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In mid-January, a group of 50 young Afghan migrants, all aged 25 or younger, set out on a deadly journey toward Europe, facilitated by people smugglers who guided them across the Iranian border into Turkey’s eastern Van Province. What followed was a harrowing ordeal of abuse, exposure, and preventable tragedy that has left at least 20 dead and 11 survivors with permanent disabilities, according to testimony from 12 survivors who spoke exclusively to the BBC.

Temperatures in the mountainous border region had plummeted to -15°C as the group was detained almost immediately after entering Turkey by Turkish border guards. The survivors detail systematic abuse that began in detention: held for several nights in an unheated, open warehouse where snow fell directly on them, the migrants were given only one meager ration of dry bread and water per day and forced to carry out hard labor including clearing snow and hauling wood. Twenty-three-year-old Alwaldin, one of the survivors, says he was cut off from all contact with both his family and the smuggler who had promised him safe passage to the continent.

The violence escalated dramatically on January 25, the survivors recall. Guards lined the group up again, this time beating them with iron bars. After stripping them of all clothing except a single pair of trousers, binding their hands, and forcing them to crawl stomach-down up a snow-covered hill, multiple migrants suffered severe head wounds that left blood running down their bodies, according to Alwaldin. Some survivors could not move their hands at all after the beating, 21-year-old Shahsawar, one of the most severely injured survivors, told reporters.

The group was then split into eight-person parties and pushed through barbed wire onto the Iranian side of the border, stranded in the middle of a heavy snowstorm with near-zero visibility and no supplies or footwear. All their warm clothes, shoes, and socks had been confiscated by guards, leaving them exposed to the brutal cold. “The paths were covered in snow. And we didn’t know which direction to go or whether we would survive,” Shahsawar said.

The death toll mounted quickly in the frozen landscape. A 13-year-old boy named Danial was separated from the group within minutes, and his body was later recovered from the snow. Exhausted and unable to walk farther, Shahsawar took shelter behind a large boulder alongside 13-year-old Asim and another migrant named Ahmed, whose hands had already frozen solid. When Asim left to seek help at dawn, Ahmed died in Shahsawar’s arms, too frozen to even speak in his final hours.

Days later, Asim was found alive by search parties looking for stranded migrants. Too cold to speak when rescued, the teen pointed searchers toward the rock where Shahsawar remained trapped—a small, deliberate gesture that ultimately saved Shahsawar’s life. By the time the survivors were located, however, extreme frostbite had already caused irreversible damage to their extremities.

After being stranded, the group says Iranian authorities refused to provide them with urgent hospital care. It was not until four days after the Afghan embassy in Tehran announced it would take urgent action to locate and assist the stranded migrants that the Red Crescent Society transferred the survivors overland to Afghanistan’s Herat Province, and eventually to Kabul for advanced medical care. By that point, the frostbite on 11 survivors had turned tissue black and necrotic, making amputation unavoidable.

Shahsawar woke up in a Kabul operating room to discover all four of his limbs had been removed. “I raised my hands – they felt light. Both had been cut off,” he told the BBC. “My throat closed up and I couldn’t speak.” Other survivors like Alwaldin lost most of their toes to the same preventable tissue damage. Medical experts note that frostbite is fully treatable if caught early—for these migrants, weeks of delayed care turned a survivable exposure into a lifelong disability.

Regional human rights activists say this incident is far from an anomaly. Şafak Bozkurt, chair of the Van Bar Association Human Rights Centre Migration and Asylum Commission, told the BBC he has documented dozens of similar push-back operations in the border region, many resulting in hypothermia and death. Zakira Hikmat, a Turkey-based migration rights advocate, says that since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of Afghans have attempted to cross this border to reach Europe, and increased Turkish border surveillance has pushed migrants onto far more dangerous, high-altitude routes that cross mountain passes prone to extreme winter weather. Mahmout Keçen, another Van-based migrant rights activist, has documented hundreds of cases of alleged abuse, push-backs, denial of asylum access, and forced returns of irregular migrants in the Iran-Turkey border region.

When contacted by the BBC for comment on the survivors’ allegations, Turkish authorities did not address the specific claims of abuse, beatings, or forced stranding. In a statement, the Turkish foreign ministry said that its border forces operate in full compliance with national and international law, and provide all detained undocumented migrants with necessary support including food, water, and medical care. The ministry added that the allegations are unfounded and unfairly undermine Turkey’s successful efforts to curb irregular migration, noting that Turkey’s policy has effectively halted almost all irregular migration flows toward the European Union. The statement added that Turkey, which hosts one of the world’s largest refugee and migrant populations, maintains a human-centered, sustainable migration management system aligned with international standards that balances security and humanitarian access. Iranian authorities have also been contacted for comment and have not yet issued a response.

All 12 survivors who spoke to the BBC have now been returned to Afghanistan, where they continue to recover from their injuries, many facing permanent disability from the amputations they suffered.

In a stark and unprecedented admission to Israeli right-wing outlet Channel 14 on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel’s ongoing military campaigns across the Middle East will have no end, rejecting any prospect of a conclusion to the country’s regional conflicts. The lengthy interview, conducted with a media outlet widely viewed as a platform for Netanyahu’s political messaging, came in response to a question asking whether Israel’s multiple wars across the region were moving toward a close.

Netanyahu pointed to what he framed as major Israeli achievements to date, including the targeted assassinations of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, and Israel’s ongoing military occupation of swathes of Gaza, southern Lebanon and Syrian territory. He also referenced the two military campaigns launched by Israel and the United States targeting Iranian-linked forces, claiming that “we broke the barrier of fear” that he said had prevented Israeli attacks on Iran for 47 years.

Pressed on whether his self-coined goal of “total victory” — announced immediately after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack — remained within reach, Netanyahu doubled down on his indefinite conflict framing, stating simply, “it never ends.” He argued that military strength is a prerequisite for security in the Middle East and globally, asserting that “Israel is stronger than ever” before prompting applause from the studio audience, which complied with his request.

When questioned about the prospect of what the interviewer called “emigration” for Gaza’s Palestinian population, Netanyahu corrected the framing to specify what he called “voluntary emigration” — a widely criticized Israeli euphemism for the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the besieged enclave. He declined to elaborate further, saying only, “I prefer to talk less and do more.” He used the same vague, action-over-words framing when asked about proposals to establish new Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza, noting that Israel faces mounting international pressure over its policies, and “I don’t have to challenge the entire world at every moment and on every issue.”

Separate reporting from Israeli outlet Haaretz has shed new light on shifting social attitudes within Israel amid the ongoing Gaza conflict, revealing that a growing share of young Israeli students hold overtly racist views toward Palestinian citizens of the country, with upcoming student elections this October marking the first national student vote since the start of the Gaza war. The outlet cites growing concern from youth workers and academic researchers, who have documented a steady rise in extremist and exclusionary attitudes among Israeli teenagers over recent years.

Data from a poll conducted by Israel’s own education ministry shows a sharp increase between 2023 and 2025 in the share of students who believe groups including Palestinian citizens of Israel do not deserve equal membership in Israeli society. The poll breaks down attitudes by school type: 52 percent of students from religious Israeli Jewish schools back the exclusionary view, compared to 35 percent of students from secular Jewish schools and 34 percent of students from Arab-speaking Israeli schools.

A youth movement official told Haaretz that for Jewish Israeli students, rising nationalist sentiment has been paired with growing demands for a more rigid Jewish identity, alongside increased willingness to enlist in Israeli combat units. Another youth organizer noted that rising fear of Arab communities among Jewish students has been accompanied by a broader erosion of trust in Israel’s own democratic institutions. Beyond the rise in exclusionary views, the report found that most recent graduates of Israel’s secular education system no longer believe a lasting peace agreement with Palestinians is possible. One Jewish high school principal summarized the shift, telling Haaretz that today’s graduates “do not believe in peace or in a political solution to the conflict between the two peoples.”

In another alarming development, Israeli news outlet Ynet reported Wednesday on a new academic study that warns of devastating, long-term mental health harms facing the children of Israeli reserve soldiers, whose deployments to multiple ongoing fronts have stretched on for nearly two years. The study, conducted by researchers at Reichman University, surveyed more than 2,500 reservist families to measure trauma rates across generations.

The findings are stark: an overwhelming majority of young children under the age of seven whose parent is a reservist show measurable symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Seventy-five percent of these children meet the threshold for sub-clinical PTSD, while nearly 32 percent of symptomatic children meet criteria for full clinical PTSD. Researchers warned that the emotional and physiological harm being experienced by these children will create long-term costs for Israeli society if widespread, accessible treatment is not rolled out immediately.

The trauma is not limited to children: the study found that 35 percent of surveyed reserve fathers and 42 percent of reserve mothers also show symptoms of PTSD and other trauma-related conditions. After almost two years of continuous combat across multiple fronts, the study concludes that Israel has effectively become “a nation in trauma,” with reservist families raising young children bearing an especially severe and ongoing burden. Researchers described daily life for many of these families as “at times, utter chaos,” warning that the country is now facing an unprecedented “tsunami of mental health problems.”

Common symptoms reported in children include insomnia, bedwetting, frequent violent outbursts, and other behavioral disruptions, while 80 percent of parents reported a major, widespread decline across all areas of their daily lives, researchers confirmed.

Overnight raids carried out by the Israeli army across the occupied West Bank early Wednesday led to the arrest of five female Palestinian activists all affiliated with local Palestinian health committees, alongside 15 additional Palestinian detainees. The arrests mark a sharp escalation in ongoing targeting of Palestinian women and healthcare workers under occupation, according to local Palestinian advocacy groups. The five detained women come from three major West Bank governorates: Ramallah-based activists Jamila Abu Dahou and Jamila Kanaan, two Nablus natives — previously released detainee Maysar al-Faqih and 26-year-old accountant Faten Hanaysheh — and 66-year-old Etaf Bader from Hebron. All five have ties to the Health Work Committees, a leading Palestinian health and community development organization. Family members of the detainees have detailed the chaotic and aggressive nature of the pre-dawn raids, which left children traumatized and violated basic cultural norms for several of the arrested women. Etaf Bader, a 20-year veteran of the Health Work Committees’ administrative board who has spent decades leading family support and women’s empowerment initiatives, was taken from her family home in Hebron. Her husband Abdul Rahman Bader recounted to Middle East Eye that Israeli soldiers forced their way into the property, demanded his wife’s identification, and took her into custody without disclosing any charges. Soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded Bader, searched the home’s rooms and storage, and transported her to an undisclosed location. “We don’t know where she was taken, and we hope the arrest is temporary and for questioning only,” Abdul Rahman Bader said. In Nablus, 61-year-old Maysar al-Faqih — who had already spent four months in Israeli administrative detention two years earlier and stepped back from women’s rights activism after her release to avoid re-arrest — was seized during a 2:30 a.m. raid on her family home. Al-Faqih’s three married daughters were visiting with their children at the time, and the young kids were roused from sleep by the soldiers’ shouting and aggressive entry into the home. Wael Abu al-Saba, Maysar’s husband, told reporters that Israeli forces acted brutally during the incursion, frightening the children, seized al-Faqih’s mobile phone, and took her into custody after restraining her. The most high-profile incident of cultural disrespect during the raids was documented in the arrest of Faten Hanaysheh, the 26-year-old accountant with the Health Work Committees. Israeli forces first searched for Hanaysheh at her brother’s home in the village of Beit Dajan, east of Nablus, before surrounding her father’s home in the village center and pounding violently on the entry door. When the family opened the door, soldiers immediately announced they intended to arrest Hanaysheh, who was wearing only pajamas. Hanaysheh’s father Murad told reporters he begged soldiers to allow his daughter time to change into street clothes, a request that aligns with basic Islamic cultural norms for modesty. Soldiers refused his request, pushed him back repeatedly, slammed the home door shut, and dragged Hanaysheh away in handcuffs to an undisclosed location. Hours after her arrest, Hanaysheh was able to contact her family to confirm she was being held at the Salem Detention Centre and would face interrogation by Israeli intelligence. Murad Hanaysheh also added that Israeli forces had raided his daughter’s office at the Health Work Committees Nablus headquarters just two weeks prior, seizing work-related documents and her work laptop. In a formal statement following the arrests, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club outlined that Palestinian women have faced a steadily rising tide of targeting as part of Israel’s broad arrest campaigns across the West Bank. Tactics used against detained women include night home raids, hostage detention, aggressive interrogation methods, and growing numbers of arrests based on Israeli allegations of “incitement” on social media platforms. Following Wednesday’s arrests, the total number of Palestinian women held in Israeli detention facilities now stands at 99, the organization confirmed. The statement also added that daily Israeli arrest raids across the West Bank are part of a deliberate, systemic state policy. Since the outbreak of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, the total number of Palestinians arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied territories has surpassed 24,000. The arrests of the five female health activists come on the heels of two recent high-profile detentions of senior Palestinian medical workers: 71-year-old Dr. Mazen al-Rantisi, arrested during a home raid in Ramallah last week, and 63-year-old Dr. Khaled Ayash, taken into custody days later from his home in Biddu, a town northwest of Jerusalem. The Palestinian NGO Network has condemned this string of arrests, framing them as a deliberate attack on core Palestinian civil society and health infrastructure. In a formal statement, the network called on the international community to ramp up pressure on the Israeli occupation to end the targeting of Palestinian doctors, health workers and humanitarian organizations. The group also demanded the activation of international accountability mechanisms to secure the release of all detained Palestinian health personnel. The network emphasized that these arrests constitute a clear violation of international humanitarian law, and represent an expansion of the occupation’s long-running campaign to dismantle Palestinian health systems across both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Amid the ongoing war in Gaza, widespread destruction of health infrastructure, and state-led policies of forced displacement, these arrests further block Palestinian civilians from accessing life-saving medical care, the statement added.

Nestled in Syria’s central desert, the ancient city of Palmyra has borne the full weight of more than a decade of civil conflict, its story woven together from centuries of cultural heritage and years of unspeakable brutality. When the Islamic State (IS) seized control of the city in 2015, Syria had already been torn apart by years of war. In the decade that followed, shifting control between IS and the Assad government, compounded by Russian military intervention, left layer upon layer of destruction: violence displaced tens of thousands, transformed ancient landscapes, and scarred a community that had thrived here for millennia.

It took 30 days for Palmyra’s residents to grasp the full brutality of the IS occupation. Within days of capturing the city, the militant group brought 20 local men to the iconic Roman Amphitheatre, one of Syria’s most revered cultural landmarks, and publicly executed them under the group’s black flag, turning a monument to ancient civilization into a stage for terror. The victims’ bodies were hung in the streets of modern Palmyra by their wrists, left to decompose in the desert heat for seven days.

Once IS consolidated its control, its attention turned to Palmyra’s 2,000-year-old ancient ruins. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, Palmyra has long stood as a symbol of the cultural and religious pluralism that once defined the Middle East. Its network of polytheistic temples, shrines, and artifacts predates the rise of Islam, making it a prime target for IS’s extremist iconoclastic ideology. In propaganda spectacles broadcast around the world, militants destroyed many of the site’s most recognizable landmarks, while looting hundreds of smaller artifacts to sell on the global antiquities black market for funding.

“They even burnt 2,000 year-old mummies because they weren’t Muslim,” explained Khalid, a Palmyran tour guide who lived through the occupation, his voice heavy with bitter irony. The famed Arch of Triumph was reduced to two standing columns; the central sanctuary of the Temple of Bel was completely leveled, only its outer enclosure wall remaining recognizable. Stone carvings of human figures were systematically chiseled away, their faces erased in line with the group’s extremist beliefs.

The damage was not limited to the ancient ruins. Palmyra’s millennia-old oasis, the source of water that turned the city into a prosperous Silk Road trading hub thousands of years ago, has also been transformed. Ahmad, a local resident who began working with tourists at the age of nine, remembers a tree-lined road where families would sit outside their homes inviting visitors in for tea. Today, that road sits exposed to the unforgiving desert sun, flanked by cleared rubble and scorched earth, a testament to successive waves of destruction.

Modern Palmyra fared no better than its ancient ruins. Homes and public buildings were systematically destroyed and looted during repeated military campaigns. “When I came back, the house was mined and everything had been stolen by regime forces, even the copper pipes,” members of the Saleh family told Middle East Eye.

Today, the scars of war have become an inescapable part of Palmyra’s identity, drawing a new breed of traveler alongside those who come for its ancient history. UNESCO has developed a formal recovery roadmap for the city, including conservation work for the ruins, improved visitor infrastructure, and livelihood support programs, building on earlier emergency safeguarding efforts. But many local residents and officials say a wide gap remains between international plans and on-the-ground reality. While global frameworks for reconstruction exist, tangible, visible support remains scarce, leaving most of the rebuilding work to the residents who have chosen to return.

“Palmyra is the hero, it’s the icon of Syria,” said Rami Nawaya, founder of Syrian Guides. “Now, it’s taken on another dimension, attracting the adventurers who are interested in the cultural dimension but also the conflict.” For local leaders working to revive the city’s once-thriving tourism industry, the top priority is not rebuilding the ancient ruins themselves, but restoring the basic infrastructure that allows visitors to experience the site and allows residents to return permanently: reopening hotels, restaurants and guesthouses, repairing roads, and restoring basic services.

For Palmyrans, tourism is one of the only viable paths to restoring the local economy. Before the war, the industry made up nearly half of the city’s total economic output, supporting thousands of jobs. After the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, visitor numbers began to slowly climb, but renewed regional instability following U.S. and Israeli military campaigns against Iran disrupted travel routes and derailed that early momentum.

Still, small signs of recovery are starting to emerge. In early June, the Silk Road Lodge welcomed its first guests, becoming one of the first new tourist facilities to open in Palmyra since the fall of the Assad government. Its owner, Radwan Abdullatif, returned to Syria after receiving asylum in Japan, helped by tourists he had met during his earlier work in Palmyra. “If we don’t fix Syria, other people won’t fix it for us. I advise everyone to come and fix the country, and Palmyra, hand by hand, so that the tourists will see, and come again,” Abdullatif said. He added that what local business owners need most from the government is not direct funding, but streamlined bureaucratic processes and easier access to permits to open and operate businesses.

Local organizations are also working to rebuild sustainable livelihoods for residents. The Caravan Foundation runs the Noor al-Badia women’s cooperative, which has trained 70 local women who lost their homes and family members during the war to make traditional handicrafts and textiles, providing many of them with their only source of household income. The cooperative’s success, however, depends entirely on tourist traffic to its tented shop at Bedouin Corner, a traditional camp and restaurant located beside the ancient ruins.

Outside of Syria, the country’s gradual reopening to travel has sparked debate over “dark tourism” and the ethics of visiting a post-conflict society. But for Palmyra’s residents rebuilding their lives, attracting any visitor matters far more than debating their motivations. “There are many tourists who entered Syria with the intention of visiting war zones, but ended up having meals with locals, visiting workshops, being introduced to other facets of the country,” Nawaya explained. The destruction cannot be erased or ignored, but it does not have to be the only story Palmyra tells.

In the absence of coverage from mainstream international media outlets that still label Syria a high-risk destination, independent travel creators and influencers have become one of the most powerful tools for promoting the country. Nick Maddock, a travel YouTuber who spent six months traveling across almost all of Syria’s governorates, says independent creators hold unique influence because audiences trust their perspectives more than official government tourism campaigns. “That trust goes a really long way in breaking down misconceptions in a way that many local folks cannot,” he said.

One largely overlooked part of Palmyra’s ongoing recovery is the fate of its long-time Bedouin communities, who have roamed the surrounding desert for generations. For these groups, reconstruction starts with making the desert landscape safe again, after years of conflict left it littered with landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). Their struggle mirrors that of many rural communities across Syria outside of the major population centers of Aleppo and Damascus: with limited state capacity and most international funding focused on urban areas where larger numbers of people are returning, rural recovery depends entirely on local residents’ limited resources: personal savings, remittances from relatives abroad, their own labor, and the constant risk to their own safety.

Repeated shifts in control of Palmyra made demining work particularly complex. Each faction that controlled the city used different tactics to lay explosive hazards, resulting in overlapping layers of contamination across large swathes of land. “This can result in overlapping contamination, including conventional landmines, IEDs, UXO, and abandoned munitions,” explained Mouiad Alnofaly, deputy programme manager at HALO, a leading international mine action organization working in Syria. “Each hazard presents different technical challenges and requires different clearance methodologies. Before any meaningful restoration, tourism or wider redevelopment can take place, explosive hazards must first be identified and removed.” The organization is currently seeking funding to expand its demining operations to Palmyra in the coming months.

Until that work is complete, local residents have no choice but to live with the daily risk of explosive devices. Local officials estimate that around 200 people have been killed or injured by mines and UXO in the Palmyra area since the end of major combat. “When people returned to the city, the houses were full of mines because they were used as weapon stores. Some looked like stones,” said Zahir al-Salim, deputy director of Palmyra. While the main archaeological site and primary access roads have been cleared and declared safe, large areas of agricultural land and the open desert remain dangerous. For Bedouins, whose traditional lifestyle depends on free movement across the desert, this contamination has been devastating, killing not only residents (including children playing in open areas) but also dozens of camels, a critical source of income and transport for the community.

Despite all it has endured, Palmyra endures. Every Friday evening at sunset, groups of local residents gather beside the ancient ruins: motorbikes pull up carrying families and water pipes for shisha, people spread blankets on the ground to shelter from the wind, and young men gather on the steps of the Roman Amphitheatre—once the stage for mass executions—to smoke and watch the sun set over the desert. Palmyra survived the IS occupation, survived a decade of war. Whether it can once again become a thriving home for its people depends on two critical things: sustained international support to clear explosives and rebuild infrastructure, and the return of tourists who can turn Palmyra’s ancient heritage into a living, sustainable livelihood for the community that calls it home.

A groundbreaking 188-page report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, backed by the global advocacy group Progressive International, has leveled explosive allegations that Israel has enacted decades of systemic reproductive genocide against the Palestinian people, a campaign that has intensified to catastrophic levels since the outbreak of full-scale conflict in Gaza in October 2023. The report argues that this deliberate strategy targets Palestinian women, children, and communal life by destroying critical medical infrastructure, causing widespread environmental harm that triggers infertility, and directly killing civilians to erode the possibility of sustained Palestinian existence. The findings align with a separate recent conclusion from the United Nations’ top independent investigative body for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which confirmed Israeli forces have intentionally targeted Palestinian children as a core component of their Gaza military campaign.

The UN commission’s investigation mapped the full scope of harm inflicted on Palestinian children: from targeted sniper attacks and drone strikes, to systematic torture of detained minors, widespread reproductive violence, and the deliberate leveling of schools and hospitals. Since the start of the campaign in October 2023, more than 21,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces, with an additional 5,160 children estimated to remain trapped and dead under the rubble of destroyed buildings. As of October 2024, at least 15,000 children in Gaza have lost their mothers, leaving them orphaned in a war zone. One particularly devastating case documented by the UN involved the Israeli military cutting power to al-Nasr paediatric hospital, leading to the deaths of four newborn infants. Their decomposing bodies were later found still connected to non-functional life support machines.

When the full-scale assault on Gaza began, UN officials estimated 50,000 pregnant women were residing in the enclave, with 5,500 births occurring each month. The report details that Israel’s military blockade and attacks have eliminated almost all access to emergency obstetric care, creating a public health catastrophe that has pushed miscarriage rates up by more than 300 percent. Widespread malnutrition, widespread anaemia, and a total lack of prenatal supplements have drastically increased the risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and fatal maternal hemorrhaging during labor. With Israel blocking entry of clean water, menstrual hygiene products, and basic reproductive health supplies into Gaza, the Palestinian Feminist Collective found that many women have been forced to use homemade sanitary pads or take continuous birth control pills to stop their periods entirely.

Compiled from research conducted between December 2025 and April 2026, the report draws from a vast array of sources: survivor and witness testimonies, declassified Israeli archival documents, Palestinian oral histories, peer-reviewed academic research, documentary evidence, independent media reporting, human rights documentation, and official UN reports and statements. In Gaza, the vast majority of hospitals have been destroyed or damaged by bombing, leaving facilities without fuel, electricity, anesthesia, or sterile surgical equipment. This has forced pregnant women to deliver babies in overcrowded emergency shelters, damaged private homes, or even on rubble-strewn city streets. International medics who have worked in Gaza have described the unspeakable horror of performing major surgeries, including emergency Caesarean sections, without any form of anesthesia. Even after giving birth, new mothers cannot access basic supplies considered universal across most of the world: diapers, adequate nutrition, clean water, or infant formula.

The report argues that Israel’s military campaign has systematically targeted the core infrastructure that enables Palestinian life, specifically reproductive healthcare systems, to make sustained Palestinian survival impossible. Israeli forces have destroyed maternity wards and in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics across Gaza. The report adds that the Israeli military’s use of toxic weaponry including white phosphorus has created long-term, intergenerational risks to Palestinian fertility, extending the harm of the campaign to future generations. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women now serve as the sole breadwinners and caregivers for their families, after being widowed by the conflict or left to raise children alone while their partners are held in Israeli political prisons. Thousands more have been forcibly separated from their families through systematic expulsions and mass incarcerations. “Palestinian mothers in Gaza have been left to shoulder the impossible task of giving life and caring for their children despite the widespread starvation, displacement, and disease,” the report states.

To illustrate the systemic nature of the violence, the report highlights the stories of two Gaza women, Rania Abu Anza and Jomana Arafa, whose cases are described as only the tip of the iceberg of harm. Abu Anza spent 10 years pursuing IVF treatment before finally giving birth to twin boys, Naeim and Wissam. In March 2024, an Israeli air strike killed both infants and their father, destroying the family Abu Anza had spent a decade building. Just two days after Arafa gave birth to her own twins, she, her newborns, and her mother were killed while seeking shelter in an area Israel had officially designated a “safe humanitarian zone.” Arafa’s husband survived only because he had left to retrieve the twins’ official birth certificates.

The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has independently confirmed that Israeli forces have systematically targeted reproductive healthcare infrastructure, all but eliminating maternity services, prenatal care, fertility clinics, and neonatal intensive care units across Gaza. For the first time in Gaza’s history, a full-scale famine has broken out in the enclave, driven by Israel’s severe restrictions on food entry. The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report also traces this reproductive violence to long-standing ideological roots in Israeli policy, noting that as early as 1995, Israeli geographer Arnon Soffer warned that “the most serious threat Israel faces is the wombs of Arab women,” framing Palestinian birth rates as an existential threat to Israeli national security. Golda Meir, who served as Israeli prime minister from 1969 to 1974, once remarked that her worst nightmares stemmed from the knowledge that “another Palestinian child will be born.”

Responding to the report, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, called the document a damning indictment of the entire system of Israeli occupation. “It is an indictment of a system that has transformed Palestinian life – bodies, homes, families, reproductive existence, and even the dead – into instruments of control and domination,” Albanese said. “It is time to understand that the crimes against the Palestinians – including the sexualised and gender-based violence meticulously researched and exposed in this report – is not a total sum of isolated abuses, but a system of domination, oppression and erasure.” This reporting is originally from independent outlet Middle East Eye, which provides unfiltered coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.

A controversial proposal to establish so-called “Hamas-free humanitarian zones” in the Gaza Strip, led by a U.S.-backed initiative led by former U.S. President Donald Trump, has emerged in recent Israeli media reports, as the Israeli military continues to consolidate its hold over more than two-thirds of the besieged territory.

According to reporting from Israeli national newspaper Israel Hayom, the first of these controlled humanitarian zones is scheduled to open within the next several weeks at Tel Sultan, a location situated on the outskirts of Rafah in southern Gaza. The site is intended to house Palestinian civilians who have been vetted and confirmed to have no weapon holdings or organizational ties to Hamas, the report says.

Security and order within the designated zones will be maintained by a newly assembled multinational contingent called the International Stabilisation Force (ISF). The force will be outfitted exclusively with non-lethal weaponry, operating out of Israel’s Amitai Camp located near the Gaza border and falling under the direct command of Trump’s Board of Peace – the body launched in January this year at the former U.S. president’s explicit order to advance a negotiated settlement for the Gaza conflict.

While the plan promises basic humanitarian support including temporary shelter and aid deliveries to residents of the zones, Board of Peace officials have made a firm commitment to ban the import of concrete into Gaza, a restriction that will heavily limit infrastructure reconstruction amid widespread destruction across the territory. The board is also moving forward with plans to develop large-scale logistics warehouses to support the management of the humanitarian shelters, with site scouting already underway in communities adjacent to Gaza’s border fence, per the report.

Parallel to these humanitarian planning efforts, the Israeli military is continuing its incremental expansion of territorial control beyond the so-called “Yellow Line”, an existing boundary that was meant to serve as a temporary holding area for Israeli forces during the first phase of an earlier ceasefire agreement. Under the terms of that deal, Israel was required to withdraw from the area during the second phase of the agreement, but Israel has refused to relinquish control, as the second phase has never been implemented. Today, this expanded buffer zone controlled by Israel encompasses approximately 70 percent of Gaza’s total land area.

An unnamed senior Israeli official speaking to Israel Hayom outlined the country’s current strategic approach: “We are manoeuvring within the American constraints, increasing the pace of targeted killings while remaining below the threshold of international criticism – and this will continue as long as Hamas is unwilling to disarm.”

In a recent public update posted to the social platform X, the Board of Peace confirmed that the first batch of tactical vehicles has already arrived at the ISF’s base in the Logistics Support Area codenamed Endurance, alongside photographs documenting the delivery.

Reaction to the plan from Hamas has been cautiously measured. Hazem Qassem, a spokesperson for the group, said Hamas holds out hope that the initiative will mark “the beginning of implementing the tasks assigned to them”, including separating Palestinian communities in Gaza from Israeli military forces and working to put a stop to ongoing Israeli violations against Palestinian civilians. “We call on the Board of Peace to begin the actual implementation of the provisions of the plan to end the war on Gaza,” Qassem added.

The plan for a concentrated humanitarian enclave near Rafah is not a new proposal. As far back as July of last year, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz first announced plans to corral the entire population of Gaza into a consolidated “humanitarian city” near Rafah, where all residents would undergo mandatory security screenings and be barred from leaving the designated area. Earlier satellite imagery analysis conducted by research group Forensic Architecture and reported by Drop Site News in January of this year already revealed that Israeli forces had carried out large-scale land clearing and ground compaction work in the Tel Sultan area of Rafah, a level of preparatory construction activity unmatched anywhere else east of the Yellow Line.