Palestine weekly: One thousand days of genocide in Gaza 

In Gaza, the week marked 1,000 days since Israel’s genocidal war began. Gaza’s Government Media Office said that more than 90 percent of the Strip had been destroyed.

By July 6, Gaza’s Ministry of Health put the toll since the October “ceasefire” at 1,072 killed, with the cumulative figure since October 2023 reaching 73,098.

The killing did not pause for the anniversary. Israeli forces killed at least three Palestinians in a drone strike near al-Hilu station on July 1 and at least seven more over the following 48 hours, among them a child killed by a quadcopter-dropped bomb at the Shujayea junction and 10-year-old Tareq Sabah, killed near Khan Younis, according to local field reports. Strikes on tents sheltering the displaced in the designated al-Mawasi humanitarian zone recurred throughout the week.

The enclave’s sick and wounded – deprived still of critical medical supplies in the decimated Strip – protested outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital to demand that Israel lift travel restrictions on medical evacuations, with Gaza health authorities saying more than 20,000 people are awaiting exit through a throttled Rafah crossing.

Separately, Elyas Abu Safiya, the son of the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, said his father’s health was deteriorating sharply after more than 555 days in Israeli prison.

Elyas Abu Safiya said on Sunday that his father’s lawyer had returned from a recent visit and said that Hussam Abu Safiya was having difficulties breathing and speaking.

“His face was disfigured from the marks of torture and pain, and the blood he endured inside the prison, especially after the last court session held in Jerusalem,” Elyas Abu Safiya said.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for Dr Abu Safiya’s immediate release, and said that his ongoing detention violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The next phase for Gaza

Meanwhile, signals of a formal transfer of authority began in Gaza. In the Cypriot resort of Ayia Napa, representatives of the US-led Board of Peace, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, met to advance the “temporary reconstruction” of Gaza zones designated free of Hamas control.

On Monday, Gaza’s Hamas-run government announced its resignation and the transfer of its authority to a Board of Peace-appointed technocratic committee, under US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war and oversee reconstruction, though power is yet to be handed over in practice.

Ali Shath, head of the technocratic National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, said his committee stood fully ready to assume its responsibilities “as soon as the necessary capabilities and enablers are available”, listing among the essential prerequisites a single governing authority under one law and force – a reference to the unresolved question of Hamas’s disarmament.

The Board of Peace, meanwhile, declared earlier in the week that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, “has no place in the new Gaza” – a statement the Palestinian leadership rejected as erasing the refugee question altogether.

Building annexation

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood on the tarmac of the former Qalandia Airport, north of occupied East Jerusalem, and laid the foundation stone for a new Israeli “heritage centre” on the site of what was once Palestine’s only airport, as part of the broader Atarot settlement project.

Three days earlier, on July 3, Israel’s Security Cabinet had approved the establishment of 13 new settlements in the Binyamin bloc of the central occupied West Bank, along the Route 60 corridor and extending towards the Jordan Valley. The Jerusalem Governorate said the scheme was designed to sever East Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings and to break territorial contiguity, with a first phase of four to six settlements expected within months and several existing pastoral outposts – a primary mechanism for violent displacement of Bedouin communities in the area – slated for formal legalisation.

The decision came amid an unprecedented surge in outpost construction. Data from the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies shows that after averaging about eight annually between 2012 and 2022, new outposts rose sharply to 32 in 2023, 62 in 2024 and 86 in 2025. Illegal outpost construction continued throughout the week: on July 1, according to Wafa, settlers began a new outpost on land belonging to the town of Kafr Ra’i, southwest of Jenin, near the Dotan settlement, and on July 6, the human rights group Al-Baidar reported another one established some 500 metres from the al-Ma’azi Bedouin community near Jaba, northeast of Jerusalem.

Israel’s consolidation of control extended beyond land grabs. The Israeli government approved a 27-million-shekel ($9m) plan to expand its hotel industry in the occupied West Bank, according to Haaretz.

In Hebron, the Palestinian Authority’s head of the Tourism and Antiquities Directorate, Jabr al-Rajoub, told Wafa that Israeli authorities were moving to transfer control of 142 archaeological sites from military to civilian Israeli administration, tying the sites – among them renovations recently carried out at the Ibrahimi Mosque – to the settlement project. On Monday, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich boasted of the recent bureaucratic moves, calling them “only the beginning of the settlement revolution”.

Confinement as a weapon

On Sunday evening, four-month-old Ahmad Marouf Zeid died of cardiac arrest after Israeli soldiers blocked his family from reaching an ambulance waiting on the far side of a military gate at the entrance to Deir Ammar refugee camp, west of Ramallah.

Laila Ghannam, the governor of Ramallah and el-Bireh, said the infant – the family’s only child, born after years of waiting – died after Israeli forces prevented his transfer to the hospital for more than an hour despite his critical medical condition, calling the infant’s death “a stain on the conscience of humanity”.

The system of gates and checkpoints runs the length of the occupied West Bank. In Sinjil, north of Ramallah, Wafa reported that Israeli forces sealed the town behind six main gates and 16 secondary and agricultural roads, days after authorities declared 465 dunams (465,000sq metres) of the town’s land “state land”. Around Ramallah, the Atara and Nabi Saleh checkpoints were closed and the entrances of Aboud and Ein Siniya were obstructed.

Settler violence this week was often organised and under the protection of armed Israeli forces. Overnight into Sunday, activist Jonathan Pollack reported, masked settlers stormed Jalud, south of Nablus, chasing residents, occupying homes and besieging families indoors under an armoured military escort that did not intervene. On July 4, settlers stole four sheep at Umm Safa, northwest of Ramallah, before Israeli forces fired rubber-coated bullets that wounded three residents, according to council head Marwan Sabbah. In Masafer Yatta, Wafa and activist Osama Makhamreh reported settlers assaulting the al-Masry family at Khallet al-Hummus and separately injuring six people the night of July 5 at Umm al-Khair. Near Nablus on July 5, settlers broke into and burned a restaurant near al-Lubban Asharqiya, stealing cash before setting it ablaze; its owner put the losses at around $330,000.

Demolitions ran in parallel. Over the course of the week, Israeli forces bulldozed the 60-year-old sports field of a Battir boys’ school near Bethlehem, an inhabited home in Tuqu, and an agricultural structure in Duma, according to Wafa reports.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that more than 2,300 Palestinians, over 1,000 of them children, have been displaced in the West Bank in 2026 alone; 121 communities have experienced full or partial displacement since 2023.