Most Palestinians in Gaza say they don’t feel the relief they expected after the ceasefire. Israel keeps blocking aid into the strip, delaying reconstruction efforts, and leaving hospitals short on supplies, while people go hungry every day. 

It’s been nearly two months since the ceasefire was reached in Gaza. Hopes were high among the 2 million Palestinians in the besieged Strip that not only would the Israeli bombings stop, but that everything they had been deprived of for the past two years – food, clean water, adequate medicine and healthcare – would flood into Gaza to ease their struggles. The hopes of regaining a fragment of the life they knew before the war, have dissipated, as the reality of a “new genocide” sets in.

Though some aid has come into Gaza, and people have tried to restore some semblance of normalcy, the reality in Gaza is far from peacetime. Israeli bombs are still falling, people cannot return to their home, and sufficient food aid and medicines are still in short supply.

The strain being felt by Gaza’s institutions, particularly its hospitals, and by ordinary Gazans, remains alarmingly close to wartime conditions. The Government Media Office in Gaza says that the humanitarian situation has not changed during or after the ceasefire, contrary to Israeli claims, and that the siege on Gaza has continued, with border crossings remaining effectively closed. What little goods do enter Gaza, the government says, does not meet “even the minimal needs of the population.”

Read more at: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/a-new-form-of-genocide-gazans-feel-little-relief-from-israeli-strangulation-since-the-ceasefire/

Account of visit to Gaza by French professor describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting convoys

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at France’s prestigious Sciences Po university, entered Gaza in December where he was hosted by an international humanitarian organisation in the southern coastal zone of al-Mawasi.

Israel has blocked international media and other independent observers from Gaza but Filiu was able to evade strict Israeli vetting. He eventually left the territory shortly after the second short-lived truce during the war came into effect in January. His eyewitness account, A Historian in Gaza, was published in French in May and in English this month.

In the book, Filiu describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting aid convoys. These permitted looters to seize huge quantities of food and other supplies destined for desperately needy Palestinians, he writes. Famine threatened parts of Gaza at the time, according to international humanitarian agencies.

UN agencies at the time told the Guardian that law and order had deteriorated across Gaza since Israel began targeting police officers, who guarded aid convoys. Israel considered police in Gaza, which has been run by Hamas since 2007, an integral part of the militant Islamist organisation.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/29/convincing-evidence-israel-backed-aid-convoy-looters-in-gaza-historian-says

The NGO’s chief says last month’s ceasefire ‘risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal’

Amnesty International has said Israel is “still committing genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, despite the ceasefire agreed last month.

The fragile, US-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas came into effect on 10 October, after two years of war.

“The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal,” said Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard. “But while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

Contacted by Agence France-Presse, the Israeli foreign ministry did not immediately respond to the allegations. When faced with such allegations previously, the ministry has vehemently rejected them as “entirely false”, “fabricated” and “based on lies”.

The 1948 UN genocide convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

In December 2024, Amnesty concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza by three of those acts – including deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/27/israel-still-committing-genocide-in-gaza-amnesty-international-says