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'Where Is the Ceasefire?': Israel's Bombing of Gaza Kills 23, Mostly Women and Children
It comes as nearly 20,000 Palestinians are being denied the ability to leave Gaza for medical treatment, in what activist Muhammad Shehada called "a slow-motion massacre."
Feb 04, 2026
Israeli bombings across Gaza have killed at least 23 Palestinians since dawn on Wednesday, including at least two infants, according to hospital officials and other health authorities.
“Where is the ceasefire? Where are the mediators?” asked Dr. Mohamed Abu Salmiya, director of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, which received the bodies of 11 people—mostly from the same family—who were killed after Israeli soldiers fired upon a building in northern Gaza.
Israel said the attack was in retaliation after Hamas militants fired at an Israeli soldier, badly wounding him. The Associated Press reports that among the Palestinians killed were "two parents, their 10-day-old girl Wateen Khabbaz, her 5-month-old cousin, Mira Khabbaz, and the children’s grandmother."
Another attack on a tent in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three more people: Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies, said they included a 12-year-old boy. Another strike killed five more people, including a paramedic named Hussein Hassan Hussein al-Semieri, who was on duty at the time.
A total of 38 Palestinians were wounded in the series of attacks, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Since a "ceasefire" agreement went into effect on October 10 last year, the Gaza Government Media Office says Israel has committed at least 1,520 violations, killing at least 556 people—including 288 children, women, and elderly people—and wounding 1,500 others.
In comments to Al Jazeera, the Palestinian human rights advocate Muhammad Shehada said a ceasefire that is violated so consistently “is no ceasefire at all”.
“At most, [the deal] can be just described as some sort of mild diplomatic restraint,” Shehada said. “Whenever the world’s attention is elsewhere, Israel escalates dramatically.”
Since its genocidal war in Gaza began in October 2023, nearly 72,000 Palestinians have been killed and 171,000 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) recently conceded are accurate after more than two years of denial. Independent estimates suggest the true death toll is much higher.
Wednesday's onslaught came as Israel began to slowly open the Rafah crossing—the main point of entry and exit from the strip—for those in severe need of medical attention to leave.
Gaza's hospitals have been rendered largely inoperable by two years of relentless bombing and a lengthy blockade on medical supplies entering the strip, which has left more than half the population without medical treatment.
The World Health Organization said last week that 18,500 Palestinians are in need of medical treatment abroad, including hundreds in need of immediate treatment.
According to Egyptian officials, 50 patients were expected to enter through the crossing each day. However, on Monday, just five Palestinians were allowed to leave Gaza for treatment, followed by 16 on Tuesday, according to Al Jazeera reporters on the ground.
Around 4,000 of those awaiting treatment are children. According to health officials, one of them, 7-year-old Anwar al-Ashi, died of kidney failure on Wednesday while on a waitlist.
Meanwhile, those attempting to cross have been met with treatment described as "humiliating" by reporters who witnessed it. Israeli troops have subjected patients to strip searches and interrogations—some were blindfolded and had their hands tied.
"The Rafah crossing continues to be a cruel and severely restricted 'passage' of pain and humiliation," said the Palestinian politician and activist Hana Ashrawi. "This continues to be a multifaceted war of aggression, based on the deliberate manipulation of the pain of a captive people."
Salmiya said that at the rate Israel is allowing them to leave, "it will take about five years on average for all patients to be discharged." He referred to Israel's actions as "crisis management, not a solution to the crisis."
On Tuesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for "the facilitation of rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief at scale—including through the Rafah crossing."
He added that Israel's recent suspension of dozens of aid organizations—including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Save the Children—defies humanitarian principles, undermines fragile progress, and worsens the suffering of civilians."
Shehada, who said he and his family were eagerly awaiting the end of travel restrictions, told Al Jazeera that "Israel hollowed [it] out of any substance or meaning." Instead, he said, "it’s basically a slow-motion massacre."
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Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine Team Quits Over Blocked Report on Right of Return
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” said resigning staffer Omar Shakir.
Feb 03, 2026
Two Human Rights Watch employees—the group's entire Israel-Palestine team—resigned after senior staffers blocked a report calling Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees' right of return to their homeland a crime against humanity.
Jewish Currents' Alex Kane reported Tuesday that HRW Israel-Palestine team lead Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari are stepping down over leadership's decision to nix the report, which was scheduled for release on December 4. Shakir wrote in his resignation email that one senior HRW leader informed him that calling Israel's denial of Palestinian right of return would be seen as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” Shakir—who is also member of Jewish Currents' advisory board—wrote in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.”
In an interview published Tuesday by Drop Site News, Shakir—who was deported from Israel in 2019 over his advocacy of Palestinian rights—said: “I’ve given every bit of myself to the work for a decade. I’ve defended the work in very, very difficult circumstances... The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told."
Ansari said that "whatever justification" HRW leadership "had for pausing the report is not based on the law or facts."
The resignations underscored tensions among HRW staffers over how to navigate a potential political minefield while conducting legal analysis and reporting of Israeli policies and practices in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
As Kane reported:
The resignations have roiled one of the most prominent human rights groups in the world just as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure. In a statement, HRW said that the report “raised complex and consequential issues. In our review process, we concluded that aspects of the research and the factual basis for our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards.” They said that “the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research,” and that the process was “ongoing.”
Kenneth Roth, a longtime former HRW executive director, defended the group's decision to block the report, asserting on social media that Bolopion "was right to suspend a report using a novel and unsupported legal theory to contend that denying the right to return to a locale is a crime against humanity."
However, Shakir countered that HRW "found in 2023 denial of a return to amount to a crime against humanity in Chagos."
"This is based on [International Criminal Court] precedent," he added. "Other reports echoed the analysis. Are you calling on HRW to retract a report for its first time ever, or it just different rules for Palestine?"
Polis Project founder Suchitra Vijayan said on X Tuesday that "the decision by Human Rights Watch’s leadership to pull a report on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, after it had cleared internal review, legal sign-off, and publication preparation, demands public reckoning."
"This was not a draft in dispute and the explanation offered so far evades the central issue of 'institutional independence' in the face of political pressure," added Vijayan, who is also a professor at Columbia and New York universities. "Why was the report stopped, and what does this decision signals for the future of its work and credibility on Palestine?"
Offering "solidarity to Omar and Milena" on social media, Medical Aid for Palestinians director of advocacy and campaigns Rohan Talbot said that "Palestinian rights are yet again exceptionalized, their suffering trivialized, and their pursuit of justice forestalled by people who care more about reputation and expediency than law and justice."
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's former Middle East and North Africa director and currently executive director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Drop Site News on Tuesday that “We have once again run into Human Rights Watch’s systemic ‘Israel Exception,’ with work critical of Israel subjected to exceptional review and arbitrary processes that no other country work faces."
The modern state of Israel was established in 1948 largely through a more than decadelong campaign of terrorism against both the British occupiers of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs and the ethnic cleansing of the latter. More than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, sometimes via massacres or the threat thereof, in what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or abandoned, and their denizens—some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes—have yet to return. Today, they and their descendants number more than 7 million, all of whom have been denied the right of return affirmed in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
Many Palestinians and experts around the world argue that the Nakba never ended—a position that has gained attention over the past 28 months, as Israel has faced mounting allegations of genocide for a war that's left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the coastal strip and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Bolopion told Kane Tuesday that the controversy over the blocked report is “a genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues on complex legal and advocacy questions."
“HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years," he added.
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US Contractor's Proposal Exposes Trump Gaza Plan as 'Vehicle for Mass Exploitation'
“Having spent three years looking at contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, this looks like highway robbery,” one expert said of the proposal—which has reportedly been halted—that would return 300% profits.
Feb 02, 2026
A reportedly withdrawn proposal from the US government contractor behind the "Alligator Alcatraz" concentration camp for immigrants in Floridawe to secure a seven-year monopoly on new trucking in the Gaza Strip was blasted Monday by critics accusing President Donald Trump of genocide profiteering.
The Guardian reported in December that Gothams LLC submitted a plan to the White House that would have guaranteed the monopoly and 300% profits from a contract to provide trucking and logistics for Trump's so-called Board of Peace in the obliterated Palestinian exclave.
The Austin-based company was previously known for being a leading recipient of no-bid contracts in Texas and for securing a $33 million deal to help run the South Florida Detention Facility, better known as Alligator Alcatraz, where detainees and human rights groups have described abuses including torture, inadequate and maggot-infested food, inability to bathe, flooding, and denial of religious practice.
Although Gothams LLC founder Michael Michelsen told the Guardian that he had withdrawn the Gaza proposal due to security concerns, critics contend that the story shows how Trump's Board of Peace is, as Center for International Policy vice president for government affairs Dylan Williams put it, "a vehicle for massive exploitation and corruption."
"Trump’s family and associates are poised to make billions at the expense of US taxpayers and Palestinian rights and lives," Williams said.
Ken Fairfax, who served as US ambassador to Kazakhstan during the Obama administration, said Monday on Bluesky, "As Trump continues to spread chaos, the constant graft by him and his buddies remains the only entirely predictable aspect of his rule."
"A built-in 300% minimum profit margin plus a guarantee of an absolute monopoly on all trucking for seven years," Fairfax added. "All for Trump's cronies."
my god, forget 19th-century colonialism, this is 17th-century colonialism. it's hard to shock me these days but "using genocide and the resulting famine to secure a royal colonial monopoly on trucking" is really somethingwww.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...
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— Henry Snow (@henrysnow.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 9:45 AM
US weapons-makers made billions of dollars arming Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, and sources told the Guardian that US contractors are now vying for a share of the estimated $70 billion Gaza reconstruction action.
“Everybody and their brother is trying to get a piece of this,” said one contractor familiar with the process. “People are treating this like another Iraq or Afghanistan. And they’re trying to get, you know, rich off of it.”
One year ago, Trump said that the United States would "take over" and "own" Gaza, which the president vowed to transform into the "Riviera of the Middle East." He later walked back his remarks, even as plans for US domination of the strip circulated.
Private equity billionaire and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner recently unveiled plans for a "New Gaza" replete with offshore fossil fuel production, luxury apartments, and industrial parks.
"It could be a hope, it could be a destination, have a lot of industry and really be a place that the people there can thrive, have great employment," Kushner said last month as Israeli forces continued their assault on Gaza that has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing since October 2023.
While Gothams LLC may have withdrawn its proposal for the trucking contract, Chris Vaneks, a partner at the company, is still involved in the project, according to records reviewed by the Guardian. A Gothams spokesperson told the newspaper that Vanek “has not had any discussions regarding financing, investment, or returns, and any suggestion otherwise would be inaccurate."
Addressing Gothams' initial proposal, Charles Tiefer, an expert on federal contracting law who was a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Guardian on Monday that “there’s never been a US government contract that had triple returns on capital, not in 200 years."
“Having spent three years looking at contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan," he added, "this looks like highway robbery.”
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