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gaza
In Act of 'Brutal Sadism,' Israel Bans Gazans From Entering Sea Under Pain of Death
"This is not about security," said the head of Gaza's fishers' union. "It's economic, social, and psychological warfare, a weapon of slow, deliberate suffocation."
Jul 14, 2025
Israel has warned Gazans to stay out of the Mediterranean Sea or risk getting killed under wartime restrictions that critics say serve no security purpose and are meant to deprive Palestinians of a key source of sustenance—and respite from the horrific realities of 21 months of constant death and destruction.
"Strict security restrictions have been imposed in the maritime area adjacent to Gaza—entry to the sea is prohibited," Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on the social media site X Saturday. "This is a call to fishermen, swimmers, and divers—refrain from entering the sea. Entering the beach and waters along the entire Gaza Strip endangers your lives."
While Israel has imposed a maritime blockade on Gaza since 2007 following Hamas' victory in legislative elections and subsequent takeover of the coastal enclave, restrictions were tightened after the October 7, 2023 attack as part of the "complete siege" that has caused deadly malnutrition throughout the strip, where Israel's 646-day U.S.-backed onslaught has left more than 211,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
However, the IDF appears to have not enforced the post-October 7 ban on entering the sea against swimmers and bathers. Only Palestinian fishers have been targeted, with more than 210 killed since October 2023, according to United Nations data.
"We live off the sea. If there's no fishing, we don't eat," Munthir Ayash, a 52-year-old fisher from Gaza City, told the Emirati newspaper The National Monday. "Me, my five sons, and their families—45 people in total—depend entirely on the sea. With it closed, we face starvation."
It is unclear why the IDF issued Saturday's warning, which came amid excessive heat warnings as temperatures rose to over 30°C (86°F). With Gaza's infrastructure obliterated by 21 months of Israeli onslaught and safe running water in severe shortage, the Mediterranean Sea provided a place to cool off and clean up.
"I used to go every day. The sea was where I bathed, where I relaxed, where I ran from the horror of war," Ibrahim Dawla, a 26-year-old Palestinian man forcibly displaced from Gaza City's Zaytun, told The National. "Now even that's gone."
Rajaa Qudeih, a 31-year-old mother of two from Deir al-Balah, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Sunday: "I'm literally dizzy from hunger, thirst, and the heat. Gaza is going through the worst famine, we haven't eaten, and we can't even find a piece of bread."
"The sea was the only outlet left. If they kill us for going there, maybe that would be easier than this slow death," she continued. "Still, I fear for my children. My oldest is 9. How can I convince him that swimming in the sea could get him killed?"
"We are camped by the sea," Qudeih added. "Where else can we go? Are they going to ban the air from us next?"
The IDF claims the maritime blockade is a security measure aimed at preventing weapons from being smuggled into Gaza.
However, Zakaria Bakr, head of the Palestinian Fishermen's Syndicate in Gaza, and many other residents of the embattled enclave believe there is another reason why Israel is prohibiting them from entering the sea.
"This is not about security. It's economic, social, and psychological warfare; a weapon of slow, deliberate suffocation," he told The National.
Dawla said that "people here die a million times every hour; we needed the sea just to feel human again, even if only for a few minutes. And they knew that. That's why they shut it down."
"We called it our last breathing space. We knew it was dangerous, but it was the only place we had left," he added. Now, "I haven't gone for two days. None of my friends have either. We're all afraid we'll be shot just for standing there."
Ayash said of Israel: "They want to take everything. They want to erase us."
"But the sea is ours," he added. "The land is ours. No matter how hard they try, it will stay ours."
Palestine defenders around the world also condemned the IDF policy.
"There can be no possible military or security reason for banning the people of Gaza from entering the sea—except to satisfy the brutal sadism of the IDF," argued Australian journalist and commentator Mike Carlton.
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'Horrific': Israeli Military Kills Seven Children in Latest Attack on Water Distribution Site
Gaza's Government Media Office said Israeli forces have killed more than 700 people at water distribution sites since October 2023.
Jul 14, 2025
Israeli forces on Sunday killed at least 10 people—most of them children—as they attempted to obtain water at a distribution point in central Gaza, an attack that came as Israel's military was accused of intentionally depriving Palestinians of access to water as part of its U.S.-backed genocidal assault on the enclave.
The attack on Sunday killed seven children and injured more than a dozen people, drawing international outrage.
"Yet again we're seeing horrific reports of the killing of seven children in Gaza, this time as they were waiting for water at a distribution site," said Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund. "This comes just days after several children and women were killed waiting for nutritional supplies."
"The Israeli authorities must urgently review the rules of engagement and ensure full compliance with international humanitarian law, notably the protection of civilians, including children," Russell added. "UNICEF calls for an immediate and lasting cease-fire, aid at scale, and release of hostages."
The Israeli military acknowledged that it carried out the attack but denied it was trying to hit the water distribution point, claiming that a "technical error" caused the missile to miss its purported target—an Islamic Jihad militant—by dozens of meters.
Gaza's Government Media Office said in a statement early Monday that Israeli forces have killed more than 700 people in more than 100 attacks on water distribution sites since October 2023. The media office also said the Israeli government has prevented 12 million liters of fuel from entering the enclave per month, "the minimum amount needed to operate water wells, sewage treatment plants, waste collection vehicles, and other vital sectors."
"The Gaza Strip is today witnessing a major crime of deprivation of water, perpetrated deliberately and systematically by the Israeli occupation, amidst complete international silence and the direct and indirect participation of European and Western countries implicated in supporting or complicit in the crime of genocide," the office said.
Leading humanitarian organizations, including Oxfam and Human Rights Watch (HRW), have also accused the Israeli government of using water as a weapon of war in the Gaza Strip by cutting off supply and decimating the enclave's existing infrastructure, including wells and desalination plants.
The International Rescue Committee said last week that Gaza's "entire water system has broken down" and warned that "there is simply not enough clean water to meet the needs of the population in Gaza."
"When clean water is unavailable, the consequences extend far beyond thirst; families are forced to rely on unsafe water sources for cooking, cleaning, and bathing, heightening the risk of disease outbreaks like skin conditions, diarrhea, and hepatitis," the group said. "This compounds the burden on Gaza's collapsing health system, particularly in overcrowded shelters with limited hygiene options."
Israeli forces have also been massacring civilians at food distribution sites in recent weeks as famine spreads throughout Gaza.
The United Nations said on Friday that it recorded 798 killings at food distribution locations in Gaza between May 27 and July 7, with the overwhelming majority occurring in the vicinity of sites managed by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
"They have a choice between being shot or being fed," said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Office.
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Francesca Albanese Names and Shames Israel's Corporate Genocide Partners
As bank accounts swell, more Palestinian bodies are piled up in morgues, mass graves, or are scattered in the streets of Jabaliya and Khan Younis.
Jul 13, 2025
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This "power" is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Her latest report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.
Albanese's "Economy of Genocide" is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.
Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel's overall settler-colonial project.
This madness needs to stop, and, since the U.N. is incapable of stopping it, then individual governments, civil society organizations, and ordinary people must do the job.
First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the U.N. Human Rights Council released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants—including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia—for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.
This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the U.N.'s consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. said it was an attempt by "the discredited" council "to fuel economic retaliation," while Israel called it a "shameful capitulation" to pressure.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing U.N. mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had "failed the people of Gaza."
This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the U.N.'s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for "epically failing" to stop the war and to end the "senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians."
Albanese's new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. "Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people's lives must cease," the report declares, pointedly demanding that "corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account."
According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.
These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.
What Albanese's report tries to do is not merely name and shame Israel's genocide partners but to tell us, as civil society, that we now have a comprehensive frame of reference that would allow us to make responsible decisions, put pressure on, and hold accountable these corporate giants.
"The ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture," Albanese writes, citing Israel's massive surge in military spending, estimated at 65% from 2023 to 2024—reaching $46.5 billion.
Israel's seemingly infinite military budget is a strange loop of money, originally provided by the U.S. government, then recycled back through U.S. corporations, thus spreading the wealth between governments, politicians, corporations, and numerous contractors. As bank accounts swell, more Palestinian bodies are piled up in morgues, mass graves, or are scattered in the streets of Jabaliya and Khan Younis.
This madness needs to stop, and, since the U.N. is incapable of stopping it, then individual governments, civil society organizations, and ordinary people must do the job, because the lives of Palestinians should be of far greater value than corporate profits and greed.
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