Israel’s security cabinet ruled on Wednesday that it would not be returning the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces to their family for burial, following weeks of appeals from the family of Ahmed Erekat, who was shot dead at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank in June.

Imagine being left to fend for yourself against the coronavirus, as your home is threatened by demolition, and your family is living under military occupation. That is the reality for Palestinians living in the village of al-Walaja. Watch the second episode in a five-part Mondoweiss series on how Palestinians are surviving under both a global pandemic, and the Israeli occupation.

After months of recording remarkably low rates of COVID-19 infection, the Gaza Strip is witnessing a worrying outbreak of the virus, recording nearly 300 new cases in just the past week — and it’s just the beginning.

The first commercial Israeli flight from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi took off Monday morning, signifying the latest step in Israeli-UAE normalization efforts. Jared Kushner said the flight meant, “peace and prosperity are possible in this region,” but for Palestinians, it signified the opposite. Instead, it serves as a reminder of the “betrayal” of their cause by the UAE, and their painful history since the Nakba.

What would you do if you were living in a refugee camp during a global pandemic? For the first time in months, Palestinian refugee camps are seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases raising concerns over the potentially devastating effects the virus can have on disadvantaged communities like the Dheisheh refugee camp.

New cases of COVID-19 were reported among relatives in the al-Maghazi refugee camp, where, as is the case in most refugee camps, overcrowding and poor infrastructure poses a major threat to the community’s ability to stop the spread of the virus.

Israel has been bombing Gaza for eight days straight, all as part of what Israel says is a response to incendiary balloons sent from Gaza into Israeli territory. “We’ve been through this countless times,” Omar Ghraieb, 33, a Palestinian journalist told Mondoweiss, “but it’s harder now with a global pandemic and the whole world falling apart, no electricity and no water.”

In the wake of the normalization agreement between Israel and the UAE, Palestinians have taken to the streets across the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip to denounce the deal, which they have described as the ultimate “betrayal” and a “stab in the back.”

In the past 24 hours alone, there were more than 612 new cases, a third of which were reported in occupied East Jerusalem, which has seen a surge in cases recently.

Palestinian children prepare to return to school as COVID-19 rates skyrocket.