Heleen Saaf

Humanitarian affairs, development aid, international politics, Middle East, South Asia, photography, travelling. Opinions are my own - RTs # endorsements

[Amnesty International USA @amnestyusa]

More than a month after a ceasefire was announced and all living Israeli hostages were released, Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signaling any change in their intent. https://t.co/BHs2gm2wiZ

[Hanan Ashrawi @DrHananAshrawi]

On Palestine and the Death of the West's International Legal Order https://t.co/eGifKumsAe

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Egyptian heavy equipment and Red Cross left Gaza’s Al Zaytoun neighbourhood after finding body of Israeli prisoner..

Why did not they continue their work to look for bodies of thousands of Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation forces and still trapped in the same area?

[Jan Egeland @NRC_Egeland]

Too many countries block refugees with barbed wire, at closed borders.

Uganda is still a generous safe haven.

It is home to almost 2 million refugees who fled violence in South Sudan, DR Congo, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

In spite of funding shortages, it remains a welcoming refugee hosting country, allowing people freedom of movement, to build livelihoods, and to settle in communities rather than in camps.

Now, Uganda is struggling to cope, because international funding cuts from donors who promised to stand by Uganda as a host-country.

Families tell NRC that they don’t have enough food, that classrooms are overcrowded, and that basic services are stretched to breaking point. Women and children – who make up 87% of the refugee population – are bearing the brunt of this neglect.

Our new video explains what makes Uganda’s approach so important, how it’s under threat, and why the international community must step up:
⬇️

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israel killed 14-year-old Faris Odeh 25 years ago today. This photo was taken 10 days earlier.

For decades, they’ve tried to convince you that children throwing rocks are the problem and not the occupying force that murders them.

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Gaza

No one touches aid trucks because there are no Israeli-backed gangsters

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Three American military planes just landed at Ben Gurion Airport — loaded with weapons.

No press releases. No denials. Just quiet coordination.
The American-Israeli war machine keeps moving and the world blames us..

[The Hind Rajab Foundation @HindRFoundation]

🚨The #HindRajabFoundation has filed a criminal complaint in Germany against German IDF soldier Shimon Zuckerman for war crimes and crimes against humanity based on verified evidence related to his role in the destruction of the village of Khuza’a in Gaza.
more ⤵️
https://t.co/uE6Az1BleA

[The Rights Forum @TheRightsForum]

Het nieuwe rapport van de VN-rapporteur voor Palestina, Francesca Albanese, beschrijft hoe de genocide in Gaza het resultaat is van decennialange westerse medeplichtigheid aan Israëls misdaden tegen de Palestijnen. Ook Nederland komt er niet best vanaf. https://t.co/NspyLhBqb6

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Today’s Israeli violations:
▪️Israeli drones killed five people in Al Shuja’yia neighbourhood, west of the Gaza City
▪️Israeli drones killed one person in Al Fakhari neighbourhood, east of Khan Younis
▪️Israeli bombing wounded several people north of the Gaza City

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

I came back today. I thought I had known despair before, but what I saw today is beyond despair.
It is not grief, nor horror, nor pain. It is something colder, a stillness where even God seems to have withdrawn His hand.

The sky was impossibly blue. The kind of blue that mocks you, that makes you wonder whether beauty itself is a crime.
I walked through streets that no longer exist, streets that were my childhood.
They are now a wilderness of stone, wire, and dust.

A man stood on a heap, a neighbor, I think.
He pointed and said, “It’s here.”
I asked him how far.
He looked down.
And I understood: my house was beneath his feet.

I lifted my phone, as if the machine could recognize what I could not. The screen glowed; there was nothing to see. The earth had swallowed the distances. Even the smell of home was gone. It was as if the thread connecting me to life itself had been cut.

I dug with my hands. The dust burned. My palms bled.
My mother had told me: “Search for anything we can save.” And so I obeyed her like a son obeys the last voice that still believes there is meaning in obedience.

From a house that once cost my father one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, a lifetime of labor, of hope, of decency, I found two things:
a knife, and a pillow.

Two relics of civilization. One for necessity, one for illusion.
That is what remains of man.

I sat in the ruins, the blue of my shirt turned gray with ash, and I thought:
this is the end not of a city, but of meaning itself.

I thought of my parents, their hands, their faith in honest work.
How will they bear this? How will any man bear seeing his father’s roof turned into dust by a stranger’s hands, hands that will never know the names of those they destroyed?

But what tears me apart more than ruin is silence. No one speaks to us.
No one tells us where to go, who will rebuild, or who is responsible.
The politicians talk of victories, the generals of strategy, the world of peace and progress.
But none of them live here among the ashes. None of them stand where I stand, sifting through their own dead.

And those who claim to represent us, where are they? Where is the money they collected in our name, the promises they made before the cameras, the slogans they wrote while we buried our children?
Who among them will come to this ruin and say: Forgive us, we failed you?
Not one.

They sit in offices with clean shirts, counting our corpses as figures on paper. They say “reconstruction,” “aid,” “negotiations,” as though the vocabulary of power could fill the emptiness of a mother’s bed.

I tell you the truth: there is no crime greater than indifference.
The murderer at least acknowledges the victim.
But those who look away, they kill the soul itself.

I brushed the dust from my shirt, though I knew it was useless.
I wanted to see if there was still color left in the world.
There wasn’t.
The blue had become the color of mourning.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking, not from fear, but from the unbearable realization that we have become expendable to the world.
Our suffering is entertainment, our death a policy, our endurance a statistic.

I wept then, openly, shamelessly.
I, who once believed in the dignity of suffering, now see that dignity itself has been annihilated.
There is nothing noble in being forgotten.

If you are reading this, do not admire the style or the language.
Lower your head, and weep.
Because this dust, this silence, this cry, is what remains of us.

[Maha Hussaini @MahaGaza]

We have returned, like we’ll always do.

📍Gaza City

[Translating Falasteen (Palestine) @translatingpal]

🚨The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s so-called “aid center” near the Netzarim Corridor has been dismantled, revealing evidence of what Palestinians identified as a death trap. The site, which was supposedly there to serve over 300,000 people, contained remnants of live bullets, sound grenades, and explosive fragments used by the Israeli occupation forces and American mercenaries against civilians seeking food and aid.

According to initial medical reports, more than 2,600 Palestinians were killed and over 19,000 wounded near these aid centers. The foundation has now handed over responsibility for aid delivery in the first phase of the ceasefire deal to the United Nations and the Red Cross following mounting international criticism over the deadly conditions surrounding these operations.

Source: Tariq Abou Azzum - abuoazzum8 (IG)

[Mustafa Barghouti @Mustafa_Barghouti @MustafaBarghou1]

According to the Israeli military analyst Yossi Yushaa, no theft has happened of the humanitarian aid trucks since the declaration of the ceasefire in Gaza which proves that the Israeli army was the one encouraging and protecting the collaboration gangs that used to steel the supplies.

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Before and after Israeli genocide

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Why would Israel refuse to release a respected surgeon? There have been reports from his lawyer than Dr. Abu Safiya has been severely tortured & presumably the Israelis now fear detailed accounts emerging about their war crimes against Palestinian doctors. But the truth will out

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

For two years, the media has told you that this is Israel “targeting Hamas.”

[UNRWA @UNRWA]

People in #Gaza have started returning north again.

They are unsure what they will find left of their homes and communities.
“Whatever it is, it’s better than facing death every second,” one of our colleagues in Gaza told us.

#ceasefire