Palestinians, including children, who are struggling to access food due to Israel’s blockade and ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip, wait in line to receive food.

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The world’s leading authority on food insecurity has confirmed a famine in Gaza.

In a report published Friday, the United Nations-backed group of experts finds that over half a million people parts of northern Gaza are at risk of dying from starvation, and hundreds of thousands more people face catastrophic shortages as the famine spreads to other areas.

“As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed. The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, report says.

The images of skeletal children in Gaza have already caused widespread protests around the world against the Israeli offensive there and prompted some of Israel’s most important Western allies to say they will recognize a Palestinian state. The IPC report brings the facts behind those photographs of starvation into stark relief.

It says famine, the most extreme classification of hunger, is occurring in Gaza Governorate, where Gaza City is located, and projected to expand to the areas of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis by the end of September.

Describing the situation as a “race against time,” the report says at least 132,000 children under the age of 5 could die from acute malnutrition in the coming months.

This estimate has doubled since an IPC report in May, showing just how drastically the conditions have worsened in Gaza in recent weeks.

Nearly 55,500 malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women will require an urgent nutrition response.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said Thursday 271 people have so far died in the famine, including 112 children.

This is the first time famine has been confirmed in the Middle East. And it’s happened in a 25-mile-long strip of land, where trucks piled with thousands of tons of food are parked at border crossings.

The people in Gaza now dying of starvation are never more than a few miles from warehouses filled with food aid that they have no way to reach.

“This is the direct result of months of deliberate restrictions on aid, the destruction of Gaza’s food, health, and water systems, and relentless bombardment,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps, said in response to the statement. “This is a man-made catastrophe, entirely preventable and entirely unconscionable.”

Israel was quick to respond to the report. Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused the IPC of publishing “a tailor-made report to fit Hamas’s fake campaign.” It claims “there is no famine in Gaza.” The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs, said the report is based “partial and unreliable sources, many of them affiliated with Hamas.” The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted point-by-point arguments against the report, including allegations that it “ignores Israel’s humanitarian efforts and Hamas’s systematic theft.”

The Israeli government has repeatedly said its restrictions on aid are to pressure Hamas and prevent its fighters from benefiting from it.

But the result has been a breakdown in the aid system for Gaza’s population living under Israeli blockade, even before this war.

Earlier this month, more than 100 international humanitarian organizations, including Caritas, Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders, accused Israel of “weaponizing” aid to help achieve its aims in Gaza. The statement from Aug. 13 said, “Despite claims by Israeli authorities that there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, most major international NGOs have been unable to deliver a single truck of lifesaving supplies since 2 March.”

They said their operations are hampered by new, more restrictive Israeli regulations for international aid groups, which they say have resulted in Israeli authorities denying dozens of permissions for groups to bring their aid into Gaza. “This obstruction has left millions of dollars’ worth of food, medicine, water, and shelter items stranded in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt, while Palestinians are being starved,” the statement said.

On July 29, an IPC alert warned that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was playing out in the Gaza Strip. It underscored the devastating living situation for Gaza’s some 2 million citizens, almost two years since the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, prompted a full-scale Israeli military invasion of Gaza.

After Israel tightened restrictions on supplies entering Gaza in mid-March, food dried up.  In the weeks that followed, adults prioritized feeding their children over themselves as a coping strategy, which, according to the IPC alert, initially mitigated a rise in acute child malnutrition.

However, by April, supplies had become so scarce that parents could no longer protect their children this way. The IPC alert said that between April and mid-July, over 20,000 children had to be treated for acute malnutrition.

What little sustenance could be found in markets skyrocketed in price.  In June, wheat flour prices increased between 1,400% and 5,600% compared to late February. By July, the IPC alert stated nearly 9 out of 10 households had to resort to taking “significant safety risks” to find food and scavenge from garbage.

The U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres posted his response to the report on social media. “Just when it seems there are no words left to describe the living hell in Gaza, a new one has been added: ‘famine’,” the U.N. chief said. “This is not a mystery — it is a man-made disaster, a moral indictment and a failure of humanity itself.”

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said it was “utterly horrifying” and held Israel responsible. “The Israeli government’s refusal to allow sufficient aid into Gaza has caused this man-made catastrophe. This is a moral outrage,” Lammy said in a statement.

Palestinians carry humanitarian aid packages near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution center operated by the U.S.-backed organization in Netzarim, central Gaza Strip.

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Hundreds of civilians have been reported shot dead as they cross dangerous militarized zones to receive supplies from the aid distribution sites of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The foundation disputes that the killings occur near its centers and says it has distributed 132 million meals.

But aid experts say that much of what the group gives out is not ready-to-eat and requires water and fuel for cooking — resources that are hard to come by in Gaza, where Israeli bombardment has devastated critical infrastructure.

Moreover, experts say the distribution sites are located primarily in militarized zones along the Khan Younis–Rafah border, where less than a quarter of Gaza’s population lives.

Finding food and resources for cooking has been made all the more difficult by the frequent and often repeated forced displacements of families across the Gaza Strip. The IPC report said some 800,000 people have had to leave their homes in waves of displacement that have forced people to abandon any remaining resources, further disrupted access to essential health services and compounded humanitarian needs.

The confirmation of famine comes as Israel’s security cabinet approved plans for Israeli soldiers and 60,000 reservists to move into Gaza City.

The U.N. says that already nearly 90% of Gaza is under military control or off-limits to Palestinians. Gaza City is home to tens of thousands of Gazans displaced from other parts of the strip and has several of the territory’s last partially functioning hospitals. The Israeli military has started calling doctors and international organizations in the city, telling them to leave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel will now resume negotiations for the release of all hostages held in Gaza and an end to the nearly 2-year-old war, but on terms acceptable to Israel. It comes in response to a temporary ceasefire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar that Hamas accepted on Monday.

Israel will dispatch negotiators to talks once a location is set, an Israeli official said. Netanyahu, however, also said he remained set on approving plans for capturing Gaza City.

The talks could offer a moment’s hope to Palestinians desperate for a ceasefire that the experts behind the IPC report say is so desperately needed as a first step to address the famine in Gaza.

But for now, the situation in the enclave remains desperate. The United Nations’ World Food Programme said in a recent report that “public order has broken down” and that “after 22 months of fighting, the social fabric of Gaza is collapsing as the fear of starvation intensifies.”

Almost all the trucks carrying WFP food aid inside Gaza have been stopped before reaching their destination by civilians desperate to find the sustenance they need for themselves and their families to survive.

Hamas fighters patrol a street before they hand over three Israeli hostages to a Red Cross team in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on Feb. 8.

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TEL AVIV, Israel — Nearly two years after launching the surprise attack that sparked the war with Israel, Hamas finds itself up against a wall.

Its fighting force has been pummeled by Israel, its charismatic leadership has been all but assassinated and its ceasefire negotiators face unprecedented pressure from Arab governments to give up its weapons and its rule.

“Hamas is facing its worst crisis yet,” said Esmat Mansour, a West Bank-based Palestinian political commentator and former militant, who is in touch with figures close to Hamas. “Hamas faces pressures from all directions: from Israel, from the street, from the West and from Arab countries.”

Yahya Sinwar (center), Hamas’ Gaza Strip chief at the time, shakes hands with a masked fighter of the group’s Qassam Brigades during an anniversary rally, in Gaza City, on Dec. 14, 2022. Israel believes Sinwar was a mastermind of the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack in the country. The Israeli military said it killed him in an operation in southern Gaza in October 2024.

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Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

The most immediate pressure comes from Israel’s latest threat: to besiege Gaza City, after displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the city, and sending soldiers inside to fight in what Israel considers to be one of Hamas’ last major strongholds. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week ordered military planners to speed up preparations for the Gaza City offensive, and military officials called on hospitals to plan to evacuate.

Civilians in Gaza face the brunt of Israel’s campaign, suffering displacement, airstrikes and severe food shortages — with the world’s experts in famine announcing famine conditions have already taken hold in Gaza.

For the first time, the 22 countries of the Arab League called in a statement last month for Hamas to give up control of Gaza and hand over its weapons.

These pressures came to a head this week, when Hamas accepted an Egyptian and Qatari proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza — giving up its initial reservations and agreeing to terms the U.S. had originally proposed that would keep Israeli troops with a significant hold on territory in Gaza. Israel is considering its response.

Israel is trying to end Hamas’ existence as a military and governing force in Gaza, and Hamas knows Israel is stronger militarily. Mansour says Hamas’ strategy is to maintain its one bargaining chip, the Israeli hostages it still holds, and hope the circumstances change in Israel to Hamas’ advantage.

“Time plays to Hamas’ benefit, not to Netanyahu’s benefit,” Mansour says. “The [Israeli] military is exhausted, Israeli protests are increasing, maybe the government will fall, maybe there will be international pressure especially because of the images of hunger, Europe will pressure the U.S. Hamas says: ‘There is nothing worse than surrender. Why should I surrender? I am remaining steadfast and maybe the situation will change to my advantage and there will be an opportunity to negotiate from a better position.'”

Mansour says Hamas’ “main goal is to exist and only to exist.”

Hamas believes it has popular support on the Arab street

Hamas is currently focused on improving its relations with Arab governments.

“The main disagreement between Hamas and the Arab countries is the armed struggle that Hamas employs in its clashes with the Israeli occupation,” says Ibrahim Al-Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst from Gaza based in Istanbul and close to Hamas. “ But all the Arab states understand that Palestine is a vital cause and Hamas is the most important player in the cause … the Arab nations love Hamas.”

Samir Ghattas, an Egyptian security analyst who studies Hamas and Gaza, says Hamas mistakes Arab support for the plight of Gaza with support for Hamas.

Palestinian Hamas fighters escort Israeli hostage Or Levy on a stage before handing him over to a Red Cross team in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on Feb. 8, as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal with Israel.

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“Hamas has only one card: the hostages. Without the hostages, Hamas has no cards at all,” Ghattas said. “There is no future for Hamas in Gaza as the people there blame Hamas for what’s happened, after they blame Israel and Netanyhu for the killing and destruction.”

Hamas is increasing its guerrilla warfare

Israel has destroyed most of Hamas’ military capabilities, yet Hamas remains in Gaza as localized guerrilla units.

In a rare move, a group of Hamas militants on Wednesday stormed an Israeli military position in southern Gaza, leading to close range fighting. Most of the Hamas militants were killed, according to the Israeli military.

Israel thinks Hamas may have tried to abduct a soldier. The ambush demonstrates how Hamas is still willing to fight at all costs.

In Gaza City, 35-year-old Mohammed Ahmad says Hamas cannot afford to give up its weapons now.

“No one will accept during a battle and a continuous fight with the occupation to surrender their weapons,” Ahmad says. “The Israelis will not leave Gaza if Hamas surrenders its weapons.”

Amjad Saleh, 22, says civilians, not Hamas, are paying the price of the war.

“Hamas is not here at all. Their leaders are either abroad, or in the tunnels underground in Gaza … they conduct their operations and we get punished for it,” he says. “The plan for displacement is coming,” he says.

Mass displacement is Palestinians’ biggest concern now

Israel’s military is calling up tens of thousands more soldiers, and vowing in the coming weeks to take control of Gaza City and drive out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to southern Gaza near the Egyptian border. Israel eventually seeks to send as many Palestinians as possible to other countries.

That could be one major driving factor for Egypt to help propose a new ceasefire and for Hamas to support it, to hold off the bigger concern of a mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt or beyond.

Abu Bakr Bashir reported from London. Nuha Musleh contributed to this story from Ramallah, West Bank.

Palestinian hamlets are seen at the E1 area, an open tract of land east of Jerusalem, between the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim and the occupied West Bank town of Eizariya, on Aug. 14.

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Nasser Nasser/AP

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel gave final approval Wednesday for a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank that would effectively cut the territory in two, and that Palestinians and rights groups say could destroy hopes for a future Palestinian state.

Settlement development in E1, an open tract of land east of Jerusalem, has been under consideration for more than two decades, but was frozen due to U.S. pressure during previous administrations. The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank to be illegal and an obstacle to peace.

This map shows the proposed area of the E1 settlement, alongside a depiction of existing settlements between it and Jerusalem.

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Will Jarrett/AP

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a former settler leader, cast the approval as a rebuke to Western countries that announced their plans to recognize a Palestinian state in recent weeks.

“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not with slogans but with actions,” he said on Wednesday. “Every settlement, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and has vowed to maintain open-ended control over the occupied West Bank, annexed east Jerusalem, and the war-ravaged Gaza Strip — territories Israel seized in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for their state.

Israel’s expansion of settlements is part of an increasingly dire reality for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as the world’s attention focuses on the war in Gaza. There have been marked increases in attacks by settlers on Palestinians, evictions from Palestinian towns, Israeli military operations, and checkpoints that choke freedom of movement, as well as several Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich holds a map that shows the E1 settlement project during a press conference near the settlement of Maale Adumim, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Aug. 14.

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Ohad Zwigenberg/AP

More than 700,000 Israelis settlers now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

The location of E1 is significant because it is one of the last geographical links between the major West Bank cities of Ramallah, in the north, and Bethlehem, in the south.

The two cities are 22 kilometers (14 miles) apart, but Palestinians traveling between them must take a wide detour and pass through multiple Israeli checkpoints, spending hours on the journey. The hope was that, in an eventual Palestinian state, the region would serve as a direct link between the cities.

“The settlement in E1 has no purpose other than to sabotage a political solution,” said Peace Now, an organization that tracks settlement expansion in the West Bank. “While the consensus among our friends in the world is to strive for peace and a two-state solution, a government that long ago lost the people’s trust is undermining the national interest, and we are all paying the price.”

Asked about E1 in an interview with The Associated Press, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said talk of a two-state solution was not a “high priority” for the Trump administration and that there were too many unanswered questions about what a Palestinian state would look like. The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.

If the process moves quickly, infrastructure work in E1 could begin in the next few months and construction of homes could start in around a year. The plan includes around 3,500 apartments that would abut the existing settlement of Maale Adumim. Smotrich also hailed the approval, during the same meeting, of 350 homes for the settlement of Ashael near Hebron.

Israel could, in theory, remove the settlement at some future date, as it did with its ones in Gaza in 2005, but that possibility appears extremely remote at present given strong support for the settlements among Israel’s government and even some opposition parties.

Israel’s government is dominated by religious and ultranationalist politicians, like Smotrich, with close ties to the settlement movement. The finance minister has been granted Cabinet-level authority over settlement policies and vowed to double the settler population in the West Bank.

Hannah Bloch/NPR

Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.

While returning to the U.S. a dozen years ago from a reporting assignment in Kabul, I had a long layover at the Dubai International Airport and got to know it well — its ebb and flow from quiet to clamor and back, as passengers from all over the planet arrived and left.

With hours to fill between flights, I roamed for miles around this colossal airport, the busiest international hub in the world. I marveled at the gold shops, wandered past the McDonald’s and Starbucks, browsed the camel’s milk chocolate and Cuban cigars, rested in the Zen Garden. I heard Arabic, Hindi, English, Chinese and French. I spritzed myself with perfume at the duty-free shops and decided to get a pedicure at 2 a.m. The man sitting next to me getting his feet done at that hour was a U.S. Marine. The mix of familiarity and disorientation at the airport made me feel I might be anywhere, everywhere — and nowhere at all.

William Gibson observed in his novel Pattern Recognition that long-haul flights get us to our destinations so fast that it can take awhile for our souls to catch up with our bodies: “Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage,” he wrote.

I thought of this when I was back in transit at DXB one evening earlier this month, and snapped this photo during a quiet moment. With several hours stretching ahead of me before my next flight, I realized that I enjoy long layovers at the Dubai airport because they give me space — in good company with tens of thousands of others heading from one part of the world to another — to take stock of where I’ve been and where I’m going. It was, for me, a perfect limbo.

See more photos from around the world:

• Greetings from Paris, where you can swim in the Seine for the first time in a century
• Greetings from Gujarat, India, where a banyan tree is a place for rest, prayers and play
• Greetings from Khartoum, Sudan, where those with the least offer their guests the most
• Greetings from Moscow, Russia, where Lenin’s tomb attracts a new surge of visitors
• Greetings from New Delhi, India, where performing monkeys spark delight — and ambivalence
• Greetings from Damascus, Syria, where a crowded bar welcomed post-Assad revelers
• Greetings from Alishan, Taiwan, whose red cypress forests offer timeless beauty
• Greetings from Odesa, Ukraine, where a Black Sea beach offers respite from war
• Greetings from Shenyang, China, where workers sort AI data in ‘Severance’-like ways
• Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with its once-grand hotel named for a warrior queen
• Greetings from Mexico City, where these dogs ride a bus to and from school
• Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, where the blue-footed booby shows its colors
• Greetings from Afrin, Syria, where Kurds danced their hearts out to celebrate spring
• Greetings from Dharamshala, India, where these Tibetan kids were having the best time

Israeli soldiers uses binoculars to look at damaged buildings in the Gaza Strip, from southern Israel, Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025.

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Ariel Schalit/AP

JERUSALEM — Israel’s military said Wednesday it will call up 60,000 reservists ahead of an expanded military operation in Gaza City. Many residents have chosen to stay despite the danger, fearing nowhere is safe in a territory facing shortages of food, water and other necessities.

Calling up extra military reservists is part a plan Defense Minister Israel Katz approved to begin a new phase of operations in some of Gaza’s most densely populated areas, the military said. The plan, which is expected to receive the chief of staff’s final approval in the coming days, also includes extending the service of 20,000 additional reservists who are already on active duty.

In a country of fewer than 10 million people, the call-up of reservists is the largest in months and carries economic and political weight. It comes days after hundreds of thousands of Israelis rallied for a ceasefire, as negotiators scramble to get Israel and Hamas to agree to end their 22 months of fighting, and as rights groups warn that an expanded assault could deepen the crisis in the Gaza Strip, where most of the roughly 2 million inhabitants have been displaced, many areas have been reduced to rubble, and the population faces the threat of famine.

Gaza City operation could begin within days

An Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military regulations, said troops will operate in parts of Gaza City where they haven’t been deployed yet and where Israel believes Hamas is still active. Israeli troops in the the city’s Zeitoun neighborhood and in Jabaliya, a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, are already preparing the groundwork for the expanded operation, which could begin within days.

Though the timeline wasn’t clear, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Wednesday that Netanyahu “has directed that the timetables … be shortened” for launching the offensive.

Gaza City is Hamas’ military and governing stronghold, and one of the last places of refuge in the northern Strip, where hundreds of thousands are sheltering. Israeli troops will be targeting Hamas’ vast underground tunnel network there, the official added.

Although Israel has targeted and killed much of Hamas’ senior leadership, parts of Hamas are actively regrouping and carrying out attacks, including launching rockets towards Israel, the official said.

Netanyahu has said the war’s objectives are to secure the release of remaining hostages and ensure that Hamas and other militants can never again threaten Israel.

The planned offensive, announced earlier this month, comes amid heightened international condemnation of Israel’s restrictions on food and medicine reaching Gaza and fears that many Palestinians will be forced to flee.

“It’s pretty obvious that it will just create another mass displacement of people who have been displaced repeatedly since this phase of the conflict started,” United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

Associated Press journalists saw small groups heading south from the city this week, but it’s unclear how many others will voluntarily flee. Some said they would wait to see how events unfold, with many insisting that nowhere is safe from airstrikes.

An Israeli soldier stands on the top of a tank parked on an area near the Israeli-Gaza border, as seen from southern Israel, Wednesday.

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Maya Levin/AP

“What we’re seeing in Gaza is nothing short of apocalyptic reality for children, for their families, and for this generation,” Ahmed Alhendawi, regional director of Save the Children, said in an interview. “The plight and the struggle of this generation of Gaza is beyond being described in words.”

Some reservists question the war’s goals

The call-up comes amid a growing campaign by exhausted reservists who accuse the Israeli government of perpetuating the war for political reasons and failing to bring home the 50 remaining hostages, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

The hostages’ families and former army and intelligence chiefs have also expressed opposition to the expanded operation in Gaza City. Most of the families want an immediate ceasefire and worry that an expanded assault could imperil the surviving hostages.

Guy Poran, a retired air force pilot who has organized veterans campaigning to end the war, said many reservists are spent after repeated tours lasting hundreds of days and resent those who haven’t been called up.

Palestinians rush to collect humanitarian aid airdropped by parachutes into Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Aug. 7.

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Jehad Alshrafi/AP

“Even those that are not ideologically against the current war or the government’s new plans don’t want to go because of fatigue or their families or their businesses,” he said.

Hamas-led militants started the war when they attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals. Hamas says it will only free the rest in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal.

Israel has yet to respond to a ceasefire proposal

Arab mediators and Hamas said this week that the militant group’s leaders had agreed to the terms of a proposed 60-day ceasefire, though similar announcements have been made in the past that didn’t lead to a lasting truce.

Egypt and Qatar have said they are waiting for Israel’s response.

Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, spoke by phone Wednesday with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the proposed ceasefire in the hopes of winning Israel’s acceptance, the Egyptian foreign ministry said. During the call, Abdelatty urged Israel to “put an end to this unjust war” by negotiating a comprehensive deal and “to lay the foundations for a just settlement of the Palestinian cause,” according to the Egyptian government.

An Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media said Israel is in constant contact with the mediators in an effort to secure the hostages’ release.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said he will oppose a deal that doesn’t include the “complete defeat of Hamas.”

Also Wednesday, Israel gave final approval to a controversial settlement project east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. The development in what’s called E1 would effectively cut the territory in two. Palestinians and rights groups say it could destroy hopes for a future Palestinian state.

Gaza’s death toll rises

At least 27 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 were wounded Wednesday at the Zikim crossing in northwestern Gaza as a crowd rushed toward a U.N. convoy transporting humanitarian aid, according to health officials.

“The majority of casualties were killed by gunshots fired by the Israeli troops,” said Fares Awad, head of the Health Ministry’s ambulance and emergency service in northern Gaza. “The rush toward the trucks and the stampede killed and injured others.”

The dead included people seeking aid and Palestinians guarding the convoy, Awad told the AP. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than 62,122 people have been killed during Israel’s offensive, Gaza’s Health Ministry said Monday. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The ministry does not say how many of the dead were civilians or combatants, but it said women and children make up around half of them.

In addition, 154 adults have died from malnutrition-related causes since late June, when the ministry began counting such deaths, and 112 children have died from malnutrition-related causes since the war began.

Palestinians carry a wounded man who was injured while rushing to collect humanitarian aid airdropped by parachute into Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Aug. 7.

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Jehad Alshrafi/AP

TEL AVIV, Israel — Leaked audio recordings broadcast Friday reveal remarks by Israel’s former chief of military intelligence about the price he believed Palestinians should pay for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

The tape recordings, aired by Israel’s Channel 12 TV, captured former Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva saying in Hebrew, “The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations.”

He went further, saying that for every Israeli killed on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians should die.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re children. I’m not speaking out of revenge. I’m talking about a message for future generations. From time to time, they need a Nakba to feel the cost,” Haliva said.

This image made from video provided in December 2023 by Israeli Defense Forces shows Aharon Haliva, then the head of Israel’s military intelligence in Gaza City, Gaza Strip.

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The term Nakba — or “catastrophe” — refers to the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the war that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948.

It is the first time a former senior Israeli military figure has been heard endorsing a high Palestinian death toll in Israel’s nearly two-year-long offensive in Gaza, saying it was “necessary.” The date the remarks were made was not broadcast.

Israeli politicians have previously made incendiary calls about “erasing” Gaza and fighting “human animals” — rhetoric that has since been cited at the International Court of Justice in a case brought by South Africa as evidence Israel is pursuing genocide, which Israel denies.

But this is the first such statement to have been attributed to a figure at Haliva’s level inside the military establishment.

“The remarks by former head of Military Intelligence Aharon Haliva are part of a long line of official statements that expose a deliberate policy of genocide,” said the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem in a post on X.

Haliva oversaw Israeli military intelligence divisions in the lead-up to the biggest intelligence failure in Israel’s history — the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis according to Israeli government figures. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.

He resigned from the military in April 2024, taking responsibility for the intelligence failures that allowed the Hamas assault and the kidnapping of more than 250 Israelis, 50 of whom still remain in captivity.

Reflecting on those failures in other remarks aired by Israeli Channel 12, he admitted that Israeli intelligence had long underestimated the threat from Gaza. For years, military assessments concluded that Hamas was deterred from launching a full-scale war — and that the greater danger of attack came from the West Bank, not Gaza.

Those assumptions collapsed on the morning of Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters stormed Israeli communities and military bases and overran them, exposing deep vulnerabilities in Israel’s defenses.

Israeli Channel 12 broadcasted a response by Haliva, in which he confirmed the authenticity of the remarks leaked from a private discussion, which he said he regretted, and said the quotes were taken out of context.

A group of people gather to greet two severely wounded Palestinian teenagers from Gaza arriving at Dulles International Airport near Washington for urgent medical treatment on Aug. 9, 2025.

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Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. State Department said Saturday that it’s stopping all visitor visas for people from Gaza. The department made the announcement on the social media platform X, saying that it’s halting these visas to conduct “a full and thorough review of the process and procedures” used for granting “medical-humanitarian” visas.

The State Department did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for details on how many such visas have been granted in recent months, but its announcement described it as “a small number.”

An Ohio-based humanitarian group, HEAL Palestine, is the main American organization helping evacuate people — primarily injured children and family members — and bringing them to several cities in the U.S. for medical treatment. According to the organization’s website, it has evacuated 148 people from Gaza, including 63 children.

On Aug. 4, the organization announced the arrival of 11 critically injured children, ages 6 to 15, along with their siblings and caregivers to several major cities, including Boston, Atlanta and Dallas, for medical care.

The news of their arrival led far-right activist Laura Loomer to claim — without providing any supporting evidence — on social media that HEAL Palestine “is mass importing GAZANS into the US” under the “false claim” of humanitarian aid.

She also demanded that the “Trump administration needs to shut this abomination down ASAP before a family member of one of these GAZANS goes rogue and kills Americans for HAMAS.”

Writing on X on Saturday, Loomer took credit for the State Department’s decision to halt the humanitarian visa program for people from Gaza, calling the news “fantastic” and thanking Secretary of State Marco Rubio for this decision.

“This policy makes no sense whatsoever,” says Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which released a statement condemning the State Department’s action. “It is sheer cruelty. It is literally going to put the lives of more children at risk.”

He added that the United States has a “special moral obligation” to provide medical treatment, or the ability for families to come to the U.S. and get their own medical care.

It is unclear how long it will take the State Department to conduct its review of the process for medical-humanitarian visas for individuals from Gaza.

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. And dire food shortages in recent months are killing more people there, including children.

A recent report by an organization backed by the United Nations that tracks food security around the world found that a “worst-case” famine scenario is playing out in Gaza. The U.N. estimates that nearly Palestinian 100,000 women and children face severe malnutrition needing treatment right away, and about a third of Gaza’s 2.1 million people haven’t eaten for days.

Senior Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti appears in court in Jerusalem in 2012.

Bernat Armangue/AP

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TEL AVIV, Israel — The world got a glimpse of one of the most famous Palestinian prisoners in Israel on Friday, Marwan Barghouti, for the first time in years.

A video posted by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, shows him berating Barghouti in his prison cell.

“You will not win. He who messes with the people of Israel, he who will murder our children, he who will murder our women, we will wipe him out,” Ben-Gvir is recorded as saying.

It was not immediately clear when the video, which has been circulating widely in Israel and the occupied West Bank, was filmed.

In the 13-second cut of video that is circulating, Barghouti, 66, tries to respond but is unable to interject. He is pale, white haired, and shrunken — nearly unrecognizable from the dark, rotund man he once was, when he was a wildly popular politician tipped to be the next leader of the Palestinian Authority.

Now, he is serving five consecutive life sentences, after being convicted by an Israeli court in 2002 for helping plan attacks on civilians during a Palestinian uprising that came to be known as the Second Intifada.

“When I received the video, really I didn’t recognize Marwan. He lost a lot of weight and even his face is not what we were used to seeing,” Khader Shkirat, one of Barghouti’s lawyers, told NPR. He said he had to consult with Barghouti’s wife to confirm that the gaunt figure in the video was her imprisoned husband. 

The number of Palestinian detainees held by Israel has roughly doubled since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. As of August 2025, there were around 10,700 Palestinians in Israeli custody — including several thousand held without trial — and, in many cases, also without charge, according to data provided by the Israel Prison Service to Israeli human rights group, Hamoked.

“The starvation of the prisoners is the same as they are imposing on Gaza,” Shkirat said.

The figures do not include the unknown number of Palestinians from Gaza detained in the past nearly two years of war.

Additionally, 76 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody in the past 22 months of war, according to Palestinian prisoners’ organizations.

In recent prisoner exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, Israel has refused to release Barghouti, whose conviction and long imprisonment are widely viewed among Palestinians as politically motivated.

Officials close to ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel say Barghouti, who remains a unifying figure for many Palestinians, is the prisoner the group most wants released in hostage exchanges. The officials spoke anonymously to discuss details of the stalled talks.

Shkirat said they considered Ben-Gvir’s comments a threat and have appealed to the U.S., Qatar and Egypt to ensure that Barghouti is protected from assassination in Israeli detention.

He said despite having been excluded from previous proposed prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel, he believed Barghouti would be freed.

“Marwan will be free and leading his people and I hope Ben-Gvir will be in prison,” he said, referring to an arrest warrant reportedly prepared by the International Criminal Court for the Israeli minister.

Ben-Gvir, convicted in Israel on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorism organization, does not shy away from publicity and has a history of stoking outrage.

Earlier this August, he openly recited a Jewish prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a site revered by both Muslims and Jews. After the site was captured by Israel from Jordan in a 1967 war, the sensitive holy site was opened to both Muslim and Jewish visitors, but Jewish visitors are not allowed to pray there.

Ben-Gvir’s political party, the Jewish Power or Otzma Yehudit, has an anti-Arab platform which borrows ideology from two political parties associated with a radical, U.S.-born rabbi and which Israel has deemed terrorism organizations.

Ben-Gvir has also encouraged Jewish settlements in defiance of international law in the occupied West Bank. Since Israel’s war against Hamas began in 2023, Ben-Gvir, a settler himself, has focused on settling the Gaza Strip once again and has repeatedly called for Palestinians to be moved elsewhere to make room for Jewish settlements.

Aya Batrawy contributed reporting.

Retired Israeli Air Force pilots protest against the war in Gaza outside the country’s defense ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv on Aug. 12.

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Itay Stern/NPR

TEL AVIV, Israel — Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets every week to protest the ongoing war in Gaza and the government’s failure to bring home Israeli hostages.

But on Tuesday, a different kind of demonstration took place: hundreds of retired Israeli Air Force pilots rallied against the war outside the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

It was the first time the group, which calls itself “555,” had gathered in person to oppose the Israeli cabinet’s latest decision — to launch an operation to capture Gaza City and expand the nearly two-year war. The crowd, most over 60 years of age, stood under a banner reading “Don’t kill hostages and soldiers” — a message that echoed throughout the speeches.

Many also stressed that their call to end the war wasn’t only about Israeli lives, but about the deaths of Palestinian civilians as well.

Among them was Dan Halutz, a former chief of staff of the Israeli military and ex-Air Force commander. Challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas still poses a significant threat, Halutz told the crowd, “Who among the senior commanders in the IDF believes Hamas is a strategic threat we can’t defend against? I don’t believe there’s such a person.”

Turning to Israel’s current chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, Halutz added that “the war has run its course. Gaza is destroyed — structurally and humanly. There’s no army there. The last Hamas operatives are hiding.”

Halutz also addressed Netanyahu directly, saying that if the prime minister had listened to President Joe Biden and ended the war a year and a half ago, “things would look different today.” The former commander accused the government of lacking the legitimacy to wage a war that “most of the public opposes.” He added that “the war in Gaza is eroding our morals, our values as human beings and as Jews. We will lose the right to send soldiers into battle if we don’t bring home those we already sent.”

Hagai Katz, one of Israel’s most decorated fighter pilots and part of the 1981 air strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, was also there to oppose the campaign to capture Gaza City. He told NPR that he rejected Netanyahu’s promise that the move would eliminate Hamas once and for all.

“We got promises from Netanyahu almost two years ago that only military pressure will eventually be effective. We heard it again and again,” said Katz. “That’s what we heard when he went into Rafah. That’s what he said when we moved to Khan Yunis. And now again, the same story about Gaza — but we believe we’ll get to the same outcome now, with more dead hostages and probably soldiers and Palestinians.”

When asked what he would say to Israeli pilots now striking Gaza from the air, Katz acknowledged the moral dilemma they face.

“That’s a very tough question because in today’s war, unlike 50 years ago, you don’t see the target. You get an accurate position or a picture, and you trust the system to check that there are not too many innocent bystanders around. On the other hand, realistically, we know that a lot of uninvolved people are getting killed. So they have a real dilemma: stop attacking or quit reserves — and in that, in some cases, quit protecting Israel — or keep going and kill innocent bystanders. It’s a major issue on the table.”

Would he fight in Gaza if he were still serving?

“Probably I wouldn’t,” he answered. “And if that means I would have to leave the service, I would’ve done that.”

The pilots’ protest adds to a recent petition by former heads of Israel’s security services calling for the war to end. Polls show a large majority of Israelis support ending the Gaza war in exchange for the hostages’ release. Yet the cabinet’s approval to launch a campaign to take control of Gaza City has drawn warnings from the current military chief, Israel media reported, who says such an operation could endanger the lives of the estimated 20 surviving hostages in Gaza.

So far, the army has not issued call-up orders for reserve soldiers to bolster mission. But the public debate — both in Israel and abroad — over whether the operation is legitimate is only expected to intensify as universities said they were planning to go on strike this coming Sunday.

Emily Feng contributed from Tel Aviv.

A protest against the war in Yad Mordechai, Israel, on Aug. 6 by members of Soldiers for Hostages, a group of reservists who have stated their opposition to the continued fighting in Gaza and their refusal to continue to serve.

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TEL AVIV, Israel — For 270 days, platoon commander Ron Finer fought for Israel, helping reinforce its northern border, and later, dismantling weapons caches in Lebanon. The work was hard, but the fight was just, he believed, as his country battled Hamas in the south and the militant group Hezbollah in the north.

The successive tours left him with emotional scars: Six of the soldiers he fought with died on his last tour, and he narrowly missed being shot in the head.

But the moment he described as like a switch flipping, changing how he saw the conflict entirely, was in March, when Israel ended a ceasefire with Hamas.

Ron Finer poses for a portrait at a protest against the war in Yad Mordechai, Israel on August 6, 2025. Finer is a member of Soldiers for Hostages, a group of reservists who have stated their opposition to the continued fighting in Gaza and their refusal to continue to serve.

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“This time it was so clear for me. … They don’t want this war to end any time before they conquer the whole Gaza Strip,” Finer, 26, said.

So he made up his mind. He decided to refuse a call-up to fight a fourth tour, this time in the Gaza Strip.

Finer is among a new anti-war camp emerging in Israel — soldiers themselves. He has joined a coalition of voices, including the families of hostages and human rights activists, who have been mounting growing protests across Israel, calling for an immediate ceasefire with Hamas and the return of all remaining hostages held in Gaza.

Israel’s long war in Gaza, which is approaching nearly two years, has already cost the country tens of billions of dollars, according to a national security think tank, and the lives of almost 900 service members. Soldiers say they are worn out. This spring, about 1,000 reservists signed a petition calling for the war to end. More reservists are quietly finding health or work reasons to avoid new calls up. Several like Finer have gone to prison for refusing. The military is running low on fighters. The Israeli military did not respond to an NPR request for comment.

Finer says the country is at a critical moment.

“Another day we suspend [a ceasefire] is another day Israeli soldiers could die and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the people dying every day also from hunger and also from like airstrikes,” he says.

A war with no end

Ron Finer at a protest against the war in Yad Mordechai, Israel on August 6, 2025. Finer is a member of Soldiers for Hostages, a group of reservists who have stated their opposition to the continued fighting in Gaza and their refusal to continue to serve.

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NPR spoke to six reservists and soldiers, including Finer, who had refused service this year. Some expressed moral qualms; others questioned the strategic value of continuing to fight in Gaza.

All said they were disillusioned when Israel walked away from a temporary ceasefire in March, and they were opposed to last week’s Cabinet decision to take over Gaza City, the last main area not already under Israeli military control in Gaza.

“War is an option, and it was chosen for us. I think there are always other options,” says Ella, a former reservist who quit earlier this year after having doubts about whether extending the war was justified. She asked that only her first name be used because she worked as an intelligence officer dealing with classified information.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion on Sunday that “Israel has no choice” but to pursue an escalation of the war has met stiff resistance from some of the very people who Israel needs to staff its military.

A member of Soldiers for Hostages, who asked only to be identified by his first name Itamar, poses for a portrait at a bomb shelter covered in stickers dedicated to soldiers killed in Gaza in Yad Mordechai, Israel on August 6, 2025. Soldiers for Hostages is a group of reservists who have stated their opposition to the continued fighting in Gaza and their refusal to continue to serve.

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Maya Levin/for NPR

“I served in Gaza 23 years of my life. … I know Gaza by heart,” says Matan Vilnai, a former major general and head of Israel’s southern command, which encompasses Gaza, during a Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s that came to be known as the Second Intifada.

Vilnai was one of more than 600 former senior military and intelligence officials who signed an open letter earlier this month, asking President Trump to pressure Netanyahu to end the war, arguing that Israel has already achieved its military aims in Gaza.

“We have nothing to do in Gaza. We must go out of Gaza. And we achieve nothing by dominating Gaza,” says Vilnai, explaining why he signed the letter.

“In order to save everyone who lives here, we must stop participating in this horrifying routine. Each of us, in our own way,” Finer told a rapt audience of demonstrators at a recent anti-war protest in Tel Aviv. “Fighters must stop fighting. Reservists must stop reporting for duty.”

“Amputees of the soul”

More than 61,000 Palestinians have been killed or starved to death in the war, Gaza health officials say.

But a figure that has garnered far more alarm in Israel is the spike in death by suicide among soldiers. There were seven known cases in July alone, mostly among soldiers who recently returned from fighting in Gaza.

As the mental cost of fighting the war in Gaza mounts, soldiers who served in Israel’s previous conflicts, including a 2014 war in Gaza, have been camping outside the main rehabilitation center overseen by Israel’s defense ministry, petitioning to have mental trauma officially recognized as a wartime injury.

“Before I went in, I was a kid with dreams, ambitions, motivation for life, a future. I had everything. When I came out, I came out dead. A walking person without a soul,” says Omar Amsalam, 32, who fought in the 2014 Gaza war. “We don’t walk around with a tag saying ‘combat veteran with PTSD.’ We have arms, we have legs — but we are amputees of the soul, and that’s something you can’t see.”

Nadav Weiman works with Breaking the Silence, an organization run by former Israeli soldiers which collects testimonies about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — and now, the war in Gaza. Weiman says the organization is getting twice as many anonymous tips as before the war, mostly from soldiers fighting in Gaza who are troubled by what they are witnessing or being asked to do.

“You know, when you interview a lot of people, you know that when somebody speaks very monotone like this, trying to avoid or not being attached to what he did, that’s the hardest thing,” says Weiman,

There is concern even among those who do support Israel’s army that it is wasting its blood and treasure on a war that will provide no more strategic gains.

“There isn’t any mother in the world that can understand what is the feeling to take your son to the war. But we did it, because we wanted to protect our country,” says Agamit Gelb. On Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, she helped her son report for duty.

In early August, she and several hundred other mothers of soldiers, both past and present, marched south around the Nahal Oz kibbutz, near Israel’s border with Gaza, to call for a ceasefire. She says her activism has taken on extra urgency now that she anticipates her second son is about to be drafted.

“Our sons are fighting almost two years, and it must end now. [Fighting] doesn’t bring back any hostage from Gaza right now, and it only kills more and more soldiers there,” says Gelb.

“A religious war”

Gelb’s concerns mirror the political tension emerging over the aim of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Netanyahu has maintained the purpose of Israel’s war in Gaza is to destroy Hamas and free hostages, about 20 of whom are still believed to be alive. Thirty are believed to have died in captivity.

Netanyahu is politically reliant on two far-right ministers, who have far bigger plans. They have explicitly and repeatedly said Gaza should be destroyed, Palestinians removed to another country, and Jewish people allowed to build settlements in Gaza again — as they did until 2005, when Israel decided to dismantle those settlements and withdraw military forces stationed on the ground in Gaza.

These ministers’ aspiration to annex and settle Gaza exceeds what many soldiers and reservists said they can support.

“There are no military targets for this mission. It’s not a military mission anymore. It’s become a religious war. And I’m not willing to risk my life fighting other people’s wars,” says one former reservist tank commander, who requested anonymity because he fears being attacked abroad for serving in Israel’s military.

He said he had fought four tours in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and served on missions attempting to free some of the hostages taken by Hamas.

“I now acknowledge that it’s a dream. We couldn’t have any military way of bringing the people back,” he says. On the other hand, nearly 150 hostages have been returned through negotiated deals, he points out. For more people to come home, he says, the fighting needs to end.

Alon Avital and Itay Stern contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, Israel.

A woman carries a poster showing Palestinian journalists Anas al-Sharif, left, and Mohamed Qreiqeh that Israel’s military targeted and killed with an airstrike late Sunday in Gaza, during a protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah Monday, Aug. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

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The killing of Anas al-Sharif — one of Al Jazeera’s most recognizable correspondents in Gaza — signals an escalation of the dangers journalists face in covering Israel’s war against Hamas in the territory, says Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “because, Israel was very open in saying that it had targeted Anas al-Sharif, but they have not been able to explain what justified killing those other journalists.”

Al-Sharif was among six journalists killed in a targeted Israeli strike on Aug. 10. The Israeli military said al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas “rocket-firing brigade,” and published spreadsheets that it said showed he was on Hamas’ payroll. Salah Negm, Al Jazeera’s director of news, rejected those allegations calling them “completely fabricated” in an interview with Morning Edition, adding al-Sharif was “a journalist doing his job, nothing more.”

Negm said that al-Sharif had received threats from the Israeli military prior to his death. Negm said the 28-year-old journalist had chosen to live in a tent near a hospital to avoid endangering others in Gaza who were not comfortable renting to al-Sharif because Israel’s accusations against him made him a target.

Negm said the media tent was hit while five other journalists were working in it with al-Sharif. “They were never accused of anything,” he said. “They deserve protection and to be treated according to international law, humanity and compassion.”

NPR asked the Israeli military if it had proof of al-Sharif’s involvement in Hamas beyond the inclusion in the lists they published, and whether they could provide evidence that he has served as a Hamas fighter since the start of the war. NPR also asked when the lists were created, how up to date they were, and why the military decided to kill al-Sharif. The military told NPR it would not be providing any further information in response to those questions.

Ginsberg told Morning Edition that her organization is also pressing Israel to provide answers to CPJ’s questions regarding allegations against al-Sharif— and why al-Sharif and the other journalists were killed.

“We’ve seen this playbook before. It’s often preceded the killings of a journalist, and it’s often used after the killing of a journalist to excuse the killing by Israel,” Ginsberg said. She added that CPJ is now investigating at least 26 cases in which she said journalists have been directly targeted by Israel.

“In some of those cases, Israel has alleged that those individuals were terrorists — again, either without providing evidence or providing evidence that is questionable, as is the case of Anas al-Sharif, or evidence that is not possible to corroborate independently,” Ginsberg said.

The CPJ CEO added that, “experts have repeatedly raised questions about the nature of the documents and the veracity of the documents themselves.” She cites the example of another Al Jazeera journalist, Ismail al-Ghoul, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2024, saying, “the documents that Israel provided would have had him as a commander of a battalion, I believe, at age ten.”

The CPJ is calling for a transparent investigation into the killing of the six journalists and holding those responsible to account. Since the war began, Ginsberg says 192 journalists have been killed in Gaza, primarily by the Israeli military.

Ginsberg added that Israel is obligated to investigate and explain the attack on Anas al-Sharif under international law. “When those rules are ignored, some of these killings amount to war crimes.”

This digital article was edited by Obed Manuel. The radio version of this story was produced by Ana Perez and Iman Maani.