The crisis is Gaza is only growing. Here's what to know
Humanitarian officials caution that famine threatens to engulf the strip. Doctors say they are out of medicine to treat routine conditions.
Israeli leaders are threatening an even more intense ground offensive. The military is preparing for a new organization with U.S. backing to take over aid delivery, despite alarms raised from humanitarian groups that the plans won't meet the massive need and could place restrictions on those eligible. It's unclear when operations would begin or who would fund them.
'This is the deadliest and most destructive phase of Israel's war on Gaza, yet the world has turned away," said Bushra Khalidi, policy lead for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory at the humanitarian nonprofit Oxfam. "After 19 months of horror, Gaza has become a place where international law is suspended, and humanity is abandoned.'
Here's what to know about the state of affairs in Gaza.
Casualties soar from increased Israeli bombardment
Israel ended a six-week ceasefire in mid-March and resumed its attacks in Gaza, saying military pressure against Hamas was the best way to push the militant group into freeing more hostages. But ceasefire talks remain deadlocked, and scores of civilians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.
On Friday, Israeli airstrikes killed 108 — raising the death toll over the past three days to more than 200 Palestinians. Those numbers come from the Palestinian Health Ministry, a body directed by the Hamas government that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The strikes — often at night, as people sleep in their tents — have directly targeted hospitals, schools, medical clinics, mosques, a Thai restaurant-turned shelter. The European Hospital, the only remaining facility providing cancer treatments in Gaza, was put out of service.
Israel says it targets only militants and accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.
But the death toll has reached the same level of intensity as the earliest days of the war, when Israel pounded Gaza with airstrikes in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, said Emily Tripp, executive director of Airwars, an independent group in London that tracks recent conflicts.
She says preliminary data indicate the number of incidents where at least one person was killed or injured by Israeli fire hovered around 700 in April. It's a figure comparable only to October or December 2023 — one of the heaviest periods of bombardment.
In the last 10 days of March, UNICEF estimates that an average of 100 children were killed or maimed by Israeli airstrikes every day.
Almost 3,000 of the estimated 53,000 dead since Oct. 7, 2023, have been killed since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18, the ministry said.
Among those killed in recent days:
A volunteer pharmacist with the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, killed with her family in a strike on Gaza City on May 4.
A midwife from Al Awda Health and Community Association, killed with her family in another strike on May 7.
A journalist working for Qatari television network Al Araby TV, along with 11 members of his family.
Motaz Al-Bayyok, age 1. His older brother, Yusuf, 11, screamed as a shroud was parted to expose young Motaz's face.
Israeli officials threaten new ground operation
Israel shows no sign of slowing its operation in Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised this week to use even more force against Hamas, against the objections of families of hostages begging him to agree to a deal instead.
An Israeli official said the strikes Friday were preparatory actions for a larger operation, intended to send a message to Hamas that it will begin soon if there isn't an agreement to release hostages. The official was not authorized to brief media and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The war began when Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people in an Oct. 7, 2023, intrusion into southern Israel. Hamas still holds 58 of the roughly 250 hostages it took during its attack, with 23 believed to still be alive, although Israeli authorities have expressed concern for the status of three.
No food has entered Gaza for 75 days, and Palestinians go hungry
Israel has blocked food, water and supplies from reaching Gaza — where the U.N. says the entire population is reliant on aid — for more than two months. Most community kitchens have shut down. The main food providers inside Gaza — the U.N.'s World Food Program and World Central Kitchen — say they are out of food. Vegetables and meat are inaccessible or unaffordable. Palestinians queue for hours for a small scoop of rice.
Food security experts said in a stark warning Monday that Gaza would likely fall into famine if Israel doesn't lift its blockade and stop its military campaign,
Nearly half a million Palestinians face possible starvation — living in 'catastrophic' levels of hunger — and 1 million others can barely get enough food, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises.
Israel is preparing south Gaza for a new aid program
Satellite photos obtained by The Associated Press show what appear to be Israeli preparations for a new aid distribution program in Gaza, one that has come under heavy criticism from aid workers.
Satellite photos from May 10 show four bases in southern Gaza — two that are newly built in the last month and two that have been enhanced.
One, at the southwestern corner of Gaza, has been fortified with new walls. A new road connects the base to a sandy expanse of newly bulldozed land.
Another base, in the center of Gaza, appears to have been fortified with new defensive sand berms. Adjacent is a newly bulldozed lot.
The photos appear to correspond to a new aid distribution program being developed by a new group supported by the U.S.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — made up of American security contractors, former government officials, ex-military officers and humanitarian officials — says it would initially set up four distribution sites, guarded by private security firms. Each would serve 300,000 people, covering only about half of Gaza's population.
The GHF proposal said subcontractors will use armored vehicles to transport supplies from the Gaza border to distribution sites, where they will also provide security. It said the aim is to deter criminal gangs or militants from redirecting aid.
___
Sam Mednick contributed from Tel Aviv.
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Starving Palestinian children line up for meals at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Aug. 18, 2025. Photo: Moiz Salhi/Anadolu via Getty Images What killed Anne Frank? The Nazis killed Anne Frank. To suggest that any other cause was primary in her vastly premature death is tantamount to vile Holocaust denialism — which is why Holocaust denialists do indeed point out that Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This is precisely the logic that Israel's apologists in the media have deployed in recent days when it comes to the deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza. The right-wing Free Press published a story on Sunday, framed as an investigative exposé, revealing that at least 12 of the Palestinian children featured in viral images depicting the state of Israel-induced famine were not only starving, but … were also sick. 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It is the very nature of genocide to involve the destruction of conditions necessary for sustaining life, such that sickness as well as direct slaughter destroys, in part or whole, the targeted population. 'This information does not change the fact that the children depicted in this story are suffering from malnutrition due to the difficulties they face accessing aid in Gaza, as reported,' a CNN spokesperson told the Free Press, after the publication informed the network that Hajjaj, a 6-year-old girl featured in a CNN story about starvation in Gaza, was not only starving but also had an 'esophagus condition.' Founded in 2021 by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, the Free Press pitches itself as home for 'heterodox' thinking, but it has been a reliable platform for the anti-woke, anti-trans, and pro-Israel talking points of mainstream American conservatism. Weiss, who has dedicated her professional life to anti-Palestinian animus and unwavering support for Israel, is reportedly in talks with CBS's new parent company Skydance about buying the online outlet for $250 million. The Free Press is actively stoking genocide denial, but it's not the first media organ to take this odious tack of minimization. In late July, the New York Times cravenly appended a lengthy editor's note and update on a story featuring the image of emaciated 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq to include the fact that he had other health issues 'affecting his brain and his muscle development.' Even if Israel's siege were only leading to the death of Palestinians with preexisting health issues and disabilities, we would still have on our hands a case of intolerable, eugenic slaughter — as if Palestinian sick children's lives are worth less. Needless to say, Israel's project of genocide and ethnic cleansing takes aim at all Palestinians. The Free Press goes as far as to admit, 'It's not that there isn't hunger in Gaza. There is.' It's a gross understatement. As is well documented and widely recognized, Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza. This has been made clear in both intent — as expressed by Israeli government ministers — and effect, as evident in the mounting starvation-based death toll of a reported 266 people from malnutrition-related causes, likely a significant underestimate. Reports from health care workers and international humanitarian groups, the desperate direct pleas of thousands and thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and the exorbitant prices of barely available basic ingredients all confirm the same. Israeli troops, and perhaps security contractors hired by an Israeli-backed aid group, have killed over 1,400 Palestinians attempting to get food at aid sites since May. Palestinians continue to try to access these death traps daily, simply because there is not enough food elsewhere — all by Israeli design. As the historian Adam Tooze pointed out in a recent newsletter, the purposeful starvation of Gaza by Israel is exceptional. There are 11 places in the world currently where more people are at serious risk of hunger than in Gaza, including Yemen and Sudan, but Tooze pointed out that Gaza is unique: 'Being the result of deliberate policy by a powerful state, commonly regarded as belonging to the exclusive club of 'advanced economies', the mass starvation in Gaza in the summer of 2025 is quite unlike that anywhere else in the world.' Tooze added that, while around half of the populations of Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti are at risk of famine, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are. In Gaza, he writes, the 'risk of famine is total.' Read our complete coverage If a person can, after nearly two years of genocidal onslaught, witness the scenes and testimonies from Gaza — of which the images of these malnourished children are just a tiny slice — and find the main problem is that not enough people know that some of the most vulnerable in Israel's genocide have preexisting health conditions, then we are are not speaking from a framework of shared humanity. I dare say there is nothing such a person could see of Palestinians suffering that would permit them to shift their worldview at this point, because the humanity of Palestinians has been a priori excluded from it. The fact that the Free Press story's authors and publishers do not see that their claim is the modern-day equivalent to suggesting that Frank primarily died of typhus makes all too clear that they do not see Palestinians as fully human. It is a supremacist, eugenicist lens that is beneath contempt, yes, but also beneath debate. A worldview that holds Israel's righteousness firmly at its center resists destabilization — even by images of systematically starved and slaughtered children and babies. After all, Zionist propaganda has for decades had to account for the fact that Israel maims, imprisons, and slaughters children. Images of dead Palestinian children and babies did not only start circulating in this genocidal phase of the ongoing Nakba. A decade ago, the late Charles Krauthammer — a Zionist Washington Post columnist — wrote a column titled 'Moral clarity in Gaza,' praising Israel's actions during its 2014 Gaza assault, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians including over 500 children. Atrocity images circulated then, too, including photos of the mangled, limp frames of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach by Israeli missiles. Krauthammer described the children as 'telegenically killed' — a line that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself then picked up to blame Hamas for using the 'telegenically dead.' Netanyahu admits that Israel's victims are often telegenic — young children tend to be — but relies on dehumanization of Palestinians so inflexible that even the worst scenes of massacred and starved babies can be consumed without compelling immediate action against Israel as génocidaires. The Free Press's so-called corrections are a ghoulish reminder: It is not a problem of insufficient evidence, it is not a problem of knowledge, that continues to fuel, with support and funds, this genocide.
