Palestinians injured by an Israeli airstrike in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip. © 2023 UNRWA Photo by Ashraf Amra.
+ At least 74,250 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023. With thousands more under the rubble and many others missing, this is almost certainly a vast underestimate. Another 175,278 Palestinians have been maimed and injured. The majority of these casualties are civilians: women, children and the elderly. Since the Trump-branded ceasefire of last October, another 1500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and 5,161 injured.
+ For the past three years, Israel has killed around 22,000 Palestinian children–that’s one child in Gaza every 71 minutes, including 5,444 children under five and 1,125 babies under one year old.
+ An investigation by CNN found that the deaths of at least 24 of the 40 Israelis who died in captivity in Gaza were deaths linked to Israeli military actions, including airstrikes and ground operations, or military operations that prompted their captors to kill them. At least 11 of the Israeli captives were killed directly by Israeli military operations. CNN also reported that Netanyahu scuttled a ceasefire deal in July 2024 that could have saved several of the captives’ lives.
+ The Palestinian Ministry of Education reports that at least 20,500 Palestinian students in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces in the last three years, including 19,189 school students and 1,386 university students. Another 32,668 students have been wounded, including 28,586 school students and 3,082 university students. Israeli forces have killed more than 1050 school teachers, staff and university professors since October 7, 2023.
+ At least 111 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in September. The death toll included 10 women, four elderly residents and 23 children.
+ Epidemiological studies estimate that the death count in Gaza is much higher…
Two studies published in The Lancet, the Capture-Recapture Analysis (Oct 7, 2023–June 30, 2024) and Gaza Mortality Survey of deaths from Dec 30, 2024–Jan 5, 2025, suggest that the real death count may be between 34.7% and 41% higher than the official count.
The Max-Planck-Institut (MPIDR) and CED Modeling used a pseudo-Bayesian modeling accounting system for under-reporting to estimate 78,318 direct conflict fatalities through the end of 2024 and projected more than 100,000 total deaths.
The Lancet Global Health survey estimated 16,300 total non-violent deaths in Gaza since October 3, 2023, with 8,540 excess deaths higher than normal.
Another Lancet study on life expectancy and life-years lost estimates that 3 million life-years have been lost in Gaza. Individual losses average more than 51 years per recorded fatality.
+ During a debate this week, Rep. David Valadao, the Republican from California’s 22nd District in the San Joaquin Valley, defended US arms sales to Israel on the grounds that it was a useful way to test the effectiveness of US-made weapons.
Moderator: Rep. David Valadao, you’ve been a staunch supporter of Israel, signing off on numerous aid packages. What is your message to your constituents, including your opponent, who believe that money would be better spent here at home?
Rep. David Valadao: The money is spent here. When we spend those dollars, that money is spent on American weapons systems. And when we develop those, we work in partnership with Israel. And when those weapons are actually used there to defend Israel, which is our closest ally in the region, especially that very hostile region, that we have to watch carefully…but the fact that those weapons are used there and tested there, we are able to learn from that and use that experience to develop our own weapons systems to help us in a situation where we have to help others, like Ukraine. We have the ability to send weapons systems over there. We learn often from those opportunities and resources being spent, again on American weapons systems, made by American manufacturers, creating American jobs, so that we can learn from those systems and help an ally at the same time.
+ Under the Trump-brokered “ceasefire,” Israel was required to allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza each day. But the average over the last year has been more on the order of 150 daily. This week Israel closed the only crossing into Gaza altogether, blocking aid into Gaza and medical evacuations of seriously ill Palestinians out of the Strip.
+ Palestinian farmers lost more than $157 million in olive crops since 2023, while some 286,000 olive trees in the occupied West Bank were damaged between 2023 and the end of September 2026 due to Israeli measures and settler attacks, according to the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry. The ministry said around 100,000 olive trees were damaged in the West Bank in the first nine months of 2026 alone, with crop losses exceeding $67 million. Farmers are currently unable to access roughly 30% of the West Bank’s olive-growing land due to Israeli restrictions, settler attacks, land seizures, and the theft of olive crops.
+ In Gaza, more than 90% of an estimated two million olive trees have been lost since the war began in 2023, alongside extensive destruction of infrastructure supporting the olive sector.
+ Around 201,290 buildings in Gaza, or an estimated 82% of all buildings in the Strip, were damaged by Israeli attacks between October 7, 2023, and June 16, 2026, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Of those, 134,422 buildings were completely destroyed and another 13,848 severely damaged. Most of Gaza’s roughly 2.1 million residents remain displaced and confined to less than 40% of the Strip due to Israeli access restrictions.
+ A new report from Forensic Architecture finds the Israeli military’s practices of demolition, compaction and removal of rubble are “desecrating the bodies of Palestinians” and making the recovery of Palestinian remains impossible in the 65% of Gaza under Israel’s control.
+ From Sarah Azizi’s Doomsday Diaries:
An image: a bulldozer rams into a fence cordoning off the Gaza Strip from Israel, and bodies rush through the aperture. Off camera, a hoarse man screams in Arabic, “Break it! God is great! Break it!” For an instant, Gaza no longer means unreachable, trapped, inert. All my life, that name has been an ache, beloved and impenetrable, intimate and out of reach. It is the land where my father was born as a refugee, a place he loved despite the larger tragedy that stranded his family there. Gaza, a place that was born in me the first time he told me stories of the sea. As a six-year-old, he’d sneak a swim in the Mediterranean on the way home from school, splashing naked in the water until his brother arrived to haul him back. I see Gaza return in his eyes each time he glimpses waves.
+ According to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her dad, Mike, the US ambassador to Israel, the reason US support for Israel has fallen since 2023 is not that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians but that Mamani “says” Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians…
FOX: American sympathy for Israelis fell by 18 points…
Sanders: Those numbers should not be happening. It’s people like Mamdani who are causing a total shift. He should be ashamed.
+ “You think I’m your Santa Claus,” Biden to Netanyahu on US aid to Israel during the Israeli genocide in Gaza, according to Biden’s former Mideast envoy Brett McGurk’s self-serving memoir Brink. Was he wrong?
+ Biden provided around $18 billion in direct military aid to Israel following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and during Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. In addition, in December 2023, Biden approved emergency authorization to sell 14,000 tank shells ($106.5 million) and artillery shells/related weapons ($147.5 million) to replenish Israel’s stocks. In May 2024, Biden approved a $1 billion arms and ammunition package including tank ammunition ($700 million), tactical vehicles ($500 million, overlapping/part of reported tracking), and mortar rounds ($60 million). In August 2024, Biden okayed another $20 billion shipment to Israel including up to 50 F-15 fighter jets, Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs), tactical vehicles, and tank/mortar cartridges. And in November, Biden approved a $680 million arms sale to Israel, including Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits and small-diameter bombs.
+ Santa Claus usually makes just one drop-shipment a year!
+ Megyn Kelly: “Americans can’t afford groceries and we’re giving $16.2 billion to Israel”
+ On Tuesday, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir once again joined Israeli forces as they demolished a five-story residential building in the Al-Tur neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The building contained 10 apartments and housed more than 70 Palestinians, most of them mothers and their children.
+ In Ramallah, Israeli settlers set fire to the home of a Palestinian family of five. The house is owned by an American citizen. A month ago, the settlers terrorized the same family, vandalizing the man’s car and slashing down his olive tree grove.
+ Israeli settlers assaulted AFP photojournalist Jaafar Ashityeh, 58, while he was reporting on settler attacks during the Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank village of Aqraba. His attackers beat him repeatedly with the butts of their rifles and then stole his camera equipment. The assault occurred in front of Israeli soldiers, who refused to intervene. Ashityeh was the victim of a similar attack during the olive harvest last year as well…
+ In an interview with GQ, the actor Adam Brody, who plays a “hot” rabbi in the Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This, called the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a genocide: “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine. It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”
Predictably, Brody was immediately denounced by Steve Leder, an LA rabbi who once served as a consultant on the TV series, who hissed that Brody’s comments were “flippant,” “disgusting” and “truly shocking.” Leder huffed that “there is no genocide in Gaza” and called Brody a “relatively ignorant Jew.”
+ Meanwhile, Ms. Rachel slammed the nameless celebrities who are “doing nothing” to help stop the genocide in Gaza…In an Instagram post, Ms. Rachel wrote…
+ Seymour Hersh on the Israelis freaking out over a potential deal between Trump and Iran over its nuclear program:
The Israeli view, according to the author of the paper on nuclear verification, is that the Trump administration, anxious for a nuclear agreement before the November elections, is being suckered by an Iranian regime that “will lie and cheat with a smile and double down when their backs are up against a wall.” The expert said he is convinced that the Iranian leadership is “buying time to improve” the economy and, with that accomplished, “will improve the defenses” around three of its major nuclear sites, at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow. All three sites have been heavily bombed in recent years by US and Israeli aircraft.
“Israel is “terrified,” the Israeli said, because “the Iranians believe that the only way to survive is to lash out.” He said the Iranian leadership has learned, like Mohammed Ali, the great American boxer, when to do “rope-a-dope” before lashing out.
+ David Milstein, a top aide to Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and altered damaging information about Israel in US government reports since taking office in April 2025. According to a report in the NYT, Milstein buried a report from earlier this year documenting how Israel had secretly approved more illegal settlements in the West Bank in the early months of the Iran War, despite Trump’s public stance against the Israeli annexation of Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories. The Times report says that Milstein consistently slanted reports from the embassy to portray Benjamin Netanyahu in a more favorable light, especially when it came to Netanyahu’s failure to take action against rising violence by Israeli settlers and security forces against Palestinians in the West Bank. Milstein also repeatedly rebuffed members of Congress who were seeking more information and accountability over the killings of Palestinian-Americans by Israeli settlers, police and the military.
+ Just hours after the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Oslo announced that this year’s award will go to Navi Pillay–the South African lawyer who fought apartheid, served for nine years as a judge on the International Criminal Court, worked as the top human rights official at the United Nations and who led the UN inquiry finding Israel committed genocide in Gaza–the Trump administration announced extreme sanctions against the court (ICC) she once served on.
+ Donald Trump on why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize: “There’s never been anybody in the history of the Nobel Prize that deserves it more. I settled eight wars. I stopped the total obliteration of the world.”
