Mimicking the motion of combing locks of hair with a brush, Sama Tubail stares at her reflection in a mirror and begins to cry. “I’m just so sad there isn’t a single strand of hair to comb with my brush,” Sama told CNN with her head in her hands. “I hold the mirror because I want to brush my hair: I really want to brush my hair again.”
For the eight-year-old, the movement brings back memories of a life before October 7, 2023 – when she had long hair and played outside with her friends in northern Gaza’s Jabalya. But since then, Sama and her family have been among the estimated 1.9 million Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes, fleeing first to the enclave’s southern Rafah region under Israeli military orders. As the violence escalated, Sama moved to a displacement camp in central Gaza’s Khan Younis.
A week after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced in January, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, told the UN Security Council that “a generation has been traumatized.” “Children have been killed, starved and frozen to death,” Fletcher said, adding that “some died before their first breath – perishing with their mothers in childbirth.”
Israel launched a fresh barrage of airstrikes early Tuesday, shattering the ceasefire and killing hundreds of Palestinians, health officials in Gaza said. A doctor told CNN the scenes at one Gaza City hospital were “nothing close to anything I’ve experienced before” and that the majority of cases she had seen were children. CNN’s interviews with the families and experts featured in this article were conducted before the resumption of violence….
Israeli airstrikes kill over 400 in Gaza after two months of truce
JERUSALEM/CAIRO, March 18 (Reuters) – Israeli airstrikes pounded Gaza and killed more than 400 people on Tuesday, Palestinian health authorities said, shattering nearly two months of relative calm since a ceasefire began, as Israel warned the onslaught was “just the beginning.”
Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas accused each other of breaching the truce. It had broadly held since January and offered respite from war for the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza, which has been reduced to rubble….
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Imagine if all those who are silent about the terrible evil being committed in Gaza spoke up
Owen Jones
If all those who know a terrible evil is being committed spoke out, what would now happen? Ministers would resign from governments. Newspapers and news bulletins would not only lead with Israel’s atrocities, they would correctly frame them as heinous crimes, underpinned with a drumbeat – that something drastic must be done to stop them. Demands for an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel would become impossible to ignore. Rather than those who opposed genocide being hounded and vilified, it would be those complicit in genocide who would be emptied from public life.
Many of the silent undoubtedly feel guilt, and they should. Through their cowardice, they have played a pivotal role in normalising some of the worst barbarism of the 21st century. Ending silence doesn’t involve handwringing and platitudes about how sad you are about civilians dying: it means calling a crime for what it is, and demanding accountability for those who facilitated it. Time is running out for the traumatised, maimed, starving people of Gaza. So is time for those who want to salvage their conscience….
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Trump’s Christian Fascists and the War on Palestine
Nation-states as national homes; and Sir Edwin Montagu’s views on Zionism (1917)
All That’s Left of You review – deeply moving epic of Palestinian intergenerational trauma
Nation-states as national homes; and Sir Edwin Montagu’s views on Zionism (1917)
Trump’s Gaza proposal rejected by allies and condemned as ethnic cleansing plan
A Massive Database of Evidence, compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza
Rashid Khalidi: ‘Israel Has Created a Nightmare Scenario for Itself. The Clock Is Ticking’
After the truth-shower 