Gaza

Khan Younis, Gaza – A few metres from the sea, near al-Qarara port on Gaza’s coast, Anas al-Shami, 33, is trying to keep his family of six warm and dry in a dilapidated tent. It offers little protection from wind and rain, while the damp seeps into their bedding and belongings at every moment. The swelling waves in the sea also pose a constant threat as winter approaches.

The beach was not al-Shami’s choice of place to live, but the refuge his family took shelter in after being displaced from their home quickly became overcrowded. They can’t afford anything safer than this tent.

Now, he and his family are living in constant fear of a repeat of last winter’s flooding.

Al-Shami and his family were forced to leave Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, when it became part of Israel’s so-called “Yellow Zone” beyond which Palestinians are not permitted to go.

“I searched for land in displacement areas where I could pitch a tent, but overcrowding and high rental costs made that impossible,” he tells Al Jazeera. “I was therefore forced to stay on the beach, despite the dangers facing my family and me.”

Al-Shami recalls last winter, when seawater and rain flooded his tent while the family was asleep. He would wake to find his children lying in water. Their bedding and belongings were repeatedly soaked, leaving him unable to protect them from the cold as the tent turned into a pond.

Despite trying all year, the family has been unable to find anywhere else to go, leaving them facing another winter on the beach.

“My children’s repeated exposure to water, cold and damp caused serious illness which threatened their lives,” he says.

‘I feel helpless in front of my children’

It’s a familiar story along this stretch of coastline.

Ibrahim Abu Tair, 47, whose family has also been displaced from eastern Khan Younis, is sharing a cramped tent with his seven children on the port’s shoreline. The dilapidated shelter lacks any basic necessities and offers little protection from the cold, rain and wind.

“What hurts me most is feeling helpless in front of my children,” he says. “I cannot provide winter clothes to protect them from the cold or even a dry mattress for them to sleep on.”

The strong wind and the sound of the rising waves keep him awake at night, he says, and he is terrified of another flood like last year’s, when water inundated the tent and forced the family to endure the cold in the open. His greatest wish is to find safe shelter where his children can sleep without fear.

Some families have found a makeshift solution to keep the water at bay.

By filling damaged cooking pots with earth, they have forged a barrier against encroaching seawater alongside the tents.

Mayasem Association, an aid organisation which works in cooperation with World Central Kitchen, has seized on this innovation and is now producing these pot-barriers for families in this area close to al-Qarara port.

The initiative reuses large pots rendered unusable by repeated exposure to flames, corrosion and holes. Three pots, donated by World Central Kitchen, are filled with soil and stacked on top of one another, reaching approximately 150 centimetres in height to form barriers that hold back the incoming water and prevent waves from reaching shelter sites.

“The initiative initially involved building barriers to protect the association’s safe space, which hosts its education programmes, school, cultural activities, arts and heritage programmes,” Khalil Abu Lahia, the association’s emergency response coordinator, tells Al Jazeera. “The idea later developed into an attempt to protect the displaced families’ tents along the coastal strip.”

A winter fraught with risk

While this is an example of the innovative thinking which can help families who are destitute and at risk in Gaza, it is nevertheless only a temporary measure which cannot make up for the widespread lack of safe shelter.

The initiative comes amid a warning from Gaza’s Winter Emergency Committee of a worsening humanitarian catastrophe, as tents and caravans remain in critically short supply as Israeli authorities continue to prevent their entry into the Gaza Strip, alongside the delivery of critical construction materials and fuel.

The committee has reported that Israeli forces have also destroyed about 70 percent of municipalities’ essential operational equipment and 90 percent of civil defence rescue equipment. The fuel crisis means machinery and generators will soon stop functioning altogether, further limiting the ability to respond to floods, carry out rescue operations and clear roads.

In all, there are about 200,000 dilapidated tents sheltering hundreds of thousands of displaced people, including children, women and people with disabilities.

Some 7,800 of them are located in extremely hazardous areas, the committee has warned, including on dry riverbeds which may now flood, rainwater collection ponds and beaches exposed to crashing winter waves. These need to be urgently relocated to safer locations.

About 2,000 cracked buildings are also at risk of collapse, threatening families who have sought refuge inside them. Building materials, caravans, shelter and fuel are all urgently needed, the committee says.

Iran says a ‘maximum deterrence’ plan is ready against any new US attack, warning of an immediate response.

The election night highs for Palestinian citizens of Israel – Arab-led parties won a record 19 seats – turned into a week of delegitimising rhetoric from Israeli politicians.

Nearly 840,000 people voted for Ra’am and the Joint List, a 64 percent increase on 2022, and adding them to opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc would give an anti-Netanyahu coalition 67 seats; without them, only a unity deal between the main Zionist blocs or another election is possible.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud alleged the election had been “stolen” by Palestinian parties with unproven claims of Qatari financing. Qatar denied such accusations, as police sources told The Times of Israel that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. By Sunday, election committee chairman Noam Sohlberg declared the election “conducted properly”.

However, the rhetoric delegitimising the Palestinian vote is now being reflected in the coalition negotiations under way. Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party, has ruled out Palestinian partners, and Eisenkot has presented four conditions for anyone joining his coalition that would be anathema to the Palestinian parties, including recognising Israel as “a Jewish, democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state”, and mandatory national service for all citizens, including Palestinians.

However, Palestinian politicians continue to express a willingness to back an Eisenkot government from outside – if only to enable the departure of Netanyahu and the far right. Meanwhile, thousands rallied in Tel Aviv for a coalition that includes the parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel.

10 days of siege in Hebron

While the Israeli electorate was consumed by the election’s unclear results, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank continued enduring a variety of sieges, most prominently in Hebron. By October 29, Al Jazeera’s data unit counted 10 entrances sealed and about 5,000 people displaced. The city saw at least 120 arrests and 13 businesses demolished by Friday, when the army also blew up the homes of two men it blamed for an attack. Palestinian officials accused the government of using the operation to win settler votes; no Israeli official has said so outright.

On November 2, Governor Khaled Dudin announced the army had withdrawn from Hebron, and that displaced families could return. The Jerusalem Post reported that the army’s chief of staff recommended leaving Hebron before the election, but that Netanyahu refused.

But even with the operation over, the damage remains following more than 120 arrests and daily economic losses the governor put at 10 million to 12 million shekels ($3.2m to $3.8m) in a city responsible for about 40 percent of Palestinian industrial output.

Sieges in homes, expulsions from land

But Hebron was only the largest of many closures that continue to plague the West Bank. In Masafer Yatta, at least 12 villages were cut off, and the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that forces detained 10 teachers from the Jinba school on Sunday.

Yousef Shanaran – who has been besieged in his home with his family in Wadi Rakhim for four weeks now – told Al Jazeera on Monday that settlers have now poisoned the well outside his family home, which the family already was unable to access for days at a time due to the siege. “No water, no food, nothing at all I’ve got,” he said. “Nobody is allowed to bring anything to us.”

These sieges continue as settlers, and increasingly Israeli forces, disrupt the olive harvest across the West Bank. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 397 settler attacks causing casualties or damage in the first 26 days of October – a monthly high since OCHA began tracking such incidents in 2006.

Across villages, a familiar pattern has emerged: settlers attack pickers, the army declares a closed military zone and orders the farmers out, and the harvest is lost.

Amid reports of detentions and deportations of solidarity activists who came to the West Bank to assist in the olive harvest in recent days, activists accused settlers of assaulting three activist journalists at Umm al-Khair, and Israel revoked Brad Lander’s travel authorisation after he was detained while harvesting olives two weeks ago.

Gaza: Deadly ‘ceasefire’ continues

In Gaza, attacks continued on a daily basis as the UN human rights office warned on October 30 that Palestinians are being pushed into an ever smaller area, calling the “Yellow Line” a “kill zone” that is moving westward.

By November 2, the Ministry of Health put the death toll since last year’s ceasefire at 1,593. Sunday was the deadliest day of the week, with at least eight killed. Among those reported killed over the past week:

• Government and police personnel were among those killed. On October 28, a drone strike on a Ministry of Economy facility in al-Mawasi, Rafah, where staff and security personnel had gathered, killed five people, including Ministry of Agriculture official Wajdi Abu Bakr, who died on Sunday from injuries sustained in the attack.
• On November 1, a drone strike in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, killed five men whom Gaza’s Interior Ministry said were police officers.
• Israeli attacks also killed children. Six-year-old Tahani Shalalfeh died of a gunshot wound in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, on October 27, and Yamen Saqr, eight, died on October 30 of wounds from Israeli fire in Khan Younis, according to Wafa and local activists. The young child Zain Owais was reported killed on November 1 with his father, Mohammed Ali Owais, and a third man in a strike near Taj Mall in Gaza City.
• On October 27, a young man was killed in an air strike in west Rafah, and a member of the Bseiso family died of earlier wounds in Gaza City, Gaza Now reported. Mohammad al-Bayouk was killed in Khan Younis on October 28, and Mohammed al-Najjar was killed near Jabalia on Thursday.
• On Friday, the body of a 47-year-old man killed in an air strike at al-Waha, north of Gaza City, was recovered, Wafa reported.
• Ibrahim Saeed died on Sunday of wounds from tank fire in al-Musaddar, and Yusuf Abu Younis died Monday of wounds from a drone strike in Khan Younis the day before, according to local activist Hamza al-Masri.
• On Monday, Mahmoud Qaffa and Asaad Qeshta were killed in separate air strikes in Khan Younis and Ibrahim al-Saayida, 40, in al-Musaddar, according to Wafa and Haaretz.

Israeli authorities claimed many of those killed this week were Hamas fighters, though no evidence was provided. Among those were Diaa Abu al-Rous, killed north of Nuseirat on Saturday, and Mohammed Qudeih, killed in a strike on a tent in Khan Younis the same day, who the military claimed were members of Hamas’s Nukhba Forces; Palestinian reports describe Abu al-Rous as a teacher.

Such killings take place with winter closing in and humanitarian conditions struggling to improve: two infant girls died of burns in a tent fire in al-Mawasi on Friday, and the shelter picture is dire, with Gaza’s Social Development Ministry saying about 200,000 tents are needed, yet only dozens have arrived due to Israeli entry restrictions.

With no hospitals in Gaza fully functioning, the Red Crescent warned on Monday that the health system is at risk of collapse after 26 hospitals went out of service – with fuel shortages threatening the remaining facilities.

Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed at least eight people, including a child, according to hospitals, despite a year-old ceasefire.

In Gaza City to the north, hospital officials said a missile attack hit a group of civilians next to Cairo School in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood, killing three people, including a four-year-old boy.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, the Hamas-run ministry of interior said a drone attack targeted a group of police officers in the Al-Mawasi area, killing five, as they were carrying out their routine duties.

The Israeli military said it had carried out two attacks on what it described as military operatives but has not yet provided evidence or further information.

Outside Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, video showed a crowd of men gathered to pray next to two body bags and the tiny body of the child, which was wrapped in a white towel.

“My son and his child were martyred. They were sitting in their tent, bothering no one, and nothing else was happening in the area when suddenly, a missile struck them, and they were martyred,” Ali Oweis told AFP news agency. “There is no ceasefire; the war is ongoing — don’t you see?”

At Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, women despaired as body bags lay on the floor, video showed. The interior ministry named the five police officers killed, who were between the ages of 23 and 53, and called the attack a “horrific massacre”.

A ceasefire came into force in Gaza in October last year, but Israeli air strikes have continued almost every day.

Since then, 1,580 people have been killed, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN. Israel says it is targeting Hamas, but often civilians are also killed.

Meanwhile, a peace plan for Gaza, brokered by the Trump administration, has stalled.

The ceasefire saw thousands of Palestinians held by Israel released in return for all of the 48 remaining hostages held in Gaza, and an agreement to end the war – which was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

Since the war began, 74,594 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Additional reporting by Jacob Phillips

UNRWA’s West Bank director, Roland Friedrich, said the scenes in Hebron carry “alarming echoes” of the mass displacement in the northern occupied West Bank in early 2025, when Israeli military operations emptied the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps.

More than 34,000 Palestinian refugees from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps remain displaced, according to UNRWA, more than a year after Israel’s “Iron Wall” operation began in January 2025. The operation destroyed more than half of the camps’ residential buildings.

OCHA’s demolition records capture only a fraction of that destruction. Between 2009 and October 2026, the agency recorded 1,399 buildings demolished in the Jenin and Tulkarem governorates, displacing 4,139 people. Those records mainly track demolitions carried out for lack of permits or as punishment, not buildings destroyed during military raids.

An investigation by the research group Forensic Architecture found evidence of deliberate, systematic destruction. Researchers verified more than 200 incidents involving the destruction of buildings and streets across four refugee camps, using armoured bulldozers, controlled demolitions and air attacks. They found that roads were widened through homes and gardens to create routes for military vehicles. The group concluded that Israel was applying tactics in the occupied West Bank similar to those it had used in Gaza.

In February 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Tulkarem and Jenin would come to resemble Jabalia and Shujayea, two of Gaza’s most devastated areas.

The raids have not stopped. Last week, Israeli forces detained four Palestinians in Tulkarem, and in the village of Burin, south of Nablus, troops converted several homes into military barracks, as they have in Hebron.

Near Jenin, the army has ordered the residents of an entire village to leave permanently. “I have sheep and cows. Our entire lives are tied to this land,” said farmer Jabri Yahya. “Last year they uprooted our olive trees, and this year they want to force us to leave. We don’t know where to go.”

Israel carried out several attacks in Gaza, including shelling the Nuseirat refugee camp.

At least four Palestinians in Gaza have been killed as Israel continues to attack the enclave, despite a so-called “ceasefire” that has been in place for over a year.

Israel carried out several attacks in Gaza on Saturday, including shelling the Nuseirat refugee camp, in which Palestinian teacher Diaa Abu al-Rous was killed, al-Awda Hospital confirmed.

Separately, another man, Arafat al-Arair, died after sustaining serious injuries days earlier when Israel struck a vehicle in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City. A medical source at al-Shifa Hospital confirmed his death.

Meanwhile, two girls also died on Saturday from injuries sustained the previous evening when their tent caught fire at a camp for displaced people in al-Mawasi, in Khan Younis. Nasser Medical Complex confirmed their deaths. It is not clear what caused the fire.

At least six Palestinians were killed in Gaza over the past 48 hours, according to the enclave’s Ministry of Health, bringing the number of people killed since the October 2025 ceasefire to 1,580.

In its daily statistical report on Saturday, the ministry said another 26 people were injured over the same period.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) warned on Friday that Israeli forces in Gaza were continuing to displace Palestinians and that their actions continued to raise concerns of ethnic cleansing.

The OHCHR said in a statement that Palestinians were increasingly being forced into a shrinking area of the territory, which has been decimated following three years of Israeli siege.

The office said Israeli forces were destroying what remained of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. The Israeli military is working to expand its control over Gaza’s territory to 70 percent, following an order from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May.

Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said Israel was targeting civilians as it sought to displace Palestinians from the city.

“We have testimonies from people who have evacuated their homes in the eastern part of Deir el-Balah city, confirming that the Israeli military has adjusted the yellow demarcation line by opening fire on civilians to push them from these areas,” Abu Azzoum said.

Since a nominal “ceasefire” came into effect a year ago, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,580 Palestinians and injured 5,711 others, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Talks aimed at permanently ending Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza under United States President Donald Trump’s peace plan have stalled. Reconstruction efforts have yet to begin amid disputes between Hamas and Israel over the implementation of Trump’s plan.

Hamas says it will not fully disarm until Israel withdraws entirely from Gaza. However, Israel maintains it will not leave the territory until Hamas forfeits its weapons.

Israel’s parliament remains in deadlock.

After one of the highest voter turnouts in decades, neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance secured the 61 seats required for a parliamentary majority in the October 27 polls.

Netanyahu’s camp came first, with 53 seats, five more than the main opposition bloc. The Arab parties surged to a record 19 seats but have been relegated to merely observing coalition negotiations.

Viewed from a distance, the results could appear startling.

The judicial reforms ushered in at the start of Netanyahu’s government term in 2022 provoked the largest street protests in Israel’s history, while the prime minister himself is still embroiled in a corruption trial dating back to 2019. Alleged failures ahead of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, that triggered Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have still to be reckoned with, despite overwhelming public pressure to do so. Moreover, the genocide has led to growing international isolation, while also providing the pretext for multiple attacks on countries across the region – the latest of which, undertaken with the United States on Iran in February, continues to roil energy markets around the world.

Nevertheless, roughly 2.38 million Israelis on Tuesday made the journey to the polls to back Netanyahu’s coalition, led by his Likud party, while some 2.21 million cast their ballots for the opposition alliance.

Between the two, little space was given to examine the multiple war crimes Israel stands accused of having carried out in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of it in ruins, or government complicity in the surging violence and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, where a United Nations commission of inquiry said on Monday that Israel had been committing crimes against humanity, including extermination, torture and rape.

Gaza did not make the ballot

Analysts said the fact that neither Gaza nor the West Bank were a deciding factor in how Israelis voted on Tuesday was largely because they already represented an area of broad agreement across both alliances.

Instead, the election was fought on largely internal issues: the power of Israel’s courts, whether members of the ultra-Orthodox minority should be exempted from military service, and whether the government’s alleged culpability in missing the warnings of the October 2023 attack should be examined.

Leading Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said the issues were pitched to the Israeli public along broadly similar lines to those used by the politicians enacting the policies.

“I don’t think the problem is simply that people are uninformed or disengaged,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Many Israelis know that Gaza has been devastated, even though they are exposed to a very selective representation of that devastation. But knowing something and recognising its moral and political implications are different things,” Shenhav-Shahrabani added, providing one explanation for the absence of empathy displayed by many Israelis in the face of the widely reported suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Ordinary people, who love their families, care for their friends, and consider themselves decent human beings, can participate in or acquiesce to a political order that produces immense suffering for others,” he said.

For Shenhav-Shahrabani, there has been “a powerful mechanism of denial” at work. “Not necessarily denial of the facts, but denial of their meaning,” he said.

Security on the agenda

For Netanyahu’s supporters, however, this denial could be traced to something more personal.

“The Likud is a tribe, or perhaps a cult and, as far as they are concerned, Dear Leader is always right,” Israeli analyst Ahron Bregman said of the prime minister’s base, which has sustained his rule for a cumulative 19 years – roughly a quarter of Israel’s entire existence.

“For them, the enemy, straight after the Arabs, is the left, and they would vote for Netanyahu regardless of his faults,” added Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at King’s College London.

For much of this electorate, the vote was less a judgement on the government’s conduct than a choice between competing claims to political legitimacy – or as Israeli academic Roi Zur put it, a contest over “the heart and soul of democracy” and the future of Jewish and Israeli identity.

“The most important thing, I think, for turnout among Netanyahu’s supporters is the understanding, or the belief, that the alternative coalition would be weaker on security,” said Zur, an expert on voter behaviour who teaches at Essex University.

What Netanyahu had been particularly successful in doing, he continued, was creating “this campaign of fear and the belief that he is the only one who can deal with this situation, that he is the only strong enough prime minister”.

“The idea that Netanyahu is the only and the strongest leader that can lead Israel through these recent times and the post-October 7 war.”

War and occupation, according to Shenhav-Shahrabani, were not choices to be made on the ballot paper.

Instead, they had become the prism through which, over decades, Israelis had come to view “security, citizenship, and the very meaning of democracy”.

“That is why replacing Netanyahu, important as it may be, would not by itself resolve the deeper problem.”

Gaza City— Mohammed Hamad, 14, was on his way home from school in Deir el-Balah on October 17 when an Israeli strike targeted the road he was travelling along.

He had finished classes at the makeshift school and was walking home through the al-Baraka neighbourhood with his 10-year-old brother, Abdullah. Mohammed was killed in the strike along with another man. Abdullah survived.

Mohammed was Riyad Hamad’s third child, an eighth-grade student among the top pupils in his class. His loss is difficult for the 44-year-old father to comprehend.

“He was not just my son, he was my friend,” Hamad told Al Jazeera from his family tent in Deir el-Balah. “He was doing so well. May God have mercy on him.”

The family has struggled to come to terms with the death of a boy whose schoolwork and achievements had been a source of pride.

“Mohammed used to ask me: ‘How am I with you?’ I swear, I never asked him for anything more,” he said.

The loss has also left a deep mark on Abdullah, who now fears losing his father, too.

“He has become very afraid of going to school. They used to go together every day and come back together. Now he cannot come to terms with having to go on his own,” Hamad said.

“We are living in fear. When I go out into the streets, I swear I am afraid. Even when I am walking or sitting in a car, my heart is filled with fear … Why should our children have to live with this constant fear and anxiety, even until the last moment?

“Enough is enough. The child is supposed to bury his father, not the father bury his child. They have turned the order of things upside down.”

The gradual return of children to school – even in makeshift classrooms and tents – had offered families in Gaza some hope of restoring a sense of normality after years of disruptions.

But Israeli air raids and sniper fire have continued, despite a ceasefire being established last October for Gaza. Since then, Israel has killed at least 1,574 Palestinians and injured 5,687 in Gaza, according to the enclave’s Ministry of Health.

The academic year resumed in Gaza on September 19, after nearly three years of disruptions caused by Israel’s war – and with it came more Israeli strikes.

Ten children aged from six to 16 and a teacher were killed between October 18 and 24. In a statement last Sunday, the Ministry of Education said that two girls were wounded during morning assembly at Muradiya School in Jabalia on October 21. Five students were also injured, some critically, in an attack on the Islamic University campus in Gaza City on Sunday.

The ministry called for urgent international action to protect students, schools and universities in Gaza.

The risks are particularly high for schools located near the so-called “Yellow Line”, a point that divided Gaza’s territory between Israeli and Palestinian control as part of the October 2025 “ceasefire” agreement. The line has moved westward to give Israel control of more than 65 percent of Gaza, according to the United Nations, up from the 53 percent agreed upon a year ago

At least 66 Palestinian children have been killed close to the Yellow Line, and pupils and teachers travelling near this zone remain in mortal danger from Israeli snipers and bombs.

On October 21, Suad Abd Rabbo, a fourth-grade student, went to school carrying her bag and books. Not long afterwards, her older sister rushed home shouting that Suad had been shot.

“I ran out barefoot,” Suad’s mother, Aliaa Abd Rabbo, recalled. “When I saw her, I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. She was bleeding, crying and screaming.”

The bullet struck Suad above the knee and lodged in a sensitive area close to her nerves and tendons. She was rushed to hospital, where doctors warned that trying to remove it could cause paralysis. They operated on Suad but were still unable to extract the bullet, which remains in her leg.

Abd Rabbo remembers when Suad came round from the anaesthesia after surgery and started reciting a passage she had been preparing for a school dictation exercise.

“‘O symbol of generosity and resilience … When I feel tired, I sit under an olive tree in the yard of our home, and feel rested after the exhaustion,” her mother recalled her saying.

Suad has since been discharged from hospital and has returned to her tent, where she remains unable to walk or move around. She needs surgery abroad to fully recover, but with Israel tightly controlling exit and entry from Gaza, her prospects of proper treatment are remote.

“Suad is now deeply frustrated. She cries and asks: ‘Why did this happen to me? Why was I targeted? What did I do?’” Abd Rabbo said.

Israeli tanks, military vehicles and cranes regularly open fire close to their tent in northern Gaza, particularly after sunset. Families often have to lie flat on the ground for hours to avoid the stray bullets that ricochet through the camp.

“My heart hurts when I send the girls to school. I told my husband I regret coming back from the south,” Abd Rabbo said about their return home to Jabalia after fleeing to Deir el-Balah during the war.

Another girl was also injured on the same day as Suad as students at Muradiya School were preparing for assembly at about 10:30am, Naim Aloush, the school’s principal, said.

“The girls had formed two lines … one suddenly screamed and fell to the ground … another girl standing nearby was struck by a bullet in her side,” she told Al Jazeera.

Teachers rushed to the girls and found that Suad had been shot while the second pupil, Amina Khader, a fifth-grade student, sustained a minor injury to her abdomen.

Aloush said the shooting sent fear through the school, with parents rushing to collect their children.

Pupils who had witnessed the incident were left terrified, and the school saw a marked increase in absenteeism in the days that followed.

The principal sees this incident as part of wider dangers facing the school in the al-Ghubari area, west of Jabalia al-Balad, consisting of 20 educational tents and serving about 1,000 pupils in the surrounding community, close to the Yellow Line.

Aloush said stray bullets or projectiles – from Israeli artillery, quadcopter drones and snipers – still regularly hit the school.

“Education is under fire, and our whole lives are under fire. At any moment, there can be gunfire. It is not light … it comes down like rain,” she told Al Jazeera.

“Every day, I come to school with my hand over my heart, afraid that one of my pupils or a member of the teaching staff might be hit.”

Amina, the other child injured along with Suad, has been left deeply traumatised by the incident, her father, Khaled Khader, said.

Khader said he rushed to the school after hearing that Amina had been injured and carried his daughter to a nearby clinic.

“There was terror, absolute terror. My daughter was in shock. She broke down, started screaming and collapsed,” Khader told Al Jazeera.

“Thank God she is safe … but the psychological impact of what happened will take years to overcome.”

Amina has since been afraid to return to school. Her family tried taking her back once, but she left early, unable to bear the sound of the gunfire.

“She is now afraid of the school itself. She keeps dreaming about her classmate lying there with blood running from her,” Khader said.

He said the incident had also left him afraid for the rest of his children and his wife, with Israeli air raids, random gunfire and shelling continuing to affect streets near the school.

“We are confused about what to do. Do we keep our children away from school and deprive them of their education, or do we send them out, knowing that they could be targeted at any moment?” Khader said. “A student needs stability to be able to learn. But we have no stability, and there are no alternatives.”

Dock and port workers have long had a tradition of solidarity with the oppressed, upheld by strong labour unions and workers’ rights.

In February 2025, nearly a year and a half into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, dockworkers’ unions from Mediterranean countries came together to disrupt weapons shipments to Israel and Western countries’ military support of the onslaught.

“Weapons need transport, infrastructure, and workers’ hands to reach their destination,” Markos Bekris, leader of Greece’s dockworkers’ union, ENEDEP, at the Port of Piraeus in Athens, told Al Jazeera. “That is where our power lies.”

Now, dock and port workers in 22 countries across five continents are holding a strike on Friday, which workers and researchers told Al Jazeera is expected to be “historic” in scale. The International Day of Action of Dockworkers and Port Workers – also called “Dockworkers do not work for war” – involves 110 ports and 25 trade unions.

“Every union will do what they choose, but be connected to the same principles and struggle,” Francesco Staccioli, the national secretary of transport and ports in Italy’s USB trade union, told Al Jazeera.

The unions’ main demand is “an immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and all imperialist wars”.

Mohammed al-Attar, a dockworker who left Gaza in 2015 and is now based in Hamburg, Germany, said the workers “are the power”.

“We can save thousands of lives if we stop working just for two days,” he said.

Al-Attar feels hopeful about the global strike, but is “deeply disappointed” in his trade union Ver.di in Germany, which he accused of “incomprehensible silence” over Gaza.

What is the International Day of Action of Dockworkers and Port Workers?

In early 2025, dockworkers in the Mediterranean area came together to discuss how to concretely act “against privatisation, and against the genocide in Palestine”.

The original meeting included five unions organising in 20 ports across five countries, but continued to grow. The unions met several times, first in Athens, then in Genoa, and later in Istanbul. That was where unions from more than 35 ports published the Istanbul Declaration in May this year, and declared October 30 as their day of action.

In a statement, the unions called for the “recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognised by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital”, and “an end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the Middle East and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan”.

“Refusing the war is giving humanity a chance to live better. This is what I’m really convinced about,” the USB’s Staccioli told Al Jazeera.

How many ports and unions are taking part?

More than 25 dockworkers’ trade unions, representing more than 110 ports in 22 countries and regions across five continents, are taking part. Most of the strikes will happen at regular working hours, but in France, Italy, India, Greece and Turkiye, 24-hour strikes have been called.

Strikes of up to two hours have also been announced in Morocco, Cyprus and other ports.

Organisers told Al Jazeera that workers and trade unions from other sectors have been called on to join with port workers, notably in Greece, while in Italy the USB has called for a general strike.

“It’s bigger than we thought,” Staccioli said. “This has spread all over the world.”

No Harbour for Genocide (NHG), a campaigning collective that researches weapon supply chains, supports the action. A spokesperson told Al Jazeera that maritime infrastructure was important in “facilitating military trade within the context of the genocide in Palestine”.

Dockworker unions in India, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and the west coast of the United States have all pledged to take part, the spokesperson added.

The Palestinian labour movement endorsed the strike and called on more to join, urging unions to “escalate Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) pressure to end all state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide.”

How are these ports involved in wars?

Of the ports participating, Genoa, Livorno and Gioia Tauro in Italy, Marseille in France, Piraeus in Greece, and Tangier in Morocco all have proven links to weapons shipments to Israel, according to No Harbour for Genocide.

The group said that between August 2025 and September 2026 it tracked 315 shipments of components for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, moving through 56 commercial ports in 29 countries. All these 56 ports are expected to be on strike on October 30 , representing a major disruption, even if only for a day.

NHG said it expects that more than $2bn worth of cargo will sit idle on October 30 .

“Up to 95 percent of Israel’s imports and exports travel by sea, relying on port infrastructure across the Mediterranean,” the campaign’s spokesperson said. “Tangier, Piraeus, Gioia Tauro and Genoa, where the largest vessels unload containers onto smaller ships for the rest of the sea, are a few of the Mediterranean’s most frequently used transshipment hubs. All four are taking part on Friday.”

“The participating Mediterranean ports handle 63 percent of all container activity in the sea,” the spokesperson added, noting that “between southern France and Piraeus, the striking ports hold 74 percent of container activity. Worldwide, the ports taking part [in the strike] handle 13.5 percent of global shipping.”

Linda Maggiore, an Italian journalist and activist, said that she has discovered several examples of increasing weapons shipments from Italy’s major ports to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza.

“In Europe, a regulation on military mobility is about to be approved, which will make it even easier for arms to be transferred without scrutiny,” Maggiore told Al Jazeera. “Blockades are essential actions, because they make it clear that civil society does not wish to be complicit.”

From the Vietnam war to Iraq, the USB’s Staccioli said that “dockworkers have a long tradition of rallying against any imperialist war or aggression in the world.”

Are protest actions prosecuted?

In Greece, union leader Bekris is facing prosecution for a protest in which he and other workers blocked the loading of a container holding 21 tonnes of ammunition destined for Israel in October 2024.

“We carry forward the tradition of workers who refuse to load weapons against other people,” Bekris told Al Jazeera on the eve of the global strike. “Our hands get covered in grease and sweat every day. We refuse to let them be stained with the blood of other people.”

Gaza City — Mohammed al-Jamal, 60, tries to secure the nylon sheets of his family’s worn-out tent as a storm approaches his displacement camp on a beach in western Gaza City.

He and his sons pull at the tarpaulin, trying to fasten it firmly to the ground for protection from rain and wind coming in from the sea.

This will be the fourth winter that displaced Palestinians in Gaza have faced without adequate shelter. Many still live in tents and makeshift structures that offer little protection against the impending winter weather when temperatures can drop to 7C (below 45F) but can feel much colder due to strong coastal winds and rain.

The family cannot afford to fix their damaged tent with a replacement tarpaulin costing between 120 and 150 shekels ($37-$47) in local markets.

All al-Jamal can do is patch up the damaged shelter and hope it holds through the coming storm.

“We are trying to prepare as much as we can to protect ourselves from the water and the wind,” he said. “We follow the weather reports, and whenever there is a warning of a storm, we start preparing. But once the storm comes, everything gets torn apart, and we have to start all over again. It is continuous suffering throughout the winter.”

Mass displacement

Al-Jamal, originally from Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood, has been displaced several times since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

About 30 members of his extended family live in these difficult living conditions.

“We are just trying to adapt to what we have. This is what is available to us. We need everything,” he said.

When it rains, water enters the tent and floods their living space, risking damage to their meagre belongings.

When temperatures drop, tents offer little protection for the displaced, with al-Jamal and his family having no choice but to put on more layers of clothing.

“We are out in the open. We are living in the street, not in houses that protect us,” he said.

Al-Jamal said he had repeatedly heard promises that shelter materials and caravans would be allowed into Gaza, but none had arrived for his family, and he had not seen any of them enter.

He described these announcements as “false promises and lies” that had left displaced families waiting for help that never came.

“Our demand is to have our lives back the way they were before,” he said.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed more than 74,500 Palestinians and destroyed or damaged more than 80 percent of buildings. With homes and infrastructure in Gaza destroyed, about 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are living in tents or makeshift shelters.

Many of the displaced have been forced to move from city to city when Israeli assaults begin on their homes or camps.

At least 294,250 families in Gaza need winter shelter assistance, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), but with current supplies, only 52,000 families, roughly 18 percent of those in need, have access to partial humanitarian assistance.

More than 65 percent of displaced households were living in tents or makeshift shelters, according to a Shelter Cluster survey, with more than half of those shelters in poor or very poor condition.

Israel’s siege on Gaza has also affected supplies reaching the enclave, with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) saying on October 5 that at least 500 truckloads of shelter materials were awaiting entry or procurement.

At the current pace, NRC said, it could take more than seven months for those supplies to enter Gaza. The materials include tents, tarpaulins, ropes and other items needed to repair shelters.

Winter around the corner

For families already living in torn tents, the shortage leaves few options beyond repeatedly repairing the same shelters.

Khitam Salman, 39, originally from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, has been displaced multiple times over the past two years.

Now living near the beach, she is trying to prepare for winter with tents that have already suffered repeated damage.

“Every time there is a storm, we put up the tarpaulins and tie them down, only to have to do it all over again,” she said. “With every low-pressure system, it is the same.”

Khitam said one of the family’s tents had collapsed four times while they were sleeping inside and was torn, allowing sand to enter and offering little protection from rain and wind.

She is trying to cover the family’s tents and the space where they store their belongings, but the costs are beyond their means.

“We need a tarpaulin for this tent, another for the other one, and one for the room where we keep our belongings,” she said. “But we don’t have the means. We have done what we can.”

Her husband works in the health sector, but she said he receives his salary only once every three months, and it is not enough to cover the family’s needs.

“The tents are not suitable for living in any more,” she said. “They are torn, and sand gets inside. It is exhausting.”

Last winter, after their tent collapsed and their belongings were soaked, Salman said she became so overwhelmed that she walked away and sat by the sea for hours.

“I was so frustrated,” she recalled. “The tent had fallen, everything was flooded, and all our belongings were wet.”

“I’m worried about this winter … that the whole nightmare will repeat itself all over again.”

Damaged roads, drainage and sewage systems also increase the risk that rainwater will mix with wastewater and swamp the camps.

Husni Muhanna, spokesperson for Gaza Municipality, said more than 85 percent of the city’s infrastructure had been damaged and its rainwater drainage system was operating at about 20 percent of its previous capacity.

Rubble, damaged drainage networks and shortages of heavy machinery, fuel and maintenance materials are hampering preparations for winter, Muhanna said.

The municipality has begun emergency cleaning and maintenance work, but its efforts remain constrained by a lack of resources.

Flood risks beyond tents

Yosra Mesleh, 45, was displaced from her home in Gaza City’s Nassr neighbourhood when her home was destroyed and is preparing for her second winter living in a tent.

Preparing for winter means thinking about what to do when water enters their tents and soaks bedding and belongings. When this happens, they often have nowhere dry to sit, cook or eat.

“When it rained last winter, the water came inside and reached the bedding. Everything got wet,” she said. “It was difficult to find somewhere to sit while we waited for everything to dry.”

In summer, the heat and humidity inside the tent were unbearable, she said, with water shortages compounding their dire living situation.

“The place where we are living is not healthy or safe. It is not suitable for summer or winter,” she said.

Her husband has been out of work since the beginning of the war, while her son is struggling to cover his own expenses.

“We need tents and tarpaulins. We need cooking utensils and a proper place to prepare food. We also need a regular supply of gas,” she said.

Without cooking gas, she worries about how the family will prepare meals when rain keeps them inside.

She remembers life before the war, when life was hard but they had an apartment and her husband ran a tea and coffee shop. They have since lost their home and their only source of income.

“We are not asking for towers or anything extravagant,” she said. “We are asking for tarpaulins and tents, for a dignified life.”

Al-Bureij, Gaza Strip – A Sack of Flour, an 11-minute documentary by the emerging filmmaker Mona Abu Qass, draws on her personal experience to examine Israel’s use of starvation against Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave.

The film is one of five documentaries by Palestinian women screened Monday at the opening of the second Gaza International Women’s Film Festival, which also marked the official launch of the Gaza Cinema Academy.

The event took place at the site of the al-Nakheel Hall in al-Bureij, central Gaza, under the slogan “Women Creating Life from Death”. The hall is destroyed, like the majority of buildings in Gaza, after three years of Israel’s war, which has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians.

The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to find food in Gaza, the dangers at aid distribution points and the lives lost while trying to obtain flour.

Through Abu Qass’s own experiences, A Sack of Flour explores how the trauma of hunger continues to affect families even after food becomes available again.

Those experiences have renewed relevance as Israeli restrictions on goods entering Gaza and cuts to food assistance have caused shortages and fears of a return to famine.

“The idea for the film stems from a personal experience and a true story,” Abu Qass told Al Jazeera. “It documents daily life in Gaza, weighed down by bombardment, destruction, siege, hunger, and loss.”

“I want to capture details that reveal suffering and people’s determination to hold on to their life,” she added. “I seek to show reality as people experience it and help viewers understand what the war has done to their relationships, dreams, and hopes.”

Highlighting struggles of the disabled

Another film, Beyond Silence, by emerging filmmaker and journalist Raghda al-Buhaisi, explores wartime struggles in Gaza for people with disabilities through the story of a deaf artist who never learned to read, write or communicate through sign language. His art studio in southern Gaza’s Rafah was destroyed by Israel, and his parents and several family members were killed.

After being displaced to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, another family took him in and set up a modest studio by the roadside. His paintings reflect loss and displacement, expressing what words cannot through colour and line.

“I want to highlight the additional challenges people with disabilities face during war, including displacement, family loss, and the destruction of livelihoods,” al-Buhaisi told Al Jazeera. “Art can cross barriers of language and silence, turning an individual experience of pain into a visual message that conveys Gaza’s suffering to the world.”

Alongside those films were three others by emerging Palestinian women filmmakers – Soso: The Lifeline, Remnants of Light, and Dandana. The films document life in Gaza and the suffering brought by war.

Soso: The Lifeline follows an orphaned child and his donkey, who help people survive in Gaza. Remnants of Light follows a filmmaker struggling with the loss of her family and home, while Dandana tells the story of a mother whose eight children were killed, and who turns to Palestinian songs with her surviving family to cope with her grief.

The five documentaries were produced through a filmmaking diploma programme that began in March and brought together 25 young Palestinian women.

Preserving Gaza’s stories

Festival director Ezzedine Shallah said the films draw on experiences women and girls lived through during the war, offering visual testimony to daily life and giving women space to tell their stories in their own voices.

“Though their subjects differ, the films turn individual pain into broader human stories, revealing war’s psychological and social scars,” he told Al Jazeera. “They preserve stories that might otherwise never reach the screen, transforming suffering into cinematic testimony and bringing Gaza’s stories to audiences beyond its borders.”

The festival, which runs until October 31, features 73 films from 24 countries and offers a broader platform for filmmakers from Gaza and beyond.

But even with events like the festival, filmmaking in Gaza comes with formidable challenges. The destruction of cultural institutions, scarce equipment, limited funding, power and internet outages, and the pressures of war and displacement have severely restricted opportunities for film production. Women filmmakers also struggle to access training, production opportunities and international festivals.

Filmmaker Rima Mahmoud, a co-founder of the festival, said that war and the Israeli siege on Gaza – which predates 2023 – have hindered young women’s filmmaking, pushing some to use simple methods, self-fund projects and document Gaza’s reality even with the difficulties.

“Despite limited resources, these films deserve international exposure,” Mahmoud said. “Their makers need technical and financial support, translation, and partnerships with festivals and platforms.”

Resisting attempts at erasure

Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri, based in Lebanon and another co-founder of the festival, said the films help young women tell their own stories, resist erasure and preserve collective memory, while building skills and accessing work in Gaza or through digital platforms.

The academy has also developed a filmmaking diploma in cooperation with al-Quds Open University and accredited by the Palestinian Ministry of Education.

Masri said that the academy is also now trying to help directors reach international festivals.

“We are seeking agreements with distributors to screen these films in educational and cultural institutions outside Palestine, and through international platforms and festivals focused on women’s and human rights,” she said.

“This would bring the voices of Palestinian women to a global audience, shed light on their human experiences and artistic creativity, strengthen the presence of Palestinian cinema internationally, and open new horizons for young female directors to reach global screening platforms and film festivals,” Masri added.

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip — After three years of genocidal war, Palestinians in Gaza are watching the upcoming elections in Israel with a mixture of fear and uncertainty.

Although the territory has been under a “ceasefire” since October 2025, Palestinians in Gaza continue to endure almost daily Israeli air strikes, dire living conditions, and a punishing siege that has caused shortages of basic goods.

Israelis will head to the polls on Tuesday to vote for their next government, in an election that has been shaped by the war on Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been strongly criticised for his handling of security before the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Members of his far-right government have called for a tougher line on Gaza, including the expulsion of its population.

The people of Gaza know this election will shape their future and many have been closely watching the campaign.

Mohammed Eliyan, 36, was displaced from Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza and now lives in Deir el-Balah with his five children. He hopes a change in leadership in Israel could bring relief to Palestinians who have endured repeated displacement and war.

“We follow the Israeli election to see who will win in the next phase. We hope there might be some easing for the Palestinian cause and for us, who have been displaced again,” he told Al Jazeera.

Eliyan hopes that Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israeli military commander and Netanyahu’s main rival, will defeat the prime minister. He sees Netanyahu as more hardline and fears that if his Likud party and far-right allies win another term, it would mean more war and further displacement for Gaza’s people.

“We hope there will be changes after the election, and that someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu will win. What Netanyahu has done to the Palestinian people, before and after October 7, has not been a small thing,” he said.

But regardless of who wins, Eliyan does not expect a major shift in Israeli policy.

“They are still our enemy, and I don’t expect things to improve dramatically,” he said. “But we hope someone else might be less harsh than Netanyahu.”

He called on Israel’s next leader to end the war, prevent displacement and starvation, and ease restrictions at Gaza’s crossings.

“We want whoever leads Israel not to be hardline. End the war and let us live in peace,” he said.

Islam Salem, 41, is displaced from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza and has three daughters. He is following Israel’s election closely and believes the result could affect Gaza’s future and the lives of his children, likely for the worse.

“Politics is our livelihood. It is connected to everything in our lives, our living conditions and even the future of our children,” he said.

But he also believes that elections primarily serve Israeli interests, so even if there are new faces in the next government, the Gaza strategy will likely remain the same.

“Israeli policy will not change in any way. Whatever they take, they consider it theirs and a political gain for them, the gains of a war they have pursued for a long time,” Islam told Al Jazeera.

He pointed to Israel’s continued control of about 65 percent of Gaza’s territory inside the “Yellow Line”. He also doubts whether reconstruction will begin soon in Gaza, where more than 80 percent of buildings have been damaged, and about two-thirds of those have been completely destroyed.

“I think reconstruction will be difficult. They do not want to give others any rights. They want their rights in full, and even more,” he said.

Years of war have left Salem struggling to imagine a future beyond his harsh daily reality.

“There is no future left for us to be afraid of. We live day by day. We have no idea what will happen next, and everything we feared has already happened,” he said.

Asked what he would say to Israel’s next prime minister, he spoke of how many in Gaza are feeling.

“If only a simple person could come and talk to him and say, ‘Leave us alone. Give us some breathing space and let us breathe.’ But he would not be convinced. What can I say to him?” he said.

Hanan Abu al-Maaza, 57, has been displaced more than 12 times during the war on Gaza. She fears Israel’s next government could bring more suffering to its people in the besieged enclave.

“We follow the election because of the fear and anxiety we are living with. We have been displaced more than 12 times, and we are afraid they will do even worse to us than before,” she said.

“We go to sleep without feeling safe, wondering what they might do to us next. The fear is still in our heads and hearts.”

Abu al-Maaza says if Netanyahu is defeated, there will be more chance that she can return to her home in Beit Lahiya.

“I hope someone else wins, so we can have peace of mind and feel safe, and return to our homes. That is what we wish for,” she said.

After years of destruction in Gaza, she hopes Israel’s next leader will show Palestinians more mercy.

“Maybe he will say that there is nothing left in Gaza, that they have done enough and should let people live. There is hardly anything left in Gaza for anyone to think about doing anything more,” she said.

Abu al-Maaza urged Israel’s next leader to end the war and stop the suffering in the territory.

“We have had enough of war and destruction. There is nothing left to destroy, yet the suffering continues,” she said.

Manar Owaida, 23, is originally from northern Gaza and is now displaced in the Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City. She is also keeping an eye on the Israeli election and considering its potential impact.

“I follow the election to know what they are saying and planning, and to understand what is happening around us and how the next Israeli government might affect the situation in Gaza,” she said.

Owaida hopes Gadi Eisenkot will replace Netanyahu, and sees the current prime minister as more extreme than his challenger. But she does not believe a change in Israel’s leadership would transform Palestinian lives, arguing that government policies have remained consistent for decades.

“Israel’s policy is one of crime, killing and destruction. Since 1948, it has been the same policy, the same killing and the same blockade,” she said.

Still, she hopes a new government could ease restrictions and killings and withdraw from areas beyond the “Yellow Line”, allowing life to gradually return to Gaza.

“There might be a change in Israeli policy if someone comes in place of Netanyahu and eases the blockade and the killing we are living through,” she said.

“There could be a withdrawal from the Yellow Line and life could gradually return to Gaza. But we are waiting with fear and uncertainty, alongside a little hope.”

Her greatest concern is that Netanyahu could launch a wider regional war to avoid domestic political pressure around the time of the vote.

Owaida said she wants Israel’s next prime minister to allow Palestinians to live without fear of further violence.

“We want to live in freedom and peace, away from killing and wars,” she said.

Mousa Ali, 33, was displaced from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza and is now in Gaza City with his four children.

He believes that the outcome of the election could determine whether displaced Palestinians can return to areas beyond the “Yellow Line”.

“For Palestinians, this election is critical, especially because of the Yellow Line. We hope the opposition will be better when it comes to allowing displaced people to return to their areas,” he said.

Ali mentioned Gadi Eisenkot as a possible alternative and hopes Arab parties will perform strongly so they have a role in the next government.

But he does not expect a new leader to bring major changes for the people of Gaza and fears that Israeli attacks will continue. He says a Netanyahu victory would prolong displacement and control over areas around the “Yellow Line”.

“Every day in Gaza, there is blood, there are people being killed, and there is bombing everywhere,” he said. “We hope this policy will end and that a new prime minister will stop this ongoing bloodshed.”