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october 7
Human Rights Defenders Decry 'Unspeakable Suffering' in Gaza as Genocide Enters Third Year
"This must end now," said Amnesty International. "Humanity cannot bear this any more."
Oct 07, 2025
As Israel's genocide in Gaza enters its third year, human rights defenders around the world on Tuesday condemned what one United Nations official called the "unspeakable suffering" of the Palestinian people and the complicity of the United States and other countries, while urging an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages held by both sides.
"Today marks two years since the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, during which at least 1,200 Israelis and other nationals—mostly civilians—were killed and 251 people were taken hostage, 20 are still alive and held in Gaza," Amnesty International said on social media.
"Today marks two years since Israel began its brutal onslaught against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip," Amnesty continued. "Over 67,000 Palestinians—mostly civilians—have been killed. 90% of homes have been destroyed or damaged. Most of the population has been forcibly displaced, starved and subjected deliberately to conditions of life calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. This is genocide."
"Stop the genocide. Now."
"This horror has been made possible with the support of the US and other allies and the tightening of Israel’s 18-year-long illegal blockade that has inflicted unimaginable suffering," the group added. "This must end now. Humanity cannot bear this any more."
Numerous United Nations agencies and officials also marked the second anniversary of the start of the Gaza genocide with calls for less cruelty and more relief.
"In Gaza, for two long years people have known nothing but destruction, displacement, bombardment, fear, death, and hunger," Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, said on social media. At least 370 UNRWA personnel have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023.
Lazzarini called for the "release of all hostages and Palestinian detainees," an "immediate ceasefire," as well as "the unfettered delivery of basic humanitarian supplies at scale to Gaza" and "accountability and justice to hold all those accountable for atrocities committed on and after October 7."
"There is no other way out of this abyss and mayhem," he added.
Israel’s war on #Gaza has dragged on far too long. Over the past two years, Israeli forces have killed over 66,000 people, including 15 of our staff. We call for an immediate and sustained ceasefire, an end to the siege and access for independent humanitarian aid at scale.
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— Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (@msf.ca) October 6, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Ricardo Pires, the communications manager and deputy spokesperson for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), asserted that Israel’s “disproportionate response” to the Hamas attack has left children suffering “in their bodies and minds for way too long."
Pires lamented that at least 61,000 Palestinian children have been killed or maimed in Gaza, which UNICEF has called "the world's most dangerous place to be a child," condemning that toll as an "unacceptable, staggering figure."
UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher said in a statement: "Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Hundreds of thousands endure starvation and displacement. So we renew the call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, for all civilians to be protected, and for humanitarian aid to flow freely at the scale needed."
Fletcher also said that he's "seen and heard from... the survivors and the families" of Israelis and others abducted by Hamas-led resistance fighters on October 7, 2023.
"The pain is indescribable," he said. "Today, I renew my call for the unconditional, immediate release of all the hostages—and until then, they must be treated humanely."
As US President Donald Trump leads efforts to end the war by forcing both Israel and Hamas into major concessions, Human Rights Watch Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir said Tuesday that "the two years since October 7, 2023 have brought a seemingly endless stream of atrocities against civilians."
"Governments should not wait for the adoption of Trump's 20-part plan or any other peace plan to take action to prevent further harm," he added.
Peace plans cannot solely be relied on to address grave abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 30+ years of escalating repression of Palestinians as "peace processes" played out made that clear.Trump's plan is no substitute for urgent action in Gaza.
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— Human Rights Watch (@hrw.org) October 6, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Although Trump told Israel to "immediately stop" bombing Gaza after Hamas conditionally agreed last week to his plan, Israeli forces have continued bombing and invading the strip with the goal of conquering, occupying, and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian exclave. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in over 130 Israeli strikes since Trump's Friday exhortation, according to Gaza officials.
"The killing in Gaza continues," the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said ahead of Tuesday's anniversary, slamming Israel's use of the October 2023 attack as a "trigger for genocide" and "an escalation rooted in decades of apartheid and occupation."
B'Tselem had a simple message as the Gaza slaughter entered its third year: "Stop the genocide. Now."
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Classified IDF Intel Reveals 83% of Palestinians Killed in Gaza Are Civilians
The data show "a proportion of civilian slaughter with few parallels in modern warfare."
Aug 21, 2025
An investigation published Thursday belied Israeli government claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, as classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence data revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were, in fact, civilians.
A joint investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that, as of May, the Military Intelligence Directorate identified by name 8,900 fighters from Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack—and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as "dead" or "probably dead."
At that time, the official Palestinian death toll in Gaza stood at 52,928, with the Gaza Health Ministry not differentiating between civilians and militants. Israeli officials and independent peer-reviewed studies have either concurred with the ministry's figures or called them an undercount.
The classified IDF data obtained by Abraham and Graham-Harrison show that at least 83% of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces through May were civilians, what Graham-Harrison called "an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare... even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars."
Israeli army database suggests at least 83% of Gaza dead were civilians Classified intelligence from May reveals Israel believed it had killed ~8,900 militants in Gaza, indicating a proportion of civilian slaughter with few parallels in modern warfare. www.972mag.com/israeli-inte...
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— +972 Magazine (@972mag.com) August 21, 2025 at 6:42 AM
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden, the 83% civilian kill rate in Gaza is far higher than in Bosnia in 1992-95 (57%), the Syrian civil war of 2012-24 (29-34%), the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine (10-22%), or the US-led war in Afghanistan of 2001-21 (8-12%).
One unnamed intelligence source who was in Gaza told Abraham and Graham-Harrison: "People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death. If I had listened to the brigade, I would have come to the conclusion that we had killed 200% of Hamas operatives in the area."
In one case, +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed how one IDF battalion stationed in Rafah killed around 100 Palestinians and labeled them all as "terrorists." However, an officer from the unit later testified that all but two of the victims were unarmed.
The new investigation adds to the body of research showing that Israel's assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case filed by South Africa—has, as Abraham put it, "killed civilians at a rate with few parallels in modern warfare."
A leaked Israeli intelligence report reveals what was obvious all along:The vast majority of Palestinians slaughtered by Israel in Gaza are civilians. There was never an excuse for not knowing the truth.This is a genocide. Not a war.
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— Owen Jones (@owenjones.bsky.social) August 21, 2025 at 9:59 AM
These studies destroy claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation—and members of his government of historically low civilian death rates in Gaza.
"Israel is setting the new gold standard for urban warfare with what appears to be the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in history," Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman claimed in May 2024.
Israel's supporters around the world have parroted this false claim. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the US Military Academy at West Point, said in January that "Israel's civilian-to-combatant ratio is still historically low," and that "Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare."
However, the facts show a very different reality. Retired IDF Gen. Itzhak Brik told Abraham and Graham-Harrison that "there is absolutely no connection between the numbers that are announced and what is actually happening. It is just one big bluff."
"They lie non-stop—both the military echelon and the political echelon," Brik said. "In every raid, the IDF spokesperson's announcements said: 'Hundreds of terrorists were killed.' It's true that hundreds were killed, but they weren't terrorists."
Following the October 7 attack, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Numerous massacres ensued, including the October 31, 2023 killing of more than 120 civilians in a single IDF bombing targeting one Hamas member in the Jabalia refugee camp.
The IDF's use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound "bunker buster" bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks,w and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths. United Nations human rights officials have said that Israel's use of 2,000-pound bombs likely violates international law by deliberately targeting civilians in disproportionate attacks.
The indiscriminate slaughter is also taking place on the ground, where volunteer American surgeons have described treating—or sending to morgues—young children who appeared to be deliberately shot in the chest and head by IDF snipers. More recently, IDF whistleblowers said they were ordered to shoot or launch artillery shells into crowds of starving Palestinian civilians at aid distribution points run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Responding to the new investigation, the IDF confirmed the existence of the Military Intelligence Directorate database, but claimed that "figures presented in the article are incorrect," without further explanation.
However, in a recording published last week, Aharon Haliva—a former IDF general who was in charge of intelligence operations on and after the October 7 attack—is heard approvingly accepting the official Gaza Health Ministry death toll at the time.
"The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations," Haliva said. "It doesn't matter now if they are children."
Similar statements by Israeli officials are a key component of South Africa's ICJ case, where applicants must prove intent to commit genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention.
The most recent Gaza Health Ministry figures show that Israel's 685-day assault and siege on Gaza have left at least 62,122 Palestinians dead—most of them women and children—and more than 156,700 others wounded, with thousands more missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. At least 271 Palestinians, including 112 children, have starved to death.
The dire situation for civilians in Gaza could be about to deteriorate even further as Israel intensifies Operation Gideon's Chariots II, which aims to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians in numbers exceeding even the Nakba, or "catastrophe," during which more than 750,000 Arabs were forcibly expelled, sometimes via massacre and death march, during the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Israeli officials have repeatedly indicated that they would approve of such an annihilation, with Haliva asserted that Palestinians "need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price" of resisting more than a century of dispossession and displacement.
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UNRWA Chief Accuses Israel of Torturing Staff as US Backs Ban on Agency at World Court
Nearly 300 UNRWA workers have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023, and dozens of other agency staffers have alleged torture during Israel Defense Forces detention.
Apr 30, 2025
As the International Court of Justice this week weighs an Israeli ban on a United Nations agency that provides lifesaving aid in Gaza, the program's leader called out attacks on its workers while the United States defended Israel—the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance.
The ICJ is holding a week of hearings in The Hague, Netherlands following the U.N. General Assembly's December passage of a Norwegian-led resolution asking the tribunal, which is also known as the World Court, for an advisory opinion on Israel's legal obligation to "ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population."
Among the 38 nations and three regional blocs scheduled to address the 15 ICJ judges, only the United States and Hungary have so far defended Israel, whose forces have killed nearly 300 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) workers during their nearly 19-month annihilation of Gaza.
"An occupational power retains a margin of appreciation concerning which relief schemes to permit," U.S. State Department legal adviser Joshua Simmons argued before the court Wednesday, referring to Israel's 58-year occupation of Palestine, which the ICJ ruled an illegal form of apartheid in a June 2024 advisory opinion.
"Even if an organization offering relief is an impartial humanitarian organization, and even if it is a major actor, occupation law does not compel an occupational power to allow and facilitate that specific actor's relief operations," Simmons continued, noting "serious concerns about UNRWA's impartiality, including information that Hamas has used UNRWA facilities and that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7th terrorist attack against Israel" in 2023.
"Given these concerns, it is clear that Israel has no obligation to permit UNRWA specifically to provide humanitarian assistance," Simmons added. "UNRWA is not the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza."
In what UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini described at the time as an act of "reverse due process," the agency fired nine employees in February 2024 following Israeli allegations that they were involved in the Hamas-led attack on Israel in which more than 1,100 Israelis were killed and 251 Israeli and foreign survivors were kidnapped.
Lazzarini admitted to terminating the staffers without due process or an adequate investigation of Israel's claims. A subsequent probe by the U.N. Office of Oversight Services "was not able to independently authenticate information used by Israel to support the allegations."
On Tuesday, Lazzarini reminded the world that "over 50 UNRWA staff—among them teachers, doctors, social workers—have been detained and abused" by Israeli forces since October 2023.
"They have been treated in the most shocking and inhumane way," he continued. "They reported being beaten up and used as human shields. They were subjected to sleep deprivation, humiliation, threats of harm to them and their families, and attacks by dogs. Many were subjected to forced confessions."
Those forced confessions spurred numerous nations including the United States to cut off funding to UNRWA. Almost all of the countries have since restored funding as Israel's claims have been debunked or questioned over a lack of evidence.
The U.S.—which has not restored funding for UNRWA—earlier this week abandoned its long-standing position that the body is immune from lawsuits, opening the door for cases by October 7 survivors and victims' relatives stemming from dubious claims of agency involvement in the attack.
In addition to accusing Israeli troops of torturing its staffers, UNRWA has also documented tortures allegedly suffered by Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including interrupted drowning—also known as waterboarding—being shot in the knees with nail guns, sexual abuse of both men and women, and being sodomized with electric batons. The Israel Defense Forces is investigating dozens of in-custody deaths, many of them at the notorious Sde Teiman base in the Negev Desert.
While Israel's physical assault on Gaza has killed hundreds of UNRWA workers, its diplomatic war on the U.N. has seen the agency banned from operating in Palestine and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared "persona non grata" in Israel after he included Israel on his 2024 "list of shame" of countries and armed groups that kill and injure children during wartime.
The U.S.-backed 572-day war waged by the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court—has left more than 184,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Nearly all of the embattled enclave's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced and Israel's "complete siege" of the coastal strip has fueled widespread starvation and illness.
This week's ICJ hearing comes amid the tribunal's ongoing genocide case against Israel, which was brought by South Africa and is backed by dozens of nations either individually or via regional blocs. The court has issued three provisional orders in the case, all of which Israel has been accused of flouting.
Responding to the U.S. intervention in this week's ICJ hearings, Palestinian Ambassador to the Netherlands Ammar Hijazi told Middle East Eye that "everybody knows that Israel is using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war and is starving the population in Gaza because of that."
U.N. agencies and international humanitarian groups have warned in recent days of the imminent risk of renewed famine in Gaza as food stocks run out.
“ #Gaza: children are starving. The Government of Israel continues to block the entry of food and other basics. A manmade and politically motivated starvation. Nearly 2 months of siege. Calls to bring in supplies are going unheeded.” — UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini
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— UNRWA ( @unrwa.org) April 27, 2025 at 1:39 AM
"The U.S. intervention is very narrow in its scope, when it highlights the rights of an occupying power but ignores the so many layers of duties of that occupying power that Israel is in violation of," Hijazi added.
Among the countries defending UNRWA during Wednesday's ICJ session were Indonesia and Russia, which is currently waging a war against Ukraine. Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono affirmed "the Palestinian people's right to self-determination," while Maksim Musikhin, legal director of Russia's Foreign Ministry, argued that "international law should be respected by Israel" and that UNRWA deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
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