Palestine weekly: Gaza marks year of ‘ceasefire’ with more Israeli killing

A year after Gaza’s ceasefire, Israeli attacks persist as settler violence disrupts West Bank’s oil harvest.

The Gaza “ceasefire” marked its first anniversary on October 10, but more than 100 humanitarian and human rights organisations said it exists “in name only”.

Islamic Relief noted that Israeli forces have killed or wounded a Palestinian in Gaza on average every 90 minutes since the ceasefire took effect.

Gaza’s Health Ministry put the toll since the truce at 1,493 killed and 5,299 wounded as of October 12, up from 1,460 a week earlier; the cumulative death toll since October 2023 stood at 74,382.

Among the Palestinians killed in Gaza over the past week:

• Four Palestinians were killed in a drone strike near Panda Mall in western Gaza City on Saturday, which Israel said targeted members of Hamas’s Nukhba force.
• Also on Saturday, eight-year-old Shahd al-Najjar was killed by Israeli fire that struck her inside her tent in western Gaza City.
• Seven-year-old Jihad al-Ghandour died of wounds from a separate shooting near Jabalia camp north of Gaza City on Sunday.
• A child and his mother were killed Thursday when Israeli warplanes struck a home in Gaza City’s al-Sabra neighbourhood after an evacuation warning.
• A drone strike on a charging point west of Khan Younis killed four people on Sunday, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
• Two more men were killed in a strike near a mosque in al-Mawasi in the south on Monday.

In statements describing attacks, Israel’s military claimed several of those killed this week were Palestinian fighters.

The Israeli military said two men killed near the Jordanian Field Hospital were Islamic Jihad operatives; Wafa identified one as a recently released former prisoner.

It separately said a civil defence worker killed while responding to the wounded near Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza had been a Hamas sniper; Hamas rejected the claim, and it has not been independently verified.

Gaza’s health system continued its collapse:

• Gaza’s Ministry of Health said that 44 percent of essential medicines are completely out of stock.
• A Physicians for Human Rights Israel report found that a year into the ceasefire, not one of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is operating at full capacity.
• More than 18,500 patients need medical evacuation and more than 1,000 have died waiting, according to the joint NGO statement.
• The Health Ministry said this week that no patient had been permitted to leave through Rafah crossing in the last week.

Israeli forces have also continued pushing the so-called Yellow Line demarcating Israeli control further into residential Gaza City neighbourhoods this week, triggering fresh displacement.

One year into the ceasefire, the Board of Peace – Gaza’s transitional oversight body – has failed to meet most of its central commitments: no international stabilisation force has deployed, aid trucks are entering at roughly a third of the agreed rate, and Israel now controls nearly two thirds of the Strip — well above the roughly 50 percent it was supposed to retain before further withdrawal and a future handover of control to Palestinians.

Olive harvest under coordinated assault

The Palestinian olive harvest – traditionally a time of family and celebration – gathered pace as Israeli settlers and soldiers intensified efforts to disrupt it. Harvesters were killed, attacked and blocked, while isolated families faced dayslong settler sieges.

Pogrom attacks included:

• On October 7, Ali Hassan Yasser al-Bazzari, 44, was shot dead when settlers and soldiers opened fire on olive pickers on farmland between Burqa and Ramin, northwest of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. At least 16 others were wounded during the pogrom, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
• The Palestine Red Crescent Society said Israeli forces assaulted ambulance crews trying to reach the wounded olive pickers and briefly detained three paramedics. Soldiers later raided the nearby village and made arrests, while the settlers who carried out the attack marched past unimpeded.
• The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 19 settler attacks on Friday alone, another 12 on Saturday and 18 more on Sunday, according to Wafa.
• The Israeli rights group Yesh Din had already documented 109 harvest-related settler incidents across 75 Palestinian communities in a 10-day period between September 27 and October 6.
• The commission says settlers and soldiers have destroyed roughly 50,000 trees so far this year.

The attacks followed a familiar shape village to village, according to Wafa and field reports from local residents and activists:

• Settlers in Qusra stole a farmer’s olives before bulldozing more than 50 of his trees.
• In Birin, settlers from the recently established Adorim outpost set a dog on a 79-year-old woman harvesting nearby, hospitalizing her.
• Settlers from the same outpost cut power to roughly 20 homes repeatedly over the week.
• In al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, soldiers followed settlers into the village’s residential streets on Sunday, kicked an elderly woman trying to reach her home, and fired live rounds and tear gas into houses “without apparent reason,” according to Israeli field monitor Jonathan Pollack. The daily incursions are part of a monthslong campaign by settlers against villagers there.
• At Deir Abu Mash’al, a solidarity harvest organised by the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission drew an attack by settlers in Area B that left eight people wounded, including a photojournalist shot in the thigh, Wafa reported.

Israeli forces frequently blocked the harvest, too. Soldiers used drone-mounted loudspeakers to drive farmers out of Wadi Abwein and turned pickers away in several locations elsewhere.

Israeli settlers’ own chat groups reveal how they frame such attacks in reverse — through a messianic lens, casting Palestinian harvesters reaching their own land in Deir Abu Mash’al as attempting to “seize” the land, and the olive harvest itself as cover for Palestinians gathering “intelligence” rather than picking olives that families have harvested there for generations. Settlers have been documented repeatedly stealing olives from Palestinians’ lands since harvesting unofficially started late last month.

Political jockeying ahead of elections

Once again, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas postponed Palestinian legislative elections – this time to September, citing Israeli restrictions on election materials and observers entering Gaza and East Jerusalem, and ongoing settler violence. Mustafa Barghouti, of the Palestinian National Initiative, said the decision reflects that “everything is concentrated in the hands of the executive authority”, with no parliament or independent judiciary to check it.

In Israel, with high-stakes parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27, Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen said his alliance – made up predominantly of Palestinian citizens of Israel – was prepared to support a coalition against current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from outside government.

The support would be given in exchange for policy commitments, including a pathway to Palestinian statehood, The Times of Israel reported – a potential route to a majority that polls suggest neither bloc can reach without Arab party support.

Israeli authorities also began demolishing homes this week in al-Dahiya, an unrecognised Bedouin village in the Naqab, after a district court rejected a request to freeze the orders; roughly 60 homes face demolition.

In diplomatic news, the UK’s consulate in occupied East Jerusalem formally became a reduced “mission” after Israel’s deadline for its closure passed; it has long handled the UK’s relations with Palestinians.