Mourners pray near the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, August 8, 2024. (Credit: Hussam al-Masri/Reuters)
BEIRUT — “We are still being butchered like sheep while the world looks elsewhere,” Nariman Husseini tells L’Orient Today from Gaza City.
She’s sitting inside what was once her spacious and luxurious house with six rooms and a big balcony filled with plants she had worked hard to grow. Israeli airstrikes have turned parts of the house into piles of rubble and she had to start a new garden from scratch.
“There are many massacres happening in Gaza, just as they have been happening,” she explains over voice notes. “Before, journalists used to contact us more for testimonies about what we saw and heard, but right now there aren't as many.”
“A few days ago — I can’t remember when, I lost track of the time — Israel attacked a school hosting refugees and I barely saw any mention of it on my phone [while checking social media.]”
It had been on Sunday: 30 people were killed when Israel bombed schools sheltering displaced civilians in Gaza, AFP reported.
Following the strike, Israel insisted — without evidence — that members of Hamas were also sheltering in those schools, among the civilians.
People in Gaza continue to endure the relentless Israeli onslaught that started on Oct.7 and has killed over 39,600 Palestinians.
The likelihood of a full-scale regional war has also increased, particularly in Lebanon, over the past few weeks as the world waits for Hezbollah’s retaliation to the assassination of its military leader Fouad Shukur in Beirut's southern suburbs and Iran’s response to the assassination of Hamas’ former leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week.
Israel immediately claimed responsibility for killing Shukur but neither acknowledged nor denied involvement in the explosion that killed Haniyeh.
Military chief Yahyah Sinwar was subsequently appointed the new political chief of Hamas.
Young men training to ‘physically fight Israel’ amid ‘lack of arms’
Amid the long days of relentless airstrikes, young men in Gaza have turned to weight training and working out in the rubble of destroyed gyms and abandoned equipment.
Palestinians train with weights at a damaged gym, which was recently re-opened in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza on August 7, 2024. (Credit: Bashar Taleb/AFP)
17 year old Sami* who wished to remain anonymous, citing security reasons, says that he was tired of sitting idly in his tent in Rafah. Once a resident of Shujaiya Street in central Gaza, he said that spending his days waiting for either a cease-fire or a strike is “unbearable.”
So he, along with some of his friends, discovered the remains of what used to be a gym from before the war and found that some of the weights were still intact despite the 10 months of bombing.
Palestinians train with weights at a damaged gym, which was recently re-opened in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza on August 7, 2024. (Credit: Bashar Taleb/ AFP)
“We decided to set a routine where we would train for around three hours, six times a week,” he explains. “It sounds like a lot of time but we really don’t have anything else to do.”
“There aren’t enough weapons to go around,” Sami says, “so instead, we can fight Israeli soldiers physically when their troops show up on our doorstep.”
However, Israel’s main tactics in the war have been the non-stop airstrikes and its heavily armored tanks.
‘More Gazan detainees say they were raped by Israeli soldiers and filmed’
Husam Hisham used to live and work in Khan Yunis, in the southern part of the Gaza strip, as a chef at one of Gaza’s hotels. He has since relocated elsewhere (undisclosed for security reasons) and now, as the war drags on into its tenth month, the days have started to blur together.
What he fears most now is “being raped by Israeli soldiers,” he tells L’Orient Today, “because this seems to be the new torture technique.”
On Wednesday, Reuters reported on leaked security camera footage — originally broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12 news — showing Israeli soldiers sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner from Gaza at the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp.
“I did not have this fear before, but now many Gazans have been released from detention — many who are [my] close friends and relatives,” Hisham says.
Palestinians freed from Israeli detention centers have consistently reported abuse that amounts to torture. They are “clearly saying, ‘We were raped by various objects, injured, and filmed,’” he says. “God knows where those videos will be released. I’m afraid.”
“You can’t imagine the shame they were feeling. It’s part of our culture that we don’t speak of such matters. We regard them as ayb [inappropriate] but now everything is out in the open.”
The Sde Teiman security camera video shows a squad of nine or 10 Israeli soldiers selecting a detainee from among more than 30 others who are all blindfolded, wrists tied, and lying on the ground. The man is then led to a corner.
According to the TV report, "It is clear that they know about the surveillance cameras, and try to hide their act with shields. The video contains documentation of the felony of the reservists: the act of sodomy in these circumstances." The nine soldiers — one with the rank of major — were subsequently detained.
Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that it was "shameful" for Israel to arrest "our best heroes," while far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israeli soldiers "deserve respect" and must not be treated as "criminals."