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palestine
10,000+ Palestinians Buried Beneath Gaza Rubble in 'World's Largest Mass Grave'
"We call on the world to send international teams to recover the bodies of the missing," said the member of one civil society group. "We call on the world to provide the necessary equipment to recover the bodies."
Nov 06, 2025
A civil society group in Gaza on Thursday appealed for international assistance to help recover the bodies of more than 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces who remain buried beneath the rubble of the flattened strip.
Referring to Gaza as "the world's largest mass grave," Aladdin Al-Aklouk, a spokesperson for the National Committee for Missing Persons in the Genocide Against Gaza, said that "these martyrs were buried under the rubble of their homes, which have turned into mass graves, without their final dignity being preserved or their bodies being retrieved."
"We express our shock and strong condemnation of the absence of an effective role by international organizations and humanitarian bodies, especially those concerned with the issue of missing persons, in light of the ongoing escalating humanitarian disaster," Al-Aklouk continued.
"The remnants are ticking time bombs and pose a danger to the population in the Gaza Strip. We need specialists alongside the teams working in the sector," he added. "We call on the world to send international teams to recover the bodies of the missing. We call on the world to provide the necessary equipment to recover the bodies."
"The remnants are ticking time bombs and pose a danger to the population in the Gaza Strip."
According to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures have been deemed accurate by Israeli military officials and a likely undercount by multiple peer-reviewed studies—at least 68,875 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023. Although a US-brokered ceasefire technically remains in effect, Gaza officials have documented over 200 Israeli violations in which more than 240 Palestinians have been killed and over 600 others injured.
More than 170,600 other Gazans have been wounded in a war which is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case and for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Palestinians are struggling to dig through more than 60 million tons of debris after over 80% of all structures in Gaza were destroyed or damaged by two years of Israeli bombardment. That's more than 200,000 buildings and other structures.
United Nations experts estimate it will take seven years for 100 trucks to remove all debris across Gaza, where more than three-quarters of roads are damaged and unexploded ordnance and Israeli booby traps beneath the debris continue to pose deadly threats to recovery workers and survivors in general.
Israel's destruction and denial of the heavy equipment needed for such a monumental recovery operation has left Palestinians reliant upon rudimentary tools such as shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, rakes, hoes, and even their bare hands. They dig amid the stench of death and decomposition that lingers in the air.
The Abu Naser family lost more than 130 members in an October 29, 2024 strike on their five-story home in Beit Lahia, where over 200 people were sheltering when it was bombed. Mohammed Nabil Abu Naser, who survived the bombing, immediately started digging through the rubble, first in search of survivors and later, for bodies.
“It was all bodies and body parts," he explained. More than a year later, many of the victims have yet to be recovered.
"About 50 of them are still under the rubble to this day, a full year later," Abu Naser told The Guardian on Monday.
Often, Gazans survived initial bombings only to die slowly trapped beneath rubble. Two American volunteer surgeons, Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, last year described how wounded survivors suffered “unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night."
“One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza," they added.
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YouTube Removed Hundreds of Videos of Israeli Human Rights Violations to Comply With Trump Sanctions
"YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” said a spokesperson for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose channel was deleted.
Nov 05, 2025
In compliance with a Trump administration effort to punish critics of Israel's genocide in Gaza, YouTube has deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian rights groups, wiping several hundred videos documenting Israeli human rights violations in the process.
According to The Intercept, the video hosting website, owned by Google, quietly removed the accounts of three groups, Al-Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in October.
These are the same three groups that the State Department hit with sanctions in September because they helped to bring evidence before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The court would issue arrest warrants for the pair in 2024.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said explicitly that the groups were sanctioned because they "directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”
YouTube deleted the groups' channels, as well as their entire archives, which contained over 700 videos that documented acts of brutality by the Israeli military against Palestinians.
According to The Intercept, these included an investigative report about the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops, the military's destruction of Palestinians' homes in the West Bank, and a documentary about mothers who'd survived Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Google confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the videos to comply with the State Department sanctions.
“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.
Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said it was "outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view."
YouTube's censorship of content deemed too supportive of Palestinians predates President Donald Trump's return to power. In 2024, officials at YouTube and other social media companies were found to have cooperated through secretive back channels with a group of volunteers from Israel's tech sector to remove content critical of Israel.
Following news of the three human rights groups losing their channels, documentarian and journalist Robert Inlakesh wrote on social media that in 2024, YouTube removed his channel without warning, deleting all his content, including several documentaries he'd produced in the occupied territories.
"YouTube deleted all my coverage of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including children targeted on a live stream, along with my entire account," he said. "No community guidelines were violated, and three separate excuses were given to me. Then Google deleted my email and won’t respond to appeals."
Groups sanctioned by the US for supporting the ICC have previously received preliminary injunctions in two cases, in which courts said the State Department violated their First Amendment rights.
But even with the sanctions in place, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said there was little legal reason for YouTube to capitulate.
"It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions," she said. "Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”
Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that YouTube has not made it clear what policies his group's channel violated.
“YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people, especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on October 7," he said.
"By doing this," he added, "YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims."
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When Palestine Was on the Ballot: The Meaning of Zohran Mamdani's Victory
Palestine is the moral litmus test of our time, and against all odds, the people of New York City voted for conscience.
Nov 05, 2025
The New York City mayoral race has been called, and the dust is settling: A young, Democratic Socialist, immigrant Muslim will be the next mayor of the largest city in America. But a big part of why this victory is pivotal to many Americans isn’t just because he was on the ballot.
It’s because Palestine was on the ballot.
Zohran Mamdani’s election as the 111th mayor of New York City—its first Muslim, first South Asian, and youngest mayor in over a century—marks a seismic shift in American political consciousness. But this victory isn't merely about representation; it's about realignment.
New York is home to some of the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbies, and candidates of all parties seeking public office have long outright ignored the topic of Palestinian rights for political expediency.
Voters delivered a message that amid our nation's moral bankruptcy, corruption, and affordability crisis, the American electorate is rejecting power hungry politicians who deliver platitudes while orchestrating widespread suffering both domestically and globally.
The fact that Mamdani championed ceasefires, divestment, and dignity for Palestinians makes his win extraordinary: It's unheard of in modern history to meet a Muslim candidate who openly supports BDS without having to sacrifice their political ambitions.
This is substantially due to the shifting of public opinion on Israel and a diverse electorate increasingly critical across party lines amid its US-backed genocide in Gaza.
According to research by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Israel reportedly increased its global public relations budget in late 2024 by $150 million to rehabilitate its image by "fomenting fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism.'"
Islamophobic attacks were evident throughout the NYC mayoral campaign.
But when detractors ramped up their race baiting, Mamdani replied by producing campaign ads in Arabic and doubling down on his identity. His refreshing, bold rejection of these smear attempts resonated with voters.
Mamdani won not despite his moral clarity, but rather because of it. And a city that once punished and policed the remotest dissent of Israel has decisively chosen as its leader a man who defies the political doctrine that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Voters delivered a message that amid our nation's moral bankruptcy, corruption, and affordability crisis, the American electorate is rejecting power hungry politicians who deliver platitudes while orchestrating widespread suffering both domestically and globally.
This affirms empathy as a legitimate and transformative political force upending the political framework upholding oligarchy and plutocracy in America.
It tells people of conscience who've felt erased or silenced that integrity is not an obstacle—it’s our most valuable asset.
What began as a local race for mayor has ended as a global referendum on our collective conscience. Palestine is the moral litmus test of our time, and against all odds, the people of New York City voted for conscience.
This triumph belongs not only to the broad-based coalition of working-class New Yorkers and progressives who powered Mamdani's campaign, but also to Palestinians exposing the decades-long brutality of Israel's injustices amid its genocide of their people.
While we celebrate this historic milestone, we cannot ignore their sacrifices, courage, faith, and steadfastness that are redefining Americans' values and priorities.
We cannot forget that Israel continues to violate the terms of the so-called ceasefire and has resumed its bombings, killings, detentions, torture, and land theft of Palestinians.
And we cannot stop calling on all of our elected officials to exercise their power and privilege to end US complicity in Israel's crimes.
Arriving to the halls of power is an enormous first step of a long journey ahead.
Those who voted for conscience—and many across the country—will be watching closely and working hard to make sure that every journey centers human rights for Palestinians too, for those who seek to serve.
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