Foreign media outlets again urge Israel to lift Gaza access ban

Rats infest Gaza’s tent camps, biting children and spreading disease

IDF kills Hamas operative allegedly planning attacks on troops, three reported dead in separate airstrike; Israeli NGO petitions for release of Gazan doctors held without charges

Rats and parasites are spreading through Gaza’s tent camps for displaced Palestinians, biting children’s fingers and toes as they sleep, gnawing through people’s few remaining treasured possessions, and spreading disease.

Some half a year into a US-brokered truce, most of Gaza’s more than 2 million people are still displaced as a result of the preceding two-year war, and many now live in bombed-out homes and makeshift tents pitched on open ground, roadsides, or atop the ruins of destroyed buildings.

Just days before her wedding day, Amani Abu Selmi, displaced with her family in Khan Younis in the south, discovered that rats had gnawed through the garments and bags of her wedding trousseau inside the tattered tent where they have been sheltering.

She and her mother showed Reuters holes the rodents had eaten through her gown, a traditional burgundy embroidered dress that is customary in Palestinian weddings.

“All my happiness was gone, it turned to sadness, turned to heartbreak – that my things are gone, my wedding trousseau is gone,” said Abu Selmi, 20.

A rat bit the hand and toes of Khalil Al-Mashharawi’s 3-year-old son several weeks ago, he said. Last Friday, he himself was bitten.

He said he and his wife now sleep in shifts to protect their children and one another from an infestation they are unable to control or defend themselves against, with rodent traps largely ineffective in Gaza’s ruined homes and tent encampments.

“They strike in our sleep,” said Al-Mashharawi, 26, who lives with his family in the ruins of their house in the Tuffah neighbourhood in northern Gaza.

“They may disappear for a day or two before they strike again, [forcing] their way under the tiles of the floor of the house.”

Mohamed Abu Selmia, head of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, said he expects the problem to worsen as summer approaches and amid an Israeli ban on pest control materials such as rat poison.

Israel generally restricts the entry to Gaza of items that it says can have dual military or civilian use.

As part of what it said was an effort with “all actors and international partners” to address the sanitation problem, COGAT, the Israeli military agency that controls access to Gaza, said that, in recent weeks, it has facilitated the transfer of about 90 tons of pest control materials and over 1,000 mousetraps into the enclave.

“Every day, hospitals record cases of patients being admitted due to rodent-related incidents, particularly among children, the elderly, and the sick,” Abu Selmia said.

There is also widespread fear about the spread of dangerous diseases, including rat-bite fever, leptospirosis, and even plague, he said.

‘A collapsed living environment’

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which went into effect in October, has not ended the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, where sewage and sanitation systems have been mostly destroyed and humanitarian aid is subject to Israeli restrictions.

With waste collection largely halted, contaminated water and refuse have accumulated near the tent cities where families sleep, cook, and wash. This has given rodents and parasites a unique environment within which they can spread, aid groups say.

Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the World Health Organization’s local representative, said there were around 17,000 rodent and ectoparasitic infection-related cases in Gaza so far this year.

“This is just the unfortunate but predictable consequence when people live in a collapsed living environment,” she said.

The truce came after two years of war, triggered by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, cross-border assault on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. The deal secured the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for thousands of Palestinian security inmates and terror convicts.

Israel cites security concerns for its limits on aid to Gaza, which is now split roughly in half, between a portion controlled by the Israeli military and a portion that is still de facto ruled by Hamas.

The US-brokered deal was envisioned as part of a larger process that would see Hamas disarmed and the Strip demilitarized, though how far that will go in practice is yet to be seen.

IDF: Killed Hamas operative planning attack on troops

In the meantime, skirmishes have continued, with four Israeli soldiers and some 800 Palestinians killed, the latter figure based on local reports that don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The Israel Defense Forces said that a Hamas operative who’d been planning an attack on Israeli troops was killed in a Wednesday airstrike.

The IDF said Ibrahim Abu Sakkar had planned an attack on troops “in the immediate timeframe” and during the war led numerous attacks on soldiers and Israel. Abu Sakkar also served as a paramedic in Hamas’s Military Medical Services, according to the army.

The military published footage of the strike.

On Thursday, three people were killed and another seriously wounded in an Israeli strike in Gaza City, reported Hamas-affiliated Palestinian media outlets in the Strip. The toll did not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

The IDF had not yet commented as of Thursday evening, and The Times of Israel could not independently verify the information.

Israeli NGO asks court to release Gazan doctors

Also on Thursday, an Israeli rights organization petitioned the Supreme Court to demand the immediate release of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza who had been held without charge for more than a year.

Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) said the doctors had been denied adequate medical care and food and subjected to physical abuse while in detention. The group said they were being held under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows for indefinite detention without charge.

“The Israeli army already investigated them and despite the lack of any evidence incriminating them… [prosecutors] decided to continue their detention,” said lawyer Nasser Odeh, representing Hussam Abu Safiya, the detained director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Israel’s Prison Service told Reuters it rejected all allegations that the doctors had been mistreated in prison, though a recent report from Israel’s own Public Defender’s Office determined that Palestinian security detainees held in Israeli prisons have suffered from severe and systematic violence from prison guards, deprivation of food, and medical neglect, while also having been subjected to unsanitary conditions that caused and exacerbated outbreaks of disease in the prisons.

It was not immediately clear if or when the court would hear the petition on the Palestinian doctors.

In February, a decades-old photo resurfaced of Abu Safiya wearing a Hamas uniform alongside other senior officers in the terror group.

Abu Safiya holds the rank of colonel in Hamas’s Military Medical Services, according to the MMS and Palestinian media reports. The MMS is separate from Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, though its members directly participated in the Hamas-led terror onslaught that started the war in 2023.

International media urge Israel to let them into Gaza

Meanwhile, the leaders of major media companies around the world called on Israel’s government to lift a ban keeping foreign journalists from independently entering and reporting from Gaza, a barrier that’s been in place since the war’s start in 2023.

“Being on the ground is essential. It allows journalists to question official accounts on all sides, to speak directly with civilians and report back what they witness firsthand,” said the statement from the executives. “That is why news organizations send their reporters into the field, often at great personal risk.”

From the AP and the BBC to CNN to MS NOW, from Reuters to German news agency dpa to The Washington Post, the top editors of more than two dozen organizations said the Israeli government has so far not responded to their efforts to discuss the situation. They questioned the country’s rationale for why the restrictions are still in place.

Initially, Israel said the ban was necessary because foreign journalists allowed into Gaza could give away the positions of Israeli soldiers and endanger them. Other rationales have included that, as an active battle zone, it was too dangerous. The army has occasionally brought foreign reporters in on highly controlled trips, but media outlets want independent access.

Currently, “the heaviest fighting is over, and there is a ceasefire in place,” the editors’ statement said. “The hostages have come home. Journalists do not pose a threat to Israeli troops. There is a mechanism in place—however restrictive—that allows aid workers to enter and exit the territory. Why not journalists?”

There have been attempts at legal action to force the issue. The Foreign Press Association, which represents international media in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, has been waiting on a decision from the Israeli Supreme Court on a petition for independent access to Gaza. That action was filed in 2024, but a ruling has been repeatedly delayed, most recently in January.