“The problem was never that Palestine lacked recognition. The problem is that Palestine lacks freedom and action.” Essential reading from Nour ElAssy: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

Been thinking about line from this podcast a lot recently: "What neoliberalism has done is taken away that thing that secures and holds us in common... So what are we? We're little Hobbesian creatures: diffident, anxious, competitive, and in the end, a little murderous." www.npr.org/2025/07/10/1...

Read @rasha-abou-jalal.bsky.social harrowing account of the past week in Gaza City and her family's forced displacement to the south. "I wept because I love my city, Gaza, where I was born and raised, and today I am being forced to leave it." www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Israeli forces have killed nearly 3,000 people attempting to get aid in the Gaza Strip & wounded almost 20,000 others. For over a year, @sparksriley.bsky.social tracked these attacks, which we just published as a publicly accessible database and timeline. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/investigatio...

Don't look away. Read Rasha Abou Jalal's intimate and harrowing diary from Gaza City as the Israeli military intensifies its assault. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Arrests of Sudanese refugees involved in organising protests against dismal conditions and lack of resettlement opportunities on 21 August in Agadez, Niger "may constitute an enforced disappearance", according to the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders.

Another message from journalist Rasha Abou Jalal in Gaza "I was deeply saddened today by the killing of journalist Maryam Abu Daqqa. Maryam was my friend...She loved photographing food, restaurants and the sea." Maryam was one of four journalists killed today in Israeli strikes on Nasser Hospital

One message I received today from Rasha About Jalal, a journalist I work with in Gaza: "I see fear and terror on the faces of people here in Gaza… they feel that danger and invasion are inevitable... Israeli drones are dropping bombs on the rooftops of people’s homes to force them to flee south."

From this week's @newhumanitarian.bsky.social Cheat Sheet. Read Rasha's article here: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Hello @longreads.com Please consider Rita Baroud's three part diary about surviving 570 days of genocide in Gaza, evacuating, and then navigating survivor's guilt while beginning to adjust to life in France for your editor's picks section. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

"Residents of Gaza City are once again living under the threat of displacement... Most conversations I overhear are about whether to head south or stay no matter the consequences." Urgent from Rasha Abou Jalal from Gaza City as Israel threatens to invade: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

A secret meeting earlier this month between UN agencies, international aid organisations, and the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been met with a mixture of outrage and disbelief by humanitarian figures and observers. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2025/08...

“Refugees are wrongly treated as a crisis, while the real crisis is a system that approaches protecting human life as optional and stopping movement across borders as essential.” Urgent view on global refugee protection, by Mustafa Alio & Rez Gardi www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

Read this painfully beautiful article by Sumaya Yasser Saleh about the things Israel's brutal assault on life in Gaza has taken from her that will never be recorded in two-dimensional tallies of death and destruction and the meaning of survival. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Every word of this demands to be read. Read it out loud to yourself. Find a loved one or friend, read it to them. Let the weight of each sentence sink in. "I don’t want to be used as a symbol of triumphant survival. Yes, I survived – but I am not okay." www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

"I had once hoped that the great iron gate of Evin would fall – not from an airstrike, but opened by the people... That the fall of that gate would be a celebration, not a mourning." Read this first-person by former prisoner Saeedeh Fathi: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Tammam Aloudat, @newhumanitarian.bsky.social's CEO, with a bold call to action for humanitarian organizations: 1) Take Western governments to court over complicity in Israeli atrocities 2) Assemble a massive flotilla to break the blockade of Gaza www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

From this week's @newhumanitarian.bsky.social Cheat Sheet. Read Rita's article here: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Every word of Rita Baroud's latest article for The New Humanitarian demands to be read, their magnitude absorbed. "Gaza is not a memory. It is a pulse inside me that will not stop. I feel like I am still there, caught between the rubble and the fire." www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Another absolutely critical, must-read in @newhumanitarian.bsky.social's "Don't look away" series of first-person articles from Gaza. This one by 22-year-old Hani Qarmoot on facing gunfire to get flour. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Civilian volunteers have rescued more than 175,000 people in the central Mediterranean Sea in the past 10 years. Their humanitarian work has also become a flashpoint in Europe's poisonous migration politics. Read this deeply human portrait of one mission: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

My last.. #Gaza

We have reached the point where a family receiving a sack of flour in Gaza without being shot at or shelled is news. Read @rasha-abou-jalal.bsky.social's latest for @newhumanitarian.bsky.social. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Despite intense media coverage, the day-to-day human reality of life in Gaza under Israeli assault is difficult to imagine. Journalist Rita Baroud writes about it with heart-wrenching power. I spoke to her for this @newhumanitarian.bsky.social podcast. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/podcasts/202...

At least 549 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get aid from the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the past month. Read Rasha Abou Jalal’s harrowing account of her husband’s experience: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Hajar Harb was a formidable human being. I was privileged to know her and work with her for the brief time that I did. This is my attempt to honor her memory: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/editors-take...

The details of what Israel is doing in Gaza are so much more sinister than even the already horrific big picture appears. The closer you look, the uglier and more pernicious it gets. From this week's @newhumanitarian.bsky.social Cheat Sheet. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2025/06...

"What is unfolding is not mere military conquest but engineered disintegration — one in which Israel actively cultivates Gaza’s collapse by empowering criminal militias, fragmenting authority, and dismantling every pillar of Palestinian social infrastructure." www.972mag.com/gaza-social-...

Journalist Ghada Abdulfattah spent two days with a team of Gaza's first responders. Perhaps more than anyone else, they have borne witness to the horror of the past 20 months, continuing to show up every day to save live. Read Ghada's remarkable report: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2025...

In case you missed it last week, this piece is incredibly powerful and essential reading. Part of @newhumanitarian.bsky.social's series "Don't look away", keeping a spotlight on the human reality of life in Gaza: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Nour ElAssy provides a view from the ground of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's violent and chaotic first week of operations and the broader context of forced displacement and deprivation imposed on people in Gaza: ⬇️

Nour ElAssy on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's disastrous first week: "The manipulation of humanitarian assistance serves a sinister purpose: to force us into the southern part of Gaza, stripping us of our homes and dignity." www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

Rita Baroud, a 22-year-old Palestinian journalist from Gaza City, continues to write the most incredibly poignant and powerful articles chronicling her life amidst the unrelenting violence, deprivation, and horror of Israel's war. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Yesterday's remarks by the UN's top humanitarian official are worth taking note of. He all-but calls Israel's conduct in Gaza genocidal. Many have gotten there before him and the institution he represents. But it's a significant shift in tone: www.ochaopt.org/content/brie...

"Recognise the humanity of those whose stories you publish. Stop using us. Stand with us. Because if we all fall, there will be no one left to tell the story." Read Nour ElAssy's excoriating plea for global media solidarity with Gaza's journalists: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

"For the people of Gaza, the objective is clear: to permanently corral them into an even smaller pen of misery where they have to beg their occupiers for a loaf of bread." Read Arwa Damon's article for @newhumanitarian.bsky.social: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

On 23 March, Israel massacred 15 first responders in Rafah, Gaza. Dr James Smith, an emergency physician, volunteered with some of these man last year. He writes for @newhumanitarian.bsky.social about the broader pattern of violence behind their killings: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

In mid January, Israel launched its largest military campaign in the West Bank in years. More than three months in, it has displaced 10,000's of people, laid waste to several refugee camps, and caused a cascade of dire humanitarian effects. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature...

Nour ElAssy, whose articles I've been editing since last October, has been forcibly displaced again from her home in Gaza City. She had only recently returned. Somehow, she had the strength to write about it and the harrowing new phase of Israel's war: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/first-person...

Amid a broader global crisis, Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian PoWs – and the perception that the institutions meant to uphold international humanitarian law have failed to stop or even mitigate abuses – has driven a deepening scepticism in Ukraine. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2025...

"The moral awakening occurred as planned. It just didn’t make a difference. What they hadn’t counted on was the utter lack of real democracy in the West." On Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation in the West Bank: harpers.org/archive/2025...

Some thoughts on the Global Migration visualization, drawn from Meta location tracking data, published by the NY Times Opinion section last week – starting with the language used in framing it. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

People in Gaza have to pay brokers fees of 20 to 40% to access cash, making it even more difficult to purchase essential supplies needed to survive, which are quickly running out under total Israeli siege. @newhumanitarian.bsky.social's latest from Gaza: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature...

"Here’s the uncomfortable truth: If your humanitarian mission dies when the money dries up, it was never a mission, it was a business." So many strong lines in the piece. @newhumanitarian.bsky.social www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2025...

"We write, we scream, we document. But who reads? Who cares?" 22-year-old journalist Rita Baroud continues to write from Gaza. The bare minimum we can do is continue to read her words so she knows that there are people still listening, who still care: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Important discussion of the current moment with philosopher Judith Butler and legal scholar Aziz Rana from @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

"Now, we know where all this is leading, and we’re just waiting to see which of the two options we’ll be served: death, or 'voluntary displacement'." Read Palestinian journalist Mohamed al-Astal's first-person for @newhumanitarian.bsky.social from Gaza: www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/firs...

Must read: “So, we are still alive, I guess, but barely. We don’t have any hope to cling on to anymore, honestly, just like the rest of the people in Gaza. But at least I’m privileged enough to tell you that we are still managing to live.”

“I’ve never seen anything where there was such a lethal combination of factors going on to create the humanitarian situation, but also prevent it from being addressed.”

I got to speak on The New Humanitarian’s What’s Unsaid podcast about why we continue to see a high number of deaths along migration routes and what — maybe — can be done about it: