Palestine weekly: Israel attacks children, hospitals in bloody week in Gaza

Published 14 July 2026 · health

Israel’s grip on the occupied West Bank tightens through outposts, demolitions, and army-backed settler raids, as its forces kill aid workers and children in Gaza

Israel’s grip on the occupied West Bank tightens through outposts, demolitions, and army-backed settler raids, as its forces kill aid workers and children in Gaza. Children have been repeatedly killed in Israel’s attacks in Gaza over the past week, as the death toll since the October ceasefire reached at least 1,108. Attacks include July 8 Israeli strikes that killed at least eight people, including a 10-year-old killed in a strike on a tent in the al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone” and a si year-old shot in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, Palestinian health officials said. A day later, a World Central Kitchen driver, Ahmad Nasser Saleem, was shot dead with his hands raised while transporting coordinated aid from the Karem Abu Salem crossing. On July 12, nine-year-old Tala Jumaa Abu Matar was killed by Israeli fire near the Nuseirat refugee camp, according to medical sources cited by Wafa. Strikes on tents sheltering the displaced in al-Mawasi took place throughout the week, per the Gaza-based activist Hamza al-Masri. On July 10, an Israeli drone struck the courtyard of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, wounding staff despite the facility sitting inside the Israeli-controlled “green zone”; Gaza’s Ministry of Health called it part of Israel’s “systematic targeting of health facilities”. The cumulative figure killed since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza started in October 2023 has now reached 73,231, with 173,686 wounded. Claims and realities Amid such daily field reports, COGAT, the Israeli military body coordinating aid, released a report claiming humanitarian supplies had entered Gaza in quantities that “significantly exceeded” the needs identified by the UN. Its chief, Major-General Yoram Halevy, said anyone disputing the figures COGAT released was “amplifying Hamas propaganda”, according to the Times of Israel. By contrast, the UN’s own data, published the following day, described the scarcity-by-design of basic necessities in Gaza. In its July 10 situation report, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said food parcels distributed to more than 53,500 people in early July covered just 75 percent of minimum caloric needs, and that a top-up of high-energy biscuits had been suspended to preserve dwindling emergency stocks.

Only 56 percent of aid cargo routed through the Egypt corridor was successfully offloaded at the Karem Abu Salem crossing. The number of families receiving shelter assistance had fallen 37 percent from May to June amid funding shortfalls and Israeli restrictions on materials. Essential services for an estimated 350,000 people living with chronic disease remain severely disrupted amid entry restrictions. Relatedly, OCHA’s Health Cluster partners recorded more than 18,000 new cases of chickenpox, skin infection, and parasitic infestation in a single week. On the ground, Gaza’s medical facilities were plunged into darkness by fuel shortages, with 38 hospitals already destroyed or rendered inoperable and surgeons forced to shorten operations. The Ministry of Health warned that its labs and blood banks face complete shutdown. New elections promised Just days after Gaza’s Hamas-run government announced its resignation to make way for a technocratic committee yet to enter Gaza, on July 9, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree setting Palestinian legislative elections for November 28 – the first such vote in 20 years. The announcement, widely seen as a response to international pressure for reform of the Palestinian Authority, faces considerable obstacles: Israel has yet to permit voting in occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza’s infrastructure lies in ruins, and its population registry is out of date. Annexation by the numbers A report published on July 7 by the Israeli advocacy and research groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot documented what it called de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank at an unprecedented pace: between 2023 and 2025, it found, 185 new outposts were established, 118 Palestinian herding communities were expelled, 102 new settlements were created, and illegal farm outposts came to control more than 1.1 million dunams (1.1 billion sq metres) of land -18 percent of all of the West Bank – functioning together as “a single, systematic government policy”. Developments across the West Bank tracked that overarching policy in motion.