The terms of Tuesday’s ceasefire declaration matter less than the new leverage, measured in international will, with which Palestinians now approach the negotiating table.

As a much-anticipated ceasefire took hold Tuesday, punctuating Gaza’s horrifying stretch without sleep or succor, spontaneous celebrations erupted throughout the Arab world. But the most jubilant displays were, of course, in Gaza itself, where residents shed the anxiety of a 50-day Israeli war for the simple pleasures of an evening outside.

Palestinians flash victory signs as hundreds of Gazans gather in the streets to celebrate the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on August 26, 2014 in Gaza City. (photo: Activestills)

It had too long been a pleasure denied. For most of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians, the right to congregate, to walk the streets without the threat of Israeli airstrikes or shelling was enough to pry victory from the rubble all around them. But some are already wondering: Once the euphoria settles, will the broad-brush terms of yesterday’s deal outweigh the costs borne by this besieged enclave?

To put that question in context, consider the children. More Palestinian children were killed in the last seven weeks than in the last five years combined. And nearly 10 times as many were killed during this Israeli operation – dubbed “Protective Edge” – than during Israel’s full-scale assault on the West Bank in 2002, known as “Defensive Shield.”

These numbers are no doubt staggering, especially against the backdrop of an eight-year siege that has left no respite from the killing, and no way for Gaza’s Palestinians to protect themselves or their children. But in all the sadness wrought by Israel’s multi-front war on a civilian population – by naval battleships, by tanks, by drones and F-16s – what matters most in this war’s wake is not the number of dead, but the fundamental question their sacrifice has raised.

The question isn’t whether 500 Palestinian children’s lives were worth the sacrifice, or whether 50 somehow would have been better. No, the question raised by this war-of-one-army is precisely this: By what law of man or nature is the killing of children so facile, so unchecked?

The answer has nothing to do with alleged militants.

The third of three Gaza towers felled by Israeli F-16s housed, among other offices, a media consultancy representing several international news organizations. But when Al Basha Tower was hit early Tuesday morning, that consultancy had already been driven out by Israeli shelling, which had destroyed its eighth-floor office on July 30.

“The first time we were hit, it was a random Israeli shell,” said Saud Abu Ramadan, who has owned the office since 2007 and works as a stringer for American, Spanish, and Japanese news outlets. “But this time,” the 50-year-old Abu Ramadan told +972, “the IDF called building occupants and told us to leave.”

The remains of the Zafer 4 tower in Gaza. (photo: Jehad Saftawi)

Unprecedented in their scale and impact, Israel’s attacks over the last 50 days have made a random shelling seem like a free pass. But with three high rises leveled in the last three days, some observers of Netanyahu’s war are asking why. Why have the Israelis upped the ante – from shelling a building randomly to executing what amounts to a demolition order?

The answer has nothing to do with alleged militants-in-hiding. After all, Israel deliberately encouraged the buildings’ occupants to leave. According to residents, the military called several of them and told them to flee along with hundreds of others in neighboring buildings, also rumored to be on the strike list. If there were some massive clandestine operation that “required” Israel to destroy a whole building, it could have done what it had no qualms doing before – killing entire families to extrajudicially “target” a single suspect. But this time, there was no attempt to strike without warning. No, Israel wanted the world to watch as the towers fell.

If that sounds all-too-familiar, it should. The parallels with America’s 9/11, which killed close to 3,000 people, would end there. Except that it was Netanyahu himself who used the 2001 attacks to fashion his tactics against the Palestinians. Speaking to a New York Times reporter the day of the attacks, Netanyahu called them “very good” for U.S.-Israel relations, and, within just six months, his country’s government was using them to justify its massive invasion of the West Bank,...

An affidavit obtained exclusively by +972 reveals what appears to be the first documented case of a ‘human shield’ used by the Israeli military during its invasion of the eastern Gaza town of Khuza’a.

Ahmad Abu Raida, now 17, was separated from his family by Israeli soldiers on July 23 as he and his family were trying to flee to safety. During Abu Raida’s five-day captivity, an Israeli soldier, who insisted he be called “captain,” repeatedly asked the boy about alleged Hamas tunnels and rocket launching sites in his neighborhood.

“I told him I did not know,” Abu Raida, who was 16 years old at the time of the incident, said. “‘I’m young. I’m 17 years old. How am I supposed to know these things?’ I said to him, but he became angry and started punching and kicking me.”

Abu Raida’s case was documented by Defense for Children International-Palestine, which released a statement Thursday based on the affidavit it collected. +972 spoke with the 17-year-old earlier today.

Trying to escape

Abu Raida’s ordeal followed two days of intense shelling from Israeli tanks, which had crossed the Gaza border near to his home. When his family decided to try and escape on foot, they were stopped by Israeli soldiers.

“I heard a soldier on one of the tanks ordering women, children and old people to stand on one side, and those between 20 and 40 years old to stand on the other side of the street,” Abu Raida said in the affidavit.

After seeing that men in the 20-40 group were taken to an empty field and made to strip down to their underwear, the 17-year-old “took two steps back to see what was going on.”

When he did, Abu Raida said an Israeli soldier took him to the open field, about 100 meters from the group of men, tied his hands with a plastic chord, and forced him to kneel down. According to Abu Raida, the soldier then proceeded to punch him in the stomach and face while saying repeatedly, “You’re not human, you’re a dog.”

At around 4 p.m., according to the affidavit, the men were taken away for questioning and the women, children and older residents were released. Abu Raida was blindfolded, made to strip to his underwear, and taken to a house.

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As evidence of Israeli war crimes mounts in Gaza, Netanyahu’s latest escalation will only add to his country’s increasing international pariah status.

Just over 24 hours after reports emerged that Israel and the Palestinians – with American urging – had reached a deal to gradually end the Gaza blockade, Israel began targeting the very people with whom it had been indirectly negotiating. Following a reported assassination attempt on Hamas military wing leader Mohammed Deif, which instead killed his wife and young child, Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said she would “always support the targeted killings of terror leaders,” adding unequivocally: “I do not negotiate with Hamas.”

A Palestinian man retrieves his belongings from the rubble of a destroyed house in Beit Hanoun following bombardment by Israeli forces, northern Gaza Strip, August 11, 2014. According to OCHA, 16,800 homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or severely damaged, leaving 370,000 displaced. (photo: Activestills)

But Israel’s about-face doesn’t add up. Ultimately, the indirect talks in Cairo have always been with Hamas, and though they have been tense from the get-go, preceding periods of calm – the most recent lasting six days, and interrupted first by last Friday’s Israeli fire at residential areas in Khan Younis – have yielded hope for a long-term truce. When that hope dimmed, the ensuing violence fell within predictable, if no less horrifying, parameters – Gaza’s resistance fired rockets, and Israel’s military bombed what it termed “terror targets.” But this time those “targets” are not the facilities – hospitals, schools, factories – Israel has struck over the past six weeks; they are individual Hamas leaders.

The move suggests a zero-sum Israeli strategy aimed at “eliminating” any of the people capable of forging a way out of the current confrontation. This strategy was tried in 2012 when Israel assassinated top Hamas negotiator Ahmad Jabari, prompting Hamas retaliation and a nine-day Israeli assault that cost the lives of more than 400 Palestinians. Given that operation’s failure to achieve Israeli Prime Minister...

In Jabaliya sustained Israeli shelling has obliterated entire families, leaving them homeless and with few options to rebuild.

Scenes of destruction abound along Gaza’s eastern border. From its northern tip to the southern town of Rafah, entire blocks along this 25-mile-long strip have been flattened, displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, overwhelming the makeshift shelters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and threatening to delay the beginning of the school year here.

But for all the trauma felt by the newly displaced, residents of Gaza’s refugee camps have suffered an especially cruel fate since Israel began its ground and air invasion five weeks ago. Nowhere is that more pronounced than in Jabaliya, where sustained Israeli shelling has obliterated entire families, leaving them homeless and with few options to rebuild.

“UNRWA can only help people in its schools,” says 27-year-old Yusef Balata, who was just outside his home when Israeli shells killed all 11 family members inside, including five children. Balata and his cousins have returned to the scene everyday since the July 29 attack, picking through the rubble for reminders of the departed.

Ahmad Balata, 18, holds up a bib and tells me it belonged to his one-year-old cousin, whose body was buried in parts. Ahmad stands nearly seven feet tall but seems to shrink at the thought. He kneels down again and finds a birth certificate, a prescription, an immunization record – all bearing his cousin’s name.

Ahmad Balata digs through the rubble to find reminders of his one-year-old cousin, whose body was buried in parts (photo: Samer Bedawi)

Home to more than 100,000 people, the Jabaliya refugee camp is Gaza’s largest. Most here hail from villages and towns that were either destroyed during Israel’s creation or “cleansed” of their Palestinian inhabitants and rebranded with Hebrew names. But ask anyone in this 1.4-square-kilometer space, and they can still name where their families’ homes used to be.

That’s no minor detail for a population that, like Gaza’s itself, is mostly below the age of 29 – and certainly too young to remember the Palestinians’ 1948 nakba, or catastrophe. Unlike that first generation of displaced, though, Jabaliya’s youth have known only this ramshackle life, where...

Reporters seize upon the list of Gaza’s most recent victims, only to parse their death certificates for proof that they, too, did not deserve to die.

“Journalism,” wrote the Swedish war correspondent Stig Dagerman, “is the art of coming too late as early as possible.” The dictum resounds in Gaza, where an eight-year Israeli siege – which has left this land all but unlivable – went woefully underreported well before Gaza was is in the throes of war. As Palestinian families again count their dead, that journalistic negligence, say human rights workers, leaves much of the reporting here dangerously devoid of context.

One glaring example of this is the notion that Palestinian civilians are only killed when Israel launches full-scale assaults – by air, land and sea – “to defend itself.” In fact, death by Israeli fiat is as routine here as the siege itself.

Consider the case of Odeh Hamad, a young man who was fatally shot by Israeli snipers on December 20, 2013. Hamad was collecting scrap metal to sell for cash – a familiar stop-gap of Gaza’s unemployed, who, even before this latest Israeli assault, represented more than 40 percent of Gaza’s population. According to his brother, who was with him and spoke a day after the killing, Hamad was a kilometer away from Israel’s unilaterally delineated “border fence” when he was shot, posing no threat to the heavily armed soldiers in their concrete turrets.

Hamad, of course, was not the first to be gunned down along Gaza’s so-called “buffer zone,” which at the time rendered off-limits “nearly 14 percent of Gaza’s total land and at least 48 percent of [its] total arable land,” according to Harvard researcher Sara Roy (the estimates are higher now). You wouldn’t know it from the Western press, though, which has largely ignored the buffer zone and its consequences.

It’s all the more galling, then, when reporters seize upon the list of Gaza’s most recent victims, only to parse their death certificates for proof that they, too, did not deserve to die. Case in point: On August 5, The New York Times ran an article by Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren titled, “Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead From the Gaza Conflict.” The money quote, according to Mahmoud Abu Rahmeh of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, is this:

I have heard the sounds of war before. In Iraq, I was jolted from sleep by the sound of incoming rockets, massive truck bombs, and exploding IEDs. In Afghanistan, I temporarily lost my hearing when an explosives-packed SUV detonated meters from my office. I have heard windows shatter and bystanders scream. And I have seen the aftermath: sinewy flesh, bone shards, jaw fragments.

But I have never heard the discord of sounds, the cacophony of violence, that Gaza’s Palestinians – all of them – know so well. Here, the ever-present drone of machines overhead mingles with the scream of jet sorties, tank shelling, and bursts of heavy guns from naval battleships. Here, modern warfare’s full range of fronts is audible everywhere and all at once.

I share a flat with two Palestinian journalists in the heart of Gaza City. Each night, we sit on the balcony floor in the dark and listen to the drones. Sometimes they seem to hover just over us, stationary and menacing. Once, my colleague snapped a photo, and the flash went off. We crawled inside in a hurry, wondering whether the drone operator, somewhere far away, would think the snap something else and decide to “liquidate” us.

The sound of Israeli drones is ever-present in Gaza’s skies (via Lara Aburamadan):

Mostly, though, there’s no time for such calculations. When we hear an F-16 begin to descend, we have no idea where the missile will fall. The one exception is when a drone “knocks” on the target beforehand. When that happens, we grab our cameras and wait for the strike. It usually comes within a few minutes. In other cases, all we hear is the gathering thunder of jet engines, a pause as the “payload” is released, and then a massive boom followed by the reverb of debris crashing to the ground. Sometimes, our building shakes.

An August 1 airstrike on the Islamic University in the heart of Gaza City (via Lara Aburamadan):

Occasionally, especially at night, we’ll hear an F-16 swoop in, see the plume of smoke it leaves in its wake – but notice that there is no explosion. We have no idea why these strikes...

While prospects for a negotiated end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza remain bleak, making use of the existing sea passage to Gaza could offer a way forward for all parties, including Egypt.

As negotiations to end the bloodshed in Gaza continue in Cairo, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said today that some 65,000 homes had been destroyed by Israeli bombing, leaving more than a quarter of the Gazan population seeking shelter – half of them at UNRWA schools. Aid organizations say the recovery effort will take years and, even then, only if Gaza has unfettered access to the construction materials it needs to rebuild.

Getting there hinges, in part, on whether Israel will allow the free movement of goods through existing land crossings into Gaza. But Palestinian negotiators have insisted that those entry points are insufficient and have called for Israel to relinquish its control over another key passage – the Mediterranean coast.

The sun setting on the Mediterranean Sea where fishing boats are docked at Gaza City Port, Gaza City, Gaza, February 5, 2012 (photo: Activestills)

In a brief televised statement issued hours before the recent three-day ceasefire expired, Hamas military wing spokesperson Abu Obeida referred three times to the Gaza port, urging Palestinian negotiators to push for a lifting of the Israeli sea blockade. His emphasis could suggest an opening for the so-far stalled indirect talks in Cairo, which aim to broker a long-term truce between the two sides.

Although details of the talks have been sparse, Palestinian negotiators have said they stand behind Hamas demands to end the now eight-year land, sea and air blockade of Gaza. Broadly speaking, these demands fall into two categories: the “free flow” of people and the right to import and export goods. On the former, Israel has offered to be “more flexible” with permits for the Erez crossing, the only civilian access point between Gaza and the West Bank. On the latter, reports indicate that Israel has categorically refused to accept a recommissioning of the Gaza air and sea ports.

At the same time, Israeli negotiators have reportedly shown some flexibility on the issue of importing cement to Gaza...

In the tragedy that is the Middle East, we Palestinians have played two roles – the victim or the vilified. But Gaza is changing all that. Gaza is fighting back.

“You want to go where?”

My colleague and I have just boarded a taxi and named our destination– Rafah. Two days after the Israeli military had sealed Gaza’s southernmost town, claiming Hamas fighters had kidnapped one of its own, few images had emerged of the ensuing destruction. We wanted to see for ourselves.

We were not alone, of course. Thousands of families displaced from points north, east and south along Gaza’s border with Israel have seized any lull in the bombing to try and return to their homes, to survey the damage and salvage what they can from the rubble. That day, the Israelis announced that they would grant a limited respite – everywhere but Rafah.

Abu Deema, our driver, hears the word, tightens his grip on the steering wheel, and nods his head. “Ok,” he says, “yallah.” The Arabic expression is a conjunction of sorts, two words made one, meaning literally: “Oh, God.” In day-to-day conversation, though, yallah means “let’s go.”

Palestinians carry a body recovered from destroyed houses in the village of Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, August 1, 2014. Hundreds of residents returned to Khuza’a at the beginning of a ceasefire to recover bodies and salvage possessions. (Anne Paq/Activestills.org)

The day-to-day here is filled with the makeshift tactics of civilians in war. The aim is simple: to survive. Before he shifts into drive, Abu Deema reaches over my knees and into the glove compartment, pulls out a roll of...

Local residents tell me that previous Israeli attacks on Beit Hanoun had targeted homes much closer to the border. This time, the military took aim at the center of town. Why? 

As negotiations over a long-term Gaza truce draw to a close in Cairo, their success may hinge on a key Hamas demand – facilitating civilian access to the West Bank. The demand, say observers here, is about more than humanitarian needs. Linking the two territories would strengthen a Palestinian reconciliation deal forged in April – a deal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to recognize.

On the ground in Gaza there is little evidence that Netanyahu intends to accede to the Hamas pre-condition. Nowhere is that more plain than in Beit Hanoun, the Palestinian town at Gaza’s northeastern edge that is home to the only civilian passage out of the territory. The lone administrative building on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing has been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, and during a site visit there on August 6, the only incoming passenger was a foreign journalist.

Erez: The lone administrative building on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing has been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike (photo: Samer Badawi)

Nearby residents say the desolation is nothing new. Permission to exit through Erez falls to the Israeli Security Agency, and permits are limited to “humanitarian cases, with an emphasis on urgent medical” ones, according to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha.

What’s different after Israel’s latest military campaign here is that the areas surrounding Erez have themselves become no-go zones, pummeled by shelling and airstrikes that have displaced thousands and destroyed homes deep into the heart of Beit Hanoun.

A stone’s throw from the centrally located UN-run school shelled by Israel on July 24, killing at least 15 people seeking shelter there, 10-year-old Ahmad Kafarneh is camped out with his father, younger sister and cousin, across from a pile of rubble that used to be their home in Beit Hanoun. When I ask Ahmad where exactly his home was, he points to a wooden trunk shorn of bark, and tells me: “There, where the tree used...

A thousand words cannot frame them, these scenes of a Gaza apocalypse. Walk its ruins with a pen, and you yearn for tools more mighty – to move tons from the memories beneath, to cast trauma to the sea.

But a writer writes; he cannot right wrongs. Each story attests to that. Today, as I climbed through the rubble of yet another erstwhile town, a group of men from the El Ejleh family called out to me. “We need help,” they said. When I demurred, as I so often must, they dialed down to this: “Tell the world, at least. Tell them what happened to us.”

The Ejleh family lived behind the Wafa Hospital in Gaza’s Sha’af neighborhood. Here’s all that’s left of their home.

That much I can do. But is it enough?

In Arabic, there is a saying, a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad. Roughly, it says: if you spot a wrong, change it with your hands. If you can’t, then change it with your words. And if all else fails, well, change it in your heart.

And that, goes the saying, “is the weakest of faith.”

So the writer falls in the middle — not heroic, not hapless. But there are days when words simply fail. Today was one of them.

Today, I went to Sha’af, a community that sits just west of an Israeli tank unit — the same one, presumably, that flattened it to the ground. Six-story buildings stood my height. Corrugated tin hung mangled from phone cables. And everywhere the faces – anguished, ashen faces – looked for signs of what was.

Just then I found one — at the foot of an elevator shaft, a concrete hull angled against a wall. It was a teal wall, the color of something I had seen once. As I struggled to mine the memory, I found a paper beneath a rock, a half-shredded document that read “El Wafa.”

And there it was: the place where Dr. Basman Alashi, executive director of the El Wafa Medical Rehabilitation Hospital, had written about life in a hospital under siege. When I interviewed him at the beginning of this war – this war of one army...

As the ranks of Gaza’s internally displaced continue to grow, communities are forming in the most unlikely places.

The Boys Preparatory School “A” is home to hundreds of Palestinians from eastern Rafah, where fierce fighting forced them to flee to the UN-run shelter. The school sits on a quiet street just off Rafah’s Nijmeh Circle, but on August 3, its residents were jarred by an explosion so loud that it left Ashraf Eid’s ears ringing.

“I jumped up to go see what was happening,” said Eid, 22, who has been at the school with his extended family for 24 days. Trained in first aid, he rushed to the scene to find shrapnel-pierced bodies and children screaming. An Israeli airstrike had killed ten people, including an employee of the UN Relief and Works Agency, two passers-by, and seven others who had sought shelter at the school.

Salah Salameen and his cousin, both 24, were injured by shrapnel from the August 3 strike. They were discharged from the Kuwaiti Hospital the day of the attack because there were no beds left for them. (photo: Samer Badawi)

The next day, when I met him, Ashraf was sitting behind a desk in the school’s courtyard, surrounded by children and selling biscuits and cigarettes – a makeshift business amid the shock gripping this haggard community.

I asked him if he and the others contemplated leaving after Sunday’s attack. “Where would we go?” he said. “Anyway, when it’s our time to die, we will die.”

That kind of fatalism pervades every conversation in Gaza. When death comes – literally – from above, there is no agency, no way to hedge against the inevitability of fate.

Another of the school’s residents, Mohammad Al-Jaafari, tried to buck fate last Friday, when he made for his home in Shoka, near Gaza’s would-be airport. He left after the day’s ceasefire took effect, at 8 a.m. By 9:30 that morning, the fighting had resumed. He never made it.

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In Cast Lead, some 5,300 Palestinians were injured. This time around, the number is almost twice that – with no end in sight.  

Hebron-born oncologist Haitham Al Amleh had never seen Gaza. Like most Palestinians from the West Bank, he had been barred from traveling here by an Israeli-imposed permit system that has made movement between the West Bank and this teeming strip all-but-impossible for Palestinians.

On Friday, 30-year-old Al Amleh entered Gaza for the first time with a delegation of 30 West Bank and Jerusalem-based doctors. Denied entry via the Israeli-controlled Erez crossing, they travelled to Egypt and entered through Rafah, where they had to wait out several hours of Israeli airstrikes which also stranded dozens of Palestinian families attempting to exit the strip.

“When we arrived to Al Shifa, there was only one oncologist tending to all the cancer cases,” says Al Amleh, whose delegation is hunkered down at the facility along with other staff, long-term patients, and hundreds of displaced residents from Gaza’s eastern border with Israel.

A Palestinian man watches on as a child breathes through a medical ventilator (photo: Activestills.org)

Al Amleh points out that in addition to the strain Gaza’s medical facilities face from a now month-long Israeli military operation, doctors are struggling to cope with complicated medical conditions, such as cancer, that require specialized care.

On Sunday alone, Al Amleh estimates that he saw close to 100 patients. “In many cases,” he says, “we lack the proper equipment and medicines to treat them” – a reality that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has traced to the eight-year Israeli siege. He adds that the most dangerous cases are awaiting transfer to specialized facilities outside Gaza, including Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital, where Al Amleh works.

But the transfers require Israel’s permission, which can take too long to obtain. The Israeli military announced on July 20 that it had opened a field hospital for injured Palestinian civilians, but reporters who were invited to tour the facility on August 1 found it empty.

For those who can’t make it to specialized hospitals like Augusta Victoria, Al Shifa remains their only option. But these days, the place feels more like a frontline field...