THE SET-UP: There has been a lot of good reporting on Gaza and, specifically, on the human toll of Israel’s Sherman-esque military campaign. Both Haaretz and 972+ Magazine have delivered devastating reports on the IDF’s rules of engagement (or lack thereof), and Reuters recently took a deep, analytical dive into the into the causalities and found that the IDF has “wiped out” 1,238 Palestinian families … meaning those families are left with “no survivors” if the baseline definition of a family is a married couple and their children. That accounts for 70% of the 1,238. The other 30% are extended families. Follow the link if you didn’t see the story when it ran on the first of March. It’s impressive work.
I also want to point out CNN’s often unflinching reporting throughout the entirety of the war. They broke a key story on the sexualized abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees and their comprehensive report on the targeting of civilian infrastructure was haunting. They’ve also aired a lot of footage that other US news networks would never touch … video from hospitals often flooded with wounded children … some terribly injured, others dead or dying … and some maimed for life.
And no one has distinguished themselves more than CNN’s Jeremy Diamond. Take a look at his latest on a hospital coping with the IDF’s resumption of bombing.
Casualties at this Gaza hospital arrive in horse-drawn carts due to lack of fuel
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/24/world/video/gaza-hospitals-blockade-diamond-pkg-digvid
It’s just too bad that so few Americans will see it. - jp
TITLE: One family. One attack. 132 names.
https://apps.npr.org/gaza-building-israel-strike-casualties/
EXCERPTS: The Abu Naser family’s building was hit on Oct. 29, 2024, just months before a ceasefire.
The day after the strike, the Israeli military said it had targeted an “enemy spotter” acting as a lookout on the roof and posing a threat to Israeli forces. The military declined to release visual evidence.
We spoke with one of the few survivors.
Waseem Abu Naser, 32, was taken to a hospital in northern Gaza.
The night before the strike, he says he was on the top floor of his family’s five-story building.
Like many in Gaza during the war, he was sheltering with his extended family and neighbors.
The family says more than 200 people were gathered in the building that night.
Shoemakers. Electricians. University students. Grandparents. Young children.
Their neighborhood was under a fierce Israeli offensive that cut off most aid, besieged hospitals and killed thousands in the ensuing months. The Israeli military says it was fighting a Hamas battalion trying to regroup, and dropped leaflets calling on civilians to evacuate. Most fled.
“We packed our bags,” Waseem Abu Naser said.
But there was intense firing, and Israeli drones swarmed the neighborhood. Waseem says it became too dangerous to escape. Then the Israeli military hit the house next door. Debris flew into the family’s building, filling the stairwell with rubble and trapping almost everyone inside.
He and his family gathered in the living room. They put mattresses on the floor and prayed.
The big strike came the next morning, around 4 a.m.
The entire building came crashing down.
Waseem Abu Naser was trapped under the rubble with his 7-year-old son.
“I heard my son saying, ‘Dad, I’m suffocating.’ I told him, ‘Take a breath. They’re coming to get us out.’”
About a half hour later, he heard his cousin Mohammed Nabil’s voice.
It was Mohammed Nabil Abu Naser, 27. He was sheltering nearby and came to rescue his relatives.
“When I looked at the ground, it was all bodies and body parts,” Mohammed Nabil said.
Gaza rescue services couldn’t help. They were blocked by an Israeli military siege on the area.
“They told me: Handle it on your own.”
Mohammed Nabil Abu Naser said he called on neighbors to help pull out the wounded and dead. They prepared burial shrouds.
His cousin Ola Abu Naser, 27, sheltering nearby, came to help.
She wrote down the names of the dead, one by one.
That day, they buried over 100 relatives in mass graves.
By her most recent count, 132 relatives and two friends sheltering with them were killed. 134 people in total. More than 40 were wounded.
Almost every branch of the family had multiple relatives who were killed or wounded.
More than 40% of the dead were children.
The youngest victim: a baby girl named Sham, 6 weeks old. Ola Abu Naser buried the baby together with her father in the same shroud.
Waseem Abu Naser, whom we spoke to at the hospital, lost his wife, father, grandfather and four of his five siblings. His mother, sister and two young children were wounded.
NPR asked Airwars, a group in London that tracks civilian harm in global conflicts, to review the incident.
Out of more than 1,000 strikes the group has assessed in the Gaza war, it said, the strike on the building housing the Abu Naser family was among the three deadliest.
TITLE: As Israeli bombs fell, wounded children overwhelmed this Gaza hospital. Dozens died
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-ceasefire-israel-hospital-children-f70b6205d99a14ffc4cfd14bfeed8944
EXCERPTS: [March 22, 2025] When the first explosions in Gaza this week started around 1:30 a.m., a visiting British doctor went to the balcony of a hospital in Khan Younis and watched the streaks of missiles light up the night before pounding the city. A Palestinian surgeon next to him gasped, “Oh no. Oh no.”
After two months of ceasefire, the horror of Israeli bombardment was back. The veteran surgeon told the visiting doctor, Sakib Rokadiya, they’d better head to the emergency ward.
Torn bodies soon streamed in, carried by ambulances, donkey carts or in the arms of terrified relatives. What stunned doctors was the number of children.
“Just child after child, young patient after young patient,” Rokadiya said. “The vast, vast majority were women, children, the elderly.”
This was the start of a chaotic 24 hours at Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital in southern Gaza. Israel shattered the ceasefire in place since mid-January with a surprise barrage that began early Tuesday and was meant to pressure Hamas into releasing more hostages and accepting changes in the truce’s terms. It turned into one of the deadliest days in the 17-month war.
The aerial attacks killed 409 people across Gaza, including 173 children and 88 women, and hundreds more were wounded, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between militants and civilians.
More than 300 casualties flooded into Nasser Hospital. Like other medical facilities around Gaza, it had been damaged by Israeli raids and strikes throughout the war, leaving it without key equipment. It was also running short on antibiotics and other essentials. On March 2, when the first, six-week phase of the ceasefire technically expired, Israel blocked entry of medicine, food and other supplies to Gaza.
Nasser Hospital’s emergency ward filled with wounded, in a scene described to The Associated Press by Rokadiya and Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American pediatrician — both volunteers with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Wounded came from a tent camp sheltering displaced that missiles set ablaze and from homes struck in Khan Younis and Rafah, further south.
One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon from California with the medical charity MedGlobal, rushed immediately to the area where the hospital put the worst-off patients still deemed possible to save.
But the very first little girl he saw -- 3 or 4 years old -- was too far gone. Her face was mangled by shrapnel. “She was technically still alive,” Sidhwa said, but with so many other casualties “there was nothing we could do.”
He told the girl’s father she was going to die. Sidhwa went on to do some 15 operations, one after another.
Khaled Alserr, a Palestinian surgeon, and an Irish volunteer surgeon were doing the same. There was a 29-year-old woman whose pelvis was smashed, the webbing of veins around the bones was bleeding heavily. They did what they could in surgery, but she died 10 hours later in the intensive care unit.
There was a 6-year-old boy with two holes in his heart, two in his colon and three more in his stomach, Sidhwa said. They repaired the holes and restarted his heart after he went into cardiac arrest.
He, too, died hours later.
“They died because the ICU simply does not have the capacity to care for them,” Sidhwa said.
TITLE: ‘I would prefer this over killing children:’ Why some Israeli teens are choosing jail over the army
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/24/middleeast/israel-refuseniks-teens-military-intl-cmd/index.html
EXCERPTS: At a military prison in central Israel, 18-year-old Itamar Greenberg sat in a US Army-issued army uniform as the Hollywood blockbuster “American Sniper” blared from the rec room’s TV.
But Greenberg is not a soldier, and the desert camouflage fatigues are the only military uniform the so-called refusenik - as conscientious objectors are called in Israel - has ever worn.
Greenberg has been in and out of prison for the last year, serving a total of 197 days over five consecutive sentences. Earlier this month, Greenberg was released from the Neve Tzedek prison for the last time.
His crime? Refusing to enlist after being summoned for military service, which is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis - and some minorities - over the age of 18.
Greenberg said his refusal to serve came as the “culmination of a long process of learning and moral reckoning.”
“The more I learned, the more I knew I couldn’t wear a uniform that symbolizes killing and oppression,” he said, explaining that Israel’s war in Gaza - which was launched after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023 - solidified his decision to refuse.
“There is genocide,” he said. “So we don’t need good reasons (to refuse).”
“I want this change, and I will give my life for it,” Greenberg said of his decision to serve time in prison rather than serving with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
It’s a decision that conscientious objectors like Greenberg don’t take lightly, as refusing the draft is essentially a choice of ostracization.
In Israel, the military is more than just an institution. It’s part of the social fabric, with military service and secular Jewish-Israeli identity deeply intertwined. And it starts early: From elementary school, students are taught they will one day be the soldiers who will protect children just like them, with soldiers visiting classrooms and schools explicitly encouraging students to enlist. At 16, those children receive their first recruitment orders, culminating with conscription at 18. Many see it as an honor, a duty and a rite of passage.
Greenberg has been called a self-hating Jew, antisemitic, a terrorist supporter, and a traitor, he said – even by family and friends.
“People message me on Instagram and say that they will slaughter me, as Hamas did to Israelis on October 7,” he said.
In prison, Greenberg was placed in solitary confinement after receiving threats from fellow inmates – a move that prison officials told him was “for his safety.”
Their numbers are still exceedingly small. Only a dozen Israeli teens have publicly refused to enlist on conscientious grounds since the start of the war, according to Mesarvot, an organization that supports objectors. But that number is higher than in years prior to the war.
Mesarvot told CNN that there are far more “grey refuseniks” or, people that claim mental or general health exemptions to dodge the draft and avoid the possibility of serving time behind bars. Because of the nature of those refusals, it is impossible to provide exact numbers.
Yesh Gvul, another anti-war group that supports conscientious objectors, told CNN that on average, every year, 20% of youngsters required to serve are refusing to do so, according to figures shared by the Israeli military. That number, Yesh Gvul said, includes both refuseniks and “grey refuseniks.”
On Saturday, around a dozen of those refuseniks met at the headquarters of the left-wing political coalition Hadash to prepare for their weekly demonstration in central Tel Aviv.
Smoking a roll-up cigarette on the balcony of the building with a handful of other conscientious objectors, Lior Fogel, a 19-year-old from Tel Aviv, said she had always had “issues with the army as an institution, based on violence and force,” and managed to get a psychiatrist to sign her off with a mental health condition to get out of service.
She told CNN that it was only after she received her exemption from the army that she began to understand the role that the military plays in the systemic everyday violence of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. That injustice, she said, drives her activism today.
“The system of apartheid and the maintenance of this rule that actively oppresses another group cannot be upheld. Not only is it immoral and generally horrible, but it will end up blowing up in your face,” Fogel said.
As Fogel and the others marched to Begin Street to join thousands of people from all walks of society who were demonstrating under an umbrella of pro-democracy and anti-war, she too, acknowledged that the views of the refuseniks remain fringe.
Another refusenik at the demonstration, Iddo Elam, 18, who served time in prison for his refusal, told CNN: “I would prefer this over killing children.” According to UNICEF, more than 14,500 children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
Elam said he was hoping his protest would help fellow Israelis to understand that “the pain of Palestinians is the same as Israelis.”
When another attendee of the wider protest heard Elam talking, he interrupted to insist that the teenager’s viewpoint isn’t representative of Israeli society, and said: “That’s not true. He is a minority, and his views don’t represent what everybody else here thinks.”
But others stood by in support of dozens of objectors who chanted “peace, equality, social justice,” and held signs that read “refuse the war, mobilize for peace.”
Rakefet Lapid, whose two children also refused service years before the war, and whose family lives in one of the kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas on October 7 said: “I’m glad they are still some young people willing to say that.”