genocide

Twelve Palestine Action activists, including hunger strikers, who were charged with breaking into the British site of an Israeli-linked defence firm, reunited with their families outside London’s Central Criminal Court after they were granted bail on Friday.

A UN fact-finding body says mass killings by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher carry the hallmarks of genocide, with thousands reported killed. Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan breaks down the findings, which accuse the RSF of rape, torture, and extortion.

Israeli forces carried out violent raids across the occupied West Bank, detaining Palestinians and demolishing homes. A young man was killed by settlers in Mukhmas, Jerusalem, while restrictions on West Bank worshippers at Al-Aqsa added to tensions during Ramadan.

Since October 2023, UNRWA has faced attacks by Israel’s government, funding cuts from the US, and legal cases questioning the organisation’s neutrality. During that time, Israeli forces have killed more than 380 UNRWA staff in Gaza.

In this episode of Centre Stage, Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Hassan speaks with UNRWA’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, about Israel’s ban on the agency and what he calls a turning point for international law and the global order.

The true human cost of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip has far exceeded previous official estimates, with independent research published in the world’s leading medical journals verifying more than 75,000 “violent deaths” by early 2025.

The findings, emerging from a landmark series of scientific papers, suggest that administrative records from the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) represent a conservative “floor” rather than an overcount, and provide a rigorous bedrock to the scale of Palestinian loss.

The Gaza Mortality Survey (GMS), a population-representative household study published in The Lancet Global Health, estimated 75,200 “violent deaths” between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025. This figure represents approximately 3.4 percent of Gaza’s pre-conflict 2.2 million population and sits 34.7 percent higher than the 49,090 “violent deaths” reported by the MoH for the same period.

The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that as of January 27 this year, at least 71,662 people have been killed since the start of the war. Of those, 488 people have been killed since the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2025.

Israel has consistently questioned the ministry’s figures, but an Israeli army official told journalists in the country in January that the army accepted that about 70,000 people had been killed in Gaza during the war.

Despite the higher figure, researchers noted that the demographic composition of casualties – where women, children, and the elderly comprise 56.2 percent of those killed – remains remarkably consistent with official Palestinian reporting.

Scientific validation of the toll

The GMS, which interviewed 2,000 households representing 9,729 individuals, provides a rigorous empirical foundation for a death toll.

Michael Spagat, a professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London and the study’s lead author, found that while MoH reporting remains reliable, it is inherently conservative due to the collapse of the very infrastructure required to document death.

Notably, this research advances upon findings published in The Lancet in January 2025, which used statistical “capture-recapture” modelling to estimate 64,260 deaths during the war’s first nine months.

While that earlier study relied on probability to flag undercounts, this report shifts from mathematical estimation to empirical verification through direct household interviews. It extends the timeline through January 2025, confirming a violent toll exceeding 75,000 and quantifying, for the first time, the burden of “non-violent excess mortality”.

According to a separate commentary in the same publication, the systematic destruction of hospitals and administrative centres has created a “central paradox” where the more devastating the harm to the health system, the more difficult it becomes to analyse the total death toll.

Verification is further hindered by thousands of bodies still buried under rubble or mutilated beyond recognition. Beyond direct violence, the survey estimated 16,300 “non-violent deaths”, including 8,540 “excess” deaths caused directly by the deterioration of living conditions and the blockade-induced collapse of the medical sector.

Researchers highlighted that the MoH figures appear to be conservative and reliable, dispelling misinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting Palestinian casualty data. “The validation of MoH reporting through multiple independent methodologies supports the reliability of its administrative casualty recording systems even under extreme conditions,” the study concluded.

A decade of reconstructive backlogs

While the death toll continues to mount, survivors face an unprecedented burden of complex injury that Gaza’s decimated healthcare system is no longer equipped to manage. A predictive, multi-source model published in eClinicalMedicine quantified 116,020 cumulative injuries as of April 30, 2025.

The study, led by researchers from Duke University and Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, estimated that between 29,000 and 46,000 of these injuries require complex reconstructive surgery. More than 80 percent of these injuries resulted from explosions, primarily air attacks and shelling in densely populated urban zones.

The scale of the backlog is staggering. Ash Patel, a surgeon and co-author of the study, noted that even if surgical capacity were miraculously restored to pre-war levels, it would take approximately another decade to work through the estimated backlog of predicted reconstructive cases. Before the escalation, Gaza had only eight board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeons for a population exceeding 2.2 million people.

The collapse of the health system

The disparity between reconstructive need and capacity is exacerbated by what researchers describe as the “systematic destruction” of medical infrastructure. By May 2025, only 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remained capable of providing care beyond basic emergency triage, with approximately 2,000 hospital beds available for the entire population, down from more than 3,000 beds before the war.

“There is little to no reconstructive surgery capacity left within Gaza,” the research concluded, warning that specialised expertise like microsurgery is almost absent. The clinical challenge is further compounded by Israel’s use of incendiary weapons, which produce severe burns alongside blast-related fractures.

The long-term effect of these injuries is often irreversible. Without prompt medical treatment, patients face high risks of wound infection, sepsis, and permanent disability. The data indicate that tens of thousands of Palestinians will remain with surgically addressable disabilities for life unless there is a huge international increase in reconstructive capacity and aid.

The ‘grey zone’ of mortality

Writing in The Lancet Global Health, authors Belal Aldabbour and Bilal Irfan observed a growing “grey zone” in mortality where the distinction between direct and indirect death becomes blurred. Patients who die of sepsis months after a blast, or from renal failure after a crushing injury because they cannot access clean water or surgery, occupy a space that risks understating the true lethality of military attacks.

Conditions have only deteriorated since the data collection periods. By late 2025, forced evacuations covered more than 80 percent of Gaza’s area, with northern Gaza and Rafah governorates facing full razing by Israeli forces. Famine was declared in northern Gaza in August 2025, further reducing the physiological reserve of injured survivors and complicating any surgical recovery.

This series of independent studies serves as an urgent call for accountability and an immediate cessation of hostilities. “The healthcare infrastructure in Gaza is being repeatedly decimated by attacks despite protection by international humanitarian law,” researchers stated. They underscored that the only way to prevent the reconstructive burden from growing further is an immediate end to attacks against civilians and vital infrastructure.

Palestinians are marking the start of the holy month of Ramadan in Gaza where the impact of Israel’s genocidal war continues to be felt, despite a ceasefire in place since October.

A 15-day-old baby lost her father in Israel’s latest violation of the Gaza ‘ceasefire’ during attacks that killed at least 11 Palestinians in 48 hours.

Thousands of Western nationals joined the Israeli military amid its genocidal war in Gaza, raising questions over international legal accountability for foreign nationals implicated in alleged war crimes against Palestinians.

More than 50,000 soldiers in the Israeli military hold at least one other citizenship, with a majority of them holding US or European passports, information obtained by the Israeli NGO Hatzlacha through Israel’s Freedom of Information Law has revealed.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed at least 72,061 people in military actions that have been dubbed war crimes and crimes against humanity by rights groups.

Rights organisations around the world have been trying to identify and prosecute foreign nationals, many of whom have posted videos of their abuse on social media, for their involvement in war crimes, particularly in Gaza.

So, what does the first such data reveal about the Israeli military? And what could be the legal implications for dual-national soldiers?

Which foreign nationals enlist most in the Israeli military?

At least 12,135 soldiers enlisted in the Israeli military hold United States passports, topping the list by a huge margin. That is in addition to 1,207 soldiers who possess another passport in addition to their US and Israeli ones.

The data – shared with Al Jazeera by Israeli lawyer Elad Man, who serves as the legal counsel for Hatzlacha – shows that 6,127 French nationals serve in the Israeli military.

The Israeli military, which shared such data for the first time, noted that soldiers holding multiple citizenships are counted more than once in the breakdown.

The numbers show service members enlisted in the military as of March 2025, 17 months into Israel’s devastating war in Gaza.

Russia stands at third, with 5,067 nationals serving in the Israeli military, followed by 3,901 Ukrainians and 1,668 Germans.

The data revealed that 1,686 soldiers in the military held dual British-Israeli citizenship, in addition to 383 other soldiers who held another passport in addition to their British and Israeli ones.

South Africa, which brought a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also had 589 of its citizens serving in the Israeli military ranks.

Furthermore, 1,686 soldiers hold Brazilian citizenship, 609  Argentine, 505 Canadian, 112 Colombian, and 181 Mexican, in addition to their Israeli nationality.

Israel’s military comprises an estimated 169,000 active personnel and 465,000 reservists – of whom nearly eight percent hold dual or multiple citizenships.

Can dual nationals be tried for war crimes in Gaza?

Ilias Bantekas, a professor of transnational law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that “war crimes incur criminal liability under international law, irrespective of what the law of nationality says”.

Otherwise, Nazi Germans, whose law allowed and obliged them to commit atrocities, would incur no liability, Bantekas added. “Dual nationality is immaterial to criminal liability,” he said.

However, the major issue in prosecuting the accused “is getting [them] on your territory and putting them before a court”, he noted.

Bantekas also added that there is no difference in the question of liability between native soldiers and those of dual nationalities.

Dual nationals, in fact, “may in addition be liable under laws that prevent military service in foreign conflicts or joining armies of other nations”, the professor said.

Prosecuting foreign nationals has been “pretty much the norm”, he noted.

“Think of Nazi Germans tried by Allied war crimes tribunals after World War II, Japanese officers tried by US military courts, and crimes committed during the Bosnian conflict where alleged offenders were tried by various courts in Europe,” Bantekas told Al Jazeera.

Last May, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office said that allegations of war crimes should be submitted to the Metropolitan Police.

“The UK recognises the right of British dual nationals to serve in the legitimately recognised armed forces of the country of their other nationality,” it said. “Allegations of war crimes should be submitted to the Met Police for investigation.”

Have foreign nationals been tried for Gaza war crimes?

Nationals with dual or multiple citizenships have not yet been arrested for committing war crimes in Gaza. But rights groups, including lawyers, are trying to get them prosecuted.

In the UK last April, the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the UK-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) filed a 240-page report to the Metropolitan Police.

Accusations against the 10 British individuals, whose names have not been publicly disclosed, include murder, forcible transfer of people, and attacks on humanitarian personnel, between October 2023 and May 2024.

In September last year, a case was filed in Germany against a 25-year-old soldier, born and raised in Munich, for participating in the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, by PCHR, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Al-Haq, and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights.

The sniper, with shootings documented near Gaza’s al-Quds and Nasser hospitals between November 2023 and March 2024, was a member of a unit known as “Refaim”, “ghost” in Hebrew.

Legal proceedings against members of the same unit are also under way in France, Italy, South Africa, and Belgium.

The Belgian public prosecutor’s office also opened a judicial investigation last October into a 21-year-old Belgian-Israeli citizen, a member of Refaim.

The mandatory military service law in Israel exempts dual nationals residing abroad, making the enlistment a voluntary act, an important distinction when such crimes are tried in foreign courts. Lawyers have reportedly noted that the voluntary nature of the soldiers’ service makes them more liable for alleged crimes.

What does international law say about soldiers in foreign wars?

South Africa brought its case to the ICJ in December 2023, arguing that Israel’s war in Gaza violates the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

While a final ruling could take years, the ICJ issued provisional measures in January 2024 ordering Israel to take steps to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza and to allow unimpeded access for humanitarian aid. But Israel has continued curb the supply of aid into Gaza in violation of the ICJ interim order.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, countries that are party to the treaty have a binding obligation to prevent and punish genocide. Countries can investigate and prosecute individuals who may have committed or been complicit in this crime.

In March last year, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) announced the “Global 195” campaign to hold Israeli and dual-national individuals accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

The coalition aims to work simultaneously within multiple jurisdictions to apply for private arrest warrants and initiate legal proceedings against those implicated, including the Israeli military members and the entire Israeli military and political command in its scope.

For countries that are parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), there is an additional layer, where the ICC can assert its jurisdiction. Palestine has been a state party since 2015.

The State of Palestine is recognised as a sovereign nation by 157 of the 193 UN member states, representing 81 percent of the international community. Most recently, it has been recognised by France, Belgium, Canada, Australia, and the UK.

A foreign national, whose country considers Palestine a “friendly state”, would also be vulnerable to prosecution for participating in the Israeli military’s war crimes in Gaza.

How is the Hind Rajab Foundation tracking alleged war criminals?

The Hind Rajab Foundation – named to honour a five-year-old Palestinian girl whose killing by Israeli soldiers on January 29, 2024 became emblematic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – has been amassing troves of data with identifiable information about Israeli soldiers.

The Belgium-based foundation is the force behind an international effort for accountability over war crimes in Gaza – and has since filed several cases, including a landmark challenge targeting 1,000 Israeli soldiers.

The foundation identified numerous individuals with dual citizenship, including 12 from France, 12 from the US, four from Canada, three from the UK, and two from the Netherlands, in the complaint.

The foundation has scoured TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where the Israeli soldiers boast about atrocities in Gaza, to collect information on the soldiers. It has been using those pieces of evidence to pursue the trail of the accused for war crimes.

“We are in possession of many more profiles of dual nationals beyond the 1,000 soldiers named in our complaint to the ICC. We will be pursuing legal action against all of them in the national courts of their respective countries,” the foundation had said in October 2024. “Impunity must end, everywhere.”

The Hind Rajab Foundation says it pursues criminal accountability for Israeli war criminals, from those who planned and ordered operations to those who executed them, including foreign nationals who have participated in or financed these crimes.

Its founder, Dyab Abou Jahjah, was also threatened by Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli, who told him to “watch your pager” in a post on X, an allusion to deadly attacks on Hezbollah members’ communication systems in September 2024. At least 12 people were killed and more than 3,000 people were wounded when thousands of pagers were detonated by Israeli operatives during those attacks.

In January last year, a complaint filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation led to a Brazilian judge ordering an investigation into an Israeli soldier vacationing in the country. The soldier had to flee, prompting the Israeli military to order all troops who participated in combat to conceal their identities.

“Criminal liability under international law cannot be dissolved by time bars. It extends forever, and no statute of limitations is applicable,” said Bantekas of Hamad Bin Khalifa University.

However, prosecuting Israeli military members “is practically difficult for two reasons”, he said, noting the difficulty of obtaining firsthand evidence and the wariness of national prosecutors who may fear political or other repercussions.

“If public opinion and political opinion in Europe shifts far more in favour of Palestine than it is now, then national prosecutions will feel more at ease to initiate prosecutions,” he told Al Jazeera.

Explosions are reported in eastern Gaza City, while at least 54 Palestinians are wounded in attacks by Israeli settlers across the occupied West Bank today.

An Israeli air attack on a residential building in western Gaza City has killed at least four people.

Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralysed. He experiences constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them. Nor can his mother. To keep the spasms under control, a drug called baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscles and stops the shaking. Suddenly halting the use of baclofen can have serious health consequences.

Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the family’s tent in al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza a week ago. It was her son’s seventh day without the medicine. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs leave him screaming out in pain.

Baclofen is unavailable anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.

Jamal now endures dozens of spasms each day. There is no alternative medication or substitute. There is no relief, only pain.

Jamal’s story is not to be told, if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their way.

Speaking at the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute last month, he said, “We need to make sure that the story is told properly so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. At this line, the audience applauded.

Pompeo went on to say that every war has civilian casualties, but the true victims in this case are the Israeli people. His concern is that October 7th and the war in Gaza would be remembered “incorrectly”.

It seems Pompeo wants to argue that the people of Gaza are just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war.  They are to remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.

His remarks reflect the next phase in Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s people, their mosques, their schools and universities, their cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now embarked on the erasure of memory and martyrdom.

The campaign is evident both inside and beyond Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an institution that has long preserved the status of the Palestinian refugee population and safeguarded their right of return under international law – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices have had a bit more freedom to speak – is now shadow banning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.

In the US, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, local laws are weaponised to come after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for using what should be their protected right to free speech. Laws are even passed at the state level in the US to shape what can be taught at schools about Israel and Palestine.

But what Pompeo – and those like him who misread biblical verses to justify their support for Israel and its genocide – do not understand is that Palestinians have faced erasure before and have overcome it. We will do so again.

In thinking about memory and bearing witness, the word “martyr” comes to mind. “Martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus”, meaning “witness”, and features prominently in the Bible. Similarly, the word “shaheed” in Arabic is derived from the root of the word for “witness” or “witnessing”. As the word evolved, it also took on connotations of violent suffering due to one’s beliefs, and even a sense of heroic steadfastness due to the scale of one’s sacrifice.

I can think of no better word than “shaheed” to describe Jamal and the people around him: they are living martyrs. Jamal’s little body has witnessed immense suffering; it has been pounded with the violence of the war, and he – like his mother – pushes on because of his overwhelming desire to live.

All around Jamal and Shaima’s tent are thousands of other tents. Day and night, each of them is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Inside the tents, cold and often wet from the recent floods, are thousands of other people who require urgent and important medical evacuation to hospitals.

The pain and suffering are immense, yet the likes of Pompeo continue to justify the ongoing and historically rooted process of the elimination of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian people are also poets at heart. And what Pompeo – who devalues language, memory and history – will never understand is that the poet is a witness.

As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his verses:

Those who pass between fleeting words

Take your names with you and go

Rid our time of your hours, and go

Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sands of memory

Take what pictures you will so as to understand

That which you never will:

How a stone from our land becomes the ceiling of our sky.

The Palestinian people will keep memory alive, just as we have kept alive the pain of Beit Daras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Muhammad al-Durrah, Anas al-Sharif and the roots of every olive tree ripped from its soil. The Palestinian people, and millions in solidarity around the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the living martyr Jamal, each of us will take the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Israel has killed more than 500 Palestinians since agreeing to end its genocidal war under a US-brokered ‘ceasefire’, which has been a truce in name only. Here are some of their stories.

While diplomatic circles welcome the recovery of the last Israeli captive’s remains in Gaza and the imminent partial reopening of the enclave’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a quieter, darker reality is taking shape on the ground.

According to comments by retired Israeli General Amir Avivi, who still advises the military, Israel has cleared land in Rafah, an area in the southern Gaza Strip that it had already flattened in more than two years of its genocidal war, to construct an enormous facility to entrench its military control and presence in Gaza for the long term.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency on Tuesday, Avivi described the project as a “big, organised camp” capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people, stating it would be equipped with “ID checks, including facial recognition”, to track every Palestinian entering or leaving.

Corroborating Avivi’s claims, exclusive analysis by Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Team confirms that ground preparations for this project are already well under way.

Satellite imagery captured from December 2 through Monday reveals extensive clearing operations in western Rafah. The analysis identifies an area of about 1.3sq km (half a square mile) that has undergone systematic levelling.

According to the investigation, the operations went beyond mere debris removal and involved the flattening of land previously devastated by Israeli air strikes.

The cleared zone is located adjacent to two Israeli military posts, suggesting the new camp will be under direct and immediate military supervision. The satellite evidence aligns with reports that the facility is to act as a controlled “holding pen” rather than a humanitarian shelter.

The trap of return

To analysts in Gaza, no humanitarian intent is behind this projected high-tech infrastructure, which they say is in fact a trap for Palestinians.

“What they are building is, in reality, a human-sorting mechanism reminiscent of Nazi-era selection points,” Wissam Afifa, a Gaza-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera. “It is a tool for racial filtering and a continuation of the genocide by other means.”

The reopening of the Rafah crossing, tentatively scheduled for Thursday, according to The Jerusalem Post, comes with strict Israeli conditions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on full “security control”.

For Palestinians hoping to return to Gaza, this means submitting to what Afifa describes as “human sorting stations”.

“This mechanism is designed to deter return,” Afifa said. “Palestinians will face interrogation, humiliation and the risk of arrest at these Israeli-run checkpoints just to go home.”

By leveraging facial recognition technology confirmed by Avivi, Israel is creating a high-risk ordeal for returnees, he said. Afifa argued it will force many Palestinians to choose exile over the risk of the “sorting station”, serving Israel’s longstanding goal of depopulating the Strip.

Permanent occupation within the ‘yellow line’

The Rafah camp is just one piece of a larger puzzle. Israel in effect occupies all of Gaza with a physical military presence in 58 percent of the Gaza Strip. Its forces directly occupy an area within the “yellow line”, a self-proclaimed Israeli military buffer zone established by an October ceasefire.

“We are witnessing the re-engineering of Gaza’s geography and demography,” Afifa said. “About 70 percent of the Strip is now under direct Israeli military management.”

This assessment of a permanent foothold is reinforced by Netanyahu’s own remarks to the Knesset on Monday. By declaring that “the next phase is demilitarisation”, or disarming Hamas, rather than reconstruction, Netanyahu signalled that the military occupation has no end date.

“The talk of ‘reconstruction’ starting in Rafah under Israeli security specifications suggests they are building a permanent security infrastructure, not a sovereign Palestinian state,” Afifa added.

A ‘show’ of peace

For the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, the hope that the return of the last Israeli captive would bring relief has turned into frustration.

“There is a deep sense of betrayal,” Afifa said. “The world celebrated the release of one Israeli body as a triumph while two million Palestinians remain hostages in their own land.”

Afifa warned that the international silence regarding these “sorting stations” risks normalising them. If the Rafah model succeeds, it would transform Gaza from a besieged territory into a high-tech prison where the simple act of travel becomes a tool of subjugation, he said.

“Israel is behaving as if it is staying forever,” Afifa concluded. “And the world is watching the show of peace while the prison walls are being reinforced.”

Malik from Gaza had just graduated from high school when an Israeli air strike killed him and more than 20 of his relatives during the war. Over 2,700 Palestinian families have been wiped out in 27 months by Israel’s genocide.