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geneva conventions
'The Howl That the World Doesn't Hear': A Gaza Teacher in Her Own Words
At 28, Reham Khaled has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known.
Sep 20, 2025
So begin the words of a Gaza teacher's recent post after being forced to flee her home in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City and the school she'd set up in a tent. A bomb tore apart the tent next to the one where Reham Khaled taught her students. Two were killed:
Pain is not a passing sensation, but a being that resides within. It has fangs and fingers. It presses on the heart, weighs down the chest, and makes the breath hesitate like a hole in the air. There is a moment, just one moment, when all the internal walls we have tried to build crumble and we reach what is called the threshold of pain. At this threshold, pain is no longer just an echo or a tremor. It turns into a howl.
Skilled at weaving the horror that is war-torn Gaza with evocative imagery of far sweeter things, Khaled says that before the bomb tore apart the tent, she and her father-in-law were dreaming of eating mangoes and chicken. “And then the rocket exploded. One moment. A collective scream. A small lake of blood begins with two children whose greatest ambition was to eat chicken and mango. It is a moment, but inside me it is years.”
Born in Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, her grandparents were displaced from the Palestinian village of Najd which was ethnically cleansed in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. The Israeli town of Sderot was later constructed over the site of the village, as well as the nearby village of Huj, according to Working Class History.com.
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day."
In Gaza, Khaled studied in UNRWA schools, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established by the UN in December 1949, to provide relief and humanitarian assistance to Palestine refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
At 28, she has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known. She and her extended family have been displaced 15 times.
The howl is “not a loud, audible scream”, explains Khaled, “but the howl of the soul, that subtle sound that the ear cannot pick up but shakes the entire body from within. It's like the wind sweeping through an empty house, or the emptiness exploding in the head. In Gaza, this howl has become the secret language of everyone. The child who smiles so as not to cry in front of his mother, the mother who hides her tears from her child, the man who stands silently before the corpse of his son. They all howl from within, with a voice the world does not hear.”
A teacher of language and literature, Khaled is not overtly political and shies away from assigning blame for what is happening to her people once again. All she knows, she tells me when we exchange more messages, is that “the language of killing and violence is the biggest mistake that my people have been paying the price for two years or more.... The world is mean, cruel, and dull to the point of melting the nerves. I try to keep up with it, but I break. I try to look at it, but I find its eyes devoid of any glimmer of humanity.”
At this writing, Israeli forces have destroyed an estimated 70% of Gaza City. Airstrikes have turned entire apartment blocks and tent encampments into rubble. The Israel Defense Forces claim, without evidence, that Hamas has been using the buildings for surveillance; justifying collective punishment of Gaza City's entire population. While collective punishment is a war crime and prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, this has done nothing to protect innocent civilians throughout Gaza from October 2023 to the present. An estimated 65,000 have been killed to date, with upwards of ten thousand trapped under the rubble.
“Howling,' writes Khaled, “doesn't always manifest in screams or tears. Sometimes it manifests as cold dullness. Evacuation notices drop on doors like inane announcements, read by people with blank eyes and then go on with their lives: a man arguing with his neighbor over a gallon of water, women fighting over a turn at the oven, a young man fixing a crack in the wall. It's as if the announcement of the city's destruction means nothing, as if the preordained mass exodus is just another rumor.”
“This isn't true indifference,” she believes, “but another form of howling: a hidden protection against total collapse. When a person is unable to face the naked truth, they hide in the small details, clinging to crumbs to prevent their souls from disintegrating. Politics isn't content with killing bodies; it seeks to break the inside, to make people treat their end as secondary news. It wants evacuation itself to become a habit, a weightless piece of paper, part of the daily noise.”
Israel has ordered everyone in Gaza City to evacuate to the al-Mawasi tent encampment in the south. But the camp is severely overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Rafah, Khan Younis, and other areas and there is no available land. Nor is it rent free, as others I am in touch with tell me. The entirety of Gaza's most southern city, Rafah, once home to 250,000 people, was razed to the ground earlier this year. Khan Younis was razed in part, but some neighborhoods remain.
As for Khaled and her family, refusing to be broken or adhere exactly to Israeli orders, they moved to Deir al-Balah, a city about 10 miles south of Gaza City. They're not safe there, but at least they found land to set up tents. Khaled has already started looking for a new place to establish a school. This morning she reposted a link for the school, which is backed by the Chuffed Project, a nonprofit whose goal is to support children's education in Gaza
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day. Plant a rose on the tip of every gun. Prevent killing. Spread love and peace and never allow war to continue for long.”
It doesn't mean she's not always hungry or trying to recover her voice or understand why such hell has been unleashed on her people. But that she refuses to surrender to the “twisted logic that turns life into a farce. My voice has been extinguished, not because it disappeared, but because the echo no longer returns. And my being? I've scattered like dust, like a ravening beast that isn't satisfied with flesh and bones, but burrows deep within me in search of something I no longer know the name of. Yes, I'm hungry, but not just for bread. I'm hungry for the security that has become a myth, for the meaning that has become a mirage, for a slice of life that resembles life, not this mockery I live.”
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Man-Made Famine Is Starving Gaza’s Children
This is the real front line in this conflict; a child clinging to life through a sachet of RUTF, now forced to flee. But none of this is inevitable. It is a choice.
Sep 10, 2025
Gaza is in the midst of a manufactured famine. I have witnessed far too many humanitarian catastrophes, but Gaza is unique. Gazans are 100% dependent on the flow of food into their territory, and there is only one actor controlling the tap: Israel. What is occurring in Gaza right now is the systematic starvation of an entire population, and children are bearing the cruelest brunt.
My MedGlobal colleagues have ample medical expertise to treat all manner of injury and illness in Gaza. But right now they face an overwhelming wave of malnutrition, and without medicines and sachets of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) to give to their patients, there is only so much they care they can offer. Within a 72-hour window in July, my colleagues watched devastated and helpless as five children between the ages of 3 months and 4 years died due to complications directly linked to malnutrition.
At MedGlobal’s primary health clinics across Gaza, we are treating children who weigh merely 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) at birth. Gazan mothers are so malnourished that they cannot breastfeed their infants, leaving newborns with no source of nutrition in a place where baby formula and clean water are scarce. Among pregnant and lactating women, 22% are acutely malnourished, and for teenage girls aged 15-19, that figure is a devastating 39%, condemning a generation to irreversible harm during their most critical developmental years.
This was an entirely predictable consequence of the near total blockade imposed on Gaza in March of this year. Starvation does not occur immediately, but deny food to an entire population over time and that is the only possible outcome. MedGlobal's recent report, Starved by Siege, reveals a skyrocketing of acute malnutrition among children under 5 to 16.8%, surpassing the famine threshold in just a few months. Our data show that more children died from malnutrition in July alone than in the previous six months combined.
Like this, the war has entered every Gazan household. As acute malnutrition rates have soared by 2,000% since the escalation of hostilities in 2023, health facilities are overrun with the casualties. As a MedGlobal doctor put it, “I looked at her feeding him the RUTF sachet and I realized… this is the front line. Not the rubble. Not the noise. This: a mother trying to keep her child alive with one packet of lifesaving food.”
As a neutral humanitarian organization, MedGlobal does not pick sides in a war, nor is our objective to end wars; we simply aim to preserve a measure of humanity in the midst of war. The Geneva Conventions lay out the rules for doing so, the most fundamental of which is that noncombatants are protected. As signatory to the Geneva Conventions, Israel has written these rules into its own law.
There is only one humane path forward: Respect the first rule of the Geneva Conventions and stop targeting noncombatants in this war.
Protected persons may not be targeted, and warring parties must allow and facilitate access to the basic means of survival. This includes food. While families starve inside Gaza, humanitarian aid sits in warehouses just outside, waiting for Israeli approval. The World Food Programme (WFP) has enough food ready to feed all of Gaza for three months. MedGlobal has medicine and nutrition supplies to treat over 10,000 children. This willful denial of an entire population’s access to food is a war crime.
What happened on October 7, 2023 was a horrendous and brutal crime too. How many more children will have to pay for that crime with their lives? There is only one humane path forward: Respect the first rule of the Geneva Conventions and stop targeting noncombatants in this war. More specifically, Gaza needs an immediate ceasefire, an end to the blockade, unimpeded access for humanitarian organizations, and the protection of healthcare facilities, health workers, and patients.
Yet, as I write this my colleagues are evacuating Gaza City in the midst of a full-scale invasion. Just two weeks ago, one of my colleagues was killed in the initial stages of this offensive. Our medical activities, including care for the malnourished, are being transplanted to areas further south, but many of our patients are in critical condition and will not survive the move.
This is the real front line in this conflict; a child clinging to life through a sachet of RUTF, now forced to flee. But none of this is inevitable. It is a choice.
Seventy-seven years ago, member states of the United Nations united in a shared commitment captured in the words “Never Again.” A genocide had occurred and the world said it would never again tolerate another. Are we tolerating one now?
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Bernie Sanders Says US Must Not Be 'Dragged Into Another Netanyahu War'
The independent U.S. senator condemned the "illegal unilateral attack on Iran" by Israel that "risks a full-blown regional war."
Jun 13, 2025
As Iranian missiles were being shot down over Israel on Friday following the IDF's unprovoked bombings of Iranian targets earlier in the day, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) condemned the government of "extremist" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayahu for his "ongoing deviance of international law" that has made the "world more dangerous and unstable" and trying to drag the United States into dangerous new war in the Middle East.
"First, he uses the starvation of children in Gaza as a tool of war, a barbaric violation of the Geneva Conventions," declared Sanders in a statement. "Now, his illegal unilateral attack on Iran risks a full-blown regional war."
Sanders said Israel's Friday bombings and assassination attacks against Iranian targets, including nuclear program facilities, "directly contravened the express wishes of the United States, which was seeking a diplomatic resolution to the long-standing tensions around Iran's nuclear program."
While a new round of diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Iran were slated to begin Sunday, said Sanders, "Netanyahu chose instead to launch an attack"—a move seen by critics as an overt effort to sabotage a negotiated agreement.
"The U.S. must make it clear that we will not be dragged into another Netanyahu war," said Sanders. "Along with the international community, we should do everything possible to prevent an escalation of this conflict and bring the warring parties to the negotiating table."
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