but this week, it was completely razed to the ground. “Our dreams turned into a mirage,” he said.
The Gaza government media office released updated statistics on the two years of genocide, including figures on the destruction of homes, livelihood, health and infrastructure across Gaza.
Among the data set was an estimate that Israel has dropped more than 200,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since October 2023.
More than 835 mosques were completely destroyed, the media office added, and at least 180 others were damaged, while three churches were damaged in bombings. More than half of all of Gaza’s 60 cemeteries have been targeted as well, 14 of which have been destroyed and 18 partially destroyed.
The media office estimates that nearly 80,000 Palestinians have been killed or are still missing since the beginning of the genocide, 67,000 of whom were brought to hospitals and recorded as killed by the health ministry. Nearly 10,000 are missing and still buried under the rubble, and approximately 20,000 children have been killed.
Among the dead are 1,015 infants under a year old. Approximately 460 Palestinians have died from starvation.
And nearly 170,000 have been injured, including 19,000 who will need long-term rehabilitation. Around 4,800 people have had their limbs amputated, nearly a fifth of them children.
Israeli armored vehicles packed with explosives have continued to destroy buildings and entire city blocks around Gaza City, particularly in the Sabra neighborhood, where this video from journalist Ahmed al-Saifi was filmed on Wednesday.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported on 8 October that Israeli forces were “scaling up attacks aimed at the systematic destruction of the city’s remaining infrastructure, flattening what is left of residential buildings, public facilities and entire neighborhoods.”
“The army is reportedly using remote-controlled explosive robots, alongside air attacks and heavy artillery, to demolish densely built areas,” Mahmoud added.
“Fighter jets have targeted wide boulevards and high-rise blocks in the city center, leaving large sections of Gaza City reduced to rubble. Despite talk of a potential agreement, many in Gaza believe the Israeli military is rushing to complete the destruction before any truce takes effect. On the ground, people describe what feels like the final stage of destruction, an effort to render Gaza uninhabitable by erasing all means of life.”
On 3 October, reporter Hamza Qreiqeh spoke to a grandmother who survived an Israeli attack on tent shelters at the Gaza port.
Sitting on the floor next to a metal bed with no mattress, where two small children lay unconscious, she asks, “what did children do to deserve this? Three children and their mother, who is my daughter, and my sister, over 15 people were killed in this strike. What did they do?”
She says that they were displaced from Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, and the Israeli army targeted their tent.
Palestinian civil defense workers in Gaza say that the situation in the north of Gaza is apocalyptic, especially following last week’s closure by Israel of the main north-south road in and out of Gaza City and the rest of the northern governorates.
Civil defense ambulance services worker Mohammad Tammous was filmed by journalist Mohammad Abu Loay on 5 October.
Tammous says that massacres, bombings, and detonations were happening around the clock with no let-up.“Entire landmarks and blocks have been erased, and have fallen on top of residents’ heads. Entire families are erased from the civil registry. In northern Gaza, life has become almost non-existent. There is no electricity, water, food or drink or anything suitable for life. The situation here is very difficult, very catastrophic,” he said.
On 7 October, marking two years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Palestinian civil defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal described what 24 months of relentless assault has taken from Palestinians, with the whole world watching.
He said that along with the enormous death toll, 2,700 families have been completely erased from the registry, and 6,000 people are now the sole survivors of their entire families. More than 90 percent of all homes in Gaza, Basal says, have been destroyed in Israel’s two-year assault.More than 80 percent of Gaza itself is under the control of the Israeli occupation.
Also on Tuesday, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reported that a Palestinian child was shot in the head in eastern Gaza, and six Palestinians were killed in separate attacks in the southern city of Khan Younis.
“This shows that despite everything going on in the negotiations over the US-proposed ceasefire deal, Palestinians are still being killed throughout the Gaza Strip,” Khoudary said.
“The Israeli military’s explosive robots continue destroying residential neighborhoods, where Palestinians know that even if this war is brought to an end, they won’t find anything to go back to.”
Maha Husseini, a journalist, human rights worker and researcher in Gaza with Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, recorded this video for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council meeting earlier this week.
Decimation of healthcare services
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza reported on Tuesday that Israel’s destruction of the health system over the last two years is complete and deliberate.
“Over the course of 730 days, [the health sector] has been subjected to devastating and lethal attacks that have ravaged the very fabric of its services and infrastructure,” the health ministry stated.
“These crimes have earned the description ‘health genocide’ due to the catastrophic indicators that have ravaged the health and humanitarian landscape in the Gaza Strip.”
More than 1,700 medical personnel have been killed, and 362 are still detained in Israeli torture camps, where they are being deprived of basic human rights.
Twenty five hospitals out of 38 are completely out of service, leaving only 13 still partially operating under difficult conditions. Israel has also destroyed 103 primary healthcare facilities.
More than 50 percent of all medicines are currently out of stock, two-thirds of all medical supplies are out of stock, and nearly 70 percent of laboratory supplies are out of stock, the ministry adds.
James Elder, the spokesperson for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, reported from Gaza on the prevention by the Israeli army of newborn incubators earlier this week, deliberately denying the most fragile babies basic machinery to keep them alive.
Flotilla activists detained
Last week, we reported on the Global Sumud Flotilla, the 44 boats with nearly 500 humanitarian aid activists that attempted to break Israel’s siege on Gaza.
All of the boats were eventually hijacked and seized by Israeli forces, but the last boat, the Marinette, evaded Israeli capture until Friday, 3 October.
Right before it was hijacked, a Marinette passenger delivered this final message to Palestinians in Gaza.
After seizing all of the boats and unlawfully towing them out of international waters into the Ashdod port, Israeli forces detained all of the activists in Ashdod before transferring them to the notorious Ketziot prison in the Naqab desert.
In Ashdod, Israel’s extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir taunted and screamed at the flotilla activists, calling them terrorists.
After her release, a Turkish activist described the abusive treatment that they experienced at the hands of Israeli guards.She says, “we protested Ben-Gvir very well. I said, ‘shut your big mouth, you genocidal filth.’”
She goes on to describe the harsh conditions inside the prison, and says that there was writing on the wall in dried blood, words written by Palestinian women who had been imprisoned there before. The detained activists were told to drink water from the toilets.Twenty two-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was a participant on the flotilla, was singled out for abuse, according to eyewitnesses. She was physically assaulted, and Israeli soldiers attached an Israeli flag to her back and tied her hands.
Italian journalist Lorenzo Agostino described her treatment.
After she was released, Greta Thunberg said this at a press conference: Shifa Abdi, a Finnish-Somali activist, told reporters after she was released from Israeli detention that the most shocking thing about the prison wasn’t the abuse they faced, but the place itself.“When we arrived at the prison, there was a picture on the wall showing the destruction of Gaza, all the houses in ruins, and Palestinians in Gaza trying to find their families or their belongings,” she recounted.
“And on that picture, it says in Arabic Gaza al-Jedida or New Gaza. They are proud of it. What they have done to Gaza is a source of pride for them. Beneath it, there was a large, dried bloodstain. We had to anxiously think about what had been done to the Palestinians here. Every cell was filled with the names of Palestinian men.”
Abdi adds that they found a piece of cloth to clean with “because no one cleaned anything there, and on it, there was an embroidered name, Abu Alaa. That’s how we found out the names of the Palestinian prisoners. Every night I was anxiously thinking, where had these men been taken? What had been done to them? Where is Abu Alaa? I’m in Helsinki now, but where is Abu Alaa? Alaa’s father, where is he? What have they done to him?”
Another flotilla of three boats, named Gaza Sunbirds, Alaa Al-Najjar and Anas Al-Sharif, set off toward Gaza from southern Europe as the Global Sumud Flotilla was being hijacked last week.
All three boats were intercepted and hijacked by Israeli forces early in the morning on 8 October. This footage is of the Gaza Sunbirds boat being taken by Israel:
Highlighting resilience
And finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Gaza and around the world.
Al Jazeera journalist Nour Abu Rokba filmed herself with a group of kids on 4 October, and she asked why they were happy. “We want an end to the war!” they answer.
She asks them where they want to go, and they say they want to go back to their homes and play with their friends.
Our contributor Asem Alnabih posted this photo of a tree in east Gaza City on 3 October:
“This is the Sidra tree, legend says it’s a thousand years old,” Asem writes. “Some believe it’s a blessed tree, while others believe it grew over the grave of a saint. Palestinians in Gaza say that people have been unable to uproot it over the past centuries, and that its roots extend dozens of meters underground.”“This tree sits at the intersection overlooking the Sayyid Hashim Mosque, where the tomb of the Prophet’s grandfather, peace and blessings be upon him, is located to the south. If you walk a little east of the tree, you’ll reach the al-Hakimiyya neighborhood, where I’ve lived for half my life. I’ve never found a neighborhood like it on earth.”
“I passed by the tree today, and memories of a city of roots, destroyed by the machine of killing and destruction, came flooding back. However, the Gazan tree, impervious to uprooting, spoke volumes that tongues cannot express: this land remains rooted and eternal, and will never die.”
And finally, reporter Saleh al-Jafarawi captured this clip of the moment he came home and found his cat waiting for him at the door, on 6 October. “I missed you,” he says to his cat.
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