After the final death toll was reached at 67, the search for the remains of those who died in an Indonesian school collapse has been postponed as families continue to search for bodies.
Published On 7 Oct 2025
Two young Gazan girls named Meet Farah and Myriam.
Night is a reminder of loved ones who were killed in the dark, in Farah’s eyes.
Myriam’s mother and sister were taken away from her home, leaving her with them. The rubble is still where her aunt’s body is buried.
After two years of fighting, the two girls meet to discuss their grief, fears, and hopes for the future. She lives in a tent next to the ruins.
Wissam Moussa directs Farah and Myriam. It’s one of 22 short films from Gaza that Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi started to tell the untold stories of the current conflict.
Published On 7 Oct 2025
When Israel started its attack on October 7, 2023, nearly all of us in Gaza had the sense that this was going to be brutal.
Yet, no one thought it would continue for two long years. No one thought that the world would allow this to happen for so long.
I was 16 years old when Israel launched the 2014 attack on Gaza. The aggression lasted 51 days, and it felt like a lifetime then. Now, the 2014 assault feels like a blink of an eye.
I don’t remember at what point I felt like there was no escape from this genocidal onslaught, that I could not even imagine its end. Was it when the Israelis massacred hundreds at the al-Ahli Hospital, or when they invaded al-Shifa Hospital, or when I was displaced to Rafah the first time, or when they invaded and destroyed Rafah, sending us fleeing for our lives, or when northern Gaza was wiped out, or when Israel breached the ceasefire agreement and resumed the genocide, or when famine took hold in Gaza?
Last year, we marked the first anniversary of the genocide on the road. That day, the Israeli army issued another forced displacement order for eastern Khan Younis, and we had to flee to al-Mawasi along with thousands of other people.
This year, we haven’t gone far. We are still displaced, living in a tent in al-Mawasi and starving.
We are still in the same circle of death and destruction, only the brutality has escalated. The list of martyrs has grown longer, the spectrum of misery has broadened, and the Israeli methods of torture have diversified.
The Israelis now don’t just want to kill us. They have gotten creative about it. They have designed various death traps, giving us a choice in how to die.
When Israel halted all aid entry to Gaza on March 2, launching another wave of starvation, while already massacring civilians around the clock, I thought that was the ultimate level of evil. I was wrong. Starvation was just the beginning.
In late May, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation opened its food distribution points, where Palestinians got to participate in real-life “hunger games”. They would be made to compete for a few boxes of food before getting shot by Israeli soldiers and foreign mercenaries.
When children started dying of malnutrition, Israel started allowing commercial trucks in so markets would get full of food that no one could afford.
When the Israeli government pressed for the conquest of Gaza City, the army deployed explosive robots to help wreak total destruction. These military vehicles packed with tonnes of explosives would pulverise not only whole blocks, but also the families living in them.
T S Eliot once wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” And yet, we, the humans of Gaza, have had to bear an unbearable reality every day for two years now.
It has been a horror after a horror. Israel has committed more massacres than I can mention. Yet, I can’t forget when Israel killed my friend Mohammad Hamo, a young Palestinian writer, alongside 200 members of his family and relatives. Or when Israel killed 112 starving people, as they waited for flour, in what is now known as the Flour Massacre. Or when, on March 18, the Israeli army resumed the genocide, killing 400 people, 100 of them children, in a couple of hours. Or when Israeli soldiers executed 15 Palestinian paramedics in Rafah.
Gaza has become a place where there is no distinction between a civilian and a combatant, between places and people protected under humanitarian law and military targets allowed under the laws of war. Here, the doctor and the patient are murdered; the journalist and the witness; the teacher and the pupil; the mother and the unborn child.
The concept of life has lost its meaning in Gaza. We are not living, we are surviving; we are in a constant battle to escape death.
My family and I have been displaced nine times. Each time, we have struggled to set up our tent, to build a toilet, to create shade to fight the sun, then to cover up to fight the wind, then to isolate to protect from the cold and rain.
In July, I sneaked out to my neighbourhood in east Khan Younis after a partial withdrawal of the Israeli army. All the way, I was walking over rubble that littered every inch of the razed streets. As I arrived on my street, I couldn’t tell where my house was, at first. The Israeli army had scrambled my entire neighbourhood. The scene was apocalyptic. Everything looked grey; there was no colour, no life, no standing building.
When I returned to our tent, I showed my mother the pictures I took. “Who do they think we are? China? Russia?” she shouted as she sobbed. “We didn’t even pick up a fork to defend ourselves”.
The next day, I went to Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza, the least damaged area in the enclave. I went there because I genuinely feared for my sanity. I felt I was losing my mind. I needed to see some buildings, paved roads, and trees; the scenes of my neighbourhood were haunting me. I wanted to prove to myself that I can recognise colours other than grey.
Gaza is small and densely populated, but it has always been incredibly diverse in its landscape, each part of it having its own distinctive history, culture and rhythm.
Gaza City was the most vibrant part, where many of the famous markets, universities, and high-rise buildings were. It was also where the old city was, with its historical sites, mosques and churches. Beit Hanoon and Beit Lahiya, in the far north, were more laid back, quieter. There, the urban landscape mixed with the rural; a lot of our food was grown there. Khan Younis and Rafah in the south were also distinct; their eastern parts morphed into farmland.
The refugee camps in the north, centre and south – from Jabalia through Bureij, to Khan Younis camp, were the most densely built, but also most resilient and diverse. They were a miniature of historic Palestine, as most of their population were descendants of the 1948 Nakba’s refugees, from Jaffa to Bir as-Sab’.
The Israeli army razed all of that, creating the same landscape of destruction all around Gaza. Rafah is a reflection of Beit Hanoon; Khan Younis, a copy of Gaza City. It is like holding a mirror against another mirror, generating endless reflections of the same picture.
These are the same images that people around the world see every day, feel sickened by, and find too much to stomach. Many would look away or scroll down. Indeed, humans cannot bear very much reality.
And yet, we, the humans of Gaza, cannot look away or scroll down. We have been stuck in this reality for what feels like an eternity. And whenever we thought we had seen the worst, worse would happen.
I wish I could just check out and escape this genocidal reality to somewhere I could live and not just exist, somewhere I could chase dreams and not be haunted by nightmares, somewhere I could get food or water without fearing death. Somewhere I can hope again, where I can be free. That is all I wish for.
After explosions tear through their neighborhoods, many children cling to the arms of rescuers with their shocked eyes.
Small bodies are instantly destroyed, homes are instantly destroyed, and youth’s innocence replaced by trauma in some images, which are too horrifying to depict.
These faces, who were once vibrant and full of life, sag and sag, becoming sagging and lifeless as hunger and loss take hold.
A child with a broken arm covered in plaster and lying on a hospital floor covered in blood is depicted in one of Ashraf Amra’s images, which were taken on May 21, 2024. The blood on the floor seeping closer to his uninjured shoulder as he fixedly gazes at the camera.
Following Israeli attacks on the Bureij refugee camp in Deir el-Balah, one of the injured Palestinians who was taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital was him.
Women in Gaza also carry heavy loads, both physically and emotionally, including mothers, teachers, doctors, journalists, and caregivers. Some are influenced by their faith in churches or mosques.
After having previously experienced similar circumstances, the older generation is seeing displacement.
Inas Abu Maamar, 36, a Palestinian woman, poses with her 5-year-old niece Sally, who was killed in an Israeli attack on October 17, 2023, at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Mohammad Salem, a photographer, was present at the hospital morgue that day.
He said the image “speaks a powerful and depressing moment,” and it “speaks to the general perception of what was happening in the Gaza Strip.”
People were perplexed, running, and worried about the fate of their loved ones, and this woman caught my attention as she held the young girl’s body and resisted to leave.
The image then won the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award for capturing the heartbreaking pain and chaos experienced by those affected by the Gaza attacks.
Many of the men pictured are carrying heavy, shrouded bodies.
Young men and rescue workers, who frequently serve as first responders and civilians, brave the rubble.
Each man’s face reflects exhaustion, grief, and the urgent need to intervene in the chaos of the world, and each shrouded body reveals a tale of tragedy and sudden loss.
A man is seen carrying the body of a child who was killed overnight by Israeli bombing at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, according to an image taken by Omar Al-Qattaa.
Published On 7 Oct 2025
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has scaled back its forecast for renewable power growth to 2030, citing weaker outlooks in the United States and China.
The Paris-based agency now projects total renewable capacity will reach 4, 600 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, down from 5, 500GW in last year’s forecast, according to a report released on Tuesday.
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This suggests that a global target of tripling renewable energy use by 2030 to combat climate change will fail.
The early phase-out of federal tax incentives for renewable energy in the US, laid out in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”, is a key driver of the lowered estimate.
Challenges in China, where the government is shifting from guaranteed electricity prices for renewable energy projects to competitive auctions that constrain profits, are also a factor, said the IEA.
It is not all bad news, however, the IEA said. While growth in China and the US may be slowing, there is a more positive outlook elsewhere.
The agency pointed to India, which “is on track to meet its 2030 target and become the second-largest growth market for renewables, with capacity set to rise by 2.5 times in five years”.
It also raised forecasts for the Middle East and North Africa by 25 percent, while the outlook for capacity in Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain was also raised.
Solar power enjoys a strong lead in pushing renewables development on.
Solar panels accounted for about 80 percent of the global growth in renewable energy over the past five years, the IEA estimates, followed by wind, water, biomass and geothermal power.
The outlook for offshore wind power was revised lower due to policy changes in key countries, the IEA said – particularly the US, which has sought to halt projects already under construction.
The IEA sought to clarify the potential benefits of raising renewables capacity in the current geopolitical climate, noting that its development is helping countries meet goals for greater financial and energy security.
El-Enany, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo’s Helwan University, would become the first Arab director-general of the organization, which oversees international cooperation efforts in science and education in addition to the UN’s handling of cultural heritage.
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Firmin Edouard Matoko of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabriela Ramos of Mexico, who both withdrew earlier this year, both campaigned heavily for the position.
The board’s decision, which includes 58 of the organization’s 194 member states, is scheduled to be finalized at UNESCO’s general assembly meeting in Uzbekistan next month.
Audrey Azoulay, France’s former minister of culture, will be the organization’s new leader, who has been in the position since 2017.
In particular, Azoulay was instrumental in initiating a significant effort to rebuild Mosul, a former city of Iraq, after it was ravaged by fighting between the ISIL (ISIS)-linked US and Iraqi forces.
El-Enany’s nomination comes as the Paris-based UN body struggles with choosing which cultural heritage sites to protect from threats like wars, pollution, and climate change.
At the end of 2026, the organization will also be subject to an 8% funding cut, with the United States once more formally resigning along with its funding.
The Trump administration will pull the US out of the UN cultural organization for the second time in protest of its members’ decision to accept the State of Palestine as a member in 2011.
More than 80% of member states now support the State of Palestine as a full member of the UN General Assembly, making it a Permanent Observer State.
US State Department spokesman Tammy Bruce argued that the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization had been a result of allowing Palestine to remain a member of UNESCO.
Israel dissolved UNESCO at the end of 2018.
Since October 7, 2023, the organization has verified damage to a total of 110 sites, including 13 religious sites, 77 historic or artistic buildings, three depositories of movable cultural property, nine monuments, one museum, and seven archeological sites.
El-Enani, 54, started out as a tour guide for ancient Egyptian sites before becoming a well-known Egyptianologist.
From 2016 to 2022, he served as Egypt’s president under the auspices of antiquities and, later, tourism.
El-Sisi applauded the nomination of El-Enani, calling it a “historical achievement that shall be added to Egypt’s diplomatic and cultural record as well as the achievements of the Arab and African people.”
El-Enani was in charge of launching numerous mega-tourism initiatives, including those involving the Cairo National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, the Jewish Temple, and numerous ancient discoveries that helped revive the nation’s sluggish tourism industry.