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    ‘We pray a visa comes before death’: Gaza’s injured children left in limbo

    Mariam Sabbah had been fast asleep, huddled under a blanket with her siblings, when an Israeli missile tore through her home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of 1 March.View image in fullscreenThe missile narrowly missed the sleeping children but as the terrified nine-year-old ran to her parents, a second one hit. “I saw her coming towards me but suddenly there was another explosion and she vanished into the smoke,” says her mother, Fatma Salman.As the parents searched desperately for their children, they found Mariam lying unconscious in a pool of blood; her left arm was ripped off, shards of shrapnel had pierced through her small body, and she was bleeding heavily from her abdomen.As well as losing her arm, the blast left Mariam with severe abdominal and pelvic injuries from shrapnel tearing through her bladder, uterus, and bowel.“Mariam needs specialised paediatric reconstructive surgery,” says Dr Mohammed Tahir, a British surgeon who treated Mariam while volunteering at al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza. “Her arm amputation is also very high and requires limb lengthening and specialist prosthesis. Without this, it will be very difficult for her to live a normal life.”View image in fullscreenMariam is one of tens of thousands of people in Gaza who have been injured by Israeli military attacks over the past 23 months, which have also killed more than 64,000, mainly women and children.Repeated military strikes and attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s blockade of basic goods and supplies into the territory have left the health sector devastated and doctors without the means to treat the sick, injured, and famished.Since October 2023, 7,672 patients, including 5,332 children, have been medically evacuated from Gaza for urgent treatment abroad, but trying to get a medical evacuation organised and approved is a slow, arduous and heavily vetted process.So far more than 700 patients – many of them children – have died waiting for permission to be granted to leave Gaza by Cogat, the Israeli government department responsible for approving medical evacuations, according to the WHO.View image in fullscreenMariam and her family secured the offer of surgical care from a specialist team in Ohio, and the little girl waited two months to be given permission from Cogat to leave Gaza, by which time her condition had deteriorated. She was finally evacuated to Egypt but was then stuck for months waiting for her US travel documents to be processed.Then, just a few days before her appointment at the embassy in Cairo to approve her visa, the US suddenly stopped issuing visas for Palestinians – including children – to be treated in US hospitals.View image in fullscreenThe decision followed an online pressure campaign by Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump, who had posted pictures and videos of evacuated patients from Gaza arriving on US soil on social media channels, asking: “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?”Despite the rhetoric surrounding the visa ban – with Loomer hailing the move as a victory, saying it would stop “this invasion of our country”, the US has only accepted a total of 48 medical evacuations from Gaza, according to the figures provided to the Guardian by WHO. In comparison, 3,995 and 1,450 critically injured people have been evacuated to Egypt and the UAE respectively from Gaza. The UK has so far accepted 13.Medical NGOs say that around 20 severely wounded children have been affected by the ban, and are now stuck in transit countries with nowhere to go and with the treatment needed to save them dangerously out of reach.Since receiving the news that she had been blocked from receiving treatment, Salman has been unable to console her daughter. “She won’t leave her bed or stop crying,” she says. “Mariam had placed all her hopes of getting better on her medical treatment in the US.”A few wards down, and also now stuck in Egypt after the US visa ban, is 18-year-old Nasser al-Najjar, who can no longer bear to look at himself in the mirror.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAfter becoming displaced, Najjar and his family were sheltering at a school in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, when it was targeted in an Israeli airstrike in January. The 18-year-old suffered devastating injuries to his face and jaw that left him completely disfigured; he lost his left eye, his nose was severed and his jaw shattered – leaving him unable to breathe, eat or speak properly.“I once took pride in my appearance but now I don’t even recognise myself,” says Najjar, his voice raspy and breathless.The teenager requires extensive reconstructive and cosmetic surgery that is not available in Egypt and doctors have warned that without the operations, his condition will deteriorate.He has been offered treatment at the El Paso children’s hospital in Texas, where specialist doctors are waiting to operate on him, but it is now uncertain if Najjar will ever be permitted to go.View image in fullscreenThe weight of uncertainty takes a heavy mental toll. Ahmed Duweik already suffers from phantom limb pain; sharp, stabbing sensations that come and go unpredictably and leave him screaming in agony. But since learning that his medical trip to the US might not go ahead, the 10-year-old has become withdrawn and emotionally unresponsive.View image in fullscreenAhmed was also asleep at home when the missiles struck the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the night. During the bombing, he suffered horrific injuries with shrapnel penetrating his entire body; he was left with an amputated arm, soft tissue loss in his right thigh, and severe nerve and vascular damage.Ahmed requires complex reconstructive surgery and prosthetic fitting that are not available in Egypt. Since the attack, he has developed severe psychological trauma and is unable to sleep, waking up every night crying and screaming, clinging to his mother in fear.Doctors warn that if Ahmed’s treatment is delayed any further, his condition will continue to worsen.Dr Mosab Nasser, chief executive of FAJR Global, the medical aid organisation that managed to evacuate the children from Gaza and was due to arrange their surgical care in the US, said the visa ban had imposed an “indirect death penalty on the most innocent victims of this war”.View image in fullscreen“We’re talking about a handful of children suffering from severe, life threatening injuries,” he says. “These medical evacuations are a lifeline for these kids and we urge the US government to reject such divisive rhetoric and reaffirm its role as a temporary safe haven for those who so desperately need it.”In a statement to the Guardian, a US state department spokesperson confirmed it had paused the visas and would take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review, adding: “There are many countries around the world with great hospitals that should be stepping up to provide assistance, including France, Australia, UK, and Canada to name a few.”For now, a bleak Egyptian hospital has become the children’s home, where they have been stuck in limbo since the visa ban, with no designated doctors and limited specialist expertise to treat their extensive war injuries. The families are confined to small, sweltering and cramped rooms. None of them have any idea what comes next.“We feel so powerless,” says Khatib, as she sits beside her son. “All we can do is pray that his visa approval comes before death does.” More

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    How to burst the Israeli bubble | Noam Sheizaf

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    View image in fullscreenThroughout the two years of the Gaza war, Israeli bombing has been so intense that, in certain weather conditions, its echoes can be heard here in Tel Aviv, 70km away. The mass starvation is quieter. Even images of dead children rarely pierce Israel’s media bubble. The war appears in protests over the hostages, political debates, stickers with the faces of fallen soldiers on walls and bus stops. Palestinian suffering – by contrast – remains distant, abstract, unmoving.After two years, Israeli society is adapting: the army has developed a practice of not calling reservists who are likely to dodge the draft; instead, it turns to former soldiers in need of cash or employment, offering them to fill the ranks of its combat units. At times, special arrangements are made so that reservists can keep working in their old jobs, practically doubling their income. Civilian contractors are hired to systematically raze whole neighborhoods in the Strip; they are paid by the house. The IDF is becoming a new military, adjusted for permanent operations in Gaza, the West Bank and the northern borders. The rest of the public goes on with their lives. War is the new normal.In early August, Israel’s security cabinet ordered the military to occupy Gaza City, where some of Hamas’s leadership is supposedly hiding. The assault began with the toppling of high-rise buildings last week. Yet the term “occupation” is misleading: Israel has no intention of ruling over the more than 1 million Palestinians sheltering in the city. Emboldened by US support, the military has ordered residents to move to a so-called “humanitarian city” in the south, while Gaza City will be leveled to the ground. This would mark another step toward realizing the far-right fantasy of removing Palestinians from the territory altogether. Until then, they will remain crammed into a corner of the Strip, given only the bare minimum to keep them alive – and at times, not even that.This week, several countries – among them France, the UK and Australia – intend to recognize the state of Palestine during the UN general assembly. Many people have long deemed the two-state solution dead, and nothing could seem further away from it than the dystopian reality on the ground. But the recognition is a sign of international engagement and a much-needed message for Israelis, who have moved into a creepy fantasy land: a recently leaked American-Israeli presentation, reportedly debated in the White House, imagines a new Gaza as a kind of futuristic theme park placed under US trusteeship and refashioned by international corporations into a glossy “Riviera of the Middle East” of smart cities, tourism and tech hubs.Yet the real danger in Israel today is that nobody imagines a future at all: the society is locked in a permanent present. The war is unpopular, but enough are willing to serve it and only few are actively protesting against it. The liberal opposition movement and the protests over the hostages have morphed into each other, along with the pre-war domestic fights over the government’s plans to weaken the judiciary. Together, they have created a sense of never-ending crisis that Netanyahu and his coalition have managed to turn into an asset.View image in fullscreenA recent poll found most people are not interested in getting more news from Gaza. The major networks broadcast cooking shows, reality TV and sports. Big Brother just had one of its most watched seasons, interrupted only for a brief moment when three anti-war protesters managed to storm the studio stage. “Everything is fine,” said the host. “Keep those votes coming in!”At times, it seems as if confusion and frustration lie beneath the acceptance of the atrocities carried out in our name: a society that lost its way, is unsure how to end the war, fearful of the reckoning that awaits, and resorts to violent tantrums instead.At other moments, a backward-looking narrative takes hold, one that is more coherent but also more perilous: what used to be political discourse on the conflict is giving way to a mythical language of victimization. It is a story in which 7 October 2023 is the continuation of the Holocaust, Hamas are the new Nazis, and the current war is our biblical retribution.Signs for this old-new vocabulary are everywhere. It is common among Jews, for example, to add the initials for “blessed his memory” next to the name of the dead – but in this war, almost every soldier or civilian victim is memorialized with the phrase “Hashem yikom damo” (God will avenge his blood). Verses and quotes such as “I have pursued mine enemies and destroyed them” (2 Samuel 22:38) appear in military headquarters and battle orders; a calendar distributed by the military rabbinate early in the war placed the Gaza campaign on a mythical timeline that included David’s victory over Goliath and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.This turn toward mythical thinking – the idea that Jews and Palestinians are locked in an eternal, zero-sum battle for the same land ֹ– dominates not just Israeli society, but much of the political thinking abroad. It obscures the more mundane reality that has enabled today’s carnage: a political system where one people rules and the other is ruled. It also narrows our political imagination, reducing the range of what is possible and fostering passivity precisely when action is most urgently needed.Tomorrow Is Yesterday is the fitting title for a new book by two former negotiators and experts on the conflict. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley observe that the current war is not just a regression to a pre-peace process era decades ago. Nor is the systematic destruction of Gaza just a repetition of the Nakba, the Palestinian mass expulsion during Israel’s war of independence. There is something fundamental in both societies that looks into the past for political meaning, a core of their identity that surfaces now.Malley, a key member of Bill Clinton’s Middle East negotiating team, is the son of an anti-Zionist Egyptian Jew who sympathized with the Palestinian cause and knew the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. As a young diplomat, Malley had been present at the Camp David summit in 2000, which was supposed to bring about a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, but ended up catalyzing the start of the second intifada 25 years ago this month. Later he served as Obama’s Middle East coordinator and as an envoy to the Iran nuclear talks. Agha, an intellectual of Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese heritage who teaches at Oxford, was a longtime adviser to Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, often operating as their envoy in formal and informal negotiations channels.Their unique backgrounds – Hussein, who was viewed as Palestinian by choice rather than by heritage, and Malley’s anti-imperialist upbringing – often made the two a dissenting voice in diplomatic circles, insiders and outsiders at the same time. After the Camp David failure they challenged the dominant view, expressed by President Clinton and the senior members of his peace team, which placed all the blame for the failure on Arafat and the Palestinian side for not accepting “Israel’s generous offer”.View image in fullscreenA year after the summit, in a much debated piece in the New York Review of Books, Malley and Agha pointed to the ways in which a deep-rooted American bias toward Israel led to poor preparation for the summit, unrealistic expectations and fundamental misunderstandings on all sides. To blame Palestinians alone, they warned, was not only unjust, but a recipe for disaster.More than two decades later, the two have returned with a more radical diagnosis, shaped also by their experiences in subsequent talks. In Tomorrow Is Yesterday they argue the peace process was doomed from the start – not by tactical missteps or bad faith, though these existed in abundance, but because it fundamentally misunderstood the conflict itself.The negotiations, Malley and Agha now write, attempted to suppress history itself, since what drives Israelis and Palestinians are not just tangible interests but existential longings rooted in history. For Jews, these flow from centuries of displacement and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, and from what they call “the long, frustrated quest for a normal, recognized, and accepted homeland”. For many religious Israelis, this translates into a sacred claim over the entire land: Kol Israel (roughly, “all of Israel are responsible for one another”). These, rather than the liberal peace camp, are the deep, authentic voices driving the society.For Palestinians, the core demands are equally elemental: to redress a history of dispossession and massacres, expulsion and dispersal, discrimination and denied dignity. Accepting Israel as a Jewish state is not, in this view, a pragmatic compromise but an intolerable “affront” – a move that would legitimize the very catastrophe that created their exile and retroactively criminalize their decades of struggle. Israelis seek something close to eternal security, which easily becomes eternal dominance; Palestinians want a return to a pre-Israel life that no longer exists.View image in fullscreenThe two-state solution, concludes the duo who devoted much of their life to reaching it, “is not the natural resting place for either Israelis or Palestinians [as] it runs counter to the essence of their national identities and aspirations”. The attempt to reach it was doomed because “both groups cannot accept a definitive closure”, since “neither is prepared to relinquish otherworldly dreams for the sake of an earthly understanding”.What emerged was an artificial process, sustained through bias and denial. By privileging Israel and suppressing Palestinian claims, ignoring more radical or religious stakeholders, and prioritizing security over justice, US-led diplomacy built not peace but a pressure cooker. It blew up on 7 October.Malley and Agha’s account is clear-eyed and unsparing, rejecting the very conventions that upheld the imbalance at the heart of the process. It reads like the work of people who have burned their bridges – and it fits the gravity of the moment.Hamas’s murderous attack, they say, was not an aberration but “Palestinian through and through” – an explosion of grievances over decades of displacement and humiliation that the peace process never addressed. Israel’s brutal response, in turn, was equally revealing: less the product of Netanyahu’s extremism than of a longstanding pattern, in which Palestinian resistance is met with overwhelming force designed to restore deterrence, dominance and territorial control.Now both sides are resorting to familiar roles: Israelis to triumphalist violence, Palestinians to resistance and survival.Once the cloud of grief over 7 October began lifting, something vile and wicked entered the Israeli public discourse: a certain enjoyment of the humiliation of Palestinians and their sympathizers that in the past was only found on the political margins.The minister for interior security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made it a habit of posting images of bent, blindfolded and handcuffed prisoners, and supporting cutting down their food rations or banning Red Cross and family visits (according to Israel’s own records, only one-fourth of the people arrested in Gaza are fighters, but all detainees are portrayed as terrorists in the media). Hanoch Daum, a popular commentator and writer, recently drew massive social media engagement with an AI-generated image mocking Palestinian hunger as a hoax. The climate activist Greta Thunberg, who leads flotillas to Gaza, is another favorite target for ridicule. Expelled after her first attempt to reach the Strip, authorities made a point of seating her on the worst seat on the plane, passengers hurled insults at her, and the pilot announced his support for the IDF on the speakers.Every criticism of Israel, any sympathy for the Palestinians, any pressure to end the war, is seen today as a form of antisemitism – even endorsement of Hamas. Over 60% of Israelis, according to recent polls, believe “nobody in Gaza is innocent.” Along with Israel’s sense of impunity, this popular notion explains how this war has turned into a genocide.The core of Palestinian identity, most Israelis believe, is the physical destruction of their state, as manifested in the 7 October attack. “It was each and every Palestinian, for nearly eight decades, who wished, believed and acted to bring this exact moment,” wrote Einat Wilf, a former member of the Knesset for the Independence and Labor parties, in a new book she co-authored about the right of return. ”Hamas was the one who fulfilled their dream.” Her conclusion: There is no solution at hand; Israel must be willing to fight Palestinians “for generations”.Oddly enough, these words echo Malley and Agha’s observations, and their view of the conflict as a clash of narratives. “[It] is not essentially about territory,” they recently wrote in the New Yorker. “It is not about roads and dunes and hills. It is about people, their lives, emotions, anger, grief, attachments, and history.”View image in fullscreenYet the reality is not of two sides arguing over myths but one sovereign power ruling over millions of people without rights. It is not just a conflict, but a problem inherent to a regime. The most important local dynamic is a de facto one-state condition in which half the population – namely, the Palestinians – is excluded from the political system.Israel controls every border, every checkpoint, every natural resource, every aspect of the economy. It decides where Palestinians can work, travel, or build; it denies them legal protection, allows their property to be vandalized or taken and leaves them exposed to violence.Racism and ethnic hatred, even the endorsement of old myths – these are not intrinsic to Jews or Palestinians, but are byproducts of this system of segregation and dominance. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates observed when he visited the West Bank on the eve of 7 October. “What my eyes now saw … was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy,” he wrote in his recent book, The Message. “I was seeking a world beyond plunder – but my proof of concept was just more plunder.” Yet, he writes elsewhere, “even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told.” In Israel, Coates recognized the colonizer’s sense of “fragile triumphalism”.It is Palestinians’ lack of rights, their existence in a political no-man’s land, that makes them expendable to a system that largely conditions protection on political rights. It allows the US and Israel to toy with ideas of mass deportation and real estate ventures. This is a conflict about hills and territory: Palestinians have been pushed outside the system that governs people and nations, so now they can be pushed (again) out of their land. The besieged Gaza – a territory belonging to nobody, governed for decades by an unrecognized militant group – was the physical embodiment of the Palestinian condition.The danger now is surrendering to fatalism: the idea that ancient hatreds or religious attachments make the current trajectory inevitable.Whether held by outside observers such as Malley and Agha or rightwing Israelis, this view misreads how religion and identity work in politics. These doctrines may claim to be eternal, but they shift according to the needs of the moment. Orthodox Jews once rejected Zionism as sacrilege; they became the most rightwing Israelis as their dependence on the state grew. Israeli rabbis banned prayer on the Temple Mount; since its fate became an object in peace talks, they began endorsing it. The Likud’s original symbol included the kingdom of Jordan within the Jewish state, now even the most rightwing Jew imagines the entire land of Israel without it. Interests and circumstances, not ancient beliefs, construct political imagination.More importantly, the idea of clashing identities easily becomes another justification for murder, as is happening in Israel today. Instead, we must recognize that violent instability is baked into any system where one side has power and rights and the other has none.Since the Oslo process in the 1990s, much of the world has accepted the Israeli framing: Palestinian rights would be recognized only after a peace process was completed. In other words, rights were treated as conditional on Israeli interests – a prize to be granted at the end rather than a foundation to guide negotiations. This is the root of past failures. But if rights become the starting point, then the two peoples could finally choose their political future: one state, two, or some in-between like a federation. No choice would need to be final; states can divide or unite, agreements can evolve. The very idea of a definite end point is an illusion.Recently, there are signs that the west is opening its eyes to the horror in Gaza, mainly due to sustained civil society activism. It is not surprising that the United States is mounting unprecedented opposition to the countries deciding to recognize Palestine, including by withholding visas from Palestinian officials seeking to travel to the UN. For Washington too, Palestinians exist only on Israel’s terms. So far, the countries leading the recognition effort are not deterred; pushing against American hegemony over diplomacy is another positive byproduct of recognition.As limited as the recognition of Palestine – a state with no territory or sovereignty – is, it is a step in the right direction, because it re-establishes the existence and the rights of Palestinians as individuals and as a collective. It finally moves up the end goal, which should have been a precondition to the talks all along. More urgently, it strengthens the Palestinian case in international institutions and further justifies the demand for sanctions that could end the war.Steps against Israeli ministers who advocate ethnic cleansing and genocide, as some countries are considering, are another positive development. More should follow, and more rapidly; as the destruction of Gaza is happening now. We need more political engagement and risk-taking, and a willingness to break old taboos.History’s myths may feel eternal, but like the violence they sustain, they are choices – and choices can be remade.

    Noam Sheizaf is a journalist and documentary film-maker based in Tel Aviv. His latest film, H2: The Occupation Lab, dealt with the history of military control and settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron More

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    Senators say US is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza

    Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both members of the Senate foreign relations committee, released their findings in a report on Thursday after returning from a congressional delegation to the Middle East where, they note, the destruction goes beyond bombs and bullets. They say they also found a systematic campaign to strangle humanitarian aid, which they call “using food as a weapon of war”.“The Netanyahu government has gone far beyond targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on all the people of Gaza,” Van Hollen said at a Thursday press conference. “What they’re doing, and what we witnessed, is putting those goals into action.”At least one hundred people have died from famine in Gaza, the United Nations said this week, citing the Gaza health ministry.View image in fullscreenThe senators, who visited Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate strategy to ethnically cleanse the local population rather than collateral damage from the war against Hamas. Their report is titled The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.During their visit to the Egyptian-Gaza border, they observed Rafah, the southern Gaza city – once home to 270,000 Palestinians – reduced to rubble. Van Hollen described how both lawmakers climbed an outside fire escape from the Egyptian side of the border to get a clear view of the destruction.The lawmakers also met with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who described participating in “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure”. Their report noted first-hand accounts of “how this was a part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools and other civilian sites”.The senators documented arbitrary restrictions that have left aid groups unable to predict what will be denied entry. Jordanian officials told them that peanut butter, honey and dates had been suddenly banned from convoys, with entire trucks turned away for carrying a single restricted item. Each truck, the report says, is subject to a new $400 customs processing fee, and when the truck is not able to make it through the screening process, the $400 has to be paid again to join a later convoy. Because of those and other restrictions by the Israeli government, humanitarian aid coming in from Jordan was currently operating under 10% of its capacity, according to the report.In Egypt, the senators report, the UN’s fleet of trucks have “sustained severe damage”, with United Nations organizations showing the senators video of their convoys coming under fire from the IDF, “a regular occurrence”. The senators also toured a warehouse run by the Egyptian Red Crescent and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) with goods that had been banned by Israel, including solar-powered water pumps, tents, wheelchairs and even spare parts for trucks under “dual-use” restrictions, according to the report.At the Israeli port of Ashdod, WFP officials told the senators that 2,200 shipping containers of food – enough to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks – sit delayed by screening procedures requiring each pallet to be checked individually.Merkley described the strategy’s two components: “One is to destroy homes so that they cannot be returned to … That second strategy is to deprive Palestinians of essentials to live, food, water, medicine.”Israel replaced the UN’s hundreds of distribution sites with just four aid points for 2 million people, three located only in southern Gaza. The senators heard accounts of malnourished mothers unable to walk miles to distribution sites while carrying children and then lift 40lb food boxes for the return journey. From 22 May to 31 July, 1,373 people were killed in the vicinity of these sites, according to the UN.That Israel and the United States are calling plans for the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza a “voluntary exodus” is one of the “most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told”, the report reads.“There is nothing voluntary about wanting to depart when your home is gone, when your agricultural fields are no longer accessible,” Van Hollen said at the press conference.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBoth senators accused the US government of enabling the described ethnic cleansing. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Van Hollen said. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.”Sentiment in Congress with regards to longstanding US support for Israel has been slow moving, but it has been shifting. A recent Senate vote on arms sales to Israel saw 27 Democratic senators – more than half the caucus – oppose weapons transfers.“The same values that made me a champion for Israel compel me to say what they are doing to the Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza, is absolutely wrong,” said Merkley.Both lawmakers called for immediate action to secure a ceasefire, noting that Israeli hostage families had told them Netanyahu “has prioritized his political survival over the survival of our loved ones”.“The world has a moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing,” their report concludes. “Strong words alone will not be sufficient. The world must impose penalties and costs on those carrying out this plan.” More

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    Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’

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    View image in fullscreenWhen a history of resistance to the lurching authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s second presidency is written, it could well begin on 11 April 2025, inside a small immigration courtroom in remote, central Louisiana.It was there, in the early afternoon, that a slight young man dressed in a blue uniform jumpsuit spoke calmly but directly to the new administration – away from the gaze of television cameras and 1,000 miles (1,610km) from his friends and family. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organiser, had been arrested a month earlier – snatched from the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building as he returned home with his wife. Now, detained in the small town of Jena, he sat before a judge who had just ruled that he was eligible to be deported from the United States purely for his political views.Khalil asked for permission to speak. He paused for a moment, before sharply rebuking the jurist who continued to hold his fate in her hands by throwing her own words back at her. He reminded her that she had guaranteed that the court would ensure him “due process” and “fundamental fairness”.“Neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process,” he told her, in effect branding the venue a kangaroo court. “This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.”I was one of a handful of journalists in Jena that day. It was a period of particular distress in the US, his arrest being the first of a spate of high-profile detentions of students seized off the streets by immigration agents over their political views. In that moment of fear, when so many were going silent, I was taken aback by the quiet courage that seemed to come so naturally to Khalil even as formal political opposition to Trump’s iron fist had largely faltered.Four months on, and now bailed from detention and back in New York, I ask Khalil where it had come from and whether he would define it as an act of bravery.“No. I have always believed in standing up against injustice,” he says in his gentle voice. “I knew that it was predetermined. That it was a play. It was theatre. I did not want to play within their rules.”On a bright summer’s day in Brooklyn, Khalil invites me to his new apartment that commands a towering view over the borough’s low-rises. The walls are freshly painted white – he had moved in just a few weeks earlier – and we sit on a grey sofa by the window. His four-month-old son, Deen, is crying softly in the next room as Noor Abdalla, his wife, soothes him.It is an archetypal scene of a young New York family: a baby rocker sits beside a large TV, white tulips lean against a ceramic vase, bright artwork adorns the walls. Khalil is warm and candid, he offers me chocolate and water before we start talking. But the grim reality of his situation soon lingers as we dial an attorney from his legal team who listens in to our three-hour conversation as a precaution.Although he is free from detention, the Trump administration’s case against him is still winding through the courts. While he is a legal permanent resident, he acknowledges deportation could still be the ultimate outcome.View image in fullscreen“This administration is trying to do everything in its power – and beyond its power, in fact – to punish me and deport me,” he says. “Up until very recently, they were trying to rearrest me.”He is working on contingency plans for if and when that happens, he acknowledges, without describing specifics. For now, he has attempted to return to a degree of normality. He spends his days with baby Deen, learning to be a father after he missed the birth while detained. He recently rode the subway for the first time since his release, but still finds himself looking over his shoulder. The move to Brooklyn was partly to create distance from Columbia’s campus and all the past wounds of its recent history. But still, it remains difficult to focus.A Palestinian refugee, intimately familiar with the experience of repeated displacement, he remains resolute in the face of a prospective fresh exile.“Even if I am deported, I would continue to speak out for Palestine,” he says.Khalil’s life was changed forever when agents in plainclothes came to his old apartment back in March. His arrest, captured on video by Abdalla, marked a turning point as Trump ramped up his era of mass deportations and began a censorship campaign against the campuses that saw large protests of Israel’s war in Gaza. Khalil remained calm as he was placed in handcuffs and driven away, with his wife – heavily pregnant – left on the sidewalk, desperately calling their lawyer.I wonder if he has ever watched the video back?He shakes his head.“It is a moment I would never want to remember,” he says. “It was one of the most difficult, scariest moments in my life. I do not want to watch a moment where I was helpless to support Noor.”His overwhelming memory of that night is his fear that Abdalla, a US citizen, might also face arrest. He repeated her phone number in his head so as not to forget it. But he also remembers making “chill” small talk with the arresting agents as he was driven away. They spoke about the iftar dinner, the breaking-fast meal taken during Ramadan, he had just eaten.“I did not fear them whatsoever,” he recalls. “I saw them eye to eye.”Shortly after the arrest, he overheard an incoming phone call from the White House, requesting an update. He was then presented with a document that accused him of no crime, but argued his presence in the US compromised foreign policy interests. (A memo signed by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, disclosed later, argued this was due to participation in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities”.)He read it and laughed in disbelief.“Are they really going this far in coming after me?” he thought.After 36 hours of travel under guard, he ended up in Jena, the sprawling centre four hours from New Orleans, hidden away in a pine forest by a country road. It is known as one of the harshest immigration jails in the US. Inside his large detention dormitory, the TV was blaring and he saw Trump at a press conference on the White House lawn perusing Teslas with Elon Musk.The president was asked about Khalil’s arrest.“We ought to get him the hell out of the country,” Trump replied.It was at this point he started to realise the enormity of it all – a public narrative about him spiralling out of his control, laundered through a vast rightwing disinformation infrastructure branding him an antisemite and terrorism supporter.“Who I am has been skewed so much,” he recalls thinking. “I was like: ‘Damn my future is basically done … my reputation, my career aspirations.’”But through the horror, he says he knew his record would ultimately speak for itself. “That was my salvation,” he says. “I was 100% confident I had a very clean history. They would be able to get no dirt on me.”He spoke to Abdalla by phone. She was safe. She told him about an outpouring of support across the world. He sighed with relief.That quiet courage, which Khalil has carried throughout this ordeal, has been forged since childhood, at the multiple junctures he was forced to upend his life.He was born in a small Palestinian refugee camp named Khan Eshieh on the outskirts of Damascus, the youngest of four brothers. His paternal grandparents were displaced from their farmland outside of Tiberias, in what is now Israel, during the Nakba of 1948. His father was a welder who left school at the age of 10. His mother, a low-level civil servant, ended her education at 16.His Palestinian identity was omnipresent growing up; most of his neighbours were displaced from the same region as his grandparents. And his grandmother, who was illiterate, would tell stories of her life in Palestine, always with a view to eventual return.View image in fullscreen“You could see the struggle in her face,” he says.His parents, both largely apolitical, instilled in him the values of a formal education and he excelled, graduating with aspirations to become a commercial pilot. But the forces of history had other plans. The final few years of his schooling in Syria coincided with the pro-democracy movements that swept across the region during the Arab spring. One of his first forays into formal activism came on 15 May 2011, as part of a series of “Nakba Day” demonstrations at Israel’s borders. At least a dozen protesters were killed during the clashes with Israeli forces. Dozens more were injured.Khalil was one of them. Aged 16, he was shot in the leg and spent a number of days in hospital. “That was the first real encounter of violence, direct violence, by Israel against me,” he says.The experience propelled him further into the tumultuous politics of the era – initially heady and full of promise before quickly deteriorating into state brutality and civil war. He witnessed the crackdowns of the Assad regime on close friends and family who helped provide shelter to Syrians fleeing Damascus. Khalil became involved in organising smaller acts of resistance: street protests, spray painting and posting anti-Assad comments on social media.“These things were the very minimum we could do,” he says. “In a time where you know that injustices are happening around you, staying silent is complicity. Pure complicity.”It all intensified after graduating high school. He had been set to study aerospace engineering at the University of Aleppo, but the city was burning as the civil war raged. On 11 January 2013, a week after he turned 18, two of his childhood friends and co-organisers named Bashar and Ali were snatched off the street by Syrian intelligence officers. He feared he would be next.The same night he made plans to flee, crossing the border into Lebanon the next day. “I left everything behind,” he says. “I fled without a plan. My biggest worry was that they would confess the names of the people around them. And you wouldn’t blame them to confess under such torture by the regime.”Bashar and Ali were murdered after their arrest, their deaths confirmed only a few months ago after the Assad regime collapsed at the end of 2024.Khalil recognises the different shades of authoritarianism he has faced throughout his life.“What shocked me at the very beginning, when I was kidnapped [by US immigration], was just how reminiscent that was to cases I witnessed in Syria,” he says. “You would have plainclothed officers without any warrant come and take you just because of your political speech.”View image in fullscreenKhalil languished in Jena for more than 100 days. He had known little about the US’s deportation machine, and the detention center’s reputation as a legal black hole, until he experienced it all.He slept in a large dorm room lined with bunkbeds, holding about 70 men. He spent time dictating well-written dispatches over the phone to his legal team. He read literature: Out of Place, the autobiography of the Palestinian academic Edward Said; Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust. But mostly he shared stories with the other men detained with him. Many had been picked up during routine check-ins with immigration officials. Others were recently apprehended at the southern border. A few had been detained in Jena for more than a year. The majority of people who pass through immigration court in Jena have no lawyers as mandatory legal representation is not guaranteed.One man, a Georgian national, had been held for about eight months, picked up with his wife in California. Held in separate detention centres about two hours apart, the couple, who were fleeing Georgia’s new pro-Russia government, had not been able to speak to each other since their arrest. The man, a carpenter, spent hours fashioning improvised rosaries from commissary items, including crayon, ground coffee and bread – hardened into beads by heat in a microwave. Khalil shows me a set, still impressed by the ingenuity.Many of the men, Khalil says, have since been removed from the US.For Khalil, the lowest moment came on the night his son was born. His requests for a furlough to attend the birth were denied and so he was forced to listen on the phone in the middle of the night, whispering quiet words of encouragement as Abdalla laboured. The line cut around 2am, and by the time he called back he heard his newborn son crying in the background. He whispered the call to prayer down the line to welcome baby Deen into the world.“It was a very difficult moment that I don’t wish anyone to go through,” he says, his eyes drifting. “It was a clear act of cruelty just to punish me.”Abdalla emerges to say hello with Deen in her arms. Khalil’s face lights up. At four months, his son has a full head of hair, deep dimples and expressive brown eyes that follow his father around the room.I ask her how it feels to have her husband back.“Not having him for the first two months of Deen’s life was hard,” she says. “We missed a lot of milestones that you can’t get back. So we are catching up on lost time.”The new apartment is their “safe space”, she says. The couple have been largely welcomed with open arms here, receiving spontaneous acts of kindness: an unexpected free lunch, smiles on the street. I am the first journalist they have invited over.Khalil met his future wife, now a dentist, in Lebanon in 2016, while working for a non-profit helping educate Syrian refugees. She visited on an exchange program. He had worked his way up from nothing after fleeing Syria, taking construction jobs during the day and volunteering for a refugee charity in the evenings, which granted him free room and board in their office. Eventually he attended university to study computer science and took remedial English classes. He gradually let go of his dream to fly commercial jets, becoming more immersed in the work of government and bureaucracy.View image in fullscreenKhalil and Abdalla bonded over games of backgammon and stayed in touch after she returned home to Flint, Michigan. He was attracted to her kindness and gentle nature. She found his intellect and ambition appealing, and eventually pushed him to apply for a job at the British embassy, where he worked on Syria policy until moving to New York in 2023. Their long-distance relationship lasted seven years.I ask how fatherhood has changed him since he returned home.“It absolutely makes me think [more] about risks,” he acknowledges. “When you have someone depending on you, you want them to have as normal a life as possible. But at the same time it pushes me towards advocacy. When I see Deen I always remember the children who are being killed because of Israel, who don’t have the luxury of being in New York. [I think of] immigrant children who don’t have the luxury of having an American passport that would somehow protect them.”But Palestinian liberation is never far from his imagination.“I want Deen to be able to visit his home town, his ancestors’ town, and live equally with everyone,” he says.View image in fullscreenThe pro-Gaza protests at Columbia marked the first time Khalil had ever assumed a public-facing role. Having set his sights on a behind-the-scenes job in government bureaucracy, he was instead thrust into a spring of campus tumult in 2024 as students constructed encampments, staged rallies and, in late April, occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall, leading to an overwhelming police response.Khalil served as a negotiator with the university’s administration, presenting students’ demands, including divestment from companies with ties to Israel. He was not present on campus during the Hamilton Hall occupation.The negotiations were protracted but civil. A Columbia administrator, anonymously quoted in the New York Times, later described Khalil as “thoughtful, passionate, and principled, sometimes to the point of rigidity”. It strikes me as apt, but I wonder if he agrees?“Pretty much,” he says, smiling. “I don’t know about rigidity though, because it was not my position, it was the students’.”Unlike many of those on the protest frontlines, Khalil did not wear a face mask, leaving him vulnerable to online doxing from hardline pro-Israel groups, which have supplied the Trump administration with lists of candidates for deportation.“I have never worn a mask during a protest because I knew that the purpose of doxing was to intimidate us, to silence us,” he says. But the campaign ramped up again after the election of Trump, shortly before Khalil’s arrest. He had not foreseen how dangerous it might become.The allegations of antisemitism have never been substantiated with hard evidence. Khalil says Jewish students played an “integral” role in organising the campus protests and argues it is Israel and the Trump administration’s policies that fuel global antisemitism through their policies.So how does he visualise a free Palestine?“I imagine it as a place where everyone lives in dignity, freedom, equality, regardless of who they are, where they come from,” he says. “I don’t think there’s an alternative to that, to have a lasting and just peace in the Middle East.“Liberation doesn’t mean throwing anyone out. Liberation means liberating everyone, whether the oppressed or the oppressors.”Khalil remains scathing of Columbia’s response to the protests and its later capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands it suppress pro-Palestinian protest. Yet he expresses an honest sadness that he was unable to walk the stage to collect his master’s degree in May this year. He is the first in his family to graduate from university. His parents had planned to travel from Germany, where they now live, to witness it. He had bought his gown a year in advance.“I know it would have been an incredibly important moment for my parents, who have fought and sacrificed so much for me to get to this point,” he says. Instead, he received the accolade as an emailed PDF file.View image in fullscreenIt was late June when Khalil emerged from Jena on a sweltering humid afternoon. He raised his fist in the air to celebrate and walked towards a small group of journalists. He had lost about 15lbs (6.8kg). A federal judge in New Jersey had just ordered his release, having found the Trump administration’s foreign policy argument was likely unconstitutional.I had asked him that day to respond in his own words to the “threat” label that Trump had branded him with. “Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this,” he told me.I had not fully comprehended what he meant by “the wrong person” at the time. But as our conversation comes to a close, it becomes clear. The adversity that Khalil has faced – from displacement to detention – in such a short span of life has only fuelled his sense of mission. He will not be forced into submission or silence. He views his past and future as inextricable from the wider Palestinian struggle stretching from 1948 to the current slaughter in Gaza. “It is a drop in the sea of Palestinian sorrow and grief, where families are being erased, children are being killed, houses being raided and dignity is eroded,” he says.He takes a moment before we wrap up, seemingly a little exhausted.“My story is just a small story,” he says. “A story of how violence against Palestinians can be transported around the world.” More

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    Trump issues ‘last warning’ to Hamas to accept Gaza ceasefire deal

    Donald Trump on Sunday issued what he called his “last warning” to Hamas, urging the Palestinian militant group to accept a deal to release hostages from Gaza.“The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”Hamas said in a later statement that it received some ideas from the US side through mediators to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza.The group said it was discussing with mediators ways to develop those ideas, without giving specifics.Hamas also reiterated its readiness for negotiations to release all hostages in exchange for a “clear announcement of an end to the war” and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the enclave.“I think we’re going to have a deal on Gaza very soon,” Trump told reporters as he traveled back to Washington from New York, without offering any details. He added that he thought all the hostages would be returned, dead or alive. “I think we’re going to get them all.”On Saturday, Israel’s N12 News reported that Trump has put forth a new ceasefire proposal to Hamas.Under the deal, Hamas would free all the remaining 48 hostages on the first day of the truce in exchange for thousands of Palestinian prisoners jailed in Israel and negotiate an end to the war during a ceasefire in the enclave, according to N12.An Israeli official said Israel was “seriously considering” Trump’s proposal but did not elaborate on its details. More

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    One by one, leaders learn that grovelling to Trump leads to disaster. When will it dawn on Starmer? | Simon Tisdall

    Sucking up to Donald Trump never works for long. Narendra Modi is the latest world leader to learn this lesson the hard way. Wooing his “true friend” in the White House, India’s authoritarian prime minister thought he’d conquered Trump’s inconstant heart. The two men hit peak pals in 2019, holding hands at a “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas. But it’s all gone pear-shaped thanks to Trump’s tariffs and dalliance with Pakistan. Like a jilted lover on the rebound, Modi shamelessly threw himself at Vladimir Putin in China last week. Don and Narendra! It’s over! Although, to be honest, it always felt a little shallow.Other suitors for Trump’s slippery hand have suffered similar heartbreak. France’s Emmanuel Macron turned on the charm, feting him at the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. But Trump cruelly dumped him after they argued over Gaza, calling him a publicity-seeker who “always gets it wrong”. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, desperate for a tete-a-tete, flew to Trump’s Scottish golf course to pay court. Result: perhaps the most humiliating, lopsided trade deal since imperial Britain’s 19th-century “unequal treaties” with Peking’s dragon throne.The list of broken pledges and dashed hopes is lengthy. Relationships between states normally pivot on power, policy and strategic interests. But with faithless, fickle Trump, it’s always personal – and impermanent. Disconcertingly, he told Mexico’s impressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, that he “likes her very much” – then threatened to invade her country, ostensibly in pursuit of drug cartels. Leaders from Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and South Africa have all attempted to ingratiate themselves, to varying degrees. They still haven’t fared well.All this should set red lights flashing for Britain’s Keir Starmer ahead of Trump’s state visit in 10 days’ time. The prime minister’s unedifying Trump-whisperer act has produced little benefit to date, at high reputational cost. Starmer apparently believes his handling of the US relationship is a highlight of his first year in office. Yet Trump ignores his Gaza ceasefire pleas and opposes UK recognition of a Palestinian state. He hugely boosted Putin, Britain’s nemesis, with his half-baked Alaska summit. US security guarantees for postwar Ukraine are more mirage than reality. His steel tariffs and protectionist policies continue to hurt UK workers.His second state visit is an appalling prospect. The honour is utterly undeserved. It’s obvious what Trump will gain: a royal endorsement, a chance to play at being King Donald, a privileged platform from which to deliver his corrosive, divisive populist-nationalist diatribes at a moment of considerable social fragility in the US and UK. Polls suggest many Britons strongly oppose the visit; and most don’t trust the US. So what Starmer thinks he will gain is a mystery. The fleeting goodwill of a would-be dictator who is dismantling US democracy and wrecking the global laws-based order championed by the UK is a poor return.View image in fullscreenAs he demands homage from abject subjects, this spectacle will confirm the UK in the eyes of the world as a lackey state, afraid to stand up for its values. Starmer’s government is now so morally confused that it refuses to acknowledge that Israel, fully backed by Trump, is committing genocide in Gaza, while at the same time making the wearing of a pro-Palestine T-shirt a terrorist act. The Trump travesty will be an embarrassment, signalling a further descent into colonial subservience. As next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence approaches, the chronically unhealthy “special relationship” has finally come full circle.Not everyone is genuflecting to Trump – and evidence mounts that resistance, not grovelling, is by far the best way to handle this schoolyard bully. Modi’s geopolitical fling in China showed he’s learned that when dealing with Trump, firm resolve, supported by alternative options, is the better policy. Last week’s defiant speech by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, reflected a similar realisation. Both he and Putin have discovered that when they dig their heels in, whether the issue is Ukraine, trade or sanctions, Trump backs off. Xi has adopted an uncompromising stance from the start. Putin uses flattery, skilfully manipulating Trump’s frail ego. The result is the same. Like cowards the world over, Trump respects strength because he’s weak. So he caves.The bigger the wolf, the more sheepishly Trump responds. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, like Putin, an indicted war criminal, has shown that by sticking to his guns (literally, in his case), he can face down Trump. More than that, Trump can be co-opted. After Netanyahu attacked Iran in June, against initial US advice, he induced the White House to join in – although, contemptibly, Trump only did so once he was certain who was winning. Then, typically, he claimed credit for a bogus world-changing victory. North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, similarly bamboozled Trump during his first term. Having learned nothing, and nursing his implausible Nobel peace prize ambitions, Trump is again raising the prospect of unconditional engagement with Kim.Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has the right idea. The more Trump tries to bully him with 50% tariffs and a barrage of criticism, the more he resists. Trump is particularly exercised over the fate of Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s hard-right predecessor, who, like Trump, mounted a failed electoral coup. But Lula is not having any of it. “If the United States doesn’t want to buy [from us], we will find new partners,” he said. “The world is big, and it’s eager to do business with Brazil.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the spirit! And guess what? Lula’s poll ratings are soaring. Wake up, Keir Starmer – and dump Trump.

    Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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    US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes investigation

    The United States has imposed sanctions against three Palestinian human rights groups that asked the international criminal court to investigate Israel over allegations of genocide in Gaza, according to a notice posted to the US treasury department’s website on Thursday.The three groups – the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Ramallah-based Al-Haq – were listed under what the treasury department said were international criminal court-related designations.The groups asked the ICC in November 2023 to investigate Israeli air strikes on densely populated civilian areas of Gaza, the siege of the territory and displacement of the population.A year later, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, Yoav Gallant, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.Donald Trump’s administration has imposed sanctions against ICC judges as well as its chief prosecutor over the Israeli arrest warrants and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan.The ICC, which was established in 2002, has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in its 125 member countries. Some nations, including the US, China, Russia and Israel, do not recognise its authority.The US sanctions against the Palestinian groups come days after the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying the legal criteria had been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.Israel called the announcement disgraceful and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies”.Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, after fighters from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the territory, attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza.Since then, Israel’s war has killed 63,000 people, forced nearly all Gaza’s residents to flee their homes at least once, and set off a starvation crisis in parts of the enclave that a global hunger monitor describes as a famine. More