Sixty-Five Percent
Sixty-five percent. That is the share of Gaza’s land now sitting inside what the UN and humanitarian agencies are calling access-restricted areas, expanded steadily since the so-called ceasefire took effect in October, and it is worth sitting with that number instead of letting it slide past as one more statistic in a war that produces statistics the way a factory produces units. Sixty-five percent of a strip of land roughly forty kilometres long, already reduced by Gaza’s Government Media Office’s own estimate to over ninety percent destroyed, is now a place Palestinians are told they cannot go, cannot return to, cannot rebuild on, under a truce that was supposed to have ended the killing rather than merely rezoned it.
The killing has not ended. Three Palestinians dead and fifteen wounded in strikes across Gaza on 13 July alone, as forces pushed the boundaries of the Yellow Zone further in. Eight killed, including two children aged ten and six, in a strike earlier in the month. Gaza’s Ministry of Health puts the toll since the ceasefire at 1,084 dead and 3,491 wounded from what are being called, with a straight face, ceasefire violations, a phrase that only makes grammatical sense if you already believe the violence was ever meant to stop. On 6 July, Al Jazeera marked one thousand days since October 2023. A thousand days is not a duration a besieged population survives by accident. It survives it because survival itself has become an act that requires organising, sourcing, redistributing, because the state apparatus responsible for the siege has no intention of doing anything but tightening it.
I want to be plain about something I notice every time I sit down to write these leads: the instinct to describe this as a humanitarian crisis, as though humanitarian were a weather system that arrived unannounced rather than the direct, engineered, fully foreseeable output of a military occupation backed by the same states that fund its weapons and shield it at the UN. I’ve written at length before about how “humanitarian aid” as a framework was never built to end the conditions producing Palestinian suffering; it was built to manage them, to keep just enough flowing through donor-approved channels that the occupation remains liveable for the states funding it. That’s why aid can be blocked at the crossing, left to rot, or resold at a markup, while the same governments issue statements about corridors and access. Nearly 9,300 cases of chickenpox reported across Gaza’s remaining health facilities is not a humanitarian crisis in the abstract sense. It is what happens when a population is confined, malnourished, and denied clean water and functioning clinics by design, and then blamed, implicitly, for the disease that predictably follows. The people managing Gaza’s day-to-day governance changed hands this month, with Hamas dissolving the body that ran the territory for nearly two decades in favour of a technocratic committee. The siege did not change hands. It never does.
What I keep returning to, as a Muslim watching this from outside the blockade but never outside the grief of it, is that the only entity that has reliably shown up these thousand-plus days, for Gaza and for everyone else this week’s list represents, has been ordinary people moving money to ordinary people, not states, not the institutions built to prevent exactly this. Below is this week’s mutual aid requests roundup: rent and bills overdue, medication running out in days, disability funds stalled for weeks, alongside the Palestinian Campaign Spotlight and the Gaza Verified Archive tracking the accounts still sitting under two hundred dollars raised after seven days. None of these requests are in competition with each other, and none of them are secondary to the others. Open them. Give directly where you can. Share what you can’t fund, because every request on this list needs reach as much as it needs money, and reach is free.
โจMutual Aid Roundupโจ
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โจPalestinian Campaign Spotlightโจ
Help Miriam and Her Family Survive in Gaza
Miriam’s children ask every morning if there will be food; she has no answer. Please don’t scroll past. Share her story, redistribute what you can.
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Help Osama’s family leave the war zone in Gaza
Usama’s family is only asking for a chance to survive. Please don’t let his story end with you. Share it and redistribute what you can, you could save his family.
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From each according to their capacity, to each according their needs.
Feel free to tag me in your mutual aid requests for a boost.
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