Nearly three years after a November 2023 Israeli airstrike buried them in the rubble, Gaza families recovered 112 of their dead and laid them to rest, including a mother still embracing her three children.

An Israeli strike destroyed two major medicine warehouses in Deir al-Balah, the latest Israeli attack on Gaza’s failing health system. Gaza’s Health Ministry says medicine shortages are now killing three cancer patients a day.

Hours after Donald Trump announced a “historic” agreement for disarming Hamas and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Israel attacked Gaza, killing 19. Palestinians weren’t surprised. “We don’t trust Israel, and we don’t trust America,” said one resident.

Despite displacement, hunger, and the loss of their homes, Gaza’s students sat for their national high school exams and still came out on top.

The church’s action follows resolutions by two other religious bodies at their summer meetings — the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the American Academy of Religion — both of which named Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide.

For nine days, Fatima Abu Khammash searched for her missing son across Gaza’s Israeli-controlled zone. When they refused to hand over his body, she crossed the line herself, finding a mother’s uneasy peace in what she carried back.

Hamas dissolved its government in Gaza to remove any obstacle to reconstruction, but little has changed for ordinary Palestinians in the Strip — because Israel ultimately controls whether the nightmare it has inflicted on them will ever end.

Israel’s conditioning of its withdrawal from southern Lebanon on the disarmament of Hezbollah mirrors its strategy in Gaza: insist on terms that are impossible to implement to justify its constant state of war.

I have worked as a journalist in Gaza for nearly a decade, and I believe the Committee to Protect Journalists’ decision to remove the names of Palestinians killed while reporting from its records is yet another attempt to silence Gaza. It will fail.

For decades, the General Secondary Education Examination, or “Tawjihi,” was one of Gaza’s most significant milestones. But now, for the third year, students are taking their exams with no classrooms, no reliable electricity, and barely enough food.