KARAPATAN condemned the escalation of the Zionist genocidal war against the Palestinian people marked by the decision of the Israeli Security Cabinet to send ground troops for the military occupation of Gaza City.
Turning a deaf ear to protests from the international community, and emboldened by the US’ condonation of the plan, Israeli forces implemented the first step in their renewed assault against Gaza— to silence the media reporting from the field about Israel’s brutal attacks and its staggering cost in human lives.
On the 10th of August 2025, Israel launched an airstrike on a tent housing Al Jazeera journalists. Killed were Pulitzer prize winning video journalist Anas Al-Sharif, four other journalists from Al Jazeera Arabic and two freelancers.
Al-Sharif’s premeditated killing was preceded by the Israeli Defense Forces’ false accusations against him of being a Hamas operative. He had also received numerous death threats. In December 2023, his father was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home.
Al-Sharif became the 235th journalist killed in Gaza, marking Israel’s desperate attempts to keep the world ignorant of its brazen violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
After the targeted airstrike on the Al Jazeera journalists, Israeli forces killed at least 73 more Palestinians in attacks across Gaza as of August 12. Since the war in Gaza began, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, 80% of them civilians. A UN study also found that 70% of Palestinians killed by Israeli air strikes in residential buildings were women and children.
Gaza now suffers from one of the worst humanitarian crises the world has known. It has over half a million residents facing starvation with Israeli air strikes targeting aid stations assisting refugees. In 2024, the Israeli parliament declared the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as a terrorist organization and banned it from operating within Israeli territory. Although technically allowed to operate in Gaza, UNRWA stations have been targeted multiple times by Israel. Over 224 humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Gaza in the line of duty, including 179 employees of UNRWA.
The consequences have been devastating since 80% of Gazans depend on humanitarian assistance to survive, including 1.1 million Palestinian refugees who receive food assistance from the UNRWA. Up to a dozen people reportedly die from starvation daily in Gaza.
Gaza’s health care system is also in danger of collapsing as Israeli air strikes have been relentlessly targeting hospitals tending to the victims of Israeli attacks. Thirty-six hospitals have been bombed and burned by Israeli forces in Gaza, which is a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Convention. Up to 1,400 health workers have been killed in these attacks.
Meantime, the US has been making outrageous proposals that would entail the depopulation of Gaza ostensibly to enable rehabilitation efforts. The US-proposed mass relocation of Gazans to neighboring countries dovetails with Zionist expansionist schemes into Palestine and will be tantamount to a second naqba—a nightmarish repeat of the violent displacement of the Palestinian people, the dispossession of their land, property and belongings and the suppression of their identity and aspirations as a nation when the US imperialists forcibly carved out the state of Israel from Palestinian territory in 1948.
KARAPATAN denounces the atrocious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in Gaza. It joins the Filipino people in standing firmly in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their courageous struggle for liberation against the US-supported Israeli Zionist genocidal war and militantly assert their right to national self-determination.