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Zikim crossing, the main entry point into the devastated northern Gaza Strip, has been reopened to allow the flow of humanitarian aid into the region, according to Israeli officials.

The announcement on Wednesday came two months after Israel shut the crossing, and followed repeated calls from United Nations aid agencies to allow aid to flow directly into the hard-hit northern part of Gaza.

Under the ceasefire brokered by the United States, which took effect on October 10, aid deliveries were to be significantly ramped up, with at least 600 trucks a day supposed to enter the Strip.

But volumes have been much less than that, and the UN has warned that the hunger crisis in Gaza remains catastrophic, as aid convoys to the north, where famine was declared in August, face a slow and difficult route from the south.

“Today, the Zikim crossing has been opened for the entry of humanitarian aid trucks into the Gaza Strip,” COGAT, the Israeli Defence Ministry body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, said on X.

COGAT said humanitarian aid entering through Zikim, supplied by the UN and other international organisations, would be subject to the usual Israeli security checks before entry and distributed through the UN.

A COGAT spokesperson told the AFP news agency that the crossing would remain open permanently.

Reopening ‘vital’

Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said it was the first time Zikim crossing had been operational since the implementation of the ceasefire deal, after having been shut down by the Israeli military “under a security pretext”.

The reopening meant that three crossings into Gaza were now open, with Karem Abu Salem (known as Kerem Shalom in Israel) in the south and al-Karara (Kissufim) in central Gaza also operational.

In a recent report, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid had said the opening of direct crossings to the north was “vital to ensure that sufficient aid reaches people as soon as possible”.

Attacks, search for captives’ bodies continue

The reopening of Zikim crossing was welcome news in Gaza, where Palestinians endure dire humanitarian conditions more than a month after the ceasefire, as well as ongoing attacks from Israeli forces.

According to Al Jazeera teams on the ground, Israeli warplanes launched three air raids on the city of Beit Lahiya in the north of the Strip, while an area east of the Jabalia refugee camp, also in the north, was targeted with Israeli artillery shelling.

Al Jazeera teams also reported gunfire from Israeli positions stationed east of the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

The attacks came as members of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, and a Red Cross team entered an area within the so-called “yellow line”, demarcating territory under Israeli military control, in an effort to recover the bodies of captives.

Since the US-brokered ceasefire took effect in Gaza, Hamas freed all 20 living captives and returned the remains of 24 deceased, with four bodies yet to be returned to fulfil the first phase of the agreement.

Lead Israeli negotiator resigns ministerial post

As the search for the remaining bodies played out in Gaza, the head of the Israeli delegation in negotiations that produced the ceasefire and exchange deal said he was resigning from his ministerial post.

Ron Dermer, a close aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced in a post on X that he was resigning as minister of strategic affairs, a post he had held since 2022.

“What the future holds for me, I do not know. But I do know this: No matter what I do, I will continue to do my part to help secure the Jewish future,” he said.

Dermer did not indicate whether he would continue as lead negotiator in the ongoing talks around the second phase of the Gaza deal.

Venezuela’s military is practicing its readiness for war, as the US continues its troop build-up in the Caribbean. Earlier, the US confirmed its largest aircraft carrier had arrived in the region.

In international diplomacy, economic sanctions are often portrayed as a clean and humane alternative to war, a supposedly civilised way to pressure governments into compliance with international law without shedding blood. Yet this reassuring narrative hides a devastating truth: sanctions can destroy the health and wellbeing of ordinary people. While they are intended to weaken regimes, they often end up crippling the targeted state’s ability to provide basic healthcare to the very citizens those measures claim to protect. The mechanisms meant to safeguard civilians and allow humanitarian aid frequently collapse, leaving the most vulnerable to pay the highest price for political decisions made far from their reach.

The result is a form of economic warfare that kills not through bombs or bullets, but through the slow erosion of health systems, medicines, and human dignity.

Our recent correspondence in The Lancet examines this reality in the context of the United Nations Security Council’s decision on September 28, 2025, to reimpose multilateral sanctions on Iran. In the piece, we do not take a position on the Security Council’s decision to reimpose multilateral sanctions; rather, our focus is squarely on the potential consequences of this move for Iran’s population, particularly given the severe health impacts seen under previous sanctions. Drawing on evidence from the pre-2015 sanctions period, our analysis in The Lancet shows how these measures shattered Iran’s health system and reveals a deeper structural failure within the international sanctions regime to protect the fundamental right to health.

The findings reveal that sanctions are not merely diplomatic instruments; they are public health interventions with deadly consequences.

Sanctions can literally shorten lives

The impact of sanctions on public health is not theoretical; it is measurable in years of life lost. A comprehensive cross-national analysis has shown that the imposition of UN sanctions is directly linked to a significant decline in life expectancy. On average, countries under such sanctions experience a reduction of around 1.2 to 1.4 years in life expectancy, with women disproportionately affected.

This is not collateral damage. It is evidence that sanctions function as a weapon against the health of entire populations. The deprivation is slow and often invisible, with hospitals running out of medicines, treatments delayed, and patients dying not from disease itself but from policies that make care inaccessible.

The illusion of humanitarian exemptions

On paper, sanctions regimes almost always include “humanitarian exemptions” to allow the import of essential goods such as food and medicine. In practice, these safeguards often exist only in name. As our Lancet correspondence highlights, during previous UN sanctions on Iran, there was no dedicated UN mechanism to verify whether these exemptions were actually functioning.

The result was catastrophic. The sanctions disrupted medicine imports, driving price spikes of up to 300 percent for some antiepileptic drugs. As millions of patients were forced to forego reliable treatment, counterfeit and expired medicines flooded the market, endangering countless lives. These were not unintended glitches; they were the predictable outcomes of a sanctions system designed without accountability or monitoring.

An institutional blind spot

The UN bodies responsible for overseeing the sanctions on Iran also operated with a dangerously narrow focus. The Sanctions Committee and its panel of experts were primarily concerned with tracking compliance with nuclear restrictions, such as monitoring uranium enrichment, while failing to assess how these measures affected people’s access to medicine, medical equipment, or healthcare more broadly.

Their reports contained no systematic evaluation of the sanctions’ humanitarian impact, revealing a persistent institutional blind spot. Technical compliance was monitored down to the last centrifuge, yet the suffering of ordinary Iranians was left unrecorded. This oversight is not unique to Iran; it reflects a wider pattern in global sanctions policy, where the political objective takes precedence over the human cost.

The hidden harm of overcompliance

The damage caused by sanctions does not end with the official restrictions themselves. A more subtle but equally destructive process, known as “overcompliance”, often magnifies the humanitarian crisis. This happens when companies and banks become excessively cautious, refusing to engage in transactions that are in fact legally permitted, including those involving medicines and medical equipment, for fear of breaching complex sanctions rules.

Our correspondence in The Lancet highlights how this excessive caution deepens the suffering of ordinary people. Overcompliance by pharmaceutical and medical device companies and financial institutions unnecessarily raises prices, fuels corruption, and opens the door to low-quality or counterfeit alternatives. It also creates a shadow market of intermediaries who claim to know how to move medical supplies under sanctions, increasing both costs and risks. In some cases, even legitimate distributors seeking to import approved medicines have found themselves inadvertently caught up in unlawful activities.

The result is a further tightening of the blockade on a country’s health system, even where humanitarian exemptions supposedly exist. Overcompliance has become one of the most insidious and least accountable aspects of modern sanctions regimes, quietly cutting off access to life-saving care while allowing policymakers to deny responsibility.

A call for a health-conscious foreign policy

The evidence is unambiguous. Without strong and actively monitored safeguards, sanctions become a blunt instrument that inflicts immense suffering on those least able to bear it. These are not unfortunate side effects, but direct and foreseeable consequences of policies applied without regard for their human cost.

The lesson from Iran, and from decades of similar experiences elsewhere, is that economic sanctions must never be imposed without independent systems to protect the right to health. This means establishing effective humanitarian payment channels, monitoring the real-time availability of essential medicines and medical supplies, and assigning oversight to a technical panel capable of assessing the full health impact of sanctions on civilian populations.

Sanctions are often justified in the name of human rights, yet they can quietly destroy the very lives they claim to defend. The international community must recognise that the protection of health is not an optional consideration, but a fundamental obligation. If sanctions are to remain part of global diplomacy, they must be reimagined with public health at their core, not left to erode it.

WATCH: A video provided by a former military guard shows soldiers torturing two detainees at an infantry base in Mandalay region in October 2021. 

Al Jazeera has also gathered testimonies from several military defectors who confirm that deaths in custody are common.

A senior officer, “AK”, who asked for a pseudonym to protect his identity, defected from the military after being forced to take part in an extrajudicial killing operation. He alleges that the murder of captured urban fighters is sanctioned at the highest level.

AK described a night in early 2024 when four suspected urban fighters were bound, blindfolded and taken away from one of the military’s deadliest interrogation facilities.

The four prisoners, suspected assassins, were tortured so badly that they had to be propped up by soldiers as they were taken to a waiting pickup truck. Surrounded by armed guards, the four were then transported to a quiet road away from the city and forced to kneel beside a ditch.

AK said a senior officer ordered the soldiers to shoot the men with pistols to avoid unnecessary noise.

The suspects were shot from behind, AK said, but they did not die immediately. As the rebels bled on the ground, the soldiers grew restless waiting for them to die, so they shot them again, then again.

“I don’t think they knew that was the moment they would die, until they heard bullets … their deaths were so brutal I couldn’t sleep for a week,” AK told Al Jazeera.

The men’s bodies were then transferred to a military hospital, where AK says doctors signed certificates that obscured their cause of death. Medical staff employed by the military are often pressured to cover up such murders, he says.

Al Jazeera has seen photos of three of the men’s bodies, along with leaked copies of the official death report, which says they were killed while trying to escape. The injuries visible in the photos do not match that claim. One photo, AK pointed out, shows one of the men with his eyes covered and his hands tied, challenging the account that he had been trying to get away.

Claiming that prisoners were killed while trying to flee is a common narrative used by the military to cover up extrajudicial killings, the former senior officer said.

Some of the details about the executions that AK shared have been omitted here due to concern about reprisals. But to verify this incident, Al Jazeera triangulated testimonies and leaked documents with local media reports and interviews with former military and civil society organisation sources.

Critically, AK explained such murders could not take place without the approval of senior military officials.

“No one could leave that detention centre without approval from the top,” he said.

Al Jazeera also spoke with two former army doctors who served on different bases after the coup. Both said they were prevented from providing medical attention to civilians aligned with the resistance who had serious injuries. After the coup, they said, it became common practice for senior military doctors to fake the causes of death of detainees who had been killed or left to die in custody.

The doctors, who requested anonymity, confirmed that such cover-ups by military leaders are both organised and strategic, allowing detainees to be murdered or left to die while the regime avoids accountability.