Israeli settlers have been organizing attacks against Palestinian herding communities to drive them off their land. Nearly 800 Palestinians have been driven out of their homes and communities since 7 October.

• The Electronic Intifada

“Thousands of stories are being told in Gaza,” writes Ruwaida Amer from the bombarded and besieged territory, giving some snapshots of life and death amid a feeling of grave uncertainty.

• The Electronic Intifada

“One consequence of the West’s support for the genocide of the Palestinians is the dissemination of the belief that Israel and the Jews are coextensive, that Jews belong in Israel and nowhere else,” writes Muhannad Hariri. “This belief, with its anti-Semitic roots in the West, is what drove Britain to establish a Zionist colony in Palestine.”

• The Electronic Intifada

Would Israel be able to get away with the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza without the shameful silence of Arab governments? Or to put it more crudely, Haidar Eid asks from Gaza, would this have happened had the normalization deals not been signed?

• The Electronic Intifada

Abu Hamza, the spokesperson for the Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, said that Israel’s indiscriminate bombing was endangering the lives of captives held in Gaza. In a nearly seven-minute video message, Abu Hamza said Israel was stalling “to escape paying the price,” alluding to a prisoner exchange.

Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’ politburo, said that the Israeli military’s claim that it had rescued a soldier held captive in Gaza was false and aimed at blunting the impact of a video released by the Qassam Brigades earlier in the day. That video showed three Israeli women held captive in Gaza in which one of them, speaking in Hebrew, forcefully accuses her government of wanting to kill all the captives. She says “free their citizens, free their prisoners, free us, free all of us” before shouting “now!”

Three prominent Palestinian human rights groups – Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – said they welcomed the visit made by Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to Rafah Crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border on 29 October. The rights groups urged Khan’s office to “insist that it be granted access to the occupied Palestinian territory to conduct an independent, on-site investigation” and to “immediately issue arrest warrants for the cases of international crimes committed by Israeli authorities and military personnel across the occupied Palestinian territory since 13 June 2014.”

The Washington-based human rights watchdog DAWN stated that the US “should oppose any Israeli actions that could result in the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza” and that Congress should “reject a supplementary funding bill that proposes funding humanitarian aid to Palestinians who have been displaced from Gaza to neighboring countries.” Sarah Leah Whitson, the group’s director, said the Biden administration is bankrolling ethnic cleansing.

The UN agency for Palestine refugees UNRWA said that 64 of its staff and personnel had been killed in Gaza since 7 October, with 10 of them slain in the past 72 hours. “This is the highest number of UN aid workers killed in a conflict in such a short time,” said UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini.

Mousa Khaled Mousa Jabarin, 16 years old, was killed by an Israeli drone-fired missile in Jenin refugee camp during an hours-long raid in the northern West Bank resistance stronghold. Three additional Palestinians were killed, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA: Amir Abdullah Shurbaji, 25, Nawras Ibrahim Zeidan Bajawi Turkman, 28, and Wiam Iyad Ahmad al-Hanoun, 27.

Physicians for Human Rights Israel said that it had urged the health and religion ministers in the country “to prevent the burial of any unidentified bodies and remains collected from the 7 October attack “until receiving approval from the Institute of Forensic Medicine.” The group said there was “growing concern from the families of hostages and missing persons that burials are being hastened for religious reasons without exhausting all identification measures.”

Israel bombed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the only specialized cancer treatment center in Gaza, causing significant damage, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera said that it was “shocked and outraged by the Israeli threat towards Al Jazeera English journalist Youmna Elsayed and her family in the Gaza Strip. Her family received a threat claiming to be from Israeli forces forcing them to leave their homes.” The threat comes only days after the killing of Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh’s family members after they followed Israel’s general evacuation order affecting more than a million Palestinians in the north half of Gaza.