Rights and Accountability 4 July 2025
A mother cares for her surviving son, Mazen, after his twin brother Ahmad died due to severe malnutrition and a lack of infant formula. Israel continues to ban food for infants in Gaza, 29 June.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 3 July livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel has bombarded areas across Gaza this week, killing 630 Palestinians and wounding more than 2,300 between 25 June and 2 July in airstrikes, tank shellings and by snipers – in attacks on residential buildings, tent shelters, cafes, and, at US-run so-called aid distribution sites.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said on 3 July that 118 Palestinians were killed and 581 injured in 24 hours, including 12 people killed and 49 injured at the aid points.
Since late May, when operations at these US-Israeli sites began, 652 starving Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,500 injured trying to obtain food aid.
Twenty four people were killed on 2 July trying to obtain a box of food.
The United Nations humanitarian office stated on 30 June that the Israeli military had issued yet another displacement order for people in areas of Jabaliya and Gaza city, in northern Gaza, affecting at least 150,000 Palestinians. The orders followed other displacement directives in central Gaza just days before.
People are being “pushed into overcrowded areas where thousands of others are already staying,” the UN added. These spaces lack shelter, water and sewage systems, as well as adequate medical facilities.
And they are being bombed.
On Tuesday, 1 July, at least 17 Palestinians were killed when Israel bombed a building housing forcibly displaced families in al-Zaytoun, a neighborhood of Gaza City.Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense, said that Israeli forces bombed 25 homes in Gaza City on Tuesday alone.
Basal added that the Israeli raids resulted in the deaths of 70 people that day, including 11 people waiting for aid, 12 children and 14 women, in addition to more than 200 wounded – some of whom are in critical condition.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that five people, including two children, were killed when Israeli airstrikes attacked the tents of displaced people in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, also on 1 July. Al-Mawasi is where Israel has ordered Palestinians in the north to flee.
Journalist Nahed Hajjaj documented the aftermath of Tuesday’s attacks from Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City, and spoke to a 10-year-old boy, Zein, who was taking care of his wounded younger siblings.
On Monday, 30 June, Israel bombed the crowded Baqa cafe on the seaside in Gaza City, killing more than 30 Palestinians, including children, and those gathering for a child’s birthday party. The cafe was a gathering spot for families who sought a moment of rest from the bombings and for journalists who needed internet access and a place to charge their phones.
A survivor of the attack, Ali Abu Ateila, who was inside the cafe when it was bombed, was quoted in the Associated Press, saying, “Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake.”Ismail Abu Hatab, a photojournalist who worked with various media outlets and who organized photo exhibitions outside Palestine, was killed in the bombing.
The Gaza government media office said that Abu Hatab is the 228th reporter and media worker to be killed by Israel since October 2023.Also on 30 June, the Israeli army bombed Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, for the 12th time in 21 months.
The government media office said that Israel targeted a tent for displaced persons inside the hospital compound, resulting in injuries and material damage to the medical facility. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from the site.
Killing fields
Meanwhile, Israeli and American forces continue to use the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites as killing fields.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated this week that “through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Israel has introduced a new killing mechanism cloaked in a humanitarian facade, further escalating the genocide in the Gaza Strip.”“The Israeli army’s targeting of starving people near distribution centers has become a systematic daily practice, carried out openly before the world, with international silence perpetuating impunity and allowing this dangerous pattern to continue unpunished,” the rights group added.
“This occurs as the international community – states and institutions – remains unable to take serious action to hold Israel accountable for its crimes, compel it to permit independent relief organizations to resume their work in the Gaza Strip, and lead humanitarian efforts that ensure the population’s vital needs are met while safeguarding their lives and dignity.”
Doctors Without Borders said that the US-Israeli scheme “is slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid and must be immediately dismantled.”
An emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza said that “The four distribution sites, all located in areas under the full control of Israeli forces after people had been forcibly displaced from there, are the size of football fields surrounded by watch points, mounds of earth and barbed wire. The fenced entrance gives only one access point in or out. GHF workers drop the pallets and the boxes of food and open the fences, allowing thousands in all at once to fight down to the last grain of rice.”
“If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot. If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot. If they arrive late, [or] they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone,’ they get shot.”
On 1 July, more than 160 non-governmental organizations operating in Gaza issued an urgent call for immediate action to end the slaughter at the military-controlled food distributions.
“Concentrating more than two million people into further confined areas for a chance to feed their families is not a plan to save lives,” the joint statement said.
The groups demanded that third-party states not fund these militarized schemes, but instead support the restoration of “a unified, UN-led coordination mechanism – grounded in international humanitarian law and inclusive of UNRWA, Palestinian civil society, and the wider humanitarian community – to meet people’s needs.”
This past week, the US State Department approved $30 million in funding for the shadowy US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, with Reuters reporting that the US could approve the same amount every month for an indefinite period.
Sources speaking anonymously to Reuters said that the State Department “exempted the foundation, which has not publicly disclosed its finances, from an audit usually required for groups receiving USAID grants for the first time.”
The foundation, which is reportedly based in Delaware but has no clear paper trail behind it, attempted to register an affiliate in Geneva.
But it came under legal scrutiny by the Swiss government over its failure to fulfill legal requirements to operate in Switzerland, Reuters reported, including having the correct number of board members, a postal address, or a Swiss bank account, none of which were provided.
Swiss media reported on 3 July that the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations ordered the formal dissolution of the Geneva affiliate of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The GHF attempted to open an affiliate in Switzerland to try to attract funding under the banner of neutrality and international Geneva, a central hub of international diplomatic missions, reported the Swiss broadcaster RTS earlier this week.
A Geneva-based lawyer who had been picked to lead the branch said that he resigned after realizing that international business partners had approached him without providing him with full information on the foundation.Children die of starvation
While people are killed every day at these so-called aid sites, and as thousands of tons of food, medicine, fuel and supplies remain trapped on the other side of Israeli checkpoints just kilometers away, Palestinian children are dying of starvation.
The Gaza government media office stated on 28 June that at least 66 children have been killed as a result of malnutrition and Israel’s policy of deliberately depriving children of baby formula, nutritional supplements and food.
As The Electronic Intifada’s senior editor Maureen Clare Murphy recently reported, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights warned that hundreds of infants and premature babies face “life-threatening danger” amid a shortage of therapeutic milk.
“Fortified milk is essential for infants with certain health conditions but supplies have run out at Gaza’s neonatal intensive care units and have all but disappeared in local markets due to Israel’s severe restrictions on what enters Gaza’s crossings,” Murphy wrote.
Dr. Jamil Suliman, the director of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City, was quoted by the Associated Press, saying that fortified formula required for newborns is out of stock and that many mothers “are unable to breastfeed due to severe malnutrition.”An American doctor told the French publication Le Monde that in preparation for his recent travel to Gaza on a medical mission, he had packed his suitcases full of basic medical supplies such as gauze, bandages and sanitary pads, and several cans of baby formula.
Once he arrived at the Allenby bridge crossing from Jordan, Israeli officers searched his bags and confiscated the baby formula.
The coordinator of the medical convoy, Diana Nazzal, told Le Monde “What other explanation is there, if it’s not that hunger is being used as a weapon of war in the ongoing genocide in Gaza?”
Physicians and women’s healthcare workers have warned of the accelerating crisis for breastfeeding women and their newborns on previous episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream and podcast.
Hospitals brace for collapse
The ongoing ban of fuel into Gaza will result in the imminent shut down essential facilities, the UN warned on 30 June, and will impact hospitals, water and sanitation equipment, telecommunications, the movement of cargo from crossings, and the operation of community kitchens.
Already, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza reported that Al-Shifa Hospital has suspended its kidney dialysis services due to fuel shortages, and that intensive care services will be limited to a few hours each day, the UN added.
Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud stated on 1 July that Al-Shifa Hospital “was once the largest healthcare facility in Gaza, but has slowly turned into a waiting room for death, not just because of the war wounds, but because of a lack of fuel that keeps everything running.”“This shows that survival in Gaza is not just about escaping the air strikes, but also about keeping the power on so patients can survive,” he said.
On 25 June, the World Health Organization said it was able to deliver its first medical shipment into Gaza since 2 March, a small convoy of nine trucks carrying essential medical supplies, 2,000 units of blood, and 1,500 units of plasma.
The blood and plasma were delivered to Nasser Medical Complex’s cold storage facility for onward distribution to hospitals facing critical shortages, amid a growing influx of injuries, many linked to incidents at food distribution sites, said the WHO.However, Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, a physician and writer in Gaza, announced this week that saline has run out at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
Leading doctor killed
One of Gaza’s leading doctors was killed along with his family in an Israeli airstrike on their tent shelter in Gaza City on 2 July.
Dr. Marwan al-Sultan was a cardiologist and the director of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, and was the 70th healthcare worker to be killed in the last 50 days, according to a member of Healthcare Workers Watch, quoted by The Guardian.
Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and a longtime colleague of al-Sultan, said that he “was a prominent scholar and one of the two remaining cardiologists left in Gaza. Thousands of heart patients will suffer as a result of his killing. His only fault was that he was a doctor. We have no option but to be steadfast, but the sense of loss is devastating.” International human rights organizations have renewed their calls to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was abducted by Israeli soldiers at the end of December 2024 and remains in Israeli detention.Dr. John Kahler, the co-founder of the Chicago-based medical organization MedGlobal, spoke to NBC News on 26 June and stated that he was “very afraid” that Abu Safiya “won’t make it out alive” from Israeli jail. Abu Safiya was MedGlobal’s lead physician in Gaza.
The organization says that five other members of its medical staff are among the approximately 180 civilian health workers from Gaza still held without charge in Israeli prisons.
In a new joint statement, 25 civil society organizations, including Glia, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, Physicians for Human Rights and Médecins du Monde International Network, are calling for the immediate release of the imprisoned health workers.
On 29 June, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was honored with an annual human rights award by the Palestine-based Lawyers for Justice organization.
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine and around the world.
Photojournalist Haneen Salem took these photos of a group of boys in Gaza.
“In a courtyard shattered by war and stripped of all signs of life, I found children sweeping the rubble with their tiny hands, trying to bring back a place that was once a playground,” she posted on Instagram.
“They ran barefoot after a faded ball, as if chasing days that haven’t arrived yet. I walked closer and asked one of them, “Aren’t you scared of the drones?” He looked up, breathless, and said, “When did we ever stop playing?” I smiled – not because the place was safe, but because their souls still believed that playing, here in Gaza, is the purest form of survival.”
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