Rights and Accountability 11 April 2025
First responders try to rescue Palestinians trapped under the rubble following Israeli airstrikes on Shujaiya, Gaza City, 9 April.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 10 April livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel has committed massacres across all areas of the Gaza Strip while, for the last six weeks, it has closed all the crossings – for food, fuel, medicines, construction vehicles and every other essential supply – plunging Gaza into another deep starvation and health crisis.
More than 390,000 people are estimated to have been displaced again, according to the United Nations, with no safe place to go.
Every day, dozens are killed in Israeli attacks. The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said that in the three weeks since Israel broke the ceasefire on 18 March, Israel has killed nearly 1,500 Palestinians.
Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif shared this video of Israeli “fire belt” strikes hitting Gaza City on 3 April.
Our contributor Abubaker Abed has been reporting on the attacks over the last week on Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where his cousin and his cousin’s child were killed at the gates of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on 5 April. The Israeli army has issued forced expulsion orders to residents of Deir al-Balah in the past week, threatening residents with attacks if they do not leave.The Israeli military said that it carried out attacks on 45 “targets” across Gaza between 8 and 9 April.
On Wednesday, 9 April, Israel attacked the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, destroying dozens of residential buildings and killing dozens of Palestinians.
An eyewitness told Al Jazeera, “We were talking in the street and suddenly we were shocked to see the building’s bricks flying apart – in addition to flying hands and feet.”
Another survivor said: “It is a massacre with the full meaning of the word. I haven’t seen or heard about a massacre like this since the start of the war. Most of the martyrs are children and defenseless civilians.”
Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defense corps, said that there were dozens of people missing and stuck underneath the rubble.
Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud said that the Israeli army “not only dropped multiple bombs, but these were also ‘earthquake bombs’ that shook the very foundation of nearby buildings, destroying the majority of them. Entire residential buildings have been turned into ruins. A large number of casualties arrived at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, but they are struggling because there is not sufficient medical care available due to shortages of supplies and doctors.”
Mahmoud said that civil defense crews needed to stop their rescue operations because armed Israeli drones hovered above them.
Also on Wednesday, Israeli airstrikes bombed the tents of displaced families in the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, killing three Palestinians, including a child.
On 8 April, Doctors Without Borders said its teams in a clinic in al-Mawasi received nine victims after a strike hit 300 meters away from the facility. Two were dead on arrival, including a 2-year-old boy, and the seven others were wounded.
Dr. Mohammad Shaath, an emergency room doctor working at the clinic, said, “Honestly, I can’t describe the scene and the injuries. In the stomach, head and chest. Absolute horror.”The day before, Israel bombed a community kitchen also in al-Mawasi that was distributing meals to displaced families.
Four children were killed in the airstrike.
This video by journalist Samer Abu Samra shows a man carrying the body of a small girl, who was wearing a traditional Palestinian thobe. He says, “Look, they’re all children, all of them.”
Another man says that the kitchen workers were distributing rice and lentils to children and Israel bombed them. And another witness says that the girl was 5, and the oldest of the children killed was 6.“This is so wrong,” he says, “nothing in the world justifies the killing of children.”
Rafah “wiped off the map”
In the south, the Gaza government media office said on 7 April that Rafah is “the city that the Israeli occupation wiped off the map and turned into a complete humanitarian disaster.”
The media office stated that Israel has transformed the entire Rafah governorate “into a closed military operations zone, completely isolating it from the rest of the Gaza Strip and considering it a complete red zone. It continues to commit horrific massacres against defenseless civilians, causing the systematic and comprehensive destruction of infrastructure, vital facilities, and residential homes, rendering the city uninhabitable.”
The occupation army, the media office added, “has completely destroyed more than 90 percent of the homes in the Rafah governorate, representing more than 20,000 buildings containing more than 50,000 housing units. In addition, 22 of the 24 water wells were destroyed, including the main ‘Canada Well’ and the distribution pumps, depriving tens of thousands of families of safe drinking water.”
The isolated Rafah governorate was not only bombed, “but was systematically destroyed and obliterated, in a scene that reflects the occupation’s premeditated intent to empty the land of its people and alter its geographic and demographic features,” the office stated.
Medicines at zero stock
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza reported this week that while medical teams and ambulance crews continue to operate under life-threatening conditions to save lives, 37 percent of medications and 59 percent of medical supplies are at zero stock.
This includes medications for operating rooms, intensive care units, and emergency departments that have been depleted to unprecedented levels, with higher percentages of critical medications being at zero stock, such as 54 percent of medications for cancer treatment, 40 percent of those for primary care and 51 percent of medicines for maternal and child health.
Furthermore, the destruction of diagnostic imaging equipment has severely restricted patients’ access to these vital services, while fuel shortages threaten to shut down the hospitals’ essential departments that rely on generators, the health ministry added.
The UN children’s fund UNICEF warned this week that Israel’s ongoing blockade of humanitarian aid is having terrible consequences for one million children in the Gaza Strip, and without essential food, medicine, shelter and safe water, malnutrition, diseases and other preventable conditions will likely surge, leading to an increase in preventable child deaths.
UNICEF said that complementary food for infants, which are crucial for growth when food stocks are low, has run out in central and southern Gaza.
Three journalists killed
Israel murdered three journalists this week in Gaza.
On 5 April, Israel bombed the home of journalist Islam Meqdad in Khan Younis, killing her and her son, Adam, along with five other members of her family.
Helmi al-Faqawi, who worked for the Palestine Today news agency, was killed when an Israeli airstrike targeted a media tent outside of the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on 7 April. Another man, Yousef al-Khazindar, was also killed. Al-Faqawi’s colleague, reporter Ahmed Mansour, was engulfed in flames as colleagues desperately attempted to save him.Mansour was left in critical condition with life-threatening injuries and succumbed to his wounds on Tuesday.
A witness to the airstrike told Middle East Eye that those in the tent “tried desperately to rescue Ahmed Mansour from the flames, but there were no resources available, as the [foam], wood and nylon in the tent quickly caught fire.”
The Gaza government media office said that eight other journalists were injured in the attack. A total of 211 reporters have now been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor condemned the public escalation of the slaughter of journalists.
The organization’s legal department director, Lima Bustani, stated, “Burning a journalist alive in Gaza is not aimed at silencing the truth. Israel already relies on a far greater force: the world’s indifference to the truth.”
Bustami explained that Israel’s systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists also sends a chilling message: “Your truth means nothing. We can kill you with the camera in your hand, and no one will save you.”
She added that Israel’s crimes against Palestinian journalists is “a performance of power [and] a declaration of impunity in action.”
Child prisoner Ahmad Manasra released
Turning to the occupied West Bank, The Electronic Intifada’s Tamara Nassar writes that Israel is subjecting Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank to a campaign of systematic ethnic cleansing, according to the human rights group Defense for Children International-Palestine.
Since the beginning of the year, Israel has killed 20 children in the West Bank.
Along with destroying children’s rights to live, Israeli soldiers are trying to destroy their rights to learn as well.
On 8 April, Israeli officials, accompanied by police, raided six separate UN-run schools in occupied Jerusalem and announced plans to close them within 30 days.
Phillippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said, “Some 800 boys and girls are directly impacted by these closure orders and are likely to miss finishing their school year.”
“These illegal closure orders come in the wake of Israeli Knesset legislation seeking to curtail UNRWA operations,” Lazzarini said.Al Jazeera correspondent Nour Odeh said that the closure of the UNRWA schools is “extremely problematic” because the children would likely end up at Israeli institutions run by the Jerusalem Municipality.
She explained that the children admitted to Israeli schools would no longer be taught under the Palestinian curriculum, but rather under an Israeli curriculum that erases Palestinian history and identity.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces are expanding their military attacks across the occupied West Bank, and continue to destroy homes inside the Jenin refugee camp.
The army also conducted heavy raids on Nablus and the Balata refugee camp on Wednesday.The Wafa news agency reported that Israeli occupation forces invaded the camp in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, deploying troops extensively inside and sealing off the camp’s entrances.
The soldiers ordered families to leave their homes at gunpoint and then ransacked them.
Palestine Red Crescent paramedics said that during the invasion of Balata, six Palestinians were shot and injured by Israeli soldiers, four with live ammunition and two with rubber-coated steel bullets. A child was hit in the face by a tear gas canister, and dozens more were suffering from tear gas inhalation.
And on Thursday, 10 April, 23-year-old Ahmad Manasra was released from Israeli prisons, after spending ten years inside and enduring what the Palestinian Prisoners Club says was physical and psychological torture, including solitary confinement, since his arrest in 2016.
The Israeli army released Manasra far from the Nafha prison in the Naqab, where he was imprisoned, while his family awaited his release at the prison gate, Al Jazeera reported.A Bedouin resident in the Bir al-Saba area recognized Manasra, contacted his family and informed them of their son’s release.
The Electronic Intifada’s Omar Karmi wrote in 2022 that Manasra’s case “came to wider public attention in 2015 when a leaked video of his interrogation was broadcast by Palestinian media.”
Manasra spent the last 10 years in Israeli prisons, and was held in solitary confinement for the past five months, which has worsened his mental health condition, according to the family’s lawyer.
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine.
Afeef Nassouli, a journalist and a volunteer with the medical solidarity organization Glia, posted this clip of himself on the beach near Khan Younis this week.
He writes, “I know you’re seeing terrible things coming out of Gaza right now, and I am glad advocates are sharing the images and the realities in the north. The loudness of strikes and drones is torturous. The images are hard to watch because they are truly happening to human beings that are just down the way.”
“But, Gaza is so much more than Israel’s demolition derby and Palestinians are so much more than their suffering in this moment. My heart is having a hard time adding to the barrage of images that convey the reality of genocide because I don’t want to make my time here about sharing images you already have.”
“I went to the beach for a walk after doing some work in Khan Younis the other day, and I wanted to share with you the ultimate resistance: Palestinian kids having a little bit of fun even amidst strikes and drones and death. They are the future of this nation and their health and happiness is the purest form of resisting this mass murder.”
Nassouli adds that a colleague of his told him something that so many in Gaza express about the beach: “The beach…is the one place that the war can’t change or steal from us.”
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