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rafah
The Elders Demand 'Decisive Measures' to End Gaza 'Genocide and Famine'
"We saw evidence of food and medical aid denied entry, and heard witness accounts of the killing of Palestinian civilians, including children," said former Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.
Aug 12, 2025
The group of global leaders known as The Elders on Tuesday demanded "decisive measures" to end the famine and "unfolding genocide" in Gaza that has led to international outcry month after month with no end in sight.
In a statement, the organization founded by the late South African President Nelson Mandela revealed that two of its members, former Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, recently visited the Rafah border crossing in Egypt that is formerly a key entry point for humanitarian aid to be delivered into Gaza that has now become only a trickle.
Robinson and Clark said that the situation in Gaza was dire and they accused the Israeli government of overseeing "human-caused famine in Gaza" as well as "an unfolding genocide." They then outlined evidence that Israel was responsible for the catastrophe going on inside the territory.
"We saw evidence of food and medical aid denied entry, and heard witness accounts of the killing of Palestinian civilians, including children, while trying to access aid inside Gaza," they said. "The deliberate destruction of health facilities in Gaza means children facing acute malnutrition cannot be treated effectively. At least 36 children starved to death just in the month of July."
Robinson and Clark also noted that no shelter materials have been allowed into Gaza since this past March, and they added that "we saw huge numbers of tents ready for delivery but blocked by the Israeli authorities."
The two leaders called for cease-fire talks to begin immediately between Israel and Hamas, while also specifically calling for Hamas to release any remaining hostages it kidnapped during its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. They also recommended that arms sales to Israel be "suspended immediately" and that "targeted sanctions should be imposed on Prime Minister Netanyahu and all members of his security cabinet."
They also chided other nations for maintaining economic relations with Israel even as starvation unfolds in Gaza.
"The uncomfortable truth is that many states are prioritizing their own economic and security interests, even as the world is reeling from the images of Gazan children starving to death," they said.
The Elders' call for action comes on the same week that the Gaza Health Ministry announced that the number of children in Gaza who have died from severe hunger has passed 100, with the vast majority of such deaths occurring over the last three weeks.
Additionally, international charity Save the Children last week said that 43% of pregnant and breastfeeding women who showed up to its clinics in Gaza last month were malnourished, which represented a threefold increase since March, when the Israeli military imposed a total siege on the area.
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Letters From Rafah: A Life Under Siege
Where is humanity? Does anyone still see us? Has the world really become this cold and dispassionate, or has it always been that way?
Apr 11, 2025
Below are excerpts from letters sent to me by my friend, Hudia, of Rafah. I have saved everything she has sent me since October 2023. The entries below are taken from messages she has sent since Israel's resumption of bombing on March 18, 2025. Hudia writes to me in Arabic. I have translated and edited them for style and clarity with her permission.
March 21, 2025
The war is more terrifying than before. It seems to have reached a level of savagery and madness we've never experienced before. The bombing doesn't stop; it goes on relentlessly day and night. Some days I want to scream when I hear it. Every day there are more home demolitions, and we hear missile sounds that are new to us. Israel is testing out its newest weapons on us to see how well they blast us into pieces of flesh or vaporize us altogether; to see, perhaps, if one bomb can turn a concrete building into dust faster than another. The power of the explosions is enormous and can be heard in Jerusalem and its environs. This time around—since Israel began its war on us again—my fear has doubled—for myself, my children, my family, for everyone. The bombing is everywhere; the killing and the places being bombed are entirely arbitrary and unpredictable. Our fate lies in the hands of chance.
March 22, 2025
One of the most devastating things about this madness is that we no longer recognize the places where we used to live. We might see a video clip of a street in Gaza—a street whose markets and shops, colors, flavors, and scents we had memorized; a street that had witnessed thousands of our memories in the city. But that video clip is all that is left. Now that street has become so unrecognizable it's as if they have taken away our ability to remember. They did not leave behind a single marker to remind us of where we are. Even the trees are gone. Perhaps they think by erasing our memories they will have erased our identity. They are wrong: It just makes us swallow our past whole until we become one and the same with it.
Every day we stand ankle deep in the remains of our people, in streams of blood and debris. What tears my heart the most are the bodies of dead children. They haunt me in my dreams. I need a truce with myself to force me away from the news; a temporary truce so I can embrace what is still living after death rains down from the skies. I need to smell air without the putrid smell of rotting flesh and gunpowder. I need to see scenes other than corpses and skeletons spread everywhere; other than people with amputated limbs moving about on some violent stage where the theme is destruction.
Do you want to know how I feel? Look at the miles of rubble and debris. That's how I feel.
By God, I am so tired of seeing tents everywhere, and little children gathering in queues for food and water. I can no longer bear seeing all these things and the sickly faces of people in the streets. I want to run away from this pain. But, let me tell you honestly that in many ways the bitterness of betrayal is even harsher than the pain of this aggression—the slaughter, displacement, and starvation. We have been completely abandoned. No one is going to step in and help us. We are alone.
March 23, 2025
[NOTE: On March 23, news of Israel's execution of 15 Red Crescent and Civil Defense workers in the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah had not yet reached the U.S. Hudia wrote in her letters to me what she heard from people in Tel al-Sultan on the day it happened and thereafter. Much that she describes was never reported in the news. Outlets such as Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera; and human rights organizations such as Al Mezan, with whose fieldworker I spoke, collected eyewitness reports and documented as much as possible.]
POEM
They buried them alive with bullets.
They stood over the hole,
piling the bodies on top of each other.
There was barely time to scream.
the spray silenced everything in seconds.
The earth swallowed them up
leaving only the sky as a witness.
The reports are terrible. The Israelis ordered the residents of Tel al-Sultan to evacuate, but didn't give them any time to pack up or coordinate plans. They had to leave immediately. Within minutes, they were fired upon by quadcopters, drones, and tanks. It was chaos.
Soldiers set up a makeshift checkpoint for people to pass through. Most were able to pass, but some were detained in a muddy area off to the side. We don't know what happened to them. We heard that somewhere they separated the men, put them in pits, and executed them. But we didn't know exactly who they meant. The ambulance crews that came to help have vanished.
Many people are still trapped in Tel al-Sultan, and no one knows anything about their fate yet either. As people were running to escape the area, anyone trying to help them was also shot so the dead and wounded were left in the streets.
Tonight, they bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. An Israeli airstrike killed a Hamas member and 16-year-old boy. This dirty war is as dirty as the world itself for allowing Israel to violate everything.
March 27, 2025
Good morning, my friend. What happened in Rafah is horrific and beyond comprehension. I don't know if we'll ever have the full truth of what the Israelis did. What is now coming out about the executed Paramedics and Civil Defense members is just the tip of the iceberg. We have reached the peak of madness. Nobody cares what's happening here. I think we are going into the unknown.
I can no longer sleep, day or night. It is after 3:00 am, and I am up writing this to you. Tomorrow I will flee again with my son's family to the Khan Younis area. I will take my tent and put it directly on the sea. Maybe there I will fall asleep. I am so tired of everything.
March 30, 2025
Yes, I am now living in one of those tents you've been seeing again and again on the open beach area of al-Mawasi. Life here is very difficult. Water trucks come, and we carry water from the street to the tents so we can clean the dishes and wash the clothes by hand. This doesn't solve the problem of sand and dust, our two constant companions. Of course, there is no gas. We cook everything over a fire, including bread.
The crossings have been closed for about a month. Nothing is entering Gaza. The markets are completely empty of almost everything, and the agricultural areas east of the strip are under Israeli control. It is possible to find only a few vegetables and fruit at food stands here and there along the streets, and most cannot afford to buy them because the prices are so high. We mostly rely on canned food when it is available. People here are hungry, scared, and sick. The general health of the people has declined because there is so little nutritious food to eat. This makes people less able to endure the hardships. So many will die with this added weakness. I am sure this is one of Israel's goals in the overall scheme to wipe us out.
April 1, 2025
I can't stand to listen to the news reports any longer. They sound like reels of dry statistics, one after another. They don't mention the empty chair at the dining table, the best friend who has disappeared, or the parents searching for their child's limbs in the rubble. They don't tell you about the families going with less and less each day, trying to keep up brave faces for their children; or how a mother feels when she passes by children playing football, which her child loved, but who died without fulfilling his share of dreams.
That news "ticker tape" at the bottom of your screen doesn't mention how many men here pretend to be strong before weeping at night from pain and longing. It lists numbers of dead, dying, wounded, and forever incapacitated, but it is those who keep going who are the future's story. They are beyond exhausted but go about their daily tasks like automatons except that they are absorbing this reality, this world of pure violence and expedited trauma, in which we are supposed to live like human beings. It is these people, plodding along half-dazed through this giant cemetery, who have internalized the reality of what Gaza has become.
April 5, 2025
Yesterday, my uncle was martyred after his tent was bombed in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis. He succumbed to his wounds. I am suffering from severe depression this time, fear and anxiety for everyone. I cannot sleep at all.
April 8, 2025
The plan to expel us is taking a serious turn, especially after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent visit to America. I don't know what I will do. With the new "Morag corridor," Israel has completely separated Rafah from Khan Younis and I believe after they've completed the destruction of Rafah, they will force us there, close to the Egyptian border, in preparation for mass expulsion. Then Rafah will be merged with the "buffer zone" around the strip and taken over by Jewish settlers. My city will have disappeared into history. This is the only logical conclusion I can come up with given the demolition of the remaining buildings in Rafah.
I spoke to my brother yesterday in Amsterdam. I informed him about our uncle Muhammad's martyrdom. I haven't spoken to him for a while, but I know how he is from the tone of his voice. He always tries to make me think he's fine and that everything is normal, but I know it's not—and I know he's not. He's panicking, I can feel it, and afraid for everyone, and so am I. The situation is terrifying, suffocating, and worrying. I always tell him everyone is still fine, and that I hope everyone will remain "fine." I speak to everyone in my family here daily, hoping that we and the others here will survive this holocaust, but I no longer know if we will.
You know, I used to love the sea and would sit out by it at night on the beach, drinking coffee and smoking my cigarettes. Now the sea is in front of me, but I can barely stand to look at it. It has become ominous, as if waiting to swallow us whole. The beautiful Mediterranean now terrifies me. What a strange paradox.
My friend, I know you're always thinking of me, and I always read our conversations, old and new. I'm so grateful for your continued support.
April 9, 2025
A hundred tents here, 50 more over there—in every corner there are more tents, and each one tells a story of pain.
I've asked myself a million times how people can live like this; how do they sleep, how do they endure the heat and cold, the oppressiveness of these "homes," the utter lack of privacy? Where is humanity? Does anyone still see us? Has the world really become this cold and dispassionate, or has it always been that way?
These are not just tents. These are souls, shattered families, and shattered dreams all under a thin fabric that conceals neither the pain nor the indignity of what we have become. Do you want to know how I feel? Look at the miles of rubble and debris. That's how I feel; you just can't take a picture of my soul.
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Israel Preparing to Seize Ethnically Cleansed City of Rafah as Part of Permanent Buffer Zone
"The entire city of Rafah is being swallowed up," warned one Israeli human rights group. "The massive death zone... continues to grow by the day."
Apr 09, 2025
The Israel Defense Forces is preparing to permanently seize the largely depopulated Palestinian city of Rafah—comprising about 20% of Gaza's land area—and incorporate what was once the embattled enclave's third-largest city into a borderland buffer that IDF troops have described as a "kill zone" rife with alleged war crimes.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Wednesday that "defense sources" said an area from the so-called Philadelphi corridor along Gaza's border with Egypt and the Morag corridor—the name of a Jewish colony that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis—will be incorporated into the buffer zone that runs along the entire length of the Israeli border.
The affected area includes the entire city of Rafah—which is thousands of years old—and surrounding neighborhoods, which were home to more than 250,000 people before Israeli launched what United Nations experts have called a genocidal assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
As Haaretz's Yaniv Kubovitch reported:
Expanding the buffer zone to this extent carries significant implications. Not only does it cover a vast area—approximately 75 square kilometers (about 29 square miles), or roughly one-fifth of the Gaza Strip—but severing it would effectively turn Gaza into an enclave within Israeli-controlled territory, cutting it off from the Egyptian border. According to defense sources, this consideration played a central role in the decision to focus on Rafah...
It has yet to be decided whether the entire area will simply be designated a buffer zone that is off-limits to civilians—as has been done in other parts of the border area—or whether the area will be fully cleared and all buildings demolished, effectively wiping out the city of Rafah.
In recent weeks and for the second time during the war, IDF troops forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands residents from Rafah and other areas of southern Gaza in an ethnic cleansing campaign reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, or "catastrophe" in Arabic, through which the modern state of Israel was founded. Most Gaza residents today are Nakba survivors or descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from other parts of Palestine in 1948.
Earlier this month, Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to seize "large areas" of southern Gaza to be added to what Katz called "security zones" and "settlements."
Jewish recolonization of Gaza is a major objective of many right-wing Israelis. Last month, Katz announced the creation of a new IDF directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing northern Gaza, which Israeli leaders euphemistically call "voluntary emigration." Katz said the agency would be run "in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump," who in February said that the United States would "take over" Gaza after emptying the strip of its over 2 million Palestinians, and then transform the enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East." Trump subsequently attempted to walk back some of his comments.
Earlier this week, the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence published testimonies of IDF officers, soldiers, and veterans who took part in the creation of the buffer zone. Soldiers recounted orders to "deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions."
Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally, were targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. One officer featured in the report told The Guardian: "We're killing [men], we're killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We're destroying their houses and pissing on their graves."
Most of Gaza's more than 2 million residents have been forcibly displaced at least once since Israel launched the war, which has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Widespread starvation and disease have been fueled by a "complete siege" which, among other Israeli policies and actions, has been cited in the ongoing South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
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