Middle East Press On: Mitsotakis, Israel, Jihadi, Israel's Army, Global Military, Terrorists, Palestinian, Genocide, Gaza, New Age Islam's Selection, 23 December 2025
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
23 December 2025
From Antiochus to Mitsotakis: Israel's Mediterranean ties defy historical precedent
Israel's Army Radio was an exception to the global military broadcasting standard
Kuban’s interview with Bardugo: When Israeli politics turns into public theatre
Power over death: The ultimate reward for jihadi terrorists
Clock is ticking on the next Palestinian genocide
Firewood, Smoke, and Survival: Life Without Cooking Gas in Gaza
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From Antiochus to Mitsotakis: Israel's Mediterranean ties defy historical precedent
By JPOST EDITORIAL
DECEMBER 23, 2025
If King Antiochus IV Epiphanes could travel through time to Hanukkah 2025, he would probably express discontent with the attitude of his successor, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Mitsotakis, unlike the monarch whose defeated legacy is the festival of Hanukkah, was welcomed to Israel during the final few hours of the Festival of Lights, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.
The three leaders addressed the media, reaffirming their commitment to regional security, energy, and technological advancement.
The Israel-Greece-Cyprus relationship has been shaped by changing regional realities and sustained by shared interests, particularly as the eastern Mediterranean became more contested and unpredictable.
The partnership began to take shape in the late 2000s, after Israel’s relationship with Turkey deteriorated sharply. As Ankara moved away from strategic cooperation with Jerusalem under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Israel was forced to rethink its regional posture. Greece and Cyprus, both long wary of Turkish ambitions, having suffered under Turkish aggression and, having been historically distant from Israel, became natural, if initially unlikely, partners.
Energy cooperation provided an early opportunity. Offshore gas discoveries allowed the three countries to work together on practical projects such as export routes, pipelines, and electricity interconnectors. These initiatives created a basis for trust and regular coordination, while also bringing Israel closer to Europe through two EU member states.
“We will advance the India-Middle East-European Union Corridor,” Netanyahu said at Monday’s trilateral summit. “This is an idea that has been brought forward before, but we think we have to put it into reality.” He described the project as a combination of maritime routes, energy pipelines, and cable connectivity linking Asia and Europe via Israel, Cyprus, and Greece.
Energy alone will not define the eastern Mediterranean
This is all substantive for Israel. For decades, Greece and Cyprus had been among Israel’s more critical voices in European forums. Regular trilateral summits and ministerial meetings marked a real diplomatic change, even if political differences remained.
Over time, however, it became clear that energy alone would not define the eastern Mediterranean.
Major projects such as the East Med pipeline proved too costly and complex, and shifting global energy markets reduced their strategic value. While energy cooperation did not disappear, as gas exports via Egypt continued and undersea electricity links remained under discussion, it no longer carried the same political weight.
What has carried the relationships forward is security cooperation.
Even before energy projects stalled, military ties were expanding. Israeli pilots trained in Greek airspace after access to Turkish skies was restricted. Joint air, naval, and ground exercises became more frequent and more sophisticated. Intelligence sharing deepened. Cyprus, too, expanded its security coordination with Israel and hosted IDF training activities.
By the early 2020s, this cooperation had become institutionalized. defence agreements were signed and operational coordination became a normal aspect of military activity.
Greece faces persistent tensions with Turkey in the Aegean Sea and worries about escalation through miscalculation. Cyprus continues to live with the reality of a divided island and a large Turkish military presence. Israel, meanwhile, is increasingly attentive to Ankara’s growing presence in Syria, attempts to entrench itself in Gaza and the eastern Mediterranean, and how that could affect its operational freedom.
Against this backdrop, Netanyahu warned that “the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean are being tested by aggression, terrorism, and instability,” adding that the trilateral partnership “provides strength, clarity, and cooperation that will prevail over chaos.”
“To those who fantasize that they can re-establish their empires and their dominion over our lands, I say, forget it. It’s not going to happen – don’t even think about it,” Netanyahu warned in a thinly-veiled threat to Turkey.
These are not identical challenges, but they intersect. All three countries value stability, freedom of navigation, and respect for sovereignty in a region where those principles are frequently tested.
That brings us to Monday’s summit. Israel has learned the hard way over the past two years who its friends are and who aren’t.
Greece and Cyprus have stood with Israel - Greece even held a Greek Independence Day ceremony at Kibbutz Beeri to show solidarity – and now the relationship moves to the next level.
Mitsotakis said that since the last trilateral summit in 2023, “we’ve now entered a new geopolitical phase,” one that “creates some serious risks, but also a profound window of opportunity to shape a regional security architecture that can deliver peace and prosperity.”
Antiochus IV Epiphanes must be turning in his grave.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881048
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Israel's Army Radio was an exception to the global military broadcasting standard
By ZVIKA KLEIN
DECEMBER 22, 2025
Few Israeli institutions feel as familiar as Army Radio. For decades, it has been both a soundtrack and a cultural engine – a place where Israeli Hebrew loosened its ties and learned to speak as people actually speak. It is also, if we are honest, a bizarre arrangement: a military unit that competes in the civilian marketplace of news, politics, and entertainment.
That contradiction is precisely why the decision by defence Minister Israel Katz to move toward closing Army Radio by March 2026 has detonated such a fierce argument.
Many of the loudest voices hear “closure” and immediately translate it as “silencing.” I understand that reflex. Israel’s media battles are rarely clean, and the line between reform and revenge sometimes gets smudged on purpose. But if we try, just for a moment, to argue the other side in good faith, there is a serious, even compelling, case that closing Army Radio – or at least removing it from military ownership – is a pro-democratic move.
The strongest argument is not about this presenter or that interview. It is about structure.
In a liberal democracy, the military is meant to be powerful in its mission and limited in its politics. The IDF must be trusted by all Israelis, and it must not be perceived as a political actor with its own media arm.
Israel is an outlier
Israel is an outlier here. Other democracies do have military broadcasting, but it typically limits its demographic to soldiers; it is not operating as a mainstream competitor in the domestic news ecosystem. The American Forces Network is designed to serve military communities abroad, not to be a stateside rival to civilian media. Germany’s Radio Andernach is even more explicit about audience boundaries; it is gated through registration and aimed at soldiers, reservists, employees, and their families.
I am not saying that Israel should copy another country’s model. The point is that most democracies have silently agreed to keep the military out of civilian political messaging. Army Radio’s very existence blurs that line, even if the station’s journalists work hard to maintain professional norms.
Defenders of Army Radio often say – correctly – that it has been editorially independent. However, Army Radio’s independence is not protected by design. When a newsroom sits inside a military hierarchy, its independence is ultimately contingent on that hierarchy. Once you accept that structure, you accept the vulnerabilities that come with it.
That is why the current legal and political fight matters so much. The attorney-general has reportedly warned that shutting down the station requires primary legislation rather than a cabinet decision, and framed the move as part of broader pressures on freedom of expression. Even those who advocate terminating the military ownership model should make it clear that any action taken should be transparent, legal, and subject to strict regulations.
And here is the devil’s advocate twist: moving Army Radio out of the IDF can actually strengthen press freedom, because it ends a system where a journalist’s independence exists at the pleasure of the chain of command.
If Israel wants a strong public-interest broadcaster, it already has one. If Israel wants military broadcasting, it can build a dedicated platform that is meant for soldiers. The hybrid is the problem.
The “soldier-journalist” is an ethical paradox that we pretend is not there
There is also a human reality that often gets buried beneath the nostalgia. Army Radio has been a launchpad for extraordinary talent, and many of Israel’s best journalists began there. But the model also asks 18-to-20-year-old soldiers to do something inherently strange: question senior officials – sometimes including the defence minister – while still being subject to military discipline.
Even if those young reporters are brilliant, the setup creates tension between two roles that are meant to be separate: soldier and reporter. It is not a moral accusation. It is a design flaw.
Then there’s the money – the least romantic part of the story and often the most persuasive.
According to reports by the committee process that reviewed the station, Army Radio’s annual budget was estimated at NIS 52 million, with roughly 87% funded by advertising and sponsorships. That’s not the money a small broadcaster makes. Those numbers indicate a commercial player, operating with structural advantages no private station can replicate.
This is where even people who love Army Radio should pause. If a station is truly a market competitor, it should compete like one. If it is truly a public service, it should be funded and regulated like one. The current model blurs the lines far too much.
Closing Army Radio is one answer. Privatizing it is another. Transferring it to a civilian public framework is a third. But “keep it exactly as it is” becomes harder to justify when the economic playing field is tilted by design.
Israel lives in a world where every sentence is clipped, translated, weaponized, and fed into narratives. When a high-profile outlet is formally an IDF station, outsiders can interpret internal Israeli debate as signals from the military establishment, even when they are not.
That confusion can harm Israel’s strategic clarity. And at a time when the IDF is fighting, investigating, and rebuilding trust, it is not unreasonable to argue that the military should reduce – not expand – the number of areas where its name is attached to civilian politics.
None of this means the closure should be done recklessly. Quite the opposite, in fact.
If the government chooses this path, it should commit to three principles.
First: protect the archive. Army Radio is a cultural repository and should be respected as such.
Second: protect the workers. They need a transition plan so that talented reporters can be absorbed into civilian frameworks. This would avoid turning journalists into collateral damage of a structural change.
Third: protect pluralism. If Israel is removing a major voice from the market, it must ensure the broader ecosystem remains competitive, independent, and diverse.
Because here is the bottom line: closing Army Radio is not necessarily a blow to democracy. If done properly, it can be a correction that makes Israel more consistent with the principle that the military defends democracy.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881031
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Kuban’s interview with Bardugo: When Israeli politics turns into public theater
By SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF
DECEMBER 22, 2025
Last week seems to have raised a larger than usual number of wacky news items. On Monday there was the visit of the president of the Paraguayan House of Representatives, Raul Latura, to the Tel Aviv District Court, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was giving evidence in his trial.
During the visit, which interrupted the court proceedings, Latura used the opportunity to express his admiration for Netanyahu as “one of the important leaders of the free world” and declared that Knesset Speaker Amir Oahana, who had organized the impromptu visit to the court in cahoots with Netanyahu, had told him “how unfair this trial is.”
According to the Paraguayan ambassador to Israel, Alejandro Rubin, in reply to a letter of protest by Labor MK Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the court visit was not part of Latura’s official itinerary, so it could not be viewed as an official Paraguayan intervention in Israel’s internal affairs.
The absurdity of the event is that even though Paraguay voted in favor of the partition plan for Palestine back in 1947 and briefly even moved its embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, it is a relatively small and unimportant landlocked state in South America, with a population of just over 7 million. What Netanyahu and Ohana thought would be gained from the episode, except for mockery, is not clear.
Another nonsensical news item was the confrontation between Deputy Speaker Eliyahu Revivo (Likud) and MK Tally Gotliv (Likud) in the Knesset plenum last Wednesday. Revivo, who was chairing the session, called Gotliv to order for talking loudly with her back turned to him while the plenum was voting on a law about the water and sewage corporations.
He suggested that she was trying to garner “likes” (toward the approaching Likud primaries) and told her to “please calm down.” Gotliv jumped back at him, saying, “You shall not talk to me as if I were a bitch. You misogynist, I am not your bitch!” and was then thrown out of the plenum. This shameful scene was broadcast repeatedly on all the TV channels (including channel 14) as we all lit the fourth Hanukkah candle.
From Knesset drama to Bardugo interview
Compared to these rather shameful items, a somewhat unusual interview between Roni Kuban from Channel 11 and media personality and advisor to Netanyahu, Yaakov Bardugo, carried out on December 13, was a fascinating example of open and highly informative journalism, involving two ideological rivals.
Of course, we did not see and hear over half of the two-hour interview and do not know what was left out. Both men occasionally expressed discomfort and nervousness, but both had moments when they clearly spoke from the bottom of their hearts.
Kuban, who very rarely speaks without consulting his cards, had many minutes of facing the cameras without them, while Bardugo, who is considered a highly calculated and manipulative person, had long moments that smacked of sincerity.
When Kuban attacked Bardugo to the effect that a journalist cannot both report and give commentary on the prime minister’s actions and act as an advisor to him, Bardugo denied – as he always does – that he is a journalist. “I am a media man,” he added, and in the final reckoning, “you, with the backing of the NIS 800 million of the Broadcasting Corporation, are much less effective than I am on a non-public channel.”
Kuban accused Bardugo of exemplifying the trio of capital-government-newspaper (Hon Shilton Iton), and being the parent of fake news in Israel. Bardugo replied that the media in Israel – mainstream and Channel 14 alike – does not report the truth. He did not deny that channel 14 is extreme in its positions and admitted he does not like everything that is said on it, but he justified this extremism by the need to find a balance vis-à-vis the mainstream media.
He views balance between extremes to be a basic Jewish principle and quoted a religious source to that effect.
When Kuban confronted Bardugo with the fact that three Likud ministers – Justice Minister Yariv Levin, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, and Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar – had declared that he had threatened and blackmailed them, the unflappable Bardugo suggested that they should “rummage through their own deeds.”
With regard to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, he admitted that he is “not my cup of tea” since he (Bardugo) has a more liberal approach than Ben-Gvir, but that they are on good working terms.
Kuban took Bardugo back to the “hot tape affair” of 1993, when, during the primaries for the Likud leadership, someone reported that a tape existed in which Netanyahu was seen with a woman who was not his wife. Netanyahu admitted at the time that he had been unfaithful to his wife and announced that “one man, surrounded by a group of criminals,” was blackmailing him with a sex tape to drop out of the race.
The man Netanyahu was referring to was MK David Levi, who was also running in the primaries. Bardugo, who worked with Levi at the time, was marked as one of the “group of criminals” the prime minister was referring to. It finally transpired that there was no incriminating tape, and Netanyahu apologized to Levi.
He never apologized to Bardugo, and the subject was never raised between them, but according to Bardugo, he did offer him a ministerial post in his current government – that of Communications Minister.
However, what was most interesting about the interview was that Bardugo presented a clear analysis of how he views left-right relations in Israel. He admitted that today the Left is feeling the pain of losing its elitist status but denied that this is accompanied by hatred from the Right.
On the other hand, he accused the Left of actively hating the Right and discriminating against those who are of oriental origin, though he admitted that he personally had never been blocked because of his Moroccan origins.
While I disagree with this analysis, I cannot deny that Bardugo sounded sincere in what he said, and Kuban listened quietly, without interrupting him. It all seemed to be the right way of carrying out a civilized, even if sometimes emotional, interview between an interviewer and interviewee who are ideological rivals – a very rare but fascinating experience these days. May there be more of them.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-880908
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Power over death: The ultimate reward for jihadi terrorists
By LOUIS RENÉ BERES
DECEMBER 22, 2025
It should be obvious to anyone who follows the daily news: In world politics, the ultimate “payoff” for individuals and nation-states is “power over death.” The fact that acquiring such power is illogical is beside the point.
Prima facie, when offered a seductive promise of immortality, human beings are incentivized to act without logic. Taken by themselves, such inducements would likely be harmless. In all civilizations, they become dangerous only when pertinent “wish fulfilment” is coupled with a presumed obligation to kill “others.”
It’s time for particulars. Almost everywhere, but especially the Middle East, terrorism expresses a murderous response to what philosopher Oswald Spengler calls “metaphysical fear.” Though this mind-challenging coupling is ignored by national leaders and policy-makers, it remains largely determinative.
When Donald J. Trump pledged stability for the region by way of his “Board of Peace,” the US president’s plan missed every conceivable element of serious understanding. This conspicuously shallow plan – much like Trump’s “peace” for Ukraine (i.e., the assaulted country’s self-annihilation) – is destined to fail.
For Israel, “defeating Hamas” is a transient and tactical goal. The core enemy for Jerusalem is not Hamas or any kindred terror group as such, but rather a jihadi ideology based on ritualistic violence against “unbelievers.” Among the variously configuring and reconfiguring jihadi organizations, terror-violence is often conceived as a pragmatic form of religious sacrifice.
This conception was certainly the driving force behind the Bondi Beach murderers in Australia. What outcome other than “martyrdom” could this father and son jihadi duo have expected? Surely, they did not expect to escape from the expected carnage and incident-chaos. Surely, they were not “radicalized” by such law-based rewards as Palestinian sovereignty or statehood.
Understanding jihadist terrorist motivations
UNTIL JIHADI terrorist motivations are fully understood, the Jewish state and also the United States will remain vulnerable to singular attacks, insurgent warfare, and (potentially) derivative chaos.
Nuclear terrorism, it should be kept in mind, need not depend on authentic chain-reaction technologies. Grievous nuclear harms could be inflicted by way of radiation dispersal devices (“dirty bombs”) and/or conventional missile attacks on nuclear reactors.
Years ago, in separate instances, Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor was attacked by both Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Hamas. While both attacks failed, a current adversary of Israel (state or sub-state) could have access to much more destructive drone and ballistic missile technologies.
There is more. While the jihadi terrorist proudly claims to “love death,” exactly the opposite is true. It is this criminal’s exceptional terror of death that leads him or her to commit egregious “sacrificial” harms. Under authoritative international law, terrorism is always criminal behaviour (even when the announced cause is allegedly just) and the individual perpetrator is always hostess humane generis, a “common enemy of humankind.”
To survive as nation-states, the members of civilizations must first be able to survive as individuals. But the most glaringly evident requirement of species survival – a sine qua non that calls for deeper and wider expressions of human empathy – could render each person’s non-transferrable life altogether unbearable. The problem is that once the necessary levels of caring for others would be achieved, corresponding levels of pain for the empathic will have become intolerable.
For jihadists, there is a “correct” way to achieve both personal and collective redemption. This is the combined path of victim and perpetrator “sacrifice.” Operationally, this signifies a glorious “martyrdom” that rewards doubly.
Ignoring the psychological dimension of “too much empathy,” ancient Jewish tradition generally calls for conspicuous caring behaviour. Indeed, as the reciprocal of modern-day jihadi justifications of terror, this tradition views empathy as a sacred path to personal and collective redemption. With this difference in mind, a critical question should be made plain: Is there anything to be learned here for dealing with jihadi terrorism and its underlying death fears?
IN ONE form of another, a meaningful redemption is the core hope of all human societies. The psychologist Carl G. Jung once remarked that “Society is the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption.” To redeem the whole world, as the seminal Swiss thinker understood, we must first call forth and “sanctify” certain exemplary metamorphoses. In essence, all such needed transformations must begin with the individual, whatever the “metaphysical fears” of divergent groups, states, or faiths.
There is more. In similar fashion to Jung, his Swiss acolyte and colleague, Sigmund Freud (who early on refined the notion of “wish fulfilment”), spoke unscientifically of “souls.” Nonetheless, he understood, even in the bewildering vortex of his own professed atheism, that an indecipherable mystery of “eternity” hovers above and beyond the temporal world. The very deepest realities of human love and empathy, Freud already knew, can never be elucidated through science.
What does all of this have to do with combatting jihadi terrorism? Here is a succinct answer: In all the world, there can never be any greater form of power than “power over death.” Now faced with jihadi adversaries who discover such incomparable power in the “religious sacrifice” of terror-violence, Israel and other vulnerable nation-states must learn how to respond.
All promising tactical and operational strategies must stem from the view that counter-jihadi terror is a problem of “mind-over-mind,” not “mind-over-matter.” Though ever-improving weapons technologies will continue to warrant expert and financial support, Israel could never compete successfully against the promise of immortality with guns, battleships or missiles.
Going forward, Israel’s best “weapon” against jihadi criminality will be a less tangible but more determinative kind of “qualitative edge.” This means having a consistent intellectual advantage – an indispensable quality in a region where even a small number of aspiring “martyrs” could cause an incomparable measure of harm.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-880988
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Clock is ticking on the next Palestinian genocide
DR. RAMZY BAROUD
December 22, 2025
Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza — a premeditated campaign to erase the enclave and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that almost 80 years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.
If we go so far as to accept the sterile, a historic claim that the Nakba of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide — ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization — we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on Oct. 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?
The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on Oct. 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants such as Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.
During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30 percent of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls trapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.
The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on the planet. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.
If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.
The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the “encouragement of migration” and demanded that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of 2 million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: “Erase Gaza,” “Leave no one there.” When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals,” they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.
This was preceded by the hermetic siege — a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of “security,” always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s “largest open-air prison.” Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded “terrorists” and “militants” whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.
Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the UN declared Gaza “uninhabitable.” Its water was toxic, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.
This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of Oct. 7, allowing Israel to weaponize its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former defence Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly stripped Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanization of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.
Tragically, the conditions that fuelled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal vow to “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.” If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice — or silence — will make the difference.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2627127
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Firewood, Smoke, and Survival: Life Without Cooking Gas in Gaza
December 22, 2025
By Shaimaa Eid
In the early hours before dawn, as the bitter cold lingers, Alaa Abu Khater sits inside her tent in front of a wood-burning stove, struggling to ignite a fire using primitive means.
Alaa begins her day before sunrise to prepare breakfast for her family of ten, after months of a complete absence of cooking gas.
Gas—once one of the simplest necessities of daily life—is no longer available in the Gaza Strip. Firewood has become the only alternative, bringing with it severe health, environmental, and humanitarian consequences.
“Getting firewood has become an exhausting task,” Alaa told the Palestine Chronicle. “Sometimes we search for it for hours; other times we’re forced to buy it at prices we can’t afford. I wake up at dawn in the freezing cold and sit in front of the fire for a long time just to prepare food for my siblings and my elderly mother.”
Her voice is tinged with exhaustion and sorrow as she adds, “On some days, when we can’t afford firewood, we resort to burning plastic or nylon, even though we know how dangerous it is. Gas used to save us time and effort. Now we are prisoners of fire and smoke.”
Worsening Health Hazards inside the Tents
Alaa’s suffering goes beyond physical exhaustion and extends to serious health risks, especially for children and the elderly. Smoke from burning firewood—or, at times, plastic—fills the tent and suffocates its occupants.
“My nieces and nephews have developed chronic coughs because of the smoke,” she explained. “The tent is small and lacks proper ventilation, but we have no other choice. Gas has become a dream we wait for year after year.”
A Recurring Reality in Displacement Tents
In Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, where displacement tents stretch along the coast, the same reality is repeated. Youssef Abdelwahab, a displaced resident living with his family in a tent for an extended period, says the situation has not improved.
“Since the announcement of the end of the war, we haven’t felt any real improvement in the gas situation,” he told us. “The occupation continues to impose suffocating restrictions. We received only one gas cylinder weighing eight kilograms. After a week, it ran out, and we returned to using fire.”
Youssef adds that his elderly mother can no longer stand in front of a firewood stove or tolerate the smoke, forcing him and his brothers to take on the task themselves, despite the daily health risks.
He calls on the international community to intervene urgently. “Cooking gas is not a luxury,” he says. “It is an essential need directly tied to the right to food. There can be no talk of stability or recovery in Gaza while we are unable to cook our meals.”
Closed Stations and Severe Shortages
The crisis has deepened with the closure of many fuel and energy stations across the Gaza Strip due to severe shortages of cooking gas and fuel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families depend on these supplies daily to prepare food, especially in the absence of safe alternatives.
Since the end of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel has allowed only very limited quantities of fuel and cooking gas to enter the Strip, keeping the crisis acute. According to official sources in Gaza, the amount permitted in does not exceed 17 percent of actual needs, highlighting the vast gap between demand and available supplies.
Other stations have ceased operations because they are located near border areas or in zones that suffered extensive destruction during Israeli bombardment, further reducing Gaza’s capacity to store and distribute the limited supplies that do arrive.
The Black Market: A Harsh Choice
Amid these shortages, the black market has become a desperate refuge for many families, despite exorbitant prices. Hala Salama, a mother who suffers from chest allergies, says the smoke from firewood directly affects her health.
“I can’t tolerate the smoke,” she says. “Sometimes my son tries to buy gas from the black market at outrageous prices just so we can cook.”
“But gas isn’t always available,” she adds. “And even when we find it, we can’t afford it every time. In the end, we return to firewood and the stove, despite knowing how harmful it is.”
The cooking gas crisis in Gaza is not merely a shortage of a consumable resource. It is a stark indicator of the collapse of basic life necessities in the Strip. Families who survived relentless bombardment now face a daily struggle to secure their most fundamental needs, amid an ongoing siege, destroyed infrastructure, and continued restrictions on the entry of essential goods.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/firewood-smoke-and-survival-life-without-cooking-gas-in-gaza/
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