The Gaza Strip has been left without food, water or medical supplies since Israel’s Oct. 7 attack on October 7, 2009, according to a United Nations official

JERUSALEM — Israel’s retaliatory air campaign across Gaza intensified overnight into Monday as essential supplies like food, water and medical supplies trickled into the region ahead of an expected ground invasion.

On Sunday, the military struck more than 320 military targets, with a focus on Hamas headquarters, tunnels and firing positions in Gaza.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the Palestinian death toll has reached 5,087 since Oct. 7, the day Hamas unleashed the deadliest attacks on civilians since Israel’s founding in 1948. There were Fourteen hundred deaths in the October 7 attack.

Nor was there word on the hostages that remain, including the two women’s husbands. Israeli officials say there are still 220 hostages from the deadly Oct. 7 assault by Hamas on Israeli communities around Gaza.

Hagari said that they are working to get the hostages back and that the weekend Israeli raids in Gaza were intended to gather information on them.

The Secretary of State briefed reporters on Friday about the release of a mother and her daughter from captivity in Afghanistan, but at least 10 Americans are still missing.

After an initial delivery of 20 truckloads worth of aid Saturday, another 14 followed on Sunday. An additional shipment entered Monday, according to the AP.

The relief isn’t nearly enough according to humanitarian workers. The UN says that 3% of what would normally cross the border before hostilities began have been shipped.

For the past two weeks, the Gaza Strip has been without food, medical supplies and fuel. The power and water are not restored. Saturday, after waiting at Egypt’s Rafah crossing, 20 trucks of aid were allowed into Gaza; Sunday, a United Nations official said on social media that another dozen or so trucks were allowed in. The UN believes it’s only a little drop in the bucket for a population of over 2 million who are under attack by Israel. More than 200 aid trucks are still waiting to cross. Palestinian civilians are still trapped inside Gaza, with no way out.

Fuel is needed to power generators for hospitals, desalination plants and wastewater treatment facilities when the main power plant in Gaza is still out of operation.

The emergency fuel supply held by the U.N.’s Relief agency for Palestinians will be exhausted within a few days, according to officials.

Dr. Abu Sitta told reporters that almost all of the medical specialties in Gaza have run out of supplies.

He told NPR that he has consumed all the supplies needed to care for such traumatic injuries and critically ill patients.

92NY, Israel: Security and Human Rights in the Context of a World without Walls or Walls: Nguyen’s Statement at Hamas’s Slain

A group of Western leaders issued a statement Sunday repeating support for Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism and calling on it to abide by the rules of humanitarian law.

A statement was given after a phone call between the Prime Minister of Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada, and President Biden of the United States.

The leaders committed to coordinating with partners in the region to ensure aid reached those in Gaza, as well as “close diplomatic coordination, including with key partners in the region, to prevent the conflict from spreading, preserve stability in the Middle East, and work toward a political solution and durable peace,” the statement reads.

The comments from Western leaders came after Biden held a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which the two agreed to a “continued flow” of aid into Gaza, the White House said.

On Tuesday, the French President was in Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu before traveling to the West Bank to meet with Abbas.

China’s special envoy to the Middle East, Zhai Jun, is also in the region today. The foreign minister of Russia is also going to head to the Middle East and will start there on Monday.

The day before Hamas launched its attack on Israel, the organization founded by the slain Saudi dissident would published an interview with Thrall. In it, Thrall was asked about his depictions of Israelis, and whether he had qualms about “humanizing the occupation.”

I was very happy to ask that question, said Thrall. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated. On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize- winning novelist was supposed to speak at 92 NY, but it was abruptly canceled because he had signed an open letter. The talk was held at a downtown bookstore. The Boston Palestine Film Festival did not screen its live screenings because it moved online. A conference about the U.S. campaign for Palestinian Rights was canceled by a Houston hotel.

I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. 92NY played a game of rules, privileging sensitivity to traumatised communities, before the robust exchange of ideas, in calling off his Friday evening appearance. And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post that called for the targeting of “Zionist journalists.” The post called for “Zionist journalists” to be targeted, and also included depictions of a knife, an ax

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. Art can help us see beyond the hatred of war and make us understand that we cannot be divided into human and inhuman beings at the same time.

92NY would have been a good place to ask him why he signed the statement in the first place. The leaders need to model the moments when dialogue is bitter and fraught.

“There can be no cease-fire, negotiated solution or peaceful coexistence with depraved barbarians who murder teen-aged girls, children & the elderly,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on X, formerly known as Twitter, advocating for Israel to respond “disproportionately.”

“If you look at how they behave — not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic,” DeSantis said to voters in Iowa, arguing that the U.S. should not accept Palestinians who might flee as refugees. “None of them believe in Israel’s right to exist,” he said.

People were also beating the drum of war on social media like Facebook and X, says Almadhoun. Sometimes they were people he knew. “You find some people who are nice and want to end the war in Gaza,” he says.

Almadhoun thinks that rhetoric made it inevitable that Palestinian Americans would face real-world violence. He knew that a family was attacked by their landlord in the Chicago area. The mother, Hanaan Shahin, was severely wounded — her six-year-old son, Wadea Al-Fayoume, was killed.

Mustafa says she’s also hearing from folks who have been fired or doxxed. She’s hearing from parents whose children’s school sent home notes in solidarity with Israel, but didn’t acknowledge lost lives or ongoing Palestinian grief.

“I barely have time to engage in the act of living,” he says. From Detroit, he’s watching the home of his family in Gaza being destroyed block by block.

According to an NPR interview with the Palestinian Americans, they feel completely abandoned by their country and they are mourning Gaza. On top of that, they fear rising anti-Palestinian sentiment and Islamophobia.

You can do data engineering by day. He’s a poet and a community organizer by night. He mostly has done work around disability justice, but ever since the war started, he’s been on Zoom calls and group texts with other organizers, strategizing the best way to call for a ceasefire and stop the bombing. He says that most of his family is in Gaza. So far, they’ve survived.

“I’m watching my family get bombed and being gaslit to say, ‘Oh, they deserve it’,” he says. He hears that Hamas is lumped into the same category as innocent Palestinians like his family or that they are solely responsible for the attack on Israel.

Hamas controls Gaza, but there haven’t been elections since 2006. More than half of Gaza’s population are children, meaning many weren’t alive, let alone old enough to vote back then.

Hani Almadhoun works at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the primary relief organization in Gaza, so he knows how things work on the ground. He was visiting his family a few weeks ago, but resides in the D.C. area.

Some of the family went south when Israel ordered 1 million Palestinians to leave Gaza City. Other members stayed together on the edge of northern Gaza – because Israel also bombed the south.

He says most of his family are sleeping under staircases during the night because they know they can die at any moment.

She’s Going Through Hell: When Hamas Attacks First Stopped, Israel Wasn’t. Sharone Leifshitz, a Palestinian Community Center Executive Director

When he first got in touch with his mother a week before the bombing, she asked to do a video call so she could see his face in case it was the last time.

12 members of a family were killed in an airstrike on their home. Her father is missing and she cannot find him in the rubble.

I fear my family members will die in front of my eye. I am afraid of the next day. I’m scared for the night to come, he said. Gazans think that they are dreaming and need someone to wake them up.

Rania Mustafa, the executive director of the Palestinian Community Center, in New Jersey, says that there are other things missing from the discourse. She says many conversations happening in the U.S. are missing important context as if everyone is reading the same book.

She says that politicians, media and culture don’t understand that this siege began with Hamas’ attack and that they are stuck in a false narrative.

Israel has had conflict with Gaza in the past five times. She says it goes back even further to the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the creation of Israel.

For the past 16 years, Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade of Gaza – restricting the movement of people and goods. Egypt also has a blockade on its border with the enclave. Both countries say it’s necessary to protect against militants, though some humanitarian groups have called Gaza an “open-air prison.”

The United States has supported Israel for a long time. Washington has continued that support even as some human rights groups have called what is happening to Palestinians in parts of the occupied territories, including Gaza, apartheid.

Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News that he wanted to level the place. “Gaza is going to look like Tokyo and Berlin at the end of World War II when this is over. He said that Israel made a mistake if it doesn’t look that way.

Ms. Lifshitz, whose town was targeted by Hamas, at times struggled to remember her abduction and the pain she felt for her neighbors. Sharone sometimes translated for foreign journalists, as she was crouched at her side on Tuesday.

“I went through hell,” Ms. Lifshitz told reporters the day after her release, sitting in a wheelchair at a hospital in Tel Aviv amid a thicket of microphones.

Hamas has released four hostages, including Judith and Natalie Raanan, American-Israeli citizens who were freed last week. Ms. Lifshitz is the first released hostage to speak publicly about her ordeal.

A video released Monday by Hamas showed the two women being greeted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which transported them across Gaza’s Rafah border with Egypt. Lifshitz reached back out to shake the hand of a Hamas fighter in the video and said “shalom”, a Hebrew word that means “peace.”

Hamas’s destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people’s right hand side – Israel’s response to the Palestinian crisis, U.N. Secretary of State Herzi Halevi

Israeli military officials say they have not paused their preparations and have emphasized their commitment to eliminating Hamas’ military capabilities.

“We want to bring Hamas to the point of full dismantlement,” Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said in remarks Monday. Additional time was given by tactical, covert, and strategic considerations. It is better for troops who have more time to be prepared.

According to NPR, the reason he hasn’t left Gaza City is that it’s difficult to move his family since his elderly parents are sick.

Instead, he has stayed to see buildings in the area damaged and destroyed, including the apartment where he had been living for only one month as a newlywed with his new wife. The family’s food supply has dwindled to some rice and canned food, which isn’t enough to last through tomorrow, he said.

Fifty-seven truckloads of aid — mostly food, water and medical supplies — have entered Gaza over the past three days, a “drop in the ocean,” according to the U.N. refugee agency.

Qatar, which has taken a lead in mediating negotiations between Israel, Hamas, the U.S. and other countries around the region, called Tuesday for an end to the war without embroiling others in the region into the conflict.

Enough is enough, we say to Israel. It is not permissible to continue ignoring the reality of occupation, siege and settlement,” Qatar’s emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani wrote on the social media site X.

“We refuse to attack civilians from any party, regardless of their nationality, and we refuse to act as if the lives of Palestinian children do not count, as if they have no faces or names,” he said.

The attack on Gaza and the Israeli response of the October 7 attack against Hamas, the israeli military, Shin Bet and its commanders

Israel is considering whether or not to launch a ground invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas after the devastating October 7 attack against it.

Hamas has built a labyrinth of underground passages in Gaza for its fighters, military analysts said, complicating both Israel’s anticipated ground operation and any attempt to rescue the hostages.

“Many people stormed our homes, they beat people, some of them they abducted, like me,” Ms. Lifshitz said. It made no difference, they abduction the elderly and young.

They took her through the network of tunnels until they reached a large hall where about 25 people were, she said. They separated five people from her kibbutz into a room which was monitored by guards and a medic, she said.

Ms. Lifshitz said that she and others were relatively well taken care of, given medicine and the same food as their captors. She said that her captivity made efforts to make the area safe to visit and that doctors would check on her occasionally. She stated that they treated them nicely and fulfilled all of their needs.

Ms. Lif shitz said that the Israeli military and Shin Bet ignored signs of a threat to towns near Gaza. The Israeli military’s chief of staff acknowledged after the attack that the military had failed to live up to its mission to protect Israel’s citizens.

Weeks before the assault, Palestinians had rioted and fired explosive balloons near the Gaza border fence, sparking fires in southern Israel, Ms. Lifshitz said.