100,000 Dead: What We Know About Gaza's True Death Toll

The death toll in Gaza, as reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry, understates the true scale of the crisis, researchers say. Hunger, disease, and Israeli gunfire at food distribution centers have made the war in the Strip one of the bloodiest of the 21st century

Nir Hasson

Jun 26, 2025

https://archive.vn/4TVuP

On Monday of this week, Hamas' Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip published an updated list of those killed in the war, a 1,227-page chart, arranged from youngest to oldest. The Arabic-language document includes the deceased person's full name, the names of the father and grandfather, date of birth and ID number.

Unlike previous lists, this compilation notes the precise age of children who were under the age of one year when they were killed. Mahmoud al-Maranakh and seven more children died on the same day they were born. Four more children were killed on the day after they entered the world, five others lived to the age of two days. Not until page 11, following 486 names, does the name appear of the first child who was more than six months old when he was killed.

The names of the children under the age of 18 cover 381 pages and amount to 17,121 children, all told. Of the total of 55,202 dead people, 9,126 were women.

Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the data of the Palestinian Health Ministry, claiming that it's inflated and exaggerated. But more and more international experts are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.

Prof. Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London, is a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts. He's written dozens of articles on the wars in Iraq, Syria and Kosovo, among others. This week he and a team of researchers published the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of mortality in the Gaza Strip.

With the aid of Palestinian political scientist Dr. Khalil Shikaki, the team surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza, comprising almost 10,000 people. They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions.

At that time, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip placed the number of those killed since the war's start at 45,660. In other words, the Health Ministry's data undercounted the true total by about 40 percent.

The study hasn't yet undergone peer review – it was published as a "preprint" – but its results are very similar to those of a study conducted by completely different methods and published last January by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That group also estimated the disparity between the Health Ministry data and the true figures to be about 40 percent.

Another report, published this week by Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill, a history doctoral student at the London School of Economics, carried out for the organization Action on Armed Violence, also cites larger numbers than those of the Gaza Health Ministry. Cockerill and his team examined the names of 1,000 children out of 3,000 that the Health Ministry erased from its lists, and concluded that, despite the erasure, solid evidence exists that most of those children were killed.

The study by Spagat and his colleagues also tries, for the first time, to answer the question of excess mortality in the Strip. In other words, how many people died from the indirect effects of war: hunger, cold, diseases that could not be treated because of the destruction of the health system, and other factors.

During the first year of the war, various estimates about the excess mortality rate were published by researchers and physicians, most of which turned out to be highly exaggerated. According to the new survey, the number of excess deaths until January stood at 8,540. That's a huge number by any standard, but low compared to the estimates that tens of thousands would die in Gaza due to hunger and disease.

Haaretz spoke to a number of experts on this subject. The conventional answer is that before the war, the health of the Gaza Strip's population and the condition of the health-care system there were relatively good, certainly compared to other places plagued with ongoing conflicts, such as Africa or Yemen. For example, the vaccination rate in Gaza was very high, in part thanks to a multi-year effort by UNRWA, the United Nations refugee agency.

Another explanation the researchers offer for what was previously a relatively low excess mortality rate is Gaza's social and communal structure. The family support networks proved their effectiveness in times of hunger and deprivation, and apparently saved many Gazans from death. Spagat also notes favorably the activity of the UN and the other aid organizations, which during the war's first year were successful in feeding the population and looking after the state of its health.

But all those protections, Spagat emphasizes, were effective only during that first year. During the past half-year, it's been evident that the Gazan population increasingly lacks the ability to protect itself against excess mortality.

For one, the displacement of 90 percent of the Strip's residents and the collapse of the health system led to a decline in the vaccination rate. Additionally, exposure to cold, heat, accidents, crowding and diseases in the tent cities in which the majority of Gaza's inhabitants now live has left them increasingly vulnerable.

The shortage of food and the neutralization of a large proportion of the UN's activity in Gaza, in the wake of the full siege of 78 days (March 2-May 19), and the partial siege that has continued for more than a month since then, are causing a deficiency of vitamins, minerals and proteins, affecting Gazans' immune systems. The ongoing destruction of the hospitals and the rest of the Strip's medical infrastructure has increased extensively since the resumption of hostilities.

The conclusion from these developments is that it's very likely that Gaza will continue to experience waves of excess mortality in the near future. "I would speculate that the ratio of nonviolent to violent deaths has gone up since [the January study]," Spagat says.

In the 'Africa league'

In the meantime, even without the anticipated future waves of excess mortality, the combination of casualties from violence and those who died from diseases and hunger led to the death of 83,740 people prior to January, taking into account the survey and the excess mortality. Since then, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 10,000 people have been killed, and that doesn't include those in the category of excess mortality. The upshot is that even if the war hasn't yet crossed the line of 100,000 dead, it's very close.

These data, says Prof. Spagat, position the war in the Gaza Strip as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century. Even if the overall number of war victims in Syria, Ukraine and Sudan is higher in each case, Gaza is apparently in first place in terms of the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed, as well as in terms of rate of death relative to population size.

According to the survey's data, which is consistent with those of the Palestinian Health Ministry, 56 percent of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18, or women. That's an exceptional figure when compared with almost every other conflict since World War II.

Data compiled and published by Spagat indicates that the proportion of women and children killed via a violent death in Gaza is more than double the proportion in almost every other recent conflict, including, for example, the civil wars in Kosovo (20 percent), northern Ethiopia (9 percent), Syria (20 percent), Colombia (21 percent), Iraq (17 percent) and Sudan (23 percent).

Another extreme datum found in the study is the proportion of those killed relative to the population. "I think we're probably at something like 4 percent of the population killed," Spagat says, adding, "I'm not sure that there's another case in the 21st century that's reached that high.

"I should have another look at the new data coming out of Sudan, and there's controversy regarding the Democratic Republic of Congo. But we are in the league of Africa, not the Middle East." That's not good company.

Despite these numbers, Spagat is in no hurry to employ the term "genocide," which has been adopted by a large part of the international community of conflict researchers about the war in Gaza. "I don't think this survey can give a verdict [on this question]," he says. It's still necessary to prove Israel's intention to perpetrate genocide, he adds, but "I think that South Africa had a pretty strong case to make" at the International Court of Justice.

The best scenario, he says, is that what's taking place in Gaza amounts to "only" ethnic cleansing.

In contrast to the richness of the data, offered by the official ministry lists and the research studies, that corroborate the numbers of the Gaza Health Ministry, the silence of official Israeli spokespeople about the number of those killed is striking. The October 7 war is the first in which the Israel Defense Forces has not provided estimates of the number of enemy civilians killed.

The only figure that the IDF Spokesperson's Unit and other official Israeli spokespersons repeat is of 20,000 terrorists from Hamas and other organizations who were killed. That figure is not backed up by a list of names or other proof or sourcing.

According to Spagat, there was an attempt to count the number of names of terrorists that were published by Israel. His team managed to arrive at a few hundred, but it's difficult to compile a list of even a thousand, he says.

Cockerill, too, maintains that that number is not credible. "Based on an overwhelmingly consistent historical pattern," he says, "we know that [in general,] at least twice as many combatants will be wounded as killed. So if Israel says 20,000 have been killed, we assume at least 40,000 have been injured, and it doesn't make sense that Hamas had 60,000 militants."

Cockerill says that Israel is "engineering the combatants figure" by two main means. "One is by redefining civilians who work for the government as combatants, the other is 'kill zones,'" in which everyone who is killed is considered a combatant.

One way or the other, even if we accept the official figure, it still comes down to a ratio of four noncombatants killed for every Hamas militant. That's very far from the statements of Israeli spokespersons, who talk about a 1:1 proportion.

The recent research raises a question: If the number of dead is indeed significantly greater than what's reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, where are the bodies? The ministry's records are based primarily on bodies that have been brought to hospital morgues.

Spagat and other researchers think that thousands of people are still buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of buildings in the Strip, and therefore their names do not appear on the lists. Some people were close to the epicenter of explosions and nothing remains of them. But that cannot account fully for the disparity between the Health Ministry and the survey.

Another explanation suggested by Spagat is that families who lost loved ones simply buried them without bringing the bodies to the hospitals and without reporting the deaths to the Health Ministry. "Some families just don't want to report or are unable to report," Cockerill avers. "Maybe the parents die, and the children, and an 8-year-old remains. How is the 8-year-old going to report this?"

'Can I die, please?'

At Nasser Hospital, in the city of Khan Yunis, the statistics take on real form. "You cope every day with cases of trauma, blast injuries and shrapnel," says Dr. Goher Rahbour, a British surgeon who returned home last week from a month at the Gaza hospital. "Every two or three days, there was a mass-casualty event, and then the ER was totally flooded, complete chaos."

One case that remains engraved indelibly in Rahbour's memory is that of a 15-year-old boy whose entire family was killed and who had himself been wounded and left paralyzed. "He has shrapnel going through the spinal cord, so he is paraplegic, which means he's got no sensation below the waist or the belly button.

"He's lived in Gaza for 15 years, he knows what's coming next, what's waiting in Gaza for a 15-year-old boy in a wheelchair. No family, no physiotherapy, all these things that we take for granted.

"So he goes around in the hospital and says to us, 'Can I die, please?'"

Even though Israel has for the past month been allowing the entry into Gaza of a limited supply of food via the UN and the Israeli-American Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the nutrition situation in the Strip continues to worsen. Last month, 5,452 children were hospitalized because of severe malnutrition, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

"People are simply gaunt," says Rahabour. "You can see the bones on their face, the bent appearance, the protruding jawbones. For a month, I haven't seen fruits, vegetables, meat or fish here.

"They have formula which they can give to children from the age of six months to five years. So I asked what happens if a hungry child of seven arrives. Sorry, we have to say bye-bye and send them home to die."

Dr. Rahabour and other physicians in the Strip say that the general health situation of the population is deteriorating steadily, because of the hunger and displacement. "You see that the body has no wound-healing capabilities," says Dr. Victoria Rose, a British surgeon who was a volunteer in the Gaza Strip until three weeks ago.

"One of the first things you lose in malnutrition is your ability to fight infection," she adds. "The children have very little healing ability left, and they're living in tents. There's no sanitation, there's no sewage [treatment] or anything like that. Everything has been destroyed and clean water is running out. All of that combined means that you just can't get anything clean, so it can't heal without infection."

If the hunger itself were not enough, hundreds of people have been killed in recent weeks by Israeli gunfire while on their way to collect food from the distribution centers.

Two weeks after Goher Rahabour arrived at Nasser Hospital, on June 1, he observed that the profile of the wounds had changed. Instead of blast and detonation injuries, many more people began arriving with bullets in their body, after Israeli troops opened fire at the starved crowd.

On the first day, he recalls, 150 or 200 wounded people arrived, in addition to 30 dead. "With some of them you can see that they were shot while they lay on the ground, trying to evade being shot. Most of them were young men, but there was one woman in her early 30s, who was 24 weeks pregnant. The bullet went through the fetus. She survived but needed a hysterectomy, so no more children. When we opened the abdomen, we could see the hand and the formed foot of the dead fetus.

"I'm just staring, like what the hell, but the [Palestinian] anesthetist, gynecologist and scrub nurse are carrying on as though this is normal. It's because they've seen this again and again. You just become numb to it.

"It's as if it's just normal, you know?"

Zohran Mamdani’s victory marks the end of Israel’s central place in U.S. politics

Zohran Mamdani's victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.

By Abdaljawad Omar  June 25, 2025

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/zohran-mamdanis-victory-marks-the-end-of-israels-central-place-in-u-s-politics/

It may appear, at first glance, irrelevant—even absurd—that a mayoral contest in New York City, or the electoral fate of a councilwoman in Brooklyn, should hinge upon one’s position vis-à-vis Palestine. What, after all, does municipal governance—zoning, sanitation, housing affordability—have to do with the devastation of Gaza, the starvation of a people, the slow-motion spectacle of death under bombardment? And yet, this apparent disconnect—between the intimacy of local issues and the enormity of geopolitical violence—is precisely the condition under which American politics operates.

It is also within this disjuncture between scale and intensity, between geographic distance and ideological proximity, that something more fundamental becomes visible.

In this context, the victory of Zohran Mamdani over a figure so emblematic of institutional continuity and dynastic power as Andrew Cuomo is not a mere electoral anecdote. It is a political event. One that must be read not through the metrics of personality or campaign mechanics, but through the symbolic grammar of what is now speakable, representable, and electorally viable. Mamdani’s triumph indexes a shifting horizon—where Palestine, long treated as a “third rail” of American politics, no longer electrocutes those who dare to touch it. It is, perhaps, not yet a mainstream moral consensus, but it is no longer a guarantee of political suicide.

To be clear, Mamdani did not run as a firebrand of unrepentant anti-Zionism. He conceded, symbolically and rhetorically, to the anxieties of some the liberal Zionist electorate. He sought a middle ground—tempering his moral commitments with gestures of reassurance, striking a posture that neither retreated from his history of solidarity with Palestine nor fully embraced the uncompromising clarity that Palestine often demands. And that, too, is telling. 

It is precisely this calibrated ambivalence—this oscillation between affirmation and reassurance—that invited criticism, even from within Mamdani’s own base, and for those who worked with him in building and disseminating the Palestine movement. His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” and his hesitant invocation of a long-standing grounding in pro-Palestinian politics, sparked unease. For some, it echoed the familiar choreography of moral retreat: a gesture of concession that risks metastasizing into posture, then into position, and eventually into principle. The fear, voiced not out of cynicism but historical memory, is that one concession invites another—and that, over time, the cumulative weight of these concessions will fold Mamdani into the very establishment his victory seemed to defy. There is, in other words, a profound anxiety that the dialectic of incorporation is already in motion: that the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of “balance”, “two sidism”, and lack of empathy for Palestine. Mamdani’s electoral success may mark the symbolic end of Palestine as a third-rail issue, but it also raises the unsettling possibility that this normalization comes at the price of its radical edge. That to enter the political bloodstream is also to risk being filtered by it, and conceding too much ground for it, too.

His win, then, is not solely an endorsement of Palestine as a cause, but a testament to Palestine’s altered status as a question. No longer a line that cannot be crossed, it has become a contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification. That shift is monumental. It speaks to the cumulative force of decades of organizing, to the moral aftermath of Gaza’s unendurable visibility, and to the weariness of younger voters and many progressives with the cold, procedural evasions of their predecessors. In that sense, Mamdani’s success is not only about what he said, but about what no longer needs to be unsaid. The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.

To be clear, there are contingencies—many, in fact. Mamdani’s victory cannot be abstracted from the particularities of this race. He was, after all, running against a disgraced former governor, whose name—once a shorthand for executive dominance in New York—now lingers with the stale odor of scandal and the exhausted theatrics of establishment redemption. Moreover, Mamdani’s campaign was unusually precise in its architecture. It moved with clarity, discipline, and a distinct communicative cadence—earnest but composed, clear but tactically agile. His appeal was not cultivated through demagoguery or cultic charisma, but through an almost anachronistic fidelity to program: free public buses, expanded child care, rent stabilization—not as isolated policy demands but as part of a larger moral and political imaginary shaped by his socialist commitments. That this message resonated, and not only in progressive enclaves but across disparate urban constituencies—young people, immigrants, tenants, cultural workers, the politically disenchanted—is itself a signal: not of a messianic candidacy, but of a deeper hunger. A hunger for coherence, for principle, and for a politics unafraid to name power, yet disciplined enough to speak of what can be built.

But what is also becoming increasingly palpable—though still spoken of in hushed or disavowing tones—is a growing fatigue within the United States itself. A kind of political and psychic exhaustion, faint at first but now unmistakable, that has begun to gather around the place of Israel in American public life. Among pundits, podcasters, and the constellation of media-facing personae who orbit the centers of alternative mediums, there is an emerging discomfort—an irritation, even—with the obsessive centrality of Israel to American identity, to its political rituals, and to the compulsive performances of allegiance it demands. It is not only the confrontation within the right wing with an “America First” that excludes Israel, and one that folds Israel into the meaning of “America First.” It is not only in the rising voices that center Palestine, although still on the margins, but growing in power.

But it is also in the very emergence of the question itself—the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” of the politician’s obligatory fealty, of the ritualistic declarations of support—that a deeper malaise becomes legible. What was once treated as settled, as axiomatic, as sacred, is now weighed down by its own performative burden. These questions no longer float as self-evident truths; they fall under the weight of their own exhaustion. To even ask them now is to register that something has shifted—that these affirmations, repeated ad nauseam, have become signifiers not of moral clarity but of ideological bankruptcy.

Increasingly, the insistence upon Israel as a litmus test is no longer heard as a signal of moral seriousness, but as the worn-out reflex of a ruling class—political, media, institutional—whose ethical coordinates are collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions. The repetition of allegiance now functions less as a marker of conviction than as a symptom: of fear, of ideological decay, of a desperate clinging to an order whose foundational myths are beginning to unravel. One need only examine the New York Times’ implicit endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, and its barely veiled aversion to Zohran Mamdani—a gesture not of policy disagreement, but of retaliatory contempt for the very fact of his pro-Palestinian record. Or one might turn, with no illusions, to the likes of Tucker Carlson, whose remarks on the obsessive centrality of Israel in American political life directed at Senator Ted Cruz are not born of solidarity with Palestine, but of exhaustion—an exhaustion nonetheless symptomatic of a wider unease. Let us be clear: this is not the emergence of a coherent pro-Palestinian mainstream. Far from it. But what is beginning to erode is the sanctity of Israel’s place in American moral life. The shift, at this stage, is not from marginality to centrality for Palestine—but from unquestioned centrality to uneasy displacement for Israel.

For instance, one should resist the temptation to assume that the relentless deployment of antisemitism accusations by Israeli hasbara is primarily about silencing criticism of Israel. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is something far more interesting: the obscene excess of this rhetorical strategy is beginning to backfire—not because people suddenly become more pro-Palestinian, but because they are growing tired, even disgusted, with being forced to perform the ritual of exceptional concern for Israel’s symbolic centrality. Let us be clear: this exhaustion is not the result of some decolonial awakening. Rather, it is the inevitable result of ideological overproduction. When every critique becomes a potential hate crime, when every call for ceasefire is labeled incitement, and when every protest is framed as an antisemitic gathering—something begins to shift in the symbolic order. The very machinery meant to preserve Israel’s hegemonic position in American moral life begins to unravel it. The more Israel insists on its unique status, the more visible its violence becomes. The more it accuses, the more it reveals, the more it demands silence or fealty the more it weakens. And here is the twist: the current dislocation of Israel’s symbolic place in the American imaginary is not only the result of pro-Palestinian activism. It is also—perhaps primarily—the result of Israel’s own actions: its insistence on exceptionalism, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its attempt to drag the United States into a region-wide war.

In the end, the shift we are witnessing is not the triumph of an alternative narrative, but the slow implosion of the dominant one under the weight of its own excess. What we are living through is not merely a crisis of legitimacy, but a crisis of legibility—a moment when the coordinates that once made support for Israel appear natural, moral, even inevitable, begin to blur. And paradoxically, it is not anti-Zionist discourse that has produced this rupture, but Zionism itself—its saturation of the symbolic space, its demand to be centered in every moral reckoning, its compulsion to speak even when no one is asking. This is the logic of ideological overproduction: when a system can no longer sustain its own fictions, not because they have been disproven, but because they have been repeated too often, too loudly, with too little shame. In that moment, ideology ceases to function as belief and begins to curdle into farce. And perhaps that is where we are now: not in the presence of a victorious counter-hegemony, but in the ruins of a narrative that exhausted itself by insisting too much, too often, and at the expense of everything else.

'Vindicated': Unscathed by war, Gulf states look to capitalise on Israel and Iran's losses

For the first time in a generation, Arab rulers got to see how Israel fared in a conventional conflict. Now, their leverage has increased

By Sean Mathews

Published date: 27 June 2025

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/vindicated-unscathed-war-gulf-states-look-capitalise-israel-and-irans-losses

The Gulf states see two losers in the conflict between Israel and Iran, analysts and Arab officials tell Middle East Eye.

Having squeaked through the hostilities with little damage themselves, leaders in the energy-rich Gulf are now in a position to tap their relative advantages in Israel and the Islamic Republic. 

Watching the smoke rise from Tehran was a change for leaders in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who just a few years ago were fending off drones and missiles launched at them from Iran’s allies, the Houthis in Yemen.

Israeli warplanes made hay of Iran’s weak air defences. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals were assassinated, and ballistic missile launchers and arms factories were destroyed. The war culminated in the US bombing Iran’s Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

And that is the aspect that US and Israeli officials are hammering home about the conflict in their interactions, three Arab officials told MEE.

But for the first time in a generation, Arab rulers got to see how Israel would fare against a conventional army.

Israeli encroachment stopped

“The Israelis showed strong spirit in supporting their military…They were brave. However, the home front in Israel couldn’t take more than two weeks of missile strikes,” one Arab official told MEE, sharing an assessment of the war review in a leading Arab capital.

MEE spoke with officials representing three Arab capitals for this article. All said that in their country’s corridors of power, the assessment is that Israel was the first to signal it was ready for a ceasefire after having exhausted its list of military targets and seeing that the Islamic Republic was not facing collapse.

“Benjamin Netanyahu was on a rise until now,” Bader al-Saif, a professor at Kuwait University, told MEE. “Of course, Israel demonstrated military superiority over Iran’s skies. But Iran stopped the Israeli encroachment and hit back. The image of an invincible Israel with flawless air defence is broken.”

The perception of Israeli vulnerability is important to understand how the US’s Arab allies will approach Israel in the future, experts say. It could give them more leverage with Israel, including states that normalised ties with it in 2020 under the Abraham Accords.

The same goes for Tehran, the Arab officials told MEE. They expect Gulf leaders to offer investments to Tehran and are not ruling out high-level visits in the coming months.

In April, Saudi Arabia’s defence minister and brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Tehran.

Despite saying Iran’s nuclear programme has been “blown up to kingdom come”, US President Donald Trump says his administration will restart talks with Iran. Iran says its nuclear programme is "badly damaged".

Either way, the Gulf states backed the nuclear talks, and their sway in Tehran could increase even more now, Arab officials told MEE. 

“The Gulf gets a hearing in Washington. At the end of the day, that remains the tremendous leverage it has with Iran - calling up Trump in the middle of the night and him answering the phone,” one Arab diplomat told MEE.

The UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia sealed deals for hundreds of billions of dollars with the US when Trump visited the region in May. At the time, they appeared to get concessions. Under pressure from Saudi Arabia, Trump stopped US attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, MEE revealed. He also lifted sanctions on Syria.

The Gulf states were unable to stop Israel's attack on Iran. For a moment, it looked dicey.

Although the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have differing priorities, experts say none of them wanted to see the US directly join Israel’s offensive.

In the end, all the Arab officials who spoke with MEE characterised the US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities as “limited" or "minimal".

Iran’s retaliatory strike on al-Udeid military base in Qatar was coordinated well in advance with Gulf states, MEE reported.

“This crisis has really elevated the Gulf states' leadership,” Ayham Kamel, Middle East president at Edelman Public and Government Affairs, told MEE.

“They were able to play a behind-the-scenes diplomatic role and avoid any significant attack on their territory. They triangulated their cooperation to be inclusive of key states in the broader region, particularly Iran, Turkey and Israel,” he added.

Sympathy with Iran?

For years, the US tried to recruit Gulf states into an alliance with Israel to counter Iran.

When Hezbollah dominated Lebanon, Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria, and the Houthis were lobbing missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia - that pitch was attractive. It reached its peak before the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, when US Central Command tried to create a “Middle East Nato” linking Israel to Gulf states and Egypt’s air defence.

But when Israel and Iran came to blows, instead of joining in Israel’s offensive, the US’s Arab allies lobbied Trump to stop the war.

Israel and Iran exchanged direct fire twice in 2024. The US did receive some Saudi and Qatari support defending Israel last year. But Iran choreographed its missile barrages then.

This round was the first bare-knuckled battle between them, with Israeli jets pounding Tehran and Iran hammering major cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia all condemned Israel’s attack on Iran. Qatar has historically maintained closer ties to the Islamic Republic, in part because they share the world’s largest natural gas field.

But this conflict saw the UAE and Saudi Arabia publicly and privately press for a ceasefire, two Arab officials told MEE.

“US and Israeli officials may not have anticipated how serious the Gulf is about de-escalation. They know now. Saudi Arabia is on the top of that list,” Patrick Theros, a former US diplomat who served as ambassador to Qatar and a high-ranking official in the UAE, told MEE.

“Right now, even among the ruling classes, including Saudi Arabia, there is more sympathy with Iran than there has been in a long time,” Theros said.

Not so long ago, Israel may have been able to convince Saudi Arabia to join in its attack. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman compared Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler and said he was trying to “conquer the world”.

Then, Saudi Arabia became bogged down fighting Iran’s allies in Yemen. In 2019, two major Saudi oil facilities were attacked. At the time, President Trump shrugged off the assault, which emanated from Iran. In the following years, Saudi Arabia moved to patch up ties with the Islamic Republic.

In 2023, China brokered a rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran. It worked for everyone during the war. The Strait of Hormuz, which China relies on for its oil shipments, remained open. Iranian oil exports soared despite Israeli attacks, and Saudi Arabia’s oil installations were safe again.

“The Gulf isn’t where it was at in 2019,” Saif, at Kuwait University, told MEE. "We [the Gulf] feel vindicated that we did not join the war.”

Gaza ceasefire and normalisation

The Gulf states' main focus is reducing their economies' dependence on oil revenue. Saudi Arabia has pushed through liberalising social reforms and is pursuing an ambitious Vision 2030 agenda that includes luxury Red Sea tourism. Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi want to build AI data centres.

One overlooked element of the change, Theros told MEE, is that the sectarian tensions that feed into the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in spheres of influence like Yemen and Syria have ebbed, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pursues modernising social reforms.

“Now that Mohammed Bin Salman has de-Wahhabised Saudi Arabia, the rhetoric out of the clerics about the Shia has been curbed,” Theros said. “That makes it harder for Israel to bring Saudi Arabia along.”

If anything, public opinion in the Gulf has turned more negative towards Israel over its war on Gaza, where over 56,000 Palestinians have been killed. A poll released by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in the first months of the Gaza war revealed 96 percent of people in Saudi Arabia oppose normalisation with Israel.

Trump signalled on Wednesday that he wants to build out his fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran to Gaza, where he said “great progress is being made” to end the war.

Ending that conflict is a prerequisite to any talk of normalising ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Under Saudi pressure, Trump refrained from lobbying the kingdom to cut a deal with Israel during his visit to Riyadh in May, but told Saudi Arabia, “you’ll be greatly honouring me” by doing so.

Saudi Arabia says it needs to see Israel take irreversible steps towards a Palestinian state to normalise relations. Diplomats say that after the Israel-Iran war, the price Saudi Arabia will demand is going up.

“Saudi Arabia has a very good sense of where the Arab street is going,” one Arab official told MEE. “It will insist on something serious.”

The Real Winners: The Strategic Fallout of the Israel-Iran War

by Ramzy Baroud | Jun 27, 2025 

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2025/06/26/the-real-winners-the-strategic-fallout-of-the-israel-iran-war/

On June 24, US President Donald Trump announced a truce between Israel and Iran following nearly two weeks of open warfare.

Israel began the war, launching a surprise offensive on June 13, with airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, missile installations, and senior military and scientific personnel, in addition to numerous civilian targets.

In response, Iran launched a wave of ballistic missiles and drones deep into Israeli territory, triggering air raid sirens across Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba and numerous other locations, causing unprecedented destruction in the country.

What began as a bilateral escalation quickly spiraled into something far more consequential: a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.

On June 22, the United States Air Force and Navy carried out a full-scale assault on three Iranian nuclear sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – in a coordinated strike dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer. Seven B-2 bombers of the 509th Bomb Wing allegedly flew nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to deliver the strikes.

The following day, Iran retaliated by bombing the Al-Udeid US military base in Qatar and firing a new wave of missiles at Israeli targets.

This marked a turning point. For the first time, Iran and the United States faced each other on the battlefield without intermediaries. And for the first time in recent history, Israel’s long-standing campaign to provoke a US-led war against Iran had succeeded.

Strategic Fallout

Following 12 days of war, Israel achieved two of its goals. First, it pulled Washington directly into its conflict with Tehran, setting a dangerous precedent for future US involvement in Israel’s regional wars. Second, it generated immediate political capital at home and abroad, portraying US military backing as a ‘victory’ for Israel.

However, beyond these short-term gains, the cracks in Israel’s strategy are already showing.

Netanyahu did not achieve regime change in Tehran – the real objective of his years-long campaign. Instead, he faced a resilient and unified Iran that struck back with precision and discipline. Worse still, he may have awakened something even more threatening to Israeli ambitions: a new regional consciousness.

Iran, for its part, emerges from this confrontation significantly stronger. Despite US and Israeli efforts to cripple its nuclear program, Iran has demonstrated that its strategic capabilities remain intact and highly functional.

Tehran established a powerful new deterrence equation – proving that it can strike not only Israeli cities but US bases across the region.

Even more consequentially, Iran waged this fight independently, without leaning on Hezbollah or Ansarallah, or even deploying Iraqi militias. This independence surprised many observers and forced a recalibration of Iran’s regional weight.

Iranian Unity

Perhaps the most significant development of all is one that cannot be measured in missiles or casualties: the surge in national unity within Iran and the widespread support it received across the Arab and Muslim world.

For years, Israel and its allies have sought to isolate Iran, to present it as a pariah even among Muslims. Yet in these past days, we have witnessed the opposite.

From Baghdad to Beirut, and even in politically cautious capitals like Amman and Cairo, support for Iran surged. This unity alone may prove to be Israel’s most formidable challenge yet.

Inside Iran, the war erased, at least for now, the deep divides between reformists and conservatives. Faced with an existential threat, the Iranian people coalesced, not around any one leader or party, but around the defense of their homeland.

The descendants of one of the world’s oldest civilizations reacted with a dignity and pride that no amount of foreign aggression could extinguish.

The Nuclear Question

Despite the battlefield developments, the real outcome of this war may depend on what Iran does next with its nuclear program.

If Tehran decides to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – even temporarily – and signals that its program remains functional, Israel’s so-called “achievements” will be rendered meaningless.

However, if Iran fails to follow this military confrontation with a bold political repositioning, Netanyahu will be free to claim – falsely or not – that he has succeeded in halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been.

A Manufactured Farce

Some media outlets are now praising Trump for supposedly “ordering” Netanyahu to halt further strikes on Iran.

This narrative is as insulting as it is false. What we are witnessing is a staged political performance – a carefully orchestrated spat between two partners playing both sides of a dangerous game.

Trump’s Truth post, “Bring your pilots home,” was not a call for peace. It was a calculated move to reclaim credibility after fully surrendering to Netanyahu’s war. It allows Trump to pose as a moderate, distract from Israel’s battlefield losses, and create the illusion of a US administration reining in Israeli aggression.

In truth, this was always a joint US-Israeli war – one planned, executed, and justified under the pretext of defending Western interests while laying the groundwork for deeper intervention and potential invasion.

Return of the People

Amid all the military calculations and geopolitical theater, one truth stands out: the real winners are the Iranian people.

When it mattered most, they stood united. They understood that resisting foreign aggression was more important than internal disputes. They reminded the world – and themselves – that in moments of crisis, people are not peripheral actors in history; they are its authors.

The message from Tehran is unmistakable: We are here. We are proud. And we will not be broken.

That is the message Israel, and perhaps even Washington, did not anticipate. And it is the one that could reshape the region for years to come.

UN special rapporteur calls for immediate sanctions against Israel over Gaza genocide

Condemning catastrophe in Palestine and taking action against Israel is not a political issue, it is a matter of humanity, says Francesca Albanese

Senhan Bolelli  |24.06.2025 - Update : 24.06.2025

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/un-special-rapporteur-calls-for-immediate-sanctions-against-israel-over-gaza-genocide/3611759

MADRID

The UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, Tuesday called for sanctions against Israel without further delay, citing its actions in Gaza as genocide and one of the darkest chapters in history.

During a series of official meetings in Madrid, including with representatives from several political groups in the Spanish Parliament, Albanese said that global inaction must end and that measures against Israel are a matter of human decency, not politics.

“Condemning the catastrophe in Palestine and taking action against Israel is not a political issue, it is a matter of humanity,” she told journalists.

Albanese described the violence and oppression by Israel in Palestine as long-standing and called for a decisive international response.

“The time has come to implement a complete halt of diplomatic, economic, and financial relations with Israel—not just as an act of solidarity, but also as a preventative measure,” she stated.

She accused Israel of violating international law with impunity, saying: “Israel is writing one of the darkest chapters in its history in Gaza. Once we understand what it has done, we will be ashamed—but it will be too late.”

Albanese also criticized the “Gaza Humanitarian Aid Fund” created by the United States and Israel, arguing that it fails to meet the real needs on the ground.

“This is a rejection of humanitarian aid,” she said.

“This is one of the most brutal experiments I have ever witnessed. This is not aid. Palestinians call it ‘The Hunger Games.’ They are killing people who are on the verge of starvation, and there is a clear solution to this: states must break the blockade. We must send humanitarian aid by ship. Stopping the genocide is our responsibility.”

Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive against Gaza since October 2023, killing nearly 56,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

 

Gaza death toll tops 56,000 as Israel continues genocidal war against Palestinians

More than 131,800 Palestinians injured in Israeli assault since October 2023, Health Ministry says

Rania Abu Shamala  |24.06.2025 - Update : 25.06.2025

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/gaza-death-toll-tops-56-000-as-israel-continues-genocidal-war-against-palestinians/3611819

ISTANBUL

At least 56,077 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war since October 2023, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Tuesday.

A statement said that 79 bodies were brought to hospitals in the last 24 hours, with 289 people injured, taking the number of injuries to 131,848 in the Israeli onslaught.

“Many victims are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them,” it added.

Israel resumed attacks on the Gaza Strip on March 18 and has since killed 5,759 victims and injured 19,807, shattering a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement that took hold in January.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.​​​​​​​

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

A majority of Americans disapproves of Trump’s Iran airstrikes, CNN poll finds

By Ariel Edwards-Levy, Jennifer Agiesta and Edward Wu, CNN

Tue June 24, 2025

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/politics/trump-iran-strikes-poll-cnn-ssrs

President Donald Trump’s decision to launch airstrikes against Iran is broadly unpopular with Americans, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS after the strikes.

Americans disapprove of the strikes, 56% to 44%, according to the survey, with strong disapproval outpacing the share who strongly approve. Most distrust Trump’s decision-making on the use of force in Iran, with about 6 in 10 worried that the strikes will increase the Iranian threat to the US.

Sharp partisan divides cut through nearly every question asked in the survey: Democrats are broadly opposed to the strikes as most Republicans support them, though younger GOP supporters and Republican-leaning independents are more skeptical than others in their party.

Majorities of independents (60%) and Democrats (88%) disapprove of the decision to take military action in Iran. Republicans largely approve (82%). But just 44% of Republicans strongly approve of the airstrikes, far smaller than the group of Democrats who strongly disapprove (60%), perhaps reflecting that some in Trump’s coalition are broadly distrustful of military action abroad.

A 58% majority overall say the strikes will make Iran more of a threat to the US, with just 27% believing it will lessen the threat and the rest expecting it to do neither. Even among those who support the strikes, just 55% expect them to lessen the threat level.

And few say the US made enough of an effort at diplomacy before using military force: 32% feel the US did enough, 39% that it did not and 29% are unsure.

The poll was conducted Sunday and Monday, with nearly all of the interviews completed before Iran launched retaliatory strikes Monday against US air bases and all interviews done before Trump’s subsequent announcement of a ceasefire.

Just over half of Americans, 55%, expresses little or no trust in Trump to make the right decisions about the US use of force in Iran, with 45% saying they trust him moderately or a great deal. And most – 65% – say that he should be required to get congressional approval for any further military action, with 21% saying he should not.

Mistrust of Trump’s judgment is especially high among Democrats (88% of whom express little or no trust) and independents (62%), who also broadly say the president should be required to get congressional approval for any further military action in Iran (88% of Democrats and 67% of independents feel that way).

Republicans express more trust in the president, although that trust is also somewhat tempered: 51% say they have a great deal of trust in him to make the right decisions on the use of force with Iran, 37% a moderate amount. And the GOP divides over whether Trump ought to be required to get congressional approval for further action, with 39% saying he should be required to do so, 38% that he should not and 23% are not sure.

Americans younger than 35 are more likely than any other age group to disapprove of the military action in Iran (68% disapprove). They also express the broadest skepticism about Trump: They are the most likely of any age group to say they have no trust at all in Trump’s ability to make the right decisions about US use of force in Iran (45% feel that way) and to say he ought to be required to get congressional approval before taking further military action (73%).

That skepticism is partly driven by younger Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Just 20% of Republican-aligned Americans younger than 45 say they strongly approve of the decision to carry out airstrikes, compared with 53% among older Republican-aligned Americans. Younger Republicans are about 20 points more likely than older adults aligned with the party to believe the strikes increase the threat to the US from Iran and are 26 points less likely to have a great deal of trust in Trump’s decision-making on the use of force in Iran.

Overall, there’s almost no public appetite for sending ground troops into Iran, with just 9% in favor, and 68% opposed, with the remaining 23% unsure. Even those who support the airstrikes against Iran oppose sending in ground troops by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

The share of Americans who offer no opinion when given the choice to do suggests that public opinion hasn’t yet fully settled in the wake of a rapidly evolving situation. While the vast majority, 8 in 10, say they’ve been following news about America’s strikes at least somewhat closely, only about one-third say they’ve followed the news very closely.

The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS on June 22 and 23. Interviews with 1,030 adults nationwide were conducted by text message. People interviewed for the poll are members of the nationally representative SSRS Text Message Panel. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.