Rights and Accountability 22 August 2025
Families mourn a child who was killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza City, 15 August.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 21 August livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel killed at least 400 Palestinians and injured nearly 2,700 between 13 August and 20 August, according to official records from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
The Israeli army has been obliterating entire blocks in Gaza City and other areas in northern Gaza, as Palestinian children, men and women starve to death, and as Israeli forces and American mercenaries continue to trap and kill starving Palestinians seeking meager amounts of food.
According to the health ministry, 22 people were killed and 49 were injured at so-called aid distribution sites on 20 August alone, bringing the total recorded number to 2,018 killed and 14,950 injured since 27 May, when the US-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began its lethal operations.As part of its intention to fully invade, occupy and destroy Gaza City, the Israeli army has intensified its attacks on al-Zaytoun neighborhood, with continuous airstrikes, artillery shelling and gunfire.
These attacks have resulted in the mass slaughter of Palestinian families and massive destruction of buildings and public facilities, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights stated on 20 August.The commission added that “hundreds of families have been forced to flee, including many children, people with disabilities and older people, with nowhere safe to go, amid dire humanitarian conditions, while others reportedly remain trapped, completely cut off from food, water and medicine supplies.”
Over two weeks, the UN recorded at least 54 attacks on residential buildings and entire blocks in Gaza City, killing entire families in airstrikes and shelling. Attacks were also recorded on shelters of forcibly displaced people, including tents and schools.
These figures, the UN says, “represent only a portion of the true toll due to underreporting in such dire circumstances. They indicate that the systematic destruction of Gaza City is already underway.”
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has reported that Israeli occupation forces have been using remote-controlled vehicles packed with explosives to destroy buildings in al-Zaytoun, in order to force Palestinians out of their homes and shelters.The army has flattened approximately 400 homes with explosive-laden robots and aerial bombardment, Euro-Med stated.
“This wide-scale military operation mirrors similar assaults in Rafah, Khan Younis and northern Gaza, aimed at obliterating entire communities and forcibly displacing all who remain. … The intent is to evacuate long-standing residents and up to one million displaced individuals, most having fled northern Gaza, and confine them to isolated, small areas in the south.”
Armed drones, “specifically quadcopters, are being deployed to encircle residential blocks and coerce civilians into fleeing under armed threat,” the human rights group added.
The Palestinian civil defense warned this week that its rescue workers are unable to reach or treat the dead and wounded in al-Zaytoun, and the residents of Gaza City have nowhere else to go.Approximately 50,000 Palestinians are in al-Zaytoun, and rescuers can’t protect its residents as Israeli forces annihilate the city.
“We are living under extremely harsh conditions in Gaza City with no means of survival. The people of Gaza have no option left but death,” the spokesperson for the civil defense stated.
Other areas in Gaza City and northern Gaza have been destroyed in escalating Israeli attacks. In al-Tuffah neighborhood on 17 August, reporter Mahmoud al-Awadia documented the widespread devastation left behind by the Israeli army.“There is massive destruction as far as the eye can see,” he says, as the camera pans around an entire landscape of rubble, including the remains of the al-Mahatta mosque.
Annihilation and expulsions in Gaza City
As Israel’s mass destruction of Gaza City accelerates, so do its practices of forced displacement and expulsion.
Satellite images released this week show the emptying of tent shelters, at least 132 buildings destroyed, and 58 Israeli military vehicles – including 17 bulldozers – moving into the city, Sky News reported.Al Jazeera English’s Hani Mahmoud said on 20 August, “More people are now receiving phone calls from the Israeli military warning them not to be in areas where they’ve lived all their lives and threatening them that they’re going to be in the line of fire if they stay in these areas – asking them to leave as soon as possible, giving them just a little window of time.”
People are leaving behind their belongings, he said, including whatever food supplies they managed to obtain in the past few weeks.
Tareq Abu Azzoum, also with Al Jazeera, said on 19 August, “There has been a huge focus by the Israeli army on targeting the eastern portions of Gaza City, destroying the civilian infrastructure and dismantling the civilian fabric there.”
“Some families have moved to other parts of Gaza and started to set up tents close to the coast. There are also huge portions of Gaza City residents determined to live close to their communities and homes even as attacks continue to unfold in other parts of the Gaza Strip.”
Our contributor, Asem Alnabih, who is also the spokesperson for the Gaza municipality in Gaza City, posted to social media: “The idea of losing Gaza forever has driven people here to madness. They would rather die than be torn from it. They would rather be killed ‘literally on Gaza’s land’ than see our city turned into nothing more than a memory.”
Elder killed by airdropped parcel
Meanwhile, western and regional states continue to send lethal airdropped parcels of food aid instead of forcing Israel to open the crossings to the thousands of aid trucks that remain blocked or, at best, trickled in.
On 17 August, an airdropped aid package killed an elderly Palestinian man in southern Gaza.
Saber al-Zamili, 75, was inside a tent when the package fell directly on him, according to his family.
He was preparing to head to the mosque for his daily prayers, his son told the publication Middle East Eye.
His daughter Sarah said his body was retrieved from beneath the package with severe injuries. “His entire body was broken,” she said.
The United Nations reported this week that only 47 percent of the 2,000 metric tons of food supplies required daily to meet basic humanitarian food assistance needs has been allowed to enter Gaza.
Starvation in Gaza is at the worst level since October 2023 and what has entered is insufficient to meet even the minimum caloric intake needs, the UN stated.
“Included in the limited quantities of food are mainly dry goods,” the UN said, however, “the risk of spoilage and infestation of food supplies has drastically increased due to being stranded for months, heat and impending expiration dates.”
Furthermore, the UN notes, cooking gas has not entered Gaza “for over five months, and firewood has become increasingly unaffordable, forcing many to use waste and scrap wood as alternative cooking sources, exacerbating health and environmental risks.”
Since the beginning of August, the children’s fund UNICEF says it was able to deliver limited amounts of therapeutic food for acutely malnourished children, as well as infant formula for 1,200 babies.
But children and adults alike are continuing to die of starvation.
Since March, nearly 100,000 children under the age of 5 have been screened by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.
This week, UNRWA reported that in less than six months, child malnutrition has tripled across the Gaza Strip, and in Gaza City, nearly one in every three children is now malnourished – six times higher than before Israel broke the so-called ceasefire in mid-March.
The Gaza government media office stated on 17 August that the ongoing prevention of allowing meat, fish, dairy products, fresh produce and other basic foods is part of its policy of deliberate starvation.“Even if a few trucks enter in very limited quantities, the occupation deliberately leaves these trucks vulnerable to looting by its affiliates, prevents their safe arrival to those entitled to them, and even kills anyone who attempts to secure these trucks,” the media office said.
On Wednesday, 20 August, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza recorded three new deaths from starvation and malnutrition, bringing the total number to 269 deaths by starvation, including 112 children.
Speaking to The Electronic Intifada Podcast this week, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency physician who has worked in Gaza during the current genocide, explained that forced and sustained starvation is “shaving years off” of Palestinians’ lives, especially children, whose cognitive and growth development is dependent on good nutrition in their earliest stages.
“Every day that passes that they are under these conditions of malnourishment, especially the severe ones, you are gambling with their future. They have cognitive issues that will develop as a result of this that will be irreversible,” Ahmad noted.
Children injured at US-controlled aid sites
Israeli forces and American mercenary squads operating the private so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites continue to trap, injure and kill starving Palestinians, including children, every day.
Defense for Children International Palestine released a report this week documenting two separate incidents in July when Palestinian children were shot and injured by the Israeli military while trying to obtain food from aid distribution areas.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammad al-Hwaiti told the children’s rights group, “While I was in the waiting area by Wadi Gaza Bridge, we were monitored by an Israeli quadcopter. We waited there for half an hour for the aid delivery gate to open. As soon as the gate opened, we rushed towards the gate when five Israeli tanks appeared and opened fire directly at us, resulting in numerous martyrs and injuries. I am an orphan, having lost both my parents. I have to go to the American aid point in Netzarim to obtain food for my eight siblings and myself.”The child recounted how he was struck in the head by an expanding bullet.
“For an hour, I remained under fire from the Israeli army, bleeding profusely. The aid gate finally opened at 11:30 am. After that, I crawled and stumbled, barely conscious, until I reached the Nuseirat intersection,” Mohammad added.
The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit seeking records from the Trump Administration over its funding of the private, US-registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The lawsuit comes on the heels the legal group’s official notification, in June, to the GHF, warning of its potential legal liability for complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Palestinians. The lawsuit also follows the Trump administration’s failure to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted last month.
The lawsuit, filed on 20 August, seeks records that could shed light on not only the decision-making process behind the $30 million grant the GHF received from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was approved by the US State Department, but also on the creation of GHF, its funding, and how it plans to use the grant.
The Center for Constitutional Rights says it is particularly interested in information that could reveal whether the administration’s distribution of funds has any link to President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” plan, which would cleanse the area of Palestinians and redevelop it for investors.
“GHF’s militarized aid distribution model, which it designed in close coordination with the Israeli occupying power, is more suited to furthering the genocide than to providing much-needed humanitarian relief to a starved Palestinian population,” Ayla Kadah, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said.
“Rather than take action to prevent GHF’s ongoing contribution to war crimes, the US government has provided it with a $30 million grant, bypassing even its baseline vetting processes. This shocks the conscience, and Americans deserve to know how their taxpayer dollars are being used to further this dangerous dimension of Israel’s genocidal project.”
Hospital bombed
Israel attacked a hospital again over the past week, as laboratories and clinics face a steady decrease in basic supplies.
On Friday, 15 August, the Israeli army bombed Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing two Palestinians. The Gaza government media office said that the attack targeted a tent for displaced people within the walls of the hospital courtyard, near the outpatient clinic.
It was the 13th time since the beginning of the genocide that the hospital was bombed.
At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, sewage overflowed into clinics on 14 August, forcing the hospital to temporarily stop its services.
Dr. Atef al-Hout, the hospital’s director, stated that the flooding could not be fixed without coordination with Israel, as the source of the sewage leak is located in a no-go zone designated by the Israeli military and closed to Palestinians.Because of the 22 months of widespread destruction of sewage lines and pumps and other infrastructure, doctors say that waterborne diseases are skyrocketing.
Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, the director general of the health ministry in Gaza, said that around 170 patients every day are brought into Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital with the parasitic infection giardia, as a result of people resorting to drinking contaminated water, especially as the summer temperatures rise.Al-Bursh also said this week that hospital beds are at 300 percent occupancy, “an unprecedented figure that reflects the scale of the health and humanitarian catastrophe we are experiencing today.”
Compounding the health crisis, the health ministry reported this week that 49 percent of laboratory testing materials are completely out of stock.
More than half – 51 percent – of laboratory consumables and supplies are out of stock; many basic tests in operating rooms and intensive care units have run out or are about to run out; most of the materials needed to check blood levels for patients who have undergone kidney and liver transplants have run out; complete blood count (CBC) testing materials, which are the basic test for visitors to healthcare facilities, are about to run out; and what is available is sufficient for only a limited number of days.
Materials for testing blood units for viral infections are sufficient for only a few more days as well, posing a risk of unsafe blood transfusions; blood bags and blood transfusion kits are only sufficient for less than a month from now; and approximately 45 percent of laboratory equipment has been damaged or destroyed and requires maintenance and spare parts.
Journalist killed, others threatened
A journalist was killed this week.
Islam El-Komy, who worked as a reporter and content creator for different media platforms, was killed along with his son when Israel bombed their tent in Gaza City on 19 August.
The Gaza government media office said that with El-Komy’s killing, the number of journalists and media workers murdered since October 2023 has risen to 239.Following the hunting and targeted assassinations by the Israeli military of six reporters on 10 August, including Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammad Qreiqeh, Gaza journalist Saleh al-Jafarawi is now being threatened by Israel.
On 14 August, al-Jafarawi said that the spokesperson for the Israeli army, Avichay Adraee, along with other military and Israeli media figures, have put a target on his back.Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine.
Two days before his brother Mohammad was killed with Anas Al-Sharif in Gaza City, photographer Ibrahim Nofal filmed a group of music students practicing their instruments in a tent shelter.
“In a place drowning in grief, Gaza’s children have chosen music as a form of therapy and a symbol of resilience,” he says.And a group of kids were filmed playing with a parachute that was dropped with food parcels over Gaza.
Ahmed al-Kilani, a photographer who captured the scene, said “Gaza kids turn a parachute into joy … simple happiness despite the pain.”
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