Israel settlers walk in Al-Ouja near Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, April 16, 2025. REUTERS
AL-MUGHAYYIR, West Bank, April 18 – Fatima Abu Naim, a mother of five, lives in a hillside cave in the occupied West Bank, under increasing pressure from Jewish settlers who, she says, try to steal her family’s sheep and come by regularly to tell her and her husband to leave.
“They say, ‘Go, I want to live here’,” she said.
The same stark message from settlers has been heard across the West Bank with increasing frequency since the start of the war in Gaza 18 months ago, notably in the largely empty hillsides where the Bedouin graze their flocks.
According to a report last week by the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA, nearly half of over 40 settler attacks documented at the end of March and early April hit Bedouin and herding communities, “including incidents involving arson, break-ins, and destruction of critical livelihood sources”.
The Israeli police did not respond to requests for comment.
The West Bank, an area of some 5,600 square kilometres that sits between Jordan and Israel, has been at the heart of the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Under military occupation ever since, but seen by Palestinians as one of the core parts of a future independent state, it has been steadily cut up by fast-growing Israeli settlements clusters that now spread throughout the territory.
Israeli settlements are deemed by most countries to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. Ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government talk openly about annexing the area completely.
Sparsely populated areas in the Jordan Valley, near the south Hebron hills or in central upland areas of the West Bank have come under increasing pressure from outposts of settlers who have themselves begun grazing large flocks of sheep on the hillsides used by Bedouin and other herders.
According to a joint report last week by Israeli rights groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot, settlers have used such shepherding outposts to seize around 78,600 hectares of land, or 14% of the total area of the West Bank, harassing and intimidating nearby communities to expel them.
“The Jordan Valley or southern areas are where there used to be big meadows for Palestinians, and this is why these areas were targeted,” said Dror Etkes, one of the authors of the report. “But if you look at a map, the outposts are everywhere. They keep constructing more and more.”
The report quotes documents from the attorney general’s office to show that around 8,000 hectares of West Bank land have been allocated for grazing by Israeli settlers in such outposts, who receive significant funding and other material support including vehicles from the government.
“The Bedouin communities are in may ways the most vulnerable,” said Yigal Bronner, an activist on the board of Kerem Navot who has monitored settler abuses for years and who says the problem has become more severe since the war in Gaza.
Without being able to graze their animals, many Bedouin cannot afford to maintain their flocks, leaving them with no way of earning their living, he said. “People are really, really struggling to make ends meet.”
“THIS IS OUR LAND”
The windswept hillside where Abu Naim’s family lives in an encampment set up around two rock caves just outside the village of Al-Mughayir, is typical of the rugged terrain along the spine of the West Bank.
The family has already been forced to move from the Jordan Valley, where Bedouin communities have faced repeated attacks by violent groups of settlers who run flocks of their own.
Now living in their third home this year, she says they have once again faced aggression from intruders who she said recently killed six of her family’s sheep and forced her husband to keep them penned up.
“The problems with the settlers started a year and a half ago, but we’ve only been really harassed for two months now. The goal is to get us out of here,” she said. “The sheep stay in the enclosure. They don’t let them out or anything.”
Abu Naim’s husband, who has confronted the settlers, was arrested this week for a reason she is unaware of. Palestinian and Israeli rights groups say there is effectively no legal redress for the herding communities and the bitterness of the Gaza war has hardened attitudes further.
“This is our land,” said 65 year-old Asher Meth, a West Bank settler who was enjoying an outing at the springs of Ein al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley that the nearby Bedouin community is prevented from accessing.
“And if the state of Israel would wake up, and say ‘Actually, do take the land’ and say ‘This land is now part of Israel’, the Arabs will understand better and move back from trying to kill us.”
Bedouin sheds are seen in Al-Ouja near Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, April 15, 2025. REUTERS
A few hundred metres from the spring, in a large Bedouin encampment, 70 year-old Odeh Khalil, has heard the message.
Ever since losing 300 sheep to a raid by settlers last August, he has kept his remaining animals in an enclosure but for the moment, says he is determined to hang on.
“People cannot live without sheep. If we leave, it will be all gone,” he said. “They want to deport us and say this is Israeli property.”
Picture of an unexploded bomb on the ground in Khan Younis, Gaza. February 17, 2025. REUTERS An unexploded bomb lies on the ground in Khan Younis, Gaza. February 17, 2025. (Reuters)
KHAN YOUNIS – The Gaza Strip is strewn with undetonated explosives from tens of thousands of Israeli air strikes, leaving the territory “uninhabitable,” according to the US government.
In February, US President Donald Trump suggested the United States take over Gaza and take responsibility for clearing unexploded bombs and other weapons, to create the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The challenge to clear the lethal remnants, examined here in detail for the first time, is huge.
Israel’s bombardments resumed in March after a January ceasefire fell apart — an offensive that the United Nations said has captured or depopulated two-thirds of the enclave. More bombs fall daily.
By October 2024, Israel’s military said, it had carried out over 40,000 air strikes on the Strip. The UN Mine Action Service estimates that between one in 10 and one in 20 bombs fired into Gaza did not go off.
Those weapons are among more than 50 million tons of rubble which according to the UN Environment Programme are scattered across Gaza, a densely populated area far smaller than the State of Rhode Island. “Inhumane”
Gaza’s own cleanup efforts started quickly. Near the city of Khan Younis a week after the January ceasefire, bulldozer driver Alaa Abu Jmeiza was clearing a street close to where 15-year old Saeed Abdel Ghafour was playing. The bulldozer blade struck a concealed bomb.
“We were engulfed in the heat of the flames, the fire,” the boy told Reuters. He said he had lost sight in one eye. Driver Jmeiza also lost sight in one eye and has burn and shrapnel injuries on his hands and legs.
Since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, at least 23 people have been killed and 162 injured by discarded or unexploded ordnance, according to a database compiled by a forum of UN agencies and NGOs working in Gaza — an estimate that aid workers say must be a fraction of the total, since few victims know how to report what has happened to them.
Hamas has said it harvested some unexploded ordnance for use against Israel, but also is ready to cooperate with international bodies to remove it.
However, international efforts to help clear the bombs during any lulls in the fighting have been hampered by Israel, which restricts imports into the enclave of goods that can have a military use, nine aid officials told Reuters.
Between March and July last year, Israeli authorities rejected requests to import more than 20 types of demining equipment, representing a total of over 2,000 items — from binoculars to armored vehicles to firing cables for detonations — according to a document compiled by two humanitarian demining organizations seen by Reuters.
“Due to the restrictions by the Israeli authorities on mine action organizations to allow the entry of necessary equipment, the clearance process has not started,” UN human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence told Reuters.
This poses “serious unnecessary challenges” to humanitarians involved, he added.
Under the 1907 Hague Convention, Israel has an obligation as an occupying power to remove or help remove war remnants that endanger the lives of civilians, said the UN human rights office and the International Committee of the Red Cross. This is an obligation that Israel accepts as binding under customary international law even though it is not a signatory, said Cordula Droege, the ICRC’s chief legal officer.
Israel’s military declined to answer questions about what munitions it has used in Gaza for security reasons, and did not respond to a request for comment on the extent of leftover ordnance. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that oversees shipments into Gaza, did not respond to requests for comment on its role in cleanup efforts. Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said most of the explosives have been scattered by Hamas, without providing evidence.
A Hamas official declined to answer a question about how many weapons it has used in Gaza or how much remains as unexploded ordnance.
“We have repeatedly stressed that Gaza is uninhabitable and to force Gazans to live among unexploded ordnance is inhumane,” said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council.
“President Trump has offered a humanitarian vision to rebuild Gaza and we continue to have discussions with regional partners on next steps,” he added, without answering questions on weapons supplied by the US, or its plans for the clean-up.
10 years, $500 Million
Seven weapons experts participating in UN-coordinated discussions on clearance efforts told Reuters it is too early to estimate how many unexploded munitions are in Gaza as there has been no survey. Most asked to remain anonymous, saying that to speak publicly about the weapons contamination or clearance challenges may interfere with their chances of working in Gaza.
The UN Mine Action Service, which removes explosive remnants, educates locals and helps victims, said its disposal teams have spotted hundreds of pieces of war ordnance on the surface, including aircraft bombs, mortars, rockets and Improvised Explosive Devices.
It expects many more may be concealed either in the rubble or lodged underground as “deep-buried bombs.”
Reuters found a bomb more than a meter long on a trash heap in Gaza City, spoke to a man in Nuseirat who said he had to live in a refugee camp because the authorities could not remove a bomb he found in his home, and to others who were still living in a building in Khan Younis beneath which an unexploded bomb was said by police and local authorities to be buried in the sand.
A UN report said two bombs were found at Gaza’s Nuseirat power plant. Gary Toombs, an explosive ordnance disposal expert with Humanity & Inclusion, an aid group, said he had seen bomb remnants being used to prop up homeless shelters. Reuters could not verify these reports.
The Egyptian foreign ministry, which has also presented a reconstruction plan for Gaza, said in March that removing unexploded ordnance would be a priority during the first six months of that project. Removing debris would continue for another two years. A foreign ministry official did not respond to a request for additional details.
Even if Israel cooperated unreservedly, a forum of UN agencies and non-governmental organizations called “the protection cluster” estimated in a document published in December that it could take 10 years and $500 million to clear the bombs.
4,000 duds
Explosive or not, the ruins contain elements like asbestos and contaminants, the UN Environment Programme says — plus thousands of bodies of Palestinians, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
“The damage in Gaza is similar to an enormous earthquake and in the middle of it there’s a few thousand bombs to make it more difficult,” said Greg Crowther, Director of Programmes at the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a global humanitarian and advocacy organization that finds, removes and destroys unexploded bombs after conflict.
“You’ve got the incredibly long process of rebuilding and then these items mean it will take even longer.”
Taking Israel’s reported 40,000 air strikes as a basis, a 10 percent failure rate implies that even if each strike contained just one bomb there would be around 4,000 duds — not including naval or ground strikes or remnants left by Hamas and its allies.
Some experts like MAG’s Crowther think the bombs’ failure rate may be higher than one in 10 in urban centers, since bombs do not always detonate when piercing through multi-story buildings — especially ones that are already damaged.
“This is the most technically challenging and worst humanitarian situation I’ve ever seen,” said Toombs. He has demined in places including Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Lebanon over a 30-year career.
“It’s going to be incredibly difficult.” Data on the Israeli strikes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows there have been strikes on Gaza almost every day. In total, the ACLED database shows over 8,000 air strike events — a term that can include multiple individual strikes.
ACLED said that by the end of 2024, Israel had carried out more than nine times as many air strikes as a US-led coalition had in the Battle of Mosul in Iraq in 2016-2017.
Mark 80 Bombs
Palestinian police say they lack equipment to safely clear the debris. Salama Marouf, the head of the Hamas-run government media office, said 31 members of the police engineering division who deal with weapons clearance had been killed and 22 injured since the war, including while defusing bombs.
Basem Shurrab, the mayor of Al-Qarara town where the January 27 bulldozer explosion occurred, called for international teams to come and help the cleanup.
But those groups say they would need Israel to give the go-ahead for expert visas, armored vehicles, explosives and tunnelling equipment to extract buried bombs.
For now, deminers say they can only mark ordnance and seek to avoid accidents, especially involving children.
Murals and posters commissioned by charities including the Red Cross and Red Crescent show colorful balloons to attract children’s attention next to drawings of bombs and a skull and cross bones.
One shows a boy with an alarmed expression with a thought bubble reading: “DANGER: war ordnance.”
The heaviest class of bombs used in Gaza are the Mark 80s, of which the Mark 84 — a US-made, 2,000 pound aircraft bomb nicknamed the “hammer” by US pilots during the first Gulf War — is the biggest.
The Biden administration sent thousands of Mark 84s to Israel before pausing deliveries last year over concerns about the risk to civilians — a pause since reversed by Trump.
Reuters reporters found two Mark 80s lying in the ruins of Khan Younis, surrounded by red and white warning tape. Three weapons experts identified them from Reuters images. They said they appeared to be Mark 84s, but they could not be sure without measuring them.
If a Mark 84 bomb were to detonate it would leave a crater 14 meters wide, destroy everything within a 7 m radius and kill most people within a 31 m radius, according to PAX, an NGO working for peace based in the Netherlands.
The blast can shower lethal shrapnel fragments nearly 400 m, according to the US airforce. In a landscape as densely populated as Gaza, that could be catastrophic.
Living with a bomb
Hani Al Abadlah, a 49-year-old school teacher, returned to his home in Khan Younis after the January ceasefire to discover that an unidentified bomb had pierced through all three floors without detonating.
It is now believed to be nestled a few meters in the sand beneath his hallway, according to municipal officials and the police explosives engineering unit.
Three weapons disposal experts said a very heavy bomb such as a Mark 84 could have plunged into the deep sand, but added that it could have been removed before Al Abadlah returned — possibly to be reharvested by armed groups.
Al Abadlah said the rest of his family including his wife and children refused to move back because they were too afraid. But he prefers to live in his own damaged home with his brother and the suspected bomb rather than return to a cold tent.
He sleeps on the middle floor and his brother on the floor above.
“No one … enters out of fear,” he said. “We now are trying to stay in the upper floors, far from where this war remnant is.”
More than 650,000 children under five in Syria were now chronically malnourished, while more than 7.5 million children nationwide needed humanitarian assistance. (AFP)
DAMASCUS – Save the Children said on Wednesday that more than 400,000 children in the Syrian Arab Republic were at risk of “severe malnutrition” after the US suspended aid, forcing the charity to slash operations in the country.
Bujar Hoxha, Save the Children’s Syria director, in a statement called on the international community to urgently fill the funding gap, warning that needs were “higher than ever” after years of war and economic collapse.
“More than 416,000 children in Syria are now at significant risk of severe malnutrition following the sudden suspension of foreign aid,” Save the Children said in a statement, adding separately that the cuts were those of the US.
The global aid situation has grown dire since US President Donald Trump ordered the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development early this year.
His administration scrapped 83 percent of humanitarian programs funded by USAID.
The agency had an annual budget of $42.8 billion, representing 42 percent of total global humanitarian aid.
The suspension has “forced the closure of one third of Save the Children’s life-saving nutrition activities” across Syria, the charity said, halting “vital care for over 40,500 children” aged under five.
Hoxha said the closure of the charity’s nutrition centers “comes at the worst possible time” with “the needs in Syria are higher than ever.”
Its clinics that are still open are “reporting a surge in malnutrition cases while struggling to keep up with the growing demand for care,” the charity added.
More than 13 years of conflict in Syria ravaged the country, with the health system shattered and infrastructure hobbled.
In February, a United Nations Development Programme report estimated that nine out of 10 Syrians now live in poverty and face food insecurity with “malnutrition on the rise, particularly among children.”
Save the Children said more than 650,000 children under five in Syria were now “chronically malnourished,” while more than 7.5 million children nationwide needed humanitarian assistance, which it said was the highest number since the crisis began.
Hoxha urged the international community to “urgently step up” to fill the funding gap.
Syrian children “are paying the price for decisions made thousands of miles away,” Hoxha added in the statement.
