Aseel, Ibrahim, and their babies

Ibrahim, 27, is a photographer who works mainly for humanitarian organizations. He and his wife, Aseel, 25, have a 14-month-old daughter, Rose.

They were among the four families who kept video diaries for the first year of the war, for use in a BBC documentary, “One year of war in Gaza: Life, Death, and Hope.”

When we meet Aseel, she is overdue to deliver a second baby. The birth goes well and they name their new baby girl Hayat, which means life. “At a time when everything makes you feel hopeless, she is the one who can bring hope and meaning to our lives,” says Aseel.

But it’s a challenge to survive. There is so little food in the market that Aseel can’t breastfeed. She, Rose, and Hayat all get seriously ill and Hayat needs hospital care. When they arrive, they find the hospital is packed with patients and the staff is stretched to the breaking point. But all three recover.

Ibrahim has to leave his family in their tent while he returns to work as a photographer so he can earn money to support them. “Whenever I take pictures of the children killed in this war,” says Ibrahim, “I feel that they could be my family. I keep waiting to see if it’s them or not.”

More at BBC

Adam, a youth worker, and his sisters, Saja and Shaiman

Adam, 29, is a youth worker in Gaza. His two sisters are Saja, 25, and Shaiman, 26. They were among the four families who kept video diaries for the first year of the war, for a BBC documentary, “One year of war in Gaza: Life, Death, and Hope.”

The two sisters are sheltering at a United Nations school with many other displaced Gazans. “We’re trying to imagine ourselves playing with our cats in our garden at home, or on the beach in Gaza, sipping coffee,” says Saja. “We hope peace comes to Gaza soon.”

The school has already been bombed once, with Adam inside. There were many dead. It is attacked again and the family decides to leave. But nowhere is safe.

Adam’s brother, who lives in Ireland, manages to raise enough money through an online appeal — $21,000 — to pay an Egyptian travel company to get Adam and his two sisters through the Rafah Crossing with Egypt. They get out before Israel occupies the Palestinian side and Egypt shuts it down. At the end of the film, they are in Cairo.

More at BBC

Muhammad Asfour and his family: Israel warned them to evacuate Gaza City, but they can’t

Subhi Muhammad Asfour came to northern Gaza in search of food, a home and hope. Instead, he and his family are hungry and terrified, as Israeli evacuation orders threaten to force them to move for a seventh time since the war began.

“I came to western Gaza looking for a place to put up a tent,” Asfour, 46, told NBC News. He said transporting his family from the area, as the Israeli military has told Palestinian civilians to do, would cost $500 or more. “I don’t have money,” he said.

“I’m afraid for my children, but where can I go?” he said. “There’s no place and no safety.”

“I want the war to end. I want to sleep. I want to take a shower. I want to eat. We want to raise children,” he said. “God willing, the war will end before we get tired, flee and die.”

 More at NBC News

Aya, law graduate and women’s rights advocate

Aya is a 23-year-old recent law school graduate and campaigner for women’s rights who has applied to study international law at the University of Sienna in Italy.

Her family is one of four that kept video diaries during the first year of the Gaza war for use in a BBC documentary, “One year of war in Gaza: Life, Death, and Hope.”

During the course of the year, Aya travels an emotional roller coaster. Early on, she’s checking herself out in a mirror to see that she’s still pretty. She’s terrified when the family is forced to relocate amid bombing, and bored in the tent they move to.

She’s devastated when she learns that the family home in northern Gaza has been destroyed, elated to be accepted by the University of Sienna, grief-stricken when she learns an uncle has been killed, and crushed when the Rafah crossing is closed just before she was to use it to go to Italy. “I might die without achieving my dreams,” she says.

More at BBC

Basma Al-Aïdi, prosthetics maker

Basma Al-Aïdi, 30, is one of the last nine prosthetics specialists still working in the Gaza Strip, where nearly 4,000 amputations have taken place since the start of the war.

She and the other eight can’t keep up. "I don't even have time to take a five-minute break,” she says. “The number of cases far exceeds our capacity."

The French newspaper Le Monde interviewed her via WhatsApp because Israel does not allow foreign journalists into Gaza.

More at LeMonde

Sajed al-Ghalban, 10, orphan

On one page in his notebook, Sajed al-Ghalban, 10, has drawn a picture of his mother and father at their old home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. On another page, there’s a drawing of his mother taking him to a vegetable stand.

Sajed’s parents were killed in an air strike in the third week of the war in 2023.

For nearly two years, Sajed and his younger brother, Abdallah, were cared for by an aunt. Then, in July, that aunt was killed in a strike on a nearby tent. Now, they live in another tent with another aunt and her three children.

With no parents and a younger brother to care for, Sajed is suspended between childhood and premature adulthood. Sometimes he plays marbles and hide-and-seek with other children in the camp. But he is also increasingly trying to support his aunt in keeping their makeshift household together.

He sweeps the tent each morning. He lines up for hours in the heat to fetch water. He fixes the tent poles when they collapse. He makes kites from scrap material and sells them for pocket change that he saves to buy food for himself and Abdallah.

“I’m the man now,” Sajed told his aunt. “I’ll go buy what we need.”

More at New York Times

Tala Abu Hilal, 8, former star student

Before the war, Tala Abu Hilal, 8, was the star of her class and sometimes got up in the middle of the night to cram for tests, according to her mother. 

“I wanted to be a doctor,” Tala said in a recent interview. “I wanted my daddy to build a hospital for me. I wanted to treat everyone for free. My daddy is in heaven now.”

There’s no school now, and Tala whiles away the day inventing games, some of which are disturbingly warped by the violence that surrounds her. Once, her mother recalled, Tala picked up a stone and said to her sisters: “I’ll throw this stone. Pretend it’s an F-16 missile.”

Then she hurled it at a tent.

More at New York Times

Rahma Abu Abed, a little girl trying to remember good food

Rahma Abu Abed, 12, plays a game with her friends. They ask one another: What did you eat before the war? What did your home look like before the war? What would you wear if you had new clothes?

She usually eats one meal a day, often lentils or pasta.

Trying to remember what good food looked like, Rahma plays with the wet sand, shaping it into imaginary meals.

More at New York Times

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaiseb, Doctors Without Borders official: “what is happening now in Gaza is beyond anything we have seen”

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaiseb, Deputy Medical Coordinator for Doctors Without Borders' in Palestine, sent a video report to LeMonde which the Paris newspaper posted on its English language website on August 12.

Dr. Mughaiseb is stationed in Al-Mawassi in southern Gaza.

He told LeMonde that the few hospitals that still function are so overwhelmed, some patients bleed to death while waiting for surgery. “Even after all wars we’ve lived through, what’s happening now in Gaza is beyond anything we’ve seen,” he said.

Doctors Without Borders has sent medical staff to conflicts around the world since it’s founding in 1971, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

More at LeMonde

Janah, 7, in need of medical evacuation

Olga Cherevko,, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, says she first met Janah in 2024 at an International Medical Corps field hospital where she was treated malnutrition. Janah recovered and returned to her family.

But recently, Cherevko saw her again at Patient Friendly Hospital, her condition worse than before. “I remembered her long eyelashes,” Cherevko said.

Janah is now on a list of children who need medical evacuation because her condition can’t be properly diagnosed and treated in Gaza.

On Wednesday, August 13, the World Health Organization helped transfer 32 children and six adults to Italy, Belgium and Turkey, but more than 14,800 patients are still waiting.

Cherevko says some of the most seriously ill patients, including Janah, have medical issues in addition to malnutrition, but those problems were manageable before the famine.

More at United Nations

Kamel Qoraan and Momen Abu Etayya, tried to get food airdropped into the sea

The Associated Press filmed Gazans trying to retrieve air-dropped aid packages that fell into the Mediterranean. Some of it was still usable but much of it was ruined by the seawater.

Kamal Qoraan: “The flour bag was drenched with water. Either you open the crossings for us, for aid to enter, or don’t drop aid like that. This is humiliation, not aid.”

Momen Abuy Etayya: "When I came to try and fetch the aid in the sea, I almost drowned. I only did that for my boy as he made me swear to bring him something to eat. I threw myself in the ocean to death just to bring him something. I was only able to bring him three biscuit packets."

More at Associated Press

Refaat Ibrahim, writer

Refaat Ibrahim, a writer born in Gaza, wrote in Al Jazeera about his first attempt to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution site:

“I went with a faint hope of getting some food for my family. What we encountered bore no trace of humanity. The scene … resembled a battlefield.

“Israeli military vehicles stood alongside GHF trucks, with a massive barrier in front of them. Occupation soldiers were stationed on elevated positions, their weapons pointed directly at the Palestinian civilians gathering.

“At one point, two trucks arrived and dumped the aid on the ground in a degrading manner. Anyone who tried to approach was met with gunfire from the Israeli soldiers. Eventually, an Israeli soldier announced over a loudspeaker, “Now you can get the aid,” and the crowd rushed towards the boxes.

“Men shoved and pushed, children cried, and women trembled from fear and exhaustion. Just a small minority managed to lay their hands on some aid. Some tried to steal from those who had made it. The vast majority – myself included – went back home empty-handed.”

Last April, Ibrahim wrote about the death of educational justice in Gaza. And in a column from last January, Ibrahim described how repeated displacements during the war have turned him into a stranger in his own country.

More at Al Jazeera

Why official aid sites have become a last resort: Three stories from the Times of Israel

For months, Israeli media have mostly avoided covering the starvation in Gaza. But recently, there has been some movement, as this article in the centrist Times of Israel demonstrates.

Khaldun Hamad, 30, has lost nearly 30 pounds since the war started, eating between one and two meals a day for the past several months. Like others, he has tried to raise money online to buy food on the black market. But the exorbitant prices forced him to set out for the Zikim crossing on Thursday, August 7, hoping to bring food back for his wife and mother, who was wounded by Israeli gunfire while sitting outside their test earlier in the war.

Hamad tells how he joined a crowd of 10,000 other hungry people near Zikim, but Israeli troops started shooting at them. Hamad and another person carried a wounded man a mile until they found a tuk-tuk driver who would take him to a hospital.

Hamad returned to the crossing point where he found the crowd racing toward four food trucks despite continuing gunfire. He grabbed a bag of flour but was knocked down and lost it.

The next day he came back and finally managed to come home with flour.

“I don’t want to die in silence,” Hamad told the Times. “I want the people [to] know [about] our suffering. I want to feel that there [is] some humanity in this world [and that] there are people who do not support collective punishment.”

Asked about the video of Israeli hostage Evyatar David released recently by Hamas, which shows David emaciated and forced to dig what could become his own grave, Hamad responded, “I feel sorry for him and sorry for us. We don’t want them to suffer, and we don’t want to suffer ourselves.”

The Times also tells the stories of two other Gazans struggling to stay alive and feed their families.

More at The Times of Israel

Nada Almadhoun, an intern in the obstetrics emergency department of a Gaza City hospital, describes one shift

Excerpt:

“At 6am, as dawn breaks on the morning of my shift, we welcome a new baby born to a mother from the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza, an area surrounded by Israeli soldiers and tanks. As the first rays of sunlight pierce the delivery room, the mother cries happy tears, her face flushed as she hugs her baby girl.”

More at Al Jazeera

Three Gazans say they will refuse to evacuate if the Israeli army comes back into Gaza City

The Associated Press asked Gaza City residents to respond to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that the Israeli army will re-occupy the city. All three of those quoted said they would not leave.

“What does (Israel) want from us? ... There is nothing here to occupy. There is no life here. I have to walk every day for more than 15 minutes to get drinking water.” — Umm Youssef

“I have no intention to leave my home, I will die here.” — Kamel Abu Nahel.

“This is our land, there is no other place for us to go. We are not surrendering ... We were born here, and here we die.” — Ismail Zaydah

More at Associated Press

Ehab Fasfous, 52: “They’ve deprived us of so much that now we’re behaving like animals.”

Much of the little aid that comes into Gaza is grabbed off the trucks by hungry Gazans before it can be distributed in an orderly way. Some is taken by armed gangs. The United Nations says hundreds of people have been killed trying to get aid directly from the trucks, mostly by Israeli soldiers.

On Wednesday, Ehab Fasfous, 52, a resident of the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis, inched toward one of the routes that aid trucks use in Gaza, aware, he said, that Israeli soldiers could open fire if he ventured too close. He shared a series of videos of the mayhem he saw next: hundreds, perhaps thousands of people closing in on the trucks from every direction.

At one point in the videos, which he said he took, a man menaces another person with a knife near a bag of flour.

Mr. Fasfous went home empty-handed.

“They’ve deprived us of so much that now we’re behaving like animals,” he said.

More at The New York Times

Mohammed Imran, Ehab al-Helou, and Sabrine Mahmoud: three reactions to Netanyahu’s decision to occupy all of the Gaza strip

Mohammed Imran from Khan Younis said the change in terminology from “occupation” to “control” made little difference. “Replace the word ‘occupation’ with ‘control’ – the meaning and the result are the same: destruction and displacement,” he told the BBC. “We have nothing but God as long as those holding power in Gaza (Hamas) have lost their minds.”

Ehab al-Helou, activist and social media influencer: “I swear to God, Hamas leaders are living in a science fiction world. Have mercy on the people. Who are you to decide to sacrifice us?” he posted online.

Sabrine Mahmoud: “I will not leave my house. We will not live through displacement again. We left Gaza City for a whole year and endured the harshest humiliation in al-Mawasi. We will not repeat the mistake. Let them destroy the house over our heads – we will not leave.”

More at BBC

Kareem and Ayman, 12-year-old twin cousins of U.S. citizen Ghada Tafesh

Gaza-born, new U.S. citizen Ghada Tafesh used to swap recipes and photos of dinner spreads with her aunt Fairouz. Those days are gone. Her 12-year-old twin cousins look up at her from her phone with gaunt, exhausted faces. They have lost a quarter of their body weight.

Fairouz says it’s too dangerous to try to get food directly from the scarce aid trucks. They buy from street hawkers when they can — $20 for a tomato.

“I just hope that people in the United States would see Palestinians in Gaza as individuals rather than numbers,” says Ghada

More information: Washington Post

Dr. Ali Alhaj Salem, neo-natal intensive care specialist, Al-Helou Hospital, whose Instagram post struck a chord in Israel

Dr. Ali Alhaj Salem posted a short video on Instagram from inside his neo-natal intensive care unit in Al-Helou Hospital, showing the babies he is trying to care for.

Many were born prematurely because their mothers are malnourished, he said. The special formula for premature babies is “not available in our market,” he says in a matter-of-fact voice, but the hospital is making do with formula for full-term babies. Dr. Salem himself looks very thin.

Dr. Salem’s Instagram post moved Israeli designer Mushon Zer-Aviv, who wrote about it in the New York Times. Zer-Aviv’s own child was born three months prematurely and weighed less than two pounds. But all of human society had provided the specialist care, equipment, and supplies Zer-Aviv’s baby needed to survive and thrive. Not so today for Dr. Salem’s little patients born in Gaza.

More information at Instagram and the New York Times

Laylah Ziyarah and her baby son, Hani, who lost a leg in a bombing

“… On 22 February 2025, I gave birth to Hani. The joy was immense. I told him he brought us hope because he was born when the war ended. But the joy didn’t last long. Less than a month later, the war started again with even greater brutality. The house next to ours was bombed, and we were rescued from under the rubble, covered in dust. Hani’s face was black from the debris.

“We moved back to my parents’ house. There were eight of us there. On 21 June 2025, the house was bombed while we were inside. At that moment, I was sitting breastfeeding Hani with the kids and my sisters. There was a massive explosion. I heard walls collapsing, stones falling, and glass shattering, and then there was thick smoke and complete darkness. We couldn’t see each other. I heard voices screaming, crying and asking, ‘Is everyone okay? Who’s hurt?’

“I felt for Hani’s head, then his body. When I reached his right leg, it was simply gone. …”

More from B’Tselem, an Israeli non-governmental organization