Palestine

By Ahmed Dremly in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
14 December 2025 12:47 GMT

Since winter began, Saber has lived in constant fear. Their fragile tent offered little protection from rain or wind, and he knew it could collapse at any moment.

Two weeks earlier, rainwater had already flooded the tent, reaching nearly 30cm. His daughters fell ill with colds that lasted for days. Desperate to prevent it from happening again, Saber borrowed money from one of his relatives to buy a plastic tarpaulin and reinforced the tent with wooden poles.

But when the latest storm hit Gaza a few days ago, his efforts proved useless.

“I spent the first night of the rain holding the tent up with my own hands as rain poured in from every direction,” Saber told Middle East Eye.

“It felt like I had done nothing at all. The tent collapsed on us in the first hours of the rain.”

Last Wednesday, Palestinian teenager Owais Hammam was on a walk near his home in the West Bank village of Kharbatha Bani Harith, when he was ambushed by a group of Israeli settlers, dragged to a hilltop outpost, and beaten unconscious. From his hospital bed in Ramallah, Hammam spoke to photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh, recounting how both settlers and Israeli soldiers took part in his brutal torture.

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Dec 14, 2025

Also:

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• The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters

https://breachmedia.ca/revealed-bmo-bankrolled-israeli-weapons-maker-with-a-90m-loan/

By Maha Hussaini in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
13 December 2025 09:44 GMT

“From the first day we came back, we heard bombardment, demolitions and gunfire,” Hamed said.

“It would start at sunset and continue until dawn.”

At first, they assumed the explosions were far away, believing the Yellow Line was still distant.

But now, Hamed can see the yellow concrete blocks placed by Israeli forces from his window – a sight that wasn’t there just weeks ago.

Across Gaza, the temporary demarcation line has been shifting, creeping ever closer to densely populated areas and fuelling fears of renewed displacement and violence by Israel.

"If Saed is dead he would be most senior militant to be killed since October ceasefire, in attack on car that reportedly left four dead"

By Mera Aladam
12 December 2025 10:20 GMT

Overall, at least 13 buildings - already partly damaged from Israeli bombing - collapsed due to heavy rain and strong winds, according to the Gaza-based Government Media Office. Some people remain trapped under the rubble, with others wounded.

Meanwhile, over 27,000 tents of displaced families have been destroyed or swept away by floods and strong winds. More than 250,000 displaced people have been affected by rain, floods, and collapsing shelters.

Over 4,300 distress calls have been made across the Gaza Strip since the storm began earlier this week, the Ministry of Interior and National Security said.

Despite limited resources, the ministry said search-and-rescue civil defence teams, along with police, are doing their best to help people

Award-winning Palestinian reporter Mohammed Mhawish, who left Gaza last year, joins us to discuss his new piece for New York magazine about Israel’s surveillance practices. It describes how Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza have been watched, tracked and often killed by Israeli forces who have access to their most intimate details, including phone and text records, social relations, drone footage, biometric data and artificial intelligence tools.

This all-encompassing surveillance system is “reshaping how people speak, how they’re moving, how they’re even thinking,” says Mhawish. “It manufactured behavior for people, so they shrink their lives to reduce risk, they rehearse what version of themselves feels safest to present, and that creates an enormous psychological burden.”

Mhawish also describes the terror of when his family’s house was bombed, killing two of his cousins and two neighbors in an attack he says was linked to Israeli surveillance of his reporting activities. “I was being watched and tracked,” he says.

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>> The [BBC's new antisemitism] training, ... says: "Antisemites frequently use the word 'Zionist' ..., when they are in fact referring to Jews, whether in Israel or elsewhere.

>> "Those claiming to be 'anti-Zionist, not antisemitic', should do so in the knowledge that many Jewish people consider themselves to be Zionists."

>> The course was made by the BBC Academy in conjunction with the Jewish Staff Network, the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Community Security Trust (#CST).

>> The #BBC training also incorporates the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (#IHRA) definition of antisemitism ...

Khaled Hroub
9 December 2025 09:16 GMT

In a time of deep Palestinian anguish, the national football team's successive victories in the Arab Cup, currently taking place in Qatar, have ignited a rare and precious sense of unity.

This joy begins in the rain-soaked tents of displaced families in Gaza, stretches to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and ripples across Palestinian communities worldwide.

From Rafah comes Ihab Abu Jazar, the team's coach, whose family home was destroyed and whose mother was moved to a tent in the Mawasi area. He becomes, suddenly, a beacon of hope.

For a fleeting moment, his squad delivers triumph on the green pitch, qualifying for the next round and dedicating the victory first to Gaza and then to Palestinians everywhere.

Behind the Fida'i, the team's nickname meaning fighter, a collective spirit emerges. It transcends sport, reflecting a profound yearning among Palestinians to reclaim an unfragmented identity, free from the suffocating grip of political division and despair.

The national soccer team made it to the knockout stages of the Arab Cup for the first time, uniting fans from Gaza to the West Bank to Cairo to Arab cities in Israel.

https://archive.ph/8DQK4

Dec. 12, 2025

In Gaza, nearly 50 men, teenagers and boys made their way through a stormy night and muddy, flooded streets to a makeshift cafe in a tent on the outskirts of Khan Younis, where a technician worked frantically to get the game’s livestream playing on a big TV powered by solar panels and batteries, and the cafe’s owner fed cardboard boxes and paper scraps into a fire to make hot drinks and heat the room.

Ismail Nasser al-Din, 20, sat dripping wet, clutching a Palestinian flag. He said he had lost his brother, a cousin and a friend in the war. “I hope our team will win,” he said. “We need any reason to laugh, enjoy and get some relief.”

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- Nearly 795,000 Palestinians in Gaza at heightened risk from storm: UN

Lubna Masarwa
11 December 2025 22:50 GMT
Last update: ~1000 EST

Storm Byron began lashing Gaza on Wednesday with torrential rain and flooding continuing into Thursday, and is expected to last through the week.

Hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Israel's ongoing genocidal war were huddling in tent camps that offer no protection from the elements, with many already swamped due to the mass bombing of sewage and drainage systems.

Two months into the so-called "ceasefire", this vulnerable population faces the worst of winter and the rapid spread of disease, with literally nowhere dry to shelter.

Moreover, Israel is still blocking aid. More than 6,500 trucks are waiting at the crossings to be let into Gaza with essential winter supplies, including tents, blankets, warm clothing and hygiene materials. As they wait, children are going barefoot and wearing summer clothes in the freezing cold.

Thu 11 Dec 2025 00.00 EST

I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse.

At the end of the second intifada, there were, according to the UN, 376 checkpoints and barriers in the West Bank. Today there are an estimated 849, many of them erected in the last two years.

At least 14 Palestinians have died in the last 24 hours from plummeting temperatures and collapsing buildings amid Storm Byron in Gaza, Wafa news agency is reporting.

The figure includes at least three children who died from hypothermia.

Civil defence services reported that six people died when a house collapsed in the Bir al-Naaja area in northern Gaza. They added that two others had died after a wall collapsed in Gaza City's al-Rimal neighbourhood, while another died in Shati refugee camp- also from a wall collapse.

They added that around 15 houses have collapsed across Gaza, leaving rescue teams scrambling to recover people from the rubble.