Rights and Accountability 19 September 2025
Israel’s massacres and destruction in Gaza City are escalating without limits. Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, 16 September.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 18 September livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel has killed at least 416 Palestinians and injured at least 2,200 between 10 September and 17 September, according to official records from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Airstrikes across Gaza, concentrated in Gaza City, have been constant and relentless. Israel has continued to obliterate high-rise towers, apartment buildings, tent shelters and entire families trying to flee on foot and in vehicles.
Journalist Islam Bader filmed a missile strike on the Eqbi mosque in al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City on Tuesday.
Israel attacked the Beach refugee camp in western Gaza City this past week, shelling homes and shelters.
Journalist Ayman al-Hessy documented an Israeli airstrike on a home in the Beach camp on 13 September, which sparked fires inside adjacent buildings and structures.
He said that over three days, the Israeli army attacked the camp with a barrage of shells and missiles.Gaza resident Jehad Madhoun captured this airstrike on a home in the camp on 11 September.
On 15 September, Israel bombed the Ghafri high-rise building in Gaza City. Reporter Ahmad Ibrahim filmed this clip.The day before, Israel struck the Mahna tower. Ahmad Ibrahim captured the destruction on camera.
Al Jazeera shared this video of an Israeli missile strike on a residential building in the Nasr neighborhood on 12 September.
Videographer Hamza Qreiqeh captured the moment an Israeli airstrike hit a building in the Rayis neighborhood on 13 September.That day, Israel also targeted the Palestine stadium, where forcibly displaced families had sought shelter. Reporters Nahed Hajjaj and Saed Hasballah filmed the aftermath of the attacks, as distraught parents rushed their injured children to Al-Shifa Hospital.
Israel also targeted a vehicle carrying displaced Palestinians, including children, on 16 September, engulfing it in flames and killing everyone inside.
Ibrahim al-Khalili, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, reported from al-Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City that same day. He had to report on the killing of many of his close family members.Israel destroyed what was left of the Islamic University of Gaza, a prestigious institution that was one of the first universities to be bombed during the first few months of the genocide and had since been used as a makeshift shelter for forcibly displaced families.
On 14 September, Israel shelled the already bombed-out buildings three consecutive times.
Ramy Abdu of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that “after the first and second shellings, a number of displaced people returned to the site to try to retrieve some of their belongings. In the third shelling, high-explosive bombs were used that directly targeted the building. Dozens of victims and missing persons are still under the rubble up to this moment.”Journalist Abdelaziz Khalil filmed this clip of the attacks.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces bombed an area near the front gate of Al-Shifa Hospital, where displaced families have sheltered in tents. The attack killed at least 13 people and wounded others.
Video and images of the aftermath of the attacks show people strewn on the ground in pools of blood or being carried by others in total panic.
The day before, on Tuesday, Israel targeted the area around Al-Shifa Hospital with airstrikes. Journalist Mahmoud Abusalama reported from the aftermath of Tuesday’s attacks. Compounding the massacres and destruction, the Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said telephone lines and internet connections were down due to Israeli attacks on several main network routes supplying the region.Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that this leaves Gaza City in total communications blackout, isolating around 800,000 Palestinians and silencing their voices as Israel attacks escalate.
Children’s hospital bombed
Israel bombed Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday.
Dr. Muneer al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, reported that the specialized pediatric facility was struck three times in rapid succession, leaving 80 patients trapped in separate departments, including four children in pediatric intensive care and eight newborns in neonatal care.“It is a scene where patients’ breaths mingle with the roar of explosions, and mothers’ cries with the whistle of rockets … Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, once a house of healing, has today become a field of death,” al-Bursh said.
On Tuesday, 16 September, Dr. Ali Tahrawi, a physician in a hospital in central Gaza, uploaded a video to his Instagram showing a toddler who was brought in after an airstrike, her face blackened from burns and her torso ripped apart, with her internal organs spilling out.
Tahrawi stands beside the little girl, in shock, not saying a word, while he and the hospital staff try to dress her gaping wound and watch her take her last, gasping breath.
“Seventeen hours into my exhausting shift, carrying the weight of unbearable stories; families escaping death in the north, only to face more death here, and others arriving with injuries that could not be treated there,” Tahrawi wrote on Instagram.
“I finally lay down to rest my back. But then came another airstrike. Minutes later, the ambulances arrived with the wounded. Among them was this girl. I saw her heart stop beating, and I feel mine will stop soon.”
“My message to the world is simple: if we are left to burn in this hell alone, then humanity itself has already died. This world is no longer human. And the silence that allowed all of this will haunt you forever.”
Activist and social media creator Tommy Marcus, who runs the account Quentin Quarantino and is on board one of the dozens of boats in the Global Sumud flotilla on their way to Gaza, said that he got in touch with Tahrawi to ask about the girl’s name – something many people asked about on social media.
Tahrwawi told him that the girl’s parents and baby brother were all killed in the airstrike, leaving no one alive to tell the physicians her name.
Mass forced displacement
As Israel’s carnage in Gaza City escalates without limits, the Gaza government media office estimates that nearly 200,000 residents have been forced to leave their homes under the threat of airstrikes and shelling. But the office says that more than 15,000 people returned to their neighborhoods earlier this week after failing to find adequate housing or basic necessities in the south.
Photographer Mahmoud Abu Hamda compiled these clips of Palestinians being forced to leave Gaza City and the north over the past week.
Al Mezan Center for Human Rights reported that Israel’s intensified attacks on multi-story residential buildings “are part of Israel’s plan to take over the city, in a severe escalation of the genocide. Relentless and deliberate attacks on Gaza City’s residential areas have generated a state of fear and panic among Palestinians, causing thousands to escape towards southern Gaza, particularly to Mawasi Khan Younis.”
Most Palestinians fleeing Gaza City, the human rights group added, “are forced to walk on foot, as transportation remains largely unavailable due to the lack of fuel and, in rare instances where transportation is available, the cost of moving their belongings soared to nearly $1,000. The extreme trauma of being forcibly displaced is compounded by the need to walk for hours on end while also experiencing famine, leading to severe exhaustion.”
Israel is currently trying to concentrate Gaza’s entire population into so-called “humanitarian zones” in southern Gaza. “Only 12 percent of Gaza’s total area” belongs to a “humanitarian zone,” Al Mezan adds.
The Gaza government media office stated that al-Mawasi “has been subjected to more than 109 airstrikes and repeated shelling, resulting in over 2,000 deaths in successive massacres perpetrated by the occupation army.”
These areas are completely devoid “of the basic necessities of life, with no hospitals, no infrastructure, and no essential services such as water, food, shelter, electricity, or education, making living there almost impossible,” the media office added.
UN commission declares genocide
Meanwhile, children and adults alike are continuing to die of starvation across Gaza. On Wednesday, the Gaza health ministry said it has recorded the deaths by starvation so far of 432 Palestinians, 146 of whom are children.
One of the mechanisms that Israel and the United States have been using to impose and entrench starvation as a means of collective punishment and genocide has been through the private Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, has found that the GHF plays a significant role in the genocide as it masquerades as a food aid distribution mechanism.
Earlier this week, the UN commission released a 70-page report that concludes that Israel, through its acts and intentions, is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The commission urged Israel and all states “to fulfill their legal obligations under international law to end the genocide and punish those responsible for it.”
“The intention of the Israeli authorities to continuously impose starvation and unlivable conditions of life for Palestinians in Gaza is also evident through the establishment and use of the GHF to maintain total control over aid distribution in Gaza,” the report declares.
Navi Pillay, the chair of the commission, read out her remarks in Geneva on Tuesday as the report was published.
Included in the commission’s report are documented testimonies of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, particularly children, who have been raped, sexually assaulted and tortured by Israeli prison forces.Considering the evidence in totality, the commission says it finds “that the Israeli security forces have intentionally inflicted serious bodily and mental harm on the Palestinians in Gaza.”
In her remarks, Pillay added that Israel “has flagrantly disregarded the orders for provisional measures from the International Court of Justice and warnings from [UN] member states, UN offices, human rights organizations and civil society groups, and continued the strategy of destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The commission found that the Israeli authorities “had no intention to change their course of action. On the contrary, Israeli authorities have persisted and continued with their genocidal campaign in Gaza for almost two years now. Israel must immediately end the genocide in Gaza and comply fully with the orders for provisional measures of the International Court of Justice,” Pillay added.
Chris Sidoti, a member of the commission, spelled out the failure by obligated member states to stop the genocide.
Israel, not surprisingly, accused the United Nations commissioners of being anti-Semitic and proxies of Hamas. Here was Sidoti’s response.Raids, mass arrests in West Bank
Turning to the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces carried out mass arrests and abductions this past week in cities in the north, particularly in Tulkarm.
Qassam Moadi of Mondoweiss reported that Israeli forces arrested at least 1,000 Palestinians in a single day on 11 September, during a wide-ranging raid on Tulkarm.“The raid came following a roadside bomb attack on an armored Israeli military vehicle earlier in the day, taking place near a checkpoint outside the city. The attack wounded two Israeli soldiers, according to the Israeli army radio,” Moadi wrote.
The Israeli army’s response was one of “collective vengeance,” said Hussein Sheikh Ali, a Tulkarm resident and local social activist.
Ali told Mondoweiss, “The occupation’s soldiers began to go from house to house, searching and damaging people’s belongings.”
The Israeli army arrested hundreds of Palestinian men and youth in the streets, Ali said, picking them up at random, based on who happened to be present at work or in the streets.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said that Israeli occupation forces have detained approximately 120 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over the last few days and have continued to escalate arrest raids in al-Khalil, Jenin, Qalqilya and Nablus.
The Wafa news agency said that at least 30 Palestinians were detained between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning alone.The total number of detentions in the West Bank since the beginning of the ongoing genocide on Gaza has reached approximately 19,000, including more than 590 women and approximately 1,550 children.
These figures include those who were kept in detention by the occupation and those who were later released, but do not account for thousands of detainees from Gaza, the Prisoners Society explained.
In addition to mass arrests, Israeli bulldozers destroyed Palestinian greenhouses in Tulkarm on 12 September.
And elsewhere in the northern West Bank, Israeli forces carried out raids in and around Nablus this week. Wafa news agency reported that a young Palestinian man was injured on Tuesday evening during an Israeli military incursion into the town of Qusra, south of Nablus.Wafa’s sources said that several military vehicles stormed the town and roamed its streets, sparking confrontations with local residents. Israeli soldiers attacked residents with live bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters, injuring the young man with live ammunition.
On Tuesday, two Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the village of Qalqiliya and their bodies were withheld, according to the Wafa news agency.
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Gaza.
Nine-year-old Banyas is a naturalist. She has made videos on Instagram exploring Gaza’s flora and fauna.
Along with her cousin and her little brother Iyas, she recently recorded this video at her grandpa’s home in Gaza City, where she found a small insect friend in her cup.
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