The Mondoweiss Palestine news team discusses what led to the Israeli escalation in Gaza and the West Bank this past week, its impact on Palestinian and Israeli politics, and what Palestinians in Gaza lived through.
Pro-Israel groups are praising President Joe Biden’s response to Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, which the administration has voiced full support for. The airstrikes have killed at least 46 Palestinians, almost half of them civilians and 16 of them children.
“There is not a single day that passes without reading or watching Israelis kill Palestinians,” Eman Hamed, a mother of four, tells Tareq Hajjaj in a Gaza city park. “My 77-year-old mother always says that she has lived her entire life in wars. I was born in wars as well, and my four kids were born in war, so how could I say that the war ended?”
My family members were killed in Israel’s massacre in May 2021. This year, my childhood friends were killed in the latest escalation. This is life in Gaza. Sometimes, to survive, you have to die. And to live, you have to die, too.
Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general who is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, praises onslaught on Gaza that killed 15 children as an “exceptional achievement.” Yadlin was protested at Harvard earlier this year. But he is excited now that PM Yair Lapid has passed the manhood test.
A surprising number of Democratic politicians running in close elections have not been vocally supportive of Israel after it attacked Gaza. They include Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, John Fetterman, and most of the candidates in the crowded 10th district in New York. These Dems surely see Israel as an issue that is going to cause them problems with Democratic voters, so they avoid the association.
An Egyptian-brokered ceasefire went into effect at 11:30pm local time (20:30 GMT). Palestinian Islamic Jihad announced the ceasefire in a statement, adding that they have a right to “respond to any Zionist aggression.”
Mondoweiss correspondent in Gaza Tareq Hajjaj reported that Israeli airstrikes were ongoing in the last hour leading up to the ceasefire.
The Gaza Health Ministry reports that 43 Palestinians, including 15 children, have been killed in Gaza since Israel began airstrikes on the besieged strip on Friday.
Amid the latest Israeli onslaught, Gaza’s sole power plant shut down after Israel closed its border crossings with the besieged strip and cut off its fuel supply. “The state of electricity in Gaza is already terrible without the continuous bombardment, and with it darkness becomes another kind of war,” Gaza resident Khaled Hassan tells Mondoweiss.
Palestinian families aren’t done crying over the 232 loved ones they lost in Israel’s last “war” in May of 2021. Hospitals haven’t finished treating many of the 1900 people who were injured in that attack, and now this latest round of aggression is piling on the cases they have to treat. Neither were the humanitarian organizations able to rebuild all the damaged sectors in time for the latest onslaught.
Twelve Palestinians, including a five-year-old child, were killed after Israeli air strikes targeted a civilian tower and several locations in the besieged Gaza Strip.