Gaza: Palestinians bear the brunt of Israel's clampdown

By Deutsche Welle (World News) | Created at 2025-04-03 15:05:46 | Updated at 2025-04-04 09:59:22 19 hours ago

Israel continues to ramp up the pressure on Gaza. On Wednesday, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that Israeli forces were establishing a new security corridor between the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

"We are cutting up the strip, and we are increasing the pressure step by step, so that they will give us our hostages," Netanyahu said.

On Thursday, Hamas rejected an Israeli proposal for a new ceasefire and reiterated that they will only release the remaining 59 hostages in exchange for the release of more Palestinian prisoners, a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, new Israeli relocation orders have displaced around 142,000 Palestinians, including those who live in Rafah, between March 18-23, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, stated in their most recent report.

According to Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 60% of Gaza is now considered a "no-go" zone because of Israeli evacuation orders.

Military strikes have also killed at least 1,042 Palestinians since March 24, the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza said this week.

And after a month of Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid, the UN food agency said this week it had to close all its bakeries due to a lack of supplies.

Going to bed without dinner in Gaza

Mohammed al-Kurd, a father of 12, told news agency AP that his children now go to bed without dinner.

"We tell them to be patient and that we will bring flour in the morning," he said. "We lie to them and to ourselves."

However, according to the Israeli body in charge of Palestinian affairs, COGAT, more than 25,000 trucks carrying 450,000 tons of aid entered Gaza during the ceasefire between January and March.

The statement said that this amount represented around a third of what had entered the Gaza Strip during the 15 months of war.

Israel's war on Gaza started after Hamas, which is categorized as terror organization by the US, EU and others, carried out a terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Around 1,150 people were killed at the time and 251 kidnapped. Hamas still holds 59 captives, 24 of whom are believed to be alive, after most of the others were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners as part of ceasefire agreements.

Israel's retaliatory war on Gaza has since killed around 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry, which doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants in any of their death tallies.

While these numbers cannot be independently verified, international organizations such as the UN consider them to be largely credible.

People holding their belongings arrive in Khan Younis following new Israeli evacuation orders. Two young women in the foreground, one is cradling a baby, one is holding a pet in her arms.

'Violence is causing a loss of hope' in Gaza

Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation of the around 2.3 million Palestinians in the coastal strip is getting worse and worse, international aid agencies warned this week.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement that "the resumption of hostilities and violence is causing a loss of hope on all sides."

"There is no longer any taste to life," Ihab Suliman, a former university professor in Gaza, told news agency AP this week. "Life and death have become one and the same for us," he said after fleeing for the eighth time.

Nicholas Orr, a former UK military deminer, told the news agency AFP this week that unexploded ammunition, or UXO, kill around two people a day, mostly children who search through the rubble of bombed-out buildings.

Palestinian children sit in the rubble of a destroyed house

"You pick that up and that detonates. That's you and your family gone, and the rest of your building," he said.

In Gaza's north, where ground battles raged for months, "mortars, grenades, and a lot of bullets" are more frequent whereas in Rafah where air strikes were more intense than ground combat, "it's artillery projectiles," Orr said.

One of them cost 15-year-old Ahmed Azzam from Rafah his leg.

"We were inspecting the remains of our home," Azzam told AFP. "I didn't know it was explosive, but suddenly it detonated," he said, causing "severe wounds to both my legs, which led to the amputation of one of them."

However, due to Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid, and the lack of medical supply across Gaza's hospitals, prosthesis are unavailable.

Israeli soldiers and a vehicle at the border between Israel and Gaza

‘De-populating Gaza'

"There's no explicit statement [from Israel] that says we are cutting off humanitarian aid in order to force people to flee but it's a reasonable supposition," Nathan Brown, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, told DW.

"But of course, if you bombard the territory, force the population within the Gaza Strip to move from one space to another and then cut off humanitarian aid, that makes what Israel calls a voluntary departure from Gaza look an awful lot less voluntary," he said.

For the first time, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on Sunday explicitly stated on the social media platform X that "we will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration."

In February, US President Donald Trump had said that the US would "own" Gaza, and turn it into the "Riviera of the Middle East," telling Arab neighbors, above all Egypt and Jordan, to take in the Palestinian population. This was widely rejected, and the UN has warned that this would be considered as ethnic cleansing.

"What we're seeing very explicitly from the Israeli political echelon and even from the military plans, is that they actually want to lay the groundwork and begin moving towards the de-population of Gaza," Amjad Iraqi of the International Crisis Group, a global conflict prevention organization, told DW.

"Now in both attack and strategy, the method is the same," Iraqi said, adding that "it is essentially the collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza, as we're also seeing it in the West Bank."