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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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'The Howl That the World Doesn't Hear': A Gaza Teacher in Her Own Words
At 28, Reham Khaled has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known.
Sep 20, 2025
So begin the words of a Gaza teacher's recent post after being forced to flee her home in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City and the school she'd set up in a tent. A bomb tore apart the tent next to the one where Reham Khaled taught her students. Two were killed:
Pain is not a passing sensation, but a being that resides within. It has fangs and fingers. It presses on the heart, weighs down the chest, and makes the breath hesitate like a hole in the air. There is a moment, just one moment, when all the internal walls we have tried to build crumble and we reach what is called the threshold of pain. At this threshold, pain is no longer just an echo or a tremor. It turns into a howl.
Skilled at weaving the horror that is war-torn Gaza with evocative imagery of far sweeter things, Khaled says that before the bomb tore apart the tent, she and her father-in-law were dreaming of eating mangoes and chicken. “And then the rocket exploded. One moment. A collective scream. A small lake of blood begins with two children whose greatest ambition was to eat chicken and mango. It is a moment, but inside me it is years.”
Born in Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, her grandparents were displaced from the Palestinian village of Najd which was ethnically cleansed in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. The Israeli town of Sderot was later constructed over the site of the village, as well as the nearby village of Huj, according to Working Class History.com.
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day."
In Gaza, Khaled studied in UNRWA schools, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established by the UN in December 1949, to provide relief and humanitarian assistance to Palestine refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
At 28, she has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known. She and her extended family have been displaced 15 times.
The howl is “not a loud, audible scream”, explains Khaled, “but the howl of the soul, that subtle sound that the ear cannot pick up but shakes the entire body from within. It's like the wind sweeping through an empty house, or the emptiness exploding in the head. In Gaza, this howl has become the secret language of everyone. The child who smiles so as not to cry in front of his mother, the mother who hides her tears from her child, the man who stands silently before the corpse of his son. They all howl from within, with a voice the world does not hear.”
A teacher of language and literature, Khaled is not overtly political and shies away from assigning blame for what is happening to her people once again. All she knows, she tells me when we exchange more messages, is that “the language of killing and violence is the biggest mistake that my people have been paying the price for two years or more.... The world is mean, cruel, and dull to the point of melting the nerves. I try to keep up with it, but I break. I try to look at it, but I find its eyes devoid of any glimmer of humanity.”
At this writing, Israeli forces have destroyed an estimated 70% of Gaza City. Airstrikes have turned entire apartment blocks and tent encampments into rubble. The Israel Defense Forces claim, without evidence, that Hamas has been using the buildings for surveillance; justifying collective punishment of Gaza City's entire population. While collective punishment is a war crime and prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, this has done nothing to protect innocent civilians throughout Gaza from October 2023 to the present. An estimated 65,000 have been killed to date, with upwards of ten thousand trapped under the rubble.
“Howling,' writes Khaled, “doesn't always manifest in screams or tears. Sometimes it manifests as cold dullness. Evacuation notices drop on doors like inane announcements, read by people with blank eyes and then go on with their lives: a man arguing with his neighbor over a gallon of water, women fighting over a turn at the oven, a young man fixing a crack in the wall. It's as if the announcement of the city's destruction means nothing, as if the preordained mass exodus is just another rumor.”
“This isn't true indifference,” she believes, “but another form of howling: a hidden protection against total collapse. When a person is unable to face the naked truth, they hide in the small details, clinging to crumbs to prevent their souls from disintegrating. Politics isn't content with killing bodies; it seeks to break the inside, to make people treat their end as secondary news. It wants evacuation itself to become a habit, a weightless piece of paper, part of the daily noise.”
Israel has ordered everyone in Gaza City to evacuate to the al-Mawasi tent encampment in the south. But the camp is severely overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Rafah, Khan Younis, and other areas and there is no available land. Nor is it rent free, as others I am in touch with tell me. The entirety of Gaza's most southern city, Rafah, once home to 250,000 people, was razed to the ground earlier this year. Khan Younis was razed in part, but some neighborhoods remain.
As for Khaled and her family, refusing to be broken or adhere exactly to Israeli orders, they moved to Deir al-Balah, a city about 10 miles south of Gaza City. They're not safe there, but at least they found land to set up tents. Khaled has already started looking for a new place to establish a school. This morning she reposted a link for the school, which is backed by the Chuffed Project, a nonprofit whose goal is to support children's education in Gaza
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day. Plant a rose on the tip of every gun. Prevent killing. Spread love and peace and never allow war to continue for long.”
It doesn't mean she's not always hungry or trying to recover her voice or understand why such hell has been unleashed on her people. But that she refuses to surrender to the “twisted logic that turns life into a farce. My voice has been extinguished, not because it disappeared, but because the echo no longer returns. And my being? I've scattered like dust, like a ravening beast that isn't satisfied with flesh and bones, but burrows deep within me in search of something I no longer know the name of. Yes, I'm hungry, but not just for bread. I'm hungry for the security that has become a myth, for the meaning that has become a mirage, for a slice of life that resembles life, not this mockery I live.”
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'Gaza Is Being Obliterated,' Says Top UN Official, as World Leaders Stand Aside
"There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone," said UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini. "It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair."
Sep 09, 2025
A top United Nations official on Tuesday called out the international community for continuing to let the Israeli military decimate civilian infrastructure in Gaza and massacre human beings with impunity.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), wrote in a social media post that Israel was making Gaza unlivable, and he slammed the country for ordering Palestinians to evacuate from Gaza City given that nowhere in the enclave appears safe from its bombing campaigns.
"Gaza is being obliterated, reduced to a wasteland," he wrote. "Gaza is being emptied from its starving population forced to move into the so called 'humanitarian' area of Mawasi. There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone. It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair."
He then turned his ire toward other nations who have continued to sit idly by as the destruction of Gaza worsens.
"Warnings of famine have fallen on deaf ears," he said. "Will warnings of this deepening catastrophe also fall on deaf ears? Cease-fire, before it is way too late. End the impunity before atrocities become the new norm."
Lazzarini was not the only observer of the Gaza conflict to raise alarms about Israel's actions on Tuesday.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, highlighted Israel's Monday destruction of Gaza City's Al-Ru'ya Commercial Tower—which was home to human rights organizations, aid groups, childcare centers, and other civil society groups—to argue that Israel is deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure in the city as a pretext for ethnically cleansing all of Gaza. Israel has brought a series of high-rise buildings to the ground with targeted missile strikes this week.
"Israel keeps blatantly destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza with barely a pretense of attacking Hamas," he said. "This is about rendering Gaza unlivable to justify (on 'humanitarian' grounds) the mass forced deportation of two million Palestinians."
Nicola Perugini, an anthropologist and political scientist at the University of Edinburgh, noted that Israel has already "destroyed 80% of civil defense equipment," which he said was being done to "maximize civilian casualties" in Gaza.
On Tuesday, a mass exodus from Gaza City was underway as Palestinian civilians attempted to flee following evacuation orders for the entirety of the city that were given by the Israeli military.
"Staying in the city is extremely dangerous," Avichay Adraee, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, said on social media.
Independent journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous responded to the IDF threat by saying, "There it is. Israel's military order to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza City of Palestinians."
The latest Gaza developments come just days after several UN experts, including United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, demanded the UN General Assembly convene to pressure Israel to end its siege of Gaza, which has caused famine and starvation in the enclave.
"Israel must immediately end its obstruction of safe, effective and dignified humanitarian assistance," they said. "But lifting these restrictions alone will not be enough to save Gaza's devastated population. What is urgently required is an end to Israel's siege and the declaration of an immediate ceasefire. At this critical moment, the world needs the General Assembly—the highest body of the United Nations—to take decisive leadership and act to prevent further catastrophe."
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