Palestine

Israel's assault on Gaza has killed at least 73,389 people by the documented count, more than 20,000 of them children. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza; Amnesty International had reached the same conclusion. It did not begin in 2023.

It began with a political movement that many Jews themselves opposed, a colonial promise made over the heads of the people who lived on the land, and a catastrophe, the Nakba, that expelled three quarters of a million Palestinians and erased over five hundred villages. It ran through military occupation, massacre by massacre, through the sealed camps of Beirut and the curfews of Kafr Qasim, through two uprisings and four wars on a blockaded strip forty kilometres long. Every era of it is documented: by the UN, by Israeli human-rights organisations, by Palestinian monitors counting their own dead, and by the survivors and soldiers who testified.

The chapters below are the shortest honest account we can give of how this got here. The live numbers, with their sources, run further down this page; the full citable data lives in The Record. Everything we publish on Palestine files into The Coverage at the foot of the page.

Origins and occupation

Political Zionism begins with Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat (1896) and the First Zionist Congress (1897). It was contested among Jews from the first hour: the congress was planned for Munich, and the protest of five German rabbis, Orthodox and Reform together, whom Herzl mocked as the Protestrabbiner, forced it to Basel. Reform Judaism's Pittsburgh Platform (1885) had declared Jews a religious community and not a nation; much of Orthodoxy rejected political Zionism on religious grounds; the socialist Bund fought it as a desertion of Jewish life in Europe.

In 1917 the Balfour Declaration promised a "national home for the Jewish people" in a land whose population was then roughly 90 percent Palestinian Arab by the demographic record; the first census of Palestine, in 1922, returned a Jewish population of about 11 percent. The British Mandate followed: mass immigration, land transfer, and the crushing of the 1936-39 Arab revolt. In 1948, the Nakba: around 750,000 Palestinians expelled or forced to flee, more than 500 villages depopulated and destroyed by documented counts, massacre at Deir Yassin. In 1967, the Naksa: Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, displacing some 300,000 more. The occupation has never ended.

Inside the new state, the history was contested too. Holocaust survivors were disparaged as weak, slurred as "sabonim", soap, until the broadcast survivor testimony of the 1961 Eichmann trial collapsed the contempt into recognition, a change documented most fully in Tom Segev's The Seventh Million.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

Gaza before October 2023

Gaza has been under Israeli blockade by land, sea and air since 2007: a strip forty kilometres long holding more than two million people, nearly half of them children, described for years by the UN as unliveable. Before October 2023 it had already endured four major assaults. Operation Cast Lead (2008-09) killed 1,385 to 1,419 Palestinians by the counts of B'Tselem and PCHR, the majority civilians. The 2014 war killed 2,251, at least 1,462 of them civilians and over 500 of them children, by the UN's figures. At the Great March of Return (2018-19), Israeli forces killed 214 people at the demonstrations by B'Tselem's count, among them medics and journalists; the UN Commission of Inquiry found that the overwhelming majority posed no imminent threat to life. Each assault ended with the blockade intact and reconstruction throttled.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The genocide

On 16 September 2025 the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Navi Pillay, concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza: four of the five prohibited acts under the 1948 Convention, with genocidal intent established from the statements of senior officials alongside the pattern of conduct, and called for genocide charges to be added to the existing ICC arrest warrants. In June 2026 the Commission found the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children to be part of the ongoing genocide. Amnesty International had concluded the same in December 2024, and Human Rights Watch has found acts of genocide.

The assault has killed at least 73,389 people in Gaza, among them more than 20,179 children, 1,700 medical personnel and 262 journalists and media workers, by the Gaza Ministry of Health's count as documented by Tech for Palestine. The true toll is higher: these are documented minimums. 90 percent of the population has been displaced, 94 percent of hospitals damaged or destroyed, 81 percent of all structures in the strip damaged or destroyed. The full ledger, updated every six hours with per-figure sourcing, is The Record.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The aid and starvation record

Starvation has been used as a weapon. At least 440 people have starved to death and at least 2,340 have been killed while trying to reach food, shot at distribution points and convoys, by the counts documented by Tech for Palestine. In August 2025 the IPC, the international famine-classification system, confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate and projected its spread. Aid has been throttled at the crossings through the entire assault, against the January 2024 order of the International Court of Justice to enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. The counts of the starved are floors, not totals, because starvation kills quietly and at home.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The ceasefire cycle and its breaches

The ceasefire was signed on 9 October 2025. Israeli forces withdrew to a demarcation called the Yellow Line, keeping direct control of roughly 53 percent of the strip. The killing did not stop: more than 730 Palestinians have been killed since the "ceasefire" began, by the Gaza Health Ministry's count, and the UN documented 224 people, children among them, killed east of or near the line in its first four and a half months. The Health Ministry has recorded thousands of Israeli violations.

The line itself moves. A CBC visual investigation showed the Israeli military relocating the yellow concrete blocks that mark the boundary deeper into Gaza, by more than a kilometre in places, demolishing what stood there and creating a de facto kill zone; aid agencies were then handed a new map, an "orange line", under which Israel controls about 64 percent of the territory, as documented by Gisha. A ceasefire whose line advances is an occupation with better branding.

For nearly three years the disarmament of Hamas was Israel's own stated condition for ending the war, repeated in every negotiation and every "total victory" speech. On 30 July 2026 the road map to a second phase was pushed forward under Trump's sponsorship. The next day Hamas agreed to the disarmament terms of the Egyptian proposal, and Israel rejected the plan. When the stated reason for a war is conceded and the war is chosen anyway, the stated reason was never the reason. Each phase, each breach, and each collapse lands on the population of Gaza, and each is filed, dated, in The Coverage below.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The West Bank and settler violence

While the world watches Gaza, the West Bank is being taken village by village: settlement expansion declared illegal by the International Court of Justice's July 2024 advisory opinion, state-backed settler violence, home demolitions, mass arrests, and the largest displacement of West Bank Palestinians in decades. Settler attacks are documented by B'Tselem and UN OCHA at record rates. Our West Bank reporting is filed in The Coverage below.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The international legal track

The legal record is unprecedented. The UN Commission of Inquiry's September 2025 genocide finding, by Pillay, Kothari and Sidoti, stands as the United Nations' own conclusion, and called for genocide charges to be added to the ICC warrants. South Africa brought Israel before the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention; in January 2024 the court found the rights Palestinians assert under the Convention to be plausible and issued binding provisional measures, including an order to enable humanitarian assistance; the merits case is pending. In July 2024 the same court found the occupation itself unlawful. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem have each separately concluded that Israel practises apartheid. Enforcement has not followed the findings; the findings stand.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The media framing record

The war over the story has its own record. At least 262 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, by the Gaza Ministry of Health count as documented by Tech for Palestine, and press-freedom organisations record it as the deadliest conflict for journalists they have ever documented; international press remains barred from independent access to the strip. Western coverage has been repeatedly shown to favour passive constructions for Palestinian deaths and active ones for Israeli deaths, to quote officials over evidence, and to bury the legal findings above. We track the framing itself: who gets named, who gets counted, and which words are permitted for whom. That record is part of this one.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk