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humanitarian aid
Trump Gives Full Support to Israel's Ceasefire-Violating Attacks That Killed 100+ Palestinians
Middle East scholar Mouin Rabbani said the US is allowing Israel "to erode the terms of the agreement with increasing violence, with increasing frequency, until there is nothing left."
Oct 29, 2025
US President Donald Trump gave his full support to Israel's ceasefire-breaking strikes, which reportedly killed at least 104 Palestinians, including 40 children, while wounding another 253 people on Tuesday and into Wednesday.
Airstrikes devastated Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and refugee camps in central Gaza, hitting homes, tents, and the courtyard of a hospital, according to Middle East Eye, leaving many of the wounded in critical condition and many others trapped beneath rubble.
The director of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City described the situation as "catastrophic," with two years of destruction and a punishing Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid having left the hospital with no medicine or medical supplies to treat the wounded.
In remarks aboard Air Force One on Wednesday, Trump said that Israel carried out the strikes after a 37-year-old Israeli soldier was reportedly killed by Hamas in southern Gaza.
“As I understand it, they took out an Israeli soldier," Trump said. "So the Israelis hit back, and they should hit back. When that happens, they should hit back." Trump described the carnage as "retribution" for the soldier's death, for which Hamas has denied responsibility.
In addition to the soldier's killing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Tuesday's strikes also came after Hamas returned only partial remains of an Israeli hostage, Ofir Tzarfati, who died in captivity after being abducted and taken to Gaza on October 7, 2023. Israel has claimed that Hamas attempted to “stage a false discovery” of the body for the international Red Cross “to create a false impression of efforts to locate the bodies”.
As part of the ceasefire agreement, Hamas has returned the living Israeli hostages and is also required to return the remains of those who died during the two years of Israeli bombardment. As of Monday, the remains of 16 hostages had been handed over, but 13 still remain, with Hamas saying it has struggled to locate them in the delapidated Gaza Strip, which has been largely reduced to rubble by Israel's aerial campaign.
Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), argued that the Trump deal was “set up to fail” using the provision requiring the return of captives' remains.
"There were so many bodies under so much rubble," Gunness said in an interview with AJ+. "There was so much confusion after two years of genocide. It was going to be very difficult for anybody to deliver the bodies and the captives given what has been going on. So Israel has a pretext to call off the plan, to reimpose the blockade, to restart the genocide if it wants to."
After Tuesday’s deadly bombings, Israel said Wednesday it had "resumed" the ceasefire. But even before the attacks removed any doubt, the ceasefire appeared to be in name only. In a press release before the bombing began, the Gaza Media Office alleged that Israel had already committed 125 violations of the agreement.
Between October 11, when the ceasefire went into effect, and October 28, nearly 100 Palestinians were killed and over 300 wounded in near-daily attacks by Israel, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. This is despite the fact that the agreement stated explicitly that "all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations, will be suspended.”
Israel has also not abided by requirements that it allow the “immediate commencement of full entry of humanitarian aid.” In what it said was a response to Hamas’ failure to return hostage remains, Israel announced last week that it had closed the critical Rafah crossing, and just 15% of the aid called for in the plan has been allowed to enter Gaza, where 55,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition according to a Lancet report released last week.
As bombs rained down on Gaza on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance asserted that "the ceasefire is holding," but that it "doesn't mean that there aren't going to be little skirmishes."
The next day, Trump insisted that even after Israel’s colossal violation of the ceasefire, “nothing is going to jeopardize” the agreement, which he and many in the press have raced to portray as a historic victory for his legacy as a peacemaker.
But Mouin Rabbani, a fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, told Al Jazeera that even while claiming to respect the ceasefire, Israel was clearly looking for any excuse it could find to resume the state of war.
"Israel was unwilling to enter this agreement, was dragged into it by the United States, and has been seeking to erode it ever since," Rabbani said.
He said he believes the US will not allow Israel to cross the "red line" of resuming "full-scale war," but that "by showing indulgence for lesser infractions, we're on a downward slope where Israel is able to erode the terms of the agreement with increasing violence, with increasing frequency, until there is nothing left."
He noted that the US now has a military command center directly in Israel with the stated purpose of "monitoring" the ceasefire.
"Arab, Israeli, and international press reports have all referred to this as 'Bibi-sitting,' basically reflecting American concerns that Israel is going to unilaterally abrogate this agreement," he said. “What this means is that the United States is now, to a much greater degree than previously, directly responsible for what happens in the Gaza Strip.”
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ICJ Rejects Israeli Claims About UNRWA and Orders Officials to Provide More Aid to Gaza
"Yet another Israeli government lie—slavishly repeated by Western media—collapses," said one policy expert.
Oct 22, 2025
The commissioner-general of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said Wednesday that he welcomed an "unambiguous ruling by the International Court of Justice" affirming that the organization has not been infiltrated by Hamas, as Israel and its allies have persistently claimed, and that Israeli officials must cooperate with the UN to ensure Palestinians receive sufficient aid after nearly two years of starvation policy.
In an advisory opinion, the ICJ ruled 10-1 that as the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is responsible for providing aid to Palestinians and allowing the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to operate in Gaza.
Israel has sought to ban UNRWA from Gaza since January 2024, when it alleged without evidence that a small number of staffers at the agency had participated in a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in October 2023.
Multiple investigations found that Israel had not provided supporting evidence of the allegations, and the ICJ on Wednesday said that the country had “not substantiated its allegations that a significant number of UNRWA employees were members of Hamas.”
With the advisory opinion, said Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, "yet another Israeli government lie—slavishly repeated by Western media—collapses."
ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa said in the ruling, which is not legally binding, that Israel's first obligation is to "ensure that the population of the occupied Palestinian territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies, and services."
The court also ordered Israel to "agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the occupied Palestinian territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip."
UNRWA has said it has roughly 6,000 aid trucks that are ready to enter Gaza.
"With huge amounts of food and other lifesaving supplies on standby in Egypt and Jordan, UNRWA has the resources and expertise to immediately scale up the humanitarian response in Gaza and help alleviate the suffering of the civilian population," said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the agency.
Israel began blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza following the Hamas-led attack in 2023, and intensified the blockade from March-May this year after breaking a ceasefire that began in January. More than 450 Palestinians have starved to death, and experts have warned that the many of the effects of starvation on those who have survived, especially children, may be irreversible. A famine was declared in August by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a UN-backed group.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the ICJ opinion "comes at a moment in which we are doing everything we can to boost our humanitarian aid in Gaza. So the impact of this decision is decisive in order for us to be able to do it to the level that is necessary for the tragic situation in which the people of Gaza still is.”
As it has with numerous other rulings by the ICJ, Israel immediately rejected the decision and claimed it was politically motivated. The US State Department also dismissed the ruling, saying it "unfairly bashe[d] Israel" and repeated the debunked allegations of UNRWA's "deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism."
Step Vaessen of Al Jazeera reported that "even if Israel ignores [the advisory opinion], as it’s done time and time again, all the UN countries are obliged to follow up on this court’s advice."
The ICJ is also considering a genocide case against Israel, brought by South Africa.
In September, a commission of independent experts at the UN said Western countries including the US must stop providing military aid to Israel as it found the country was carrying out a genocide in Gaza, citing several of the attacks that have killed more than 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023 and public statements made by Israeli officials demonstrating their intent to wipe out Gaza's population of 2.1 million people.
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Palestinians, Aid Groups Express Cautious 'Jubilation' as Ceasefire Deal Reached
“People were screaming in the streets, because after two years of bombings and destruction and loss, finally they will sign the ceasefire," said one aid worker. "I hope they can maintain this deal."
Oct 09, 2025
Palestinian civilians and aid groups in Gaza expressed "jubilation" along with underlying caution and "skepticism," as one local reporter said, on Thursday following the news that Hamas and Israel had come to an agreement to end Israel's two-year assault on the exclave.
Israel is expected to withdraw troops to an agreed-upon line and to allow an influx of aid into Gaza along with releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that a ceasefire would take effect later in the day, "once the government convenes and approves the deal," but Nour Odeh reported at Al Jazeera that "that is not stopping the celebrations" of the news that Israel's relentless destruction of Gaza was expected to soon come to a halt.
“People were screaming in the streets, because after two years of bombings and destruction and loss, finally they will sign the ceasefire [deal]," Laila Al Shana, a project manager for Palestinian grassroots aid group Humans To Be in Gaza, told Al Jazeera. "I hope they can maintain this deal."
Tareq Abu Azzoum, a reporter for the outlet in az-Zawayda, central Gaza, said there was "an undeniable collective sense of relief seen here in Gaza" on Thursday following President Donald Trump's announcement that Hamas and Israel had reached a deal on the first phase of the 20-point peace plan Trump proposed last week.
"People were celebrating, and there were very obvious scenes of jubilation across Gaza for families who took to the streets, cheering, waving Palestinian flags, and even launching fireworks," reported Abu Azzoum. "But beneath that surface jubilation, there is a relative sense of skepticism, especially as families are quite afraid that Israel could resume the war in Gaza under one security pretext or another."
Reports from Gaza's Civil Defense suggested that the fears were not unfounded; Drop Site News reported at 9:30 am local time that according to the agency, there was "a series of intense air strikes" on Gaza City and explosions across northern Gaza after the deal was announced, while Hani Mahmoud said there were "a couple of attacks in Khan Younis."
Mahmoud said that there was "cautious hope" in Gaza that "the truce may hold this time, despite Israel’s pattern of last-minute actions aimed at derailing agreements."
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestinian rights, also expressed cautious optimism, noting that Israel broke a ceasefire deal in March, and stressed that "Israel's illegal occupation and apartheid in Palestine" must ultimately be "dismantled."
Hamas negotiators told Drop Site News that there was a risk to accepting a deal that does not include a complete withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza, but rather a withdrawal to a specific line—the details of which were "still being worked out" Wednesday night.
“This is a risk, but we trusted President Trump to be the guarantor of all the commitments made,” Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, told Drop Site News on Monday.
The Palestinian negotiators have "faced unprecedented pressure from Arab and Islamic mediators over the past 48 hours to make significant concessions and to quickly reach an agreement on the aspects of Trump’s plan that address the exchange of captives, a ceasefire, and the resumption of aid," Drop Site News reported.
But Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy emphasized that "it wasn’t pressure on Hamas that got the ceasefire, they’ve obviously been under intense pressure all along."
Rather, with the international community increasingly expressing outrage over the human-caused humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israel's expressions of intent to commit genocidal violence there, "the key variable here was pressure on Netanyahu," said Duss.
Recent polls in the United States, the largest international funder of the Israel Defense Forces, have found a major reversal in the public's views on the war, with more respondents telling The New York Times in September that they supported the Palestinians over the Israelis—for the first time since the newspaper began polling people on the subject nearly 30 years ago.
The Washington Post also found that support for Israel has plummeted among Jewish Americans, 61% of whom told the newspaper that they believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.
Aid groups expressed hope Thursday that they would be able to begin delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians promptly. The Gaza Health Ministry has reported that more than 461 people have died of malnutrition and starvation since the war started, with most dying this year. A famine in parts of Gaza was declared by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification in August.
“We need sustained humanitarian supplies to enter. We need, as a humanitarian community, access to communities, to children. We need to be able to do our jobs, we need safe and dignified distributions,” Rachel Cummings, the humanitarian director of Save the Children in Deir el-Balah, Gaza, told Al Jazeera. “Organizations like Save the Children and obviously the [United Nations] and its partners, we know how to prevent famine. We know how to treat malnutrition, and we need these sustained supplies to enter to be able to do them."
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees emphasized that it has food, medicine, and other essentials ready to be distributed as soon as it is permitted to begin delivering aid, and said the progress reported Wednesday night came as a "huge relief."
"After their excruciating ordeal, hostages and Palestinian detainees will finally join their families,” Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X. “We have enough to provide food for the entire population for the coming three months. Our teams in Gaza are crucial for the implementation of this agreement, including to provide basic services like healthcare and education."
James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Fund, posted a video on Instagram from Gaza, where over the last two years, more than 67,000 Palestinians—including more than 18,000 children—have been killed; 90% of the population has been displace; at least 39,000 children have been left without one or both of their parents; and many children have undergone surgeries and amputations without anesthesia.
"A journalist just asked me: Did you imagine that we would reach this moment? Did you think we would reach the stage of a ceasefire?" said Elder. "My reflections were that I never thought we would reach a point where 20,000 girls and boys would be killed."
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