GAZA RELIEF #134 July 14, 2025
Today's version of boarding trains for resettlement in the East; and an American beaten to death by Israeli settlers.
This is how our friends get the news that they and their families must drop everything and run.
Text message translated by Haytham.
#Urgent‼️To residents of the Gaza City area in Blocks 783, 784
⭕️In light of the Hamas terrorist organization's use of civilian areas for terrorist activities, the IDF will attack the area with extreme force.
⭕️For your security, evacuate the area immediately.🔴
⭕️Full responsibility for the residents' suffering lies with the terrorist organizations, first and foremost Hamas.
⭕️For your security, evacuate immediately.
Haitham: That's today.
[7/12/25, 4:38:50 AM] Haitham Hilles: # Urgent! A serious warning to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, ⭕️ We remind you that he imposed strict security restrictions in the maritime area adjacent to the sector where he prohibits access to the sea. Swimmers and divers from abstaining from entering the sea. Access to the sea along the sector offers you at risk
UNDERSTANDING RIDICULOUS HEADLINES
The following article presents an excellent example of why you need to actually think about the headlines that you see.
The headline is clearly leading the reader to believe that a truce has been somewhere in the offing, at least a possibility, when the reality is that there is NO TRUCE IN THE OFFING, period. Only one person in the world is remotely able to press Netanyahu and that person — one Donald Trump — is not the least interested in doing so.
Even before Netanyahu handed over the (presumably gilded) copy of his Nobel Prize nomination for Trump, there was nothing remotely leading to a truce, the most recent one of which Israel broke more than four months ago. Witkoff is running around making claims of a possible truce while Netanyahu is blowing him off and moving on with the south Gaza concentration camp, detailed below, as a de facto staging area for displacement of the Gaza population, “voluntary” or otherwise.
Witkoff is dealing with an Israeli negotiating team that has zero authority to agree to anything and the can’t go to the bathroom without the approval of Netanyahu’s far, far Right dual-citizen advisor Ron Dermer. I have ample experience with this Israeli tactic; send a delegation to pretend to be negotiating, but leave them unable to do anything. Sometimes they pretend to want progress; other times they don’t even pretend. More than one previous American ambassador to Israel has written of their experience dealing with such teams.
NYTimes: Plan to Indefinitely Displace Palestinians Threatens to Derail Gaza Truce
BBC: Outrage builds over plan to force all Gazans to southern city
History demonstrates how this works, in British South Africa, the Congo, German Southwest Africa, the Soviet Union, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Kenya, Rwanda, Yugoslavia: Harass and arrest, seize property, bombard, blockade, cut off food and medical care, concentrate them (yes, the term comes from the British-run concentration camps in the Boer War where thousands of Boers died of disease and starvation) in corralled areas, practice “caloric management” (the official Israeli government term for restricting food) to keep them in line, and then do with them what you will as the world stands by fecklessly.
JUST ONE DAY IN GAZA
AP News: 59 people in Gaza are killed by Israeli airstrikes or shot dead while seeking aid | AP News
People desperately seeking food have been getting killed now for weeks. Are the Israelis and their American buddies incapable of finding some sort of solution to this problem? Or is it not a problem for them?
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-war-news-07-12-2025-c4c28f93ab77584f7909b5cd63aeb22e
Nearly 800 killed at Gaza food hubs and aid convoy routes since end of May, UN says | Gaza | The Guardian
EIGHT … HUNDRED
That’s a lot of dead people..., all killed for trying to get food from supposedly authorized food distribution centers.
CHILD DEATHS
From Haytham: UNICEF Deputy Special Representative in Palestine, Majed Twal, told Al Jazeera that the rate of child deaths in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war has reached 27 children per day. Twal explained that the lack of aid and malnutrition have exacerbated the humanitarian crisis facing Gaza's children.
13/7/2025
OH, THE MANY WAYS TO INCREASE HARDSHIP: RESTRICTING CURRENCY
To get their own cash, people in Gaza must pay middlemen a 40% cut
We wrote recently about the ingenuity that our friends display to avoid paying these exorbitant fees, on top of rampant inflation, but for most people in Gaza, there’s no other choice as long as Israel restricts currency. It’s worth pondering this article to appreciate what it would take to manage in this situation, even if you were well off.
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-cash-crisis-economy-shekel-israel-67e1cff55e2c042dd89e831c4f22b0ee
AN AMERICAN CITIZEN … BEATEN… TO… DEATH.
WHERE’S THE OUTCRY?
An American citizen beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Will this be just another example in a long line of U.S. disinterest, denial?
We have commented many times on U.S. policy toward Palestinian-Americans. If an Israeli gets killed anywhere the world, it’s a major issue. If an Israeli-American gets killed anywhere in the world, it’s a matter for State Department intervention. If an Israeli-American gets killed in Israel or the Occupied territories, he or she is most often identified as an American, and the State Department engages fully, condemns the attackers, helps punish the Palestinian population, and helps track down the killer anywhere in the world.
But the State Department treats Palestinian-Americans as simply Palestinians, and allows Israel to treat them strictly as Palestinians: stateless, without rights, subject to discriminatory military law, and liable for arbitrary arrest and indefinite incarceration.
The same Israeli authorities who can identify and locate a single Palestinian target anywhere in the world, among millions of other people, and target him with a missile are unable to identify violent Israeli settlers whose images are captured on video and whose actions are observed at close range by Israeli police and soldiers.
And, more prosaically, if an American of Palestinian origin, however distant, wishes to visit the Occupied Territories, Israel forces them — with American consent — to register with the Occupying military authorities as “Palestinian” and receive a registration number, just as all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories must be registered. In short, once in the Occupied Territories, there’s no American protection for Palestinian-Americans.
Palestinian-American Among Two Killed in West Bank Settler Attack, Health Ministry Says
Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that 10 additional Palestinians – all residents of Sinjil and neighboring villages – were wounded in clashes with settlers
'It Was Planned': Eyewitness Recounts Killing of Two Palestinians in Israeli Settler Attack in West Bank: Haaretz
Fridays' attack in the West Bank took place in an area recently seized by Israeli settlers and repeatedly targeted with violent attacks. According to an eyewitness, two settlers were armed with M16s and wearing army pants
Prepare to be embarrassed: See how Netanyahu’s visit to the United States was covered in Israel.
As Netanyahu has long said, the Americans are easy to manage.
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