The U.N. agency in Gaza is trying to provide aid
The death of 102 UNRWA workers in Gaza during the Second World War and the humanitarian work of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza
At least 102 workers from the largest United Nations agency in Gaza have been killed in five weeks of heavy Israeli bombing. Most did not die in the line of duty but instead while at home, often in strikes that also killed members of their families, U.N. officials said.
They were both men and women. The teachers were the largest group of people. Others included school principals, warehouse workers, engineers, a software developer, a gynecologist and a man in charge of staff safety. He was killed in his home along with his wife and their eight children, said Juliette Touma, the communications director for UNRWA, the agency that cares for Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East.
More than 600,000 Palestinian refugees were forced to flee their homes during the Second World War, and the UN Relief and Works Agency was created to help them. More than 1.3 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants are refugees and UNRWA is the largest employer in the territory.
The Times of Israel and Palestine: The Fall of the Israeli–Palestinian Coupling in the Gaza Strip and the Assassination of Hamas
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. Here is our email. [email protected].
If there is a path forward toward peace — whether in two states or one state — it will begin with all of us moving beyond stereotypes. Israelis are not the same as Netanyahu, and Palestinians are not the same as Hamas.
Dark days are ahead — that much we know. We’ve been through wars, invasions and bombardments so we have come to expect the worst. The streets in the West Bank are quiet. Arabic satellite news stations give a constant background to daily life. Their stream of images and videos is shocking, but not new.
The Oct. 7 attacks broke that state of play. The impossibility of governing two peoples and the unsustainable nature of the occupation were laid bare for all to see.
Israeli officials point out that Hamas is also active in the West Bank and say that many of those clashes resulted from the military’s efforts to root out militants. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians since Oct. 7.
Many Gazans have parents and grandparents who grew up only a few miles from where they live now, in areas they are now, of course, forbidden to enter. They still remember the time when they walked through the groves of lemons and olives in Yaffa or the acres of olive trees in Qumya, which were all wiped out during the 1948 war.
The National Security Minister, who is also a settler, has been distributing assault rifles to civilian squad in settlements in the northern West Bank part of a larger effort by him to arm civilian groups after the Oct. 7 attacks. So far, the ministry has purchased 10,000 assault rifles for such teams around the country. More than 130 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7.
Israel, Gaza and What We Get Wrong – A New Perspective on Hamas in the Middle East: Myths and Reality
For the past month, normal life in Ramallah — a city in the West Bank usually known for its young population and its vibrant nightlife — has been brought to a standstill.
The initial myth is that the conflict in the Middle East has always been on one side and wrong on the other.
Life isn’t that neat. The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. The conflict is not excused by the fact that Hamas massacres and savagery or Israel leveling entire neighborhoods in Gaza.
The engineer in Gaza told me that they are normal people trying to survive. He despises Hamas and would like to see it removed from power, but he says that Hamas fighters are safe in tunnels while he and his children are the ones most at risk: “We’re the civilians paying the price.”
One side includes desperate human beings who are hoping that their children can live free and prosper in their own nation.
The second myth is that Palestinians can be put off indefinitely, strung along by Israel, the United States and other countries. That was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, his way of avoiding a Palestinian state, and it worked for a time — the way a pressure cooker works, until it explodes.
There is no way to know if a Palestinian state would have been better for Israeli security. But Palestinian statelessness in retrospect has not made Israel safe, and risks may increase if the Palestinian Authority collapses from corruption, ineffectiveness and lack of legitimacy.
Israel’s president said that one of the Hamas attackers had been given instructions to release chemical weapons, which is a reminder of the risk that terrorism experts have warned about for years.
My friend Roy Grow, an international relations specialist at Carleton College who died in 2013, used to say that a crucial goal of terror organizations was getting the adversary to overreact. He compared this to jujitsu, with terrorist organizations using their opponents’ weight against them — and that is what Hamas has done.
Human Rights and the War Between Israel and Palestine: Revisiting Ben-Gvir’s Propagation of Bombs in a Demonstration
“There was heavy bombing in our area,” he wrote in English in one message. “We run for our lives and I lost two of my children in the dark. Me and my wife stayed all night searching for them amidst hundreds of airstrikes. We miraculously survived an airstrike and found them fainted in the morning. Please pray for us. The situation is beyond description.”
He said that he saw death a hundred times a day. “We defecate in the open and my children defecate on themselves and there is no water to clean them.”
What should we say to him if he is able to survive the war? How can we explain to him that he was supplied bombs for a war he did not authorize, and that we were involved in his family’s degradation?
Seeking humanity in each side means demanding the release of Israeli hostages and calling out the dehumanization that leads people to pull down posters for kidnapped Israelis. It also means renouncing what Netanyahu called “mighty vengeance” that transforms entire neighborhoods of Gaza into rubble, with bodies buried underneath.
I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
If you only cry for Israeli children, you will have a problem that goes beyond your tear ducts. Children on both sides have been slaughtered quite recklessly, and fixing this crisis starts with acknowledging a principle so basic that it shouldn’t need mentioning: All children’s lives have equal value, and good people come in all nationalities.
The debate on acceptable speech has been opened in Israel because of the growth of such language by Israelis. Mr. Netanyahu has a minister in his cabinet who has made comments about Palestinians. Itamar Ben-Gvir was Minister of National Security and he has a long history of making inflammatory comments. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”
Last week, another right-wing minister raised the idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza, although he told a radio station that there were no noncombatants in the area. Mr Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu for his comments being disconnected from reality.
Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”
“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of “The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.”
Yehuda Shaul, co director of Ofek in Jerusalem, has collected 281 statements since October 7 that he considers to be potentially inciting unlawful behavior. He also has Eyal Golan, Sara Netanyahu, and Yinon Magal on his list.
During an interview with a radio station in October, Netanyahu said that she doesn’t call Hamas humans because that would be offensive to animals.
“It’s time for Nakba 2,” Mr. Magal wrote on X on Oct. 7, a reference to the mass displacement and flight of Palestinians before and after Israel’s creation in 1948, which Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”
In the West Bank, several academics and officials used Mr. Eliyahu’s comment about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as proof that Israel is going to clear the enclave of all Palestinians.
The use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is understandable, according to Eran Halperin, a professor of psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He said the survival of Israel hangs in the balance for the first time in over 40 years. The country is currently facing a potential conflict against Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as a potential uprising in the West Bank.
The Fate of Israel: The Era of the War and the Call for Its Destroy, or Should Israel Be Enough to Kill Israel?
“People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. There are good guys and bad guys.
Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.
Mr. Sfard believes that using language like this will damage Israel’s democracy, cause the conflict with the Palestinians to end, and make a younger generation use the language in their discussion with their friends.
Turn the wheel back requires lots of education after a certain rhetoric has become legitimized. “There is an old Jewish proverb: ‘A hundred wise men will struggle a long time to take out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.’”
In the wake of the attacks, Gallant said that the Israeli military intended to destroy Hamas in Gaza.
Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. According to a report by the Israeli group Fake Reporter, calls for Gaza to be flattened, Erased or destroyed have been mentioned over 18,000 times on the Hebrew site X. The phrases were mentioned 16 times before the war began.
The idea of ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza and the nuclear annihilation of the territory had been discussed in the public before Oct. 7.
Incendiary statements aren’t limited to Israel. Ghazi Hamad, a senior leader of Hamas, vowed on Oct. 24 that the group would wipe out Israel as a country, and appeared to exult in the barbaric acts that his militants had carried out against Israeli civilians. “We are not ashamed to say it with full force,” he said. We have to teach Israel a lesson again and again.
