Fear controls every moment of our lives. The sky over Khan Younis is filled with drones and helicopters flying at very low altitudes, their constant noise becoming part of our days and nights.
This small window screen that once protected us from the cold night air and insects can no longer protect us from anything. Continuous bombardment and airstrikes have torn it apart, just as they have torn apart so many simple parts of our lives.
We live between fear and uncertainty, trying to hold on to the little hope we have left amid pain that seems never-ending.
Please keep us in your prayers and thoughts. We desperately need them. Perhaps a sincere prayer will reach the heavens and bring us some peace, safety, and mercy during these difficult days.
“The first thing anyone noticed in Theodosia was her smile. We’d always see her laughing.”
This Lebanese student was killed by Israel just after finishing her final exams. Theodosia Karam is one of over 3,500 people killed by Israel’s attacks on Lebanon since March.
Palestinians in the southern governorates of the Gaza Strip staged a protest demanding immediate intervention from international organisations to secure water, as a severe thirst crisis deepens across displacement camps. "We want water! We want water!" the crowd chants, before Dr. Kamal al-Sheikh Ali, director of the displacement camps in Rafah, addresses the camera to spell out the scale of the disaster. He explains that Rafah governorate alone hosts 181 camps sheltering roughly 200,000 displaced Palestinians, while the entire population receives only 2,500 cubic metres of water per day, split between 1,500 from the Red Cross and 1,000 from the Palestinian Water Authority. The wider picture across Gaza is bleaker still: the strip's water system, which once supplied around 100,000 cubic metres a day, has collapsed to just 35,000, with per capita availability dropping from 80 litres per person per day before the genocide to less than 10 litres now, and at times as low as 2 litres, far below the global humanitarian minimum of 50 to 100 litres.
Over 96% of Gaza's water is unfit for human consumption, more than 1,675 kilometres of the strip's 4,800-kilometre water and sanitation network have been destroyed by the Israeli occupation army, and 93% of households face water insecurity. Dr. al-Sheikh Ali calls on the International Red Cross, UNICEF, the Water Authority, and the United Nations to intervene immediately, warning that without a swift response, the displaced will face a catastrophe with dire consequences. The crisis is a direct result of the Israeli occupation's systematic destruction of Gaza's water infrastructure and its continued restrictions on the entry of fuel, equipment, and supplies needed to operate wells and desalination plants.
mhmadalshaer11 (IG)
The irony is hard to miss.
Overall, more than half (55%) of all U.S. Jews state that being Jewish is NOT about practicing Judaism - that it’s primarily about ancestry and culture. Moreover, in Israel, which is home to about half of the world’s Jewish population, approximately 44% of Israeli Jews self-identify as secular (hiloni).
For decades, Zionists have claimed an ancestral THEOLOGICAL right to Palestine, yet most of the loudest advocates of this claim are not even practicing Jews and mostly identify as secular or atheist.
So how does a religious claim become an ethnic one?
Enter the term “ethnoreligion.”
However, what most people don’t know is that the term was totally made up by Lawrence H. Fuchs in 1956 - an American Zionist scholar whose parents were European Jews.
The concept immediately gained traction in the mid-20th century and helped advance the argument that Judaism is not merely a religion, but an ethnicity, thereby, allowing even those with no religious observance to claim a collective theological national right to Palestine.
You have been lied to. Like every other religion in the world, Judaism, too, is a faith, not an ethnicity.
This entire “ethnoreligion” argument deserves far more scrutiny than it receives, particularly given its role in justifying the displacement of Palestinians and the colonisation of their land.
In this podcast episode, I unpack why I believe the “ethnoreligion” framework is intellectually flawed and politically convenient.
I’m currently working on a detailed article tracing the origins and evolution of this concept. More soon.
One of the hardest nights we have ever endured.
We are not okay.
Goodbye to a world that chose silence while we suffered.
We will never forget those who looked away when we needed humanity the most.
We have spent decades carefully measuring the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer while simultaneously structuring agriculture around continuing the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer.
I can no longer keep going.
Every day, I wake up and go to work. I spend long hours traveling between central Gaza and Gaza City, then spend my day surrounded by the wounded, blood, exhausted faces, and endless pain. I return home physically and emotionally drained, only to find myself far from my wife and children, who are living in a tent. I feel helpless because I cannot be with them as I should.
I work as a volunteer, holding on to the hope that one day I might earn a modest income that will help me continue. But the truth is that I feel I am losing what little strength, determination, and energy I have left. Every day I grow weaker, both mentally and physically.
After nearly two years and eight months of war, words have become incapable of describing what we are living through. There are things that photographs cannot capture, reports cannot explain, and language itself cannot express.
I want nothing more than a chance to live. I want to leave Gaza before I lose what remains of myself. I want to live a normal life, to watch my children grow up in safety, and to wake up one day without fear, anxiety, or this constant feeling of exhaustion.
I am very tired.
So tired that I no longer know how to explain the depth of this exhaustion.
Israel yesterday kidnapped four women. Two are footballers in the Palestinian National Team.
Their names are: Natali Abu Dia and Rand Halwani.
Is it normal to kidnap footballers, @FIFAcom? Where are sports media organisations? This story should be the headline everywhere.
“The genocide in Gaza is an unequivocal message sent from the industrialized nations of the north, which spent billions to sustain Israel’s mass slaughter, to a global population that subsists on a few dollars a day:
We don’t care about humanitarian law. We don’t care about human rights. Your lives mean nothing to us. We will use any tool, including genocide, to protect our monopoly on wealth and power.”
Chris Hedges on what’s really at stake in Gaza – humanity’s survival against the billionaires’ insatiable appetite for hoarding wealth.
https://t.co/f7Tsrl3c78
BREAKING
U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie:
“Just withhold foreign aid to Israel for a month and they’ll stop bombing their neighbors — instant peace.”
“Israel has been, and continues to be, the biggest welfare recipient from American tax payers.”
Good morning from Gaza🇵🇸 🍉
In this video, I am documenting for you what our lives have become in Gaza.
Despite the destruction and tragedy we are living through, we still try to find moments of happiness among the rubble ✌️✌️
🔴An incredibly violent morning so far in Lebanon. Dozens of Israeli air and drone strikes so far have killed multiple people, including six Palestinian and Syrian laborers in a massacre in the Hosh neighborhood of Tyre, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.
See below a video of a man being hunted by an Israeli drone and then targeted on the side a busy highway. This is not the first time this has happened.
A few days ago, my family made a decision that no family should ever have to make.
We packed a small bag with our most important documents and agreed to carry it with us wherever we go.
Not because we are planning a trip, but because we have learned that in Gaza, life can change in five minutes.
Our home was already destroyed in the war. Now we live in a rented apartment, and yet even this temporary shelter no longer feels permanent.
The recent escalation in airstrikes and the growing number of homes being destroyed minutes after warnings are issued have brought back a feeling we know too well:
The feeling that nothing is certain. Not where you will sleep tonight, not whether you will return home, not whether the place you call home will still exist tomorrow.
I sometimes think about how absurd this transformation has been.
Once, we had a large house and a garden, today the most important things we own fit inside a single backpack.
Identification cards. Passports. Certificates. A few papers proving who we are.
Sometimes I look at that bag and wonder how an entire life became so light.
As if years of memories, celebrations, losses, and ordinary days had all been folded into documents that can be carried on a shoulder.
Yesterday , an airstrike hit very close to where we live. Two people were killed, and twelve others were injured.
What troubles me most is that we were there. We had been walking through the same streets, moving through the same area.
Had our timing been slightly different, had we stopped for a few extra minutes, had we taken another route, perhaps this post would never have been written.
That is how thin the line between life and death has become.
A few minutes. A coincidence. A different turn at the corner.
This is what life feels like now.
Not a life built on plans, but on probabilities. Not security, but luck. Not certainty, but survival.
So we carry our bags with us, not because they contain our possessions, but because they contain the last evidence of the lives we once had.
And perhaps the strangest part of all is that we have begun to treat this as normal.
A family carrying emergency bags wherever they go. An airstrike a few streets away. A narrow escape. And then another ordinary day.
But none of this is ordinary.
No family should have to carry its past on its shoulder because it is no longer certain of its future.
And no human being should ever have to live this way!!
#WoundedGaza