HumanitarianNotes @aidnotes

I don’t know who will care about what I’m saying, but the situation here in Gaza is literally spiraling out of control in a terrifying way. We are living in an area that makes up no more than 30% of the entire Gaza Strip, and this area has been reduced to rubble and tents. We are besieged by land, sea, and air. There is no real way out and nowhere we can escape to. There are cranes and massive sand embankments surrounding Gaza, and people are living under constant surveillance and fear. You cannot leave, and you cannot choose where you want to go. All you can do is wait. Water stations have almost completely stopped operating because fuel and oil have run out. The tents have been torn apart and worn down by the extreme heat, and people are living inside them in conditions that are impossible to describe. Hospitals have been extensively destroyed, with medicines and medical supplies unavailable, and even basic diagnostic and treatment equipment has become extremely scarce. Almost everything is prohibited from entering Gaza, and even what is allowed in is subject to approval and restrictions. The entire education system has collapsed. Schools have been destroyed, children have been deprived of their education, and families are sleeping on the streets or living in tents that offer no protection from the extreme heat, cold, or any other danger. The reality here is far worse than anything I can write. Words cannot convey the scale of what we are experiencing, and no single photograph can show what it is like to watch an entire city collapse before our eyes. We are not living a normal life. We are simply trying to survive. Besieged from every direction, without a home, without safety, and without any clear way out.

In Sudan, the brutal RSF militia is besieging the city of El Obeid. It may be repeating its siege last year of El Fasher where it slaughtered 60,000 people. World leaders warn of mass atrocities but won't name the country behind this mass murder and mass rape. So I will: It's the UAE. Neither the Biden nor Trump administration was willing to offend the UAE by holding it accountable for what Washington described as the genocide unfolding in Sudan. Trump, whose family is enriched by business dealings with the UAE, is silent. So the slaughter continues. The UAE even has a candidate for UN Secretary General, and people are too polite to point out that a country empowering mass atrocities might not be ideal for that role. I write: "We should have the fortitude to speak up about human rights outrages whether the responsible party is Russia, China, Israel, America or the Emirates; if you care about human rights in only some places, you don’t actually care about human rights." A gift link to the column: nytimes.com/2026/07/11/opi… Thoughts?

🚨We are deeply alarmed by the reports that there is an imminent threat to Dr. #HussamAbuSafiya’s life as a result of torture and other ill treatment he has been suffering while in Israeli custody. Israeli authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Dr. Abu Safiya. Pending his release, we call on the Israeli Prison service to ensure he is fully protected from abuse, granted urgent adequate medical care and allowed immediate visitation by independent monitors. Act now: amn.st/6012BEBnD2 #FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya

A doctor who saved lives in #Gaza is now fighting for his own. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya - detained without charges for over 500 days- is reportedly being tortured & at an imminent risk of death in Israeli detention. Abu Safiya is among 14 Gaza doctors (pediatricians, surgeons & other specialists) who remain detained without charge, many for more than a year. Their continued detention deprives patients of vital care & further undermines Gaza’s shattered healthcare system. Their release is essential to saving lives + restoring Gaza’s shattered healthcare system. @DrTedros

DOGE deletes itself on July 4th. It will be remembered as a hugely destructive failure. Musk promised $2 trillion in savings. What we got, by DOGE’s own unverified math, was $215 billion. Even that number was never proven. The costs were atrocious. Nearly 140,000 federal workers pushed out. Veterans waiting longer for care. USAID dismantled while people died overseas as a direct result. 20-year-olds with Red Bulls and no college degrees rummaging through Americans’ most sensitive data. Musk, the world’s richest man, a federal contractor with billions in government business, auditing the government that pays him, accountable to no voter anywhere.  Even Musk now says he wouldn’t do it again. The guy who ran it calls it a mistake. Government reform was there for the taking. Both parties know federal technology is outdated. Both parties know waste exists. Fixing it required serious people working with career civil servants who know where the problems actually are. Instead we got a chainsaw, a photo op, and years of lost expertise we now have to rebuild. Now Trump’s budget director says there will be no final accounting or receipts. They promised transparency and they’re closing up shop in the dark. They’re counting on us all to forget. eenews.net/articles/doge-…

I am writing these words to you from inside Gaza City, and I say this with complete honesty: the situation has become extremely dangerous, perhaps worse than ever before. Temperatures continue to rise, and the tents have turned into real ovens. More than 170,000 tents across Gaza City are sheltering thousands of families in conditions that are impossible to describe. Inside these tents, temperatures exceed 50°C (122°F). There is no electricity, no fans, no air conditioning, and none of the basic necessities needed to survive. The tents are packed tightly together, with almost no space between them. Many families are forced to leave their tents and sit in the streets because remaining inside has become unbearable. Water is desperately scarce, and the extreme heat is making thirst even more severe. And this is only the beginning of summer. Every day, I see the effects of the intense heat on children’s bodies heat rashes, exhaustion, and suffering while insects emerging from the ground make life even harder. The coming days could be even more devastating if these conditions continue. The tents are no longer places of shelter; they have become another source of danger. Please don’t let these families be forgotten. Speak about them. Write about them. Share their stories with others. Keep their voices alive and let the world know what is happening. Behind every tent is a family struggling to survive. They need to be seen, they need to be heard, and they need your solidarity.

It took me a couple of days to read the latest @UN Commission of Inquiry's report on how Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children. I had to stop, again and again, just to breathe. The level of devastation, the detail, the evidence, it is overwhelming. The findings are devastating and unequivocal: Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in #Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank. At @Amnesty, we documented the genocide in Gaza in our report published in December 2024, and more recently detailed evidence of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. We know the patterns. We have exposed the atrocities. Yet reading this report still shakes you to the core. It goes deeper into the intent, into the systematic nature of the violence, into the unbearable reality that children themselves are being targeted. This is not collateral damage. This is not incidental. This is deliberate. Children, killed, maimed, traumatized, deprived not only of safety, but of any possibility of a future. Entire generations being erased in plain sight. How much more evidence does the world need? How many more reports must confirm what is already undeniable? Governments cannot continue to look away. Silence and inaction, in this moment, are complicity. This must end. Israel must be held fully accountable. 🔗ohchr.org/en/press-relea…

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what I lived through today. Even though I have been living in Gaza and documenting what is happening since the beginning of the war, what I witnessed today was one of the most shocking and painful scenes of my entire life. A group of families living in a very remote camp, almost directly beside the Israeli sand berms, contacted us. They told us they had not received water for a long time. At first, we hesitated because reaching the area with a water truck meant entering an extremely dangerous zone. In the end, we decided to try. Throughout the journey, I saw destruction and rubble everywhere, but the scene that awaited us near the camp was unlike anything else. Directly in front of us were the sand berms and Israeli cranes, surrounded by a landscape of devastation where little remained except tents and ruins. When the water truck was still about a kilometer away, people began shouting and running toward it. Women, children, and elderly people carried empty water containers and ran with all the strength they had, terrified that the water would run out before their turn came. The moment the truck stopped, large numbers of people emerged from among the rubble and damaged tents. They were not looking for food, shelter, or anything else. They were looking for water. Just water. This time we distributed 6,000 liters of clean water, more than we had distributed before, but even that was not enough. Many people remained waiting, and some left without receiving enough water for their families. As we distributed the water and documented what was happening, fear never left us for a single moment. Yet what I felt in the face of such immense suffering was greater than fear itself. Today I witnessed a level of thirst I never imagined I would see. I saw mothers running after a water truck, and children clutching empty containers as if they were holding on to their last hope. I thought I had already seen everything during this war, but what I witnessed today made me realize that the humanitarian catastrophe is far greater than what the world sees on television screens. This is not simply a shortage of services or difficult living conditions. It is a daily struggle for the most basic necessities of survival. We are facing a real humanitarian disaster that grows worse with each passing day, while thousands of families wake up every morning searching for one thing only: water.

Report from Harouf, where an entire family was massacred in an Israeli airstrike this morning. The Lebanese ministry of health has updated the death toll since I recorded; so far 21 people have been killed in violent strikes across south Lebanon.

🚨The recent images of Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia are shocking evidence of Israel's abuse against Palestinian detainees. Dr. Abu Safyia has been arbitrarily detained for one and a half years without charges, while being physically abused and denied healthcare. His recent solitary confinement adds a further layer of concerns over his deteriorating health. Dr. Abu Safyia must be immediately and unconditionally released. Israel must release all Palestinians arbitrarily detained. States must pressure Israel to stop abusing Palestinian prisoners. #FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya

Today Elon Musk became the first trillionaire. Last year he abruptly eliminated aid to millions of the poorest people on the planet, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mainly African children in 2025. Well done Elon. May their voices haunt you til your last breath.

The south of Lebanon is not a “war zone.” Dahiye is not a “Hezbollah stronghold.” These are the places people live. The cafés and restaurants where friends meet. The shops people rely on. Homes, schools, businesses, neighbourhoods full of life. But as we see here, much of the media describes them in military terms, erasing the people who live there. Calling entire communities “Hezbollah strongholds dehumanises civilians and turns vibrant neighbourhoods into acceptable targets in the public mind. This language is not neutral. It helps manufacture consent for the bombing of civilian areas by presenting them as little more than extensions of a “militant” group, rather than places where hundreds of thousands of ordinary people live their lives. When the people are excluded from the story, the bombings become easier to justify.

Trump, Musk and Rubio slashed aid and scoffed that it was woke nonsense. Now they're seeing that it not only saved one life every 10 seconds but also protected us from diseases like Ebola. Their actions constituted a security failure as well as a moral one. More broadly, their fecklessness contrasts with the courage and humanity of doctors and aid workers in Congo and Uganda, lacking adequate PPE but still risking the virus to care for fellow humans. Trump, Musk and Rubio might learn something from them. nytimes.com/2026/06/03/opi…

In what lexicon is ethnically cleansing one quarter of a neighbouring state "taking a much tougher stance". Shameful complicity in war crimes by @SkyNews @adamparsons

Sky News @SkyNews

4 months ago

The Israeli military are "taking a much tougher stance" against Hezbollah as they attack Beirut and capture a strategically important fortress from the Crusades era, says Sky's @adamparsons. Latest 🔗 trib.al/cAyRzjW 📺 Sky 501

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Children terrified as I$rael bombs the Jabal Amel hospital in Tyre, another war crime committed with Western supplied weapons with total impunity

This morning I listened to the @BBC talk about Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern occupied Palestine without once mentioning the hundreds of Israeli attacks we have been subjected to just in the last couple of days, the flattered historical cities, razed villages, massacres of families and almost 3,500 civilians killed. Israel is committing acts of genocide in Lebanon and the @BBC is spreading propaganda. Photo was taken a few minutes ago in Marwaniyeh.

BREAKING: Israel just carried out a massacre in Tyre, completely demolishing three buildings — where many remain trapped inside — and wrecking the Jabal Amel hospital. Exact casualty figures unknown but thought to be very serious. More footage below

@EUCouncil What a joke

Luxembourg’s @Xavier_Bettel: I must reiterate that Germany and Austria saying they have an eternal debt to Israel doesn’t excuse what’s happening today. Are we going to accept a 2nd Gaza? Do we want southern Lebanon to be a field of ruins and turn a blind eye? It’s not right.

I love Tyre. It is a truly beautiful place and you can't scrape the ground anywhere without disturbing ancient archaeology from the heart of the great Phoenician civilisation. Israel is carpet bombing it.

sarah @sahouraxo

5 months ago

This is Tyre in South Lebanon today. Israel is leveling entire civilian neighborhoods in one of the most intense bombardments yet. One of humanity’s oldest cities. Is being systematically wiped out. And not a peep from the complicit international community, of course.

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