The following report is based on a press briefing organized by American Community Media, where only supporters and advocates of the Palestinians in Gaza spoke. Therefore, this report does not present a comprehensive, objective picture of the war against Hamas – showing that the conflict was triggered by decades of Palestinian terrorist attacks and the massacre of October 7 – but instead offers a portrayal of civilian life and the current situation solely from the perspective of the people in Gaza. For this reason, it is a highly one-sided account, reflecting the one-sided nature of the press briefing itself, though it still provides an interesting snapshot.
It was a three-day attack by Israeli forces on Gaza, which killed 49 people in a single day, that turned into a conversation that still haunts a human rights investigator.
Boudour Hassan, an Amnesty International researcher on Israel and Palestine, has been documenting the dire situation in Palestine since 2022. After Israel launched one of its deadliest attacks, a sentence from a Palestinian father, whose child had just been seriously injured in a drone attack, struck her as chillingly prophetic. He said, “This time we had survived. We don’t know what will happen next. We don’t know if you’ll find us alive next.” The future, sadly, did turn grim.
“Unfortunately, I have not been able to reestablish contact with this person,” Hassan said.
Hassan’s recounts of the tragedy and fear endured by this father and his family in Gaza reflect a daily reality for many living in the region. Since the Oct. 7 brutal murderous attack on Israel by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has launched an aggressive counterattack that has since escalated to new levels of destruction. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, with nearly 90% of the population forcibly displaced. Strikes have completely destroyed more than 70% of buildings by early March, leaving many homeless and without shelter.
Speaking live from Ramallah during a briefing held by American Community Media, Hassan shared firsthand accounts from inside Gaza that reveal the devastating reality on the ground. Her gripping narrative highlights how months of warfare brought moral atrocities to Gaza that threaten the life and soul of the Palestinian people, often shredding humanity to its very core and leaving scars that will take decades to heal.
Having released a report in December 2024 that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, Hassan analyzed over 100 statements made by Israeli officials and studied the patterns of hunger and disease permeating the northern Gaza Strip. Conditions, however, rapidly intensified by late February during the Flour Massacre, when at least 118 Palestinians were killed while seeking food delivered by aid trucks.
“Israeli forces allowing trucks carrying flour and other types of aid or commercial supplies entered Gaza very early at dawn, around 4 a.m,” Hassan said. “People in their thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, waited for the trucks, and then once the truck would approach, starved, desperate people, some of them at that point had to resort to eating animal feed, started rushing to get that aid.”
She describes this moment as the point when it became clear that a “process of dehumanization” was underway. She said people painfully described it as a “breakdown of social fabric,” as traditionally tight-knit communities started fighting for scarce resources.
“The first instinct of people when they see someone in need is to help each other. There is this very strong social fabric, cohesion, togetherness, communal aid. But then you start seeing the changes to the society once these threats, the need to individually survive or to save the family, starts taking over, and people start thinking of how we can save this for our families. And then the fight over the very meager resources allowed in.”
Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a social anthropologist with more than 40 years of experience on famine and mass atrocity, emphasized the dehumanization that arrives with starvation.
“The core principle of humanitarianism, the first principle, is the principle of humanity,” de Waal said. “As a social observer, I would say the moment when you really see famine is when instead of a family being able to share bread, break bread together. They fight for bread. When you get that breakdown, that is the dividing line between what it is to be a human and what it is to be an animal.”
By January to late March, a brief ceasefire brought a short window of hope to the people of Gaza, as they longed to heal the physical and emotional wounds left by months of war. As they started rebuilding, the period was stained by deep grief as families searched for lost loved ones.
“They were digging up for the remains of their loved ones buried there for months, and they not being able to access it as they started going back to the north, to the rubble of their homes, starting rebuilding something from scratch,” Hassan said. “They were also looking for hope and hoping that this would be over, at least we would start thinking of how we can rebuild our lives. At that time, aid was allowed in.”
Even as Gaza’s most fertile agricultural lands were sealed off as no-go military zones, small signs of hope emerged amid the rubble as residents began to rebuild. Shortly after, however, a total siege was reinstated.
“Somehow, people found a way to create life out of lifelessness and to look forward and start planning for something other than this,” Hassan said. “Then on the 2nd of March, Israel reestablished a total siege. We’re talking about total siege, nothing getting in. A week later, Israel cut off the only operational desalination plant which was connected.”
Hassan describes March 18 as “one of the most horrific nights” that Gaza ever lived, as hospitals were overcrowded with injured people from massively indiscriminate attacks on civilian housing. More than 400 people, over 180 of whom were children, were killed on that night.
In early April, she and her team of researchers began interviewing pediatricians working at stabilization centers in hospitals across the city. When mass displacement orders forced Palestinians to relocate under threat of bombardment, necessities like medical supplies, baby formula and sources of food production were left behind. Starvation began escalating, creating a new health emergency of rising famine and malnutrition.
Hearing testimony from families struggling to raise children in these war-torn conditions, Hassan described the deep pain mothers endure while caring for infants amid the conflict.
“A woman who is breastfeeding her 4-month old infant… saying to explain to us how guilty she feels of even having given birth,” Hassan said. “What breaks her, she said, ‘I am weak before my children. I can’t hear their cries. Once, I had to beat my child to sleep because he was crying so hard.’”
The mother’s family spent three days without food, as the community kitchen at their camp was no longer running. When her husband left to seek aid, he returned injured. Hassan said the woman noted, ‘We don’t feel like the world sees us as human.’
In response to renewed global pressure and international outrage, the total blockade was eased and the US-Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was created in February to distribute aid. Israel, alleging that Hamas was stealing food, established the GHF to keep aid distribution more controlled and essentially replace U.N. operations. The New York Times had reported, however, that there was no evidence Hamas was routinely stealing U.N. aid, as confirmed by Israeli military officials.
The GHF has also been widely criticized by humanitarian organizations and human rights groups, many of which have condemned its aid distribution as entirely ineffective and even “death traps.”
“It’s not a system that any professional humanitarian would set up,” de Waal said. “The United Nations had about 400 locations, and it had a reliable system. That system gave people the confidence that even if they were not getting food today, they would get it tomorrow because the system was embedded with the community. What the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has is four [locations]. They are far away, particularly 3 of them are in the far south of Gaza, and people have to go there.”
More than 800 people have been killed trying to reach aid at these centers, as the GHF distribution sites have no security for Palestinians who are asked to rush for food during a span of 10 to 15 minutes.
“[They’ve] said, ‘we felt like animals,’ and it’s not a metaphor, because some people were even on the floor trying to get some food, or what had remained or dispersed,” Hassan said. “Some people would just get their box of flour, literally some of the flour that they got was tarnished with blood.”
Afeef Nessouli, a journalist and aid worker, had returned in June after nine weeks of volunteering in Gaza, joined the briefing to share his own firsthand account of the stark realities faced by Palestinians. He said he ate once a day, adding that this doesn’t even compare to the current reality of eating only once every few days.
“I lost 12 pounds while I was there. Living it and breathing it and experiencing it makes you kind of really understand that it is not happening to you. You are witnessing people’s extreme,” Nessouli said. “They’re being tortured. Like, there’s no other way to say it. They’re being tortured before your eyes.”
Now, as the region braces for complete control over Gaza City with a recently approved plan by the Israeli security cabinet, the speakers stress the importance of elevating Palestinian voices to amplify stories unfolding on the ground.
“It will take decades for people to heal, if at all, and we really should not forsake that. This should not become just any other journalistic trend,” Hassan said. “We really have to keep following with the stories, keep documenting, and I think this is our moral obligation.”
The above report is based on a press briefing that described the situation strictly from a Palestinian point of view. Missing from the discussion were Israelis who could have spoken about the details of the barbaric October 7 massacre, the torture, rape, and murder of kidnapped hostages, and the pain of their families. Nor did the participants speak about what triggered the war, or about the responsibility borne by the people of Gaza and the Palestinian nation in this conflict. For these reasons, the above account – shaped by a one-sided press conversation – does not reflect the full picture.
