Israel is unleashing what some Palestinians have described as the worst bombings in Gaza yet as it has issued mass evacuation orders in the northernmost and southernmost parts of the region, displacing hundreds of thousands of starving, ill and exhausted Palestinians who have no safe place to go.
On Saturday, Israel issued a second set of evacuation orders in Rafah in the eastern part of the city, while also forcing Palestinians in Beit Lahia and Jabalia in the north to flee as Israeli forces drove tanks deep into the Jabalia refugee camp and raided shelters there. Though Israel has attacked Jabalia many times throughout its genocide, the military is once again carpet bombing the neighborhood.
Israel has also begun intensifying its ethnic cleansing campaign in the central and southern parts of Gaza, essentially bombarding every region of the strip.
Evacuation orders have affected an estimated 100,000 people still sheltering in Jabalia. At the same time, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has estimated that 360,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah since Israel’s first evacuation order last week, with the number growing rapidly by the day.
The areas that Israel is forcing Palestinians to evacuate to from Rafah are essentially destitute. Al-Mawasi, where those in Rafah have been forced to go, is already full, with 450,000 people sheltering in an area that has no running water or other infrastructure. Khan Yunis, the nearest city to Rafah, has already been essentially leveled by Israeli forces in recent months.
Even as Israel has escalated its offensive in Rafah and other parts of the region, U.S. officials have largely remained mum on the issue of suspending weapons shipments, despite President Joe Biden’s pledge that he would withhold some “bunker buster” bombs if Israeli forces invaded Rafah.
Israel is continuing its near-total blockade of humanitarian aid in the region. Health officials warned on Monday that the health system in Gaza had mere hours left of functionality before it would run out of fuel and collapse. This will lead to horrific consequences for Palestinians, with nowhere to go to get even basic illnesses treated, much less the complicated cocktail of maladies caused by Israel’s genocidal campaign of constant bombings, starvation, dehydration and the ending of sanitation services.
The Gaza health ministry relies largely on hospitals’ tallies in order to count deaths in Gaza, as well as public and media sources. Without hospitals and with telecommunications going down intermittently or being destroyed by Israeli forces, and with hundreds of thousands experiencing famine and disease, it’s unclear how accurately health officials will be able to track future deaths due to Israel’s genocide.
Some hospitals and health centers in Gaza are already in a blackout due to a shortage of fuel, while Israeli forces have ordered the evacuation of one of the last hospitals in the Rafah area — the Kuwaiti Hospital, with only 16 beds. According to Medical Aid for Palestinians, only 12 of 36 hospitals are still functioning, though at an extremely limited capacity, as of Monday.
Humanitarian groups are “scraping the bottom of the barrel” for resources, as UNICEF said on Friday. Israeli forces allowed a mere six trucks of flour through the Karem Abu Salem crossing and some fuel on Friday and Saturday as food aid organizations warned of rapidly depleting supplies; the main entry point for aid, the Rafah crossing, is still closed after it was seized by Israeli forces last week.
A small fraction of the extremely limited aid that has entered through Rafah in recent months has entered through a “Western Erez” crossing that Israeli forces opened on Sunday.
Humanitarian groups have warned that the horrors that come with this little aid entering the region are indescribable, with some characterizing Israel’s blockade as a “medieval siege” due to its destruction of Gaza’s health, aid, water and sanitation systems.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.