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National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded with his own AI video<\/a> depicting overweight Palestinian prisoners entering Israeli jails on an assembly line and emerging emaciated and crying. He also published a video of himself berating Palestinian women prisoners and separately planted an Israeli flag on seized United Nations agency for Palestinian refugee (UNRWA) facilities<\/a> in occupied East Jerusalem.<\/p>\n These were not rhetorical excesses divorced from policy; each echoed recent broader government actions or pressure this week \u2013 from seizing a UN facility to a hardening right-wing push for a post-election ground operation to reoccupy Gaza City rather than proceed with Hamas\u2019s disarmament. As the campaign rhetoric intensified, illegal outposts multiplied, demolitions and evictions continued across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza\u2019s death toll widened again beyond the narrower \u201ctargeted assassination\u201d framing to include farmers, delivery workers, fishermen and children.<\/p>\n Gaza\u2019s killings returns to its old shape<\/p>\n Following a brief lull leading up to talks<\/a> with the Trump-appointed Board of Peace, Israel had framed a return to Gaza strikes around targeting individually named \u201ccommanders\u201d of Hamas<\/a>, though this in practice also included figures from Gaza\u2019s police force.<\/p>\n This week, such pretenses were set aside as the toll widened again to Gaza\u2019s general population. A drone killed three members of the Abdin family while they farmed land in al-Qarara on August 28. Another man was reportedly killed the next day, August 29, near Deir el-Balah. Separate strikes killed at least four people working as delivery drivers or riding electric bikes, and a quadcopter dropped a bomb on children collecting water near a road junction in Gaza City\u2019s historic Tuffah neighborhood.<\/p>\n On August 30, a strike near a bakery west of Deir el-Balah killed<\/a> Husam Osama Nasir and three-year-old Tim Said Mahmoud Hamdan. On August 31, two Palestinians were killed and several wounded following an Israeli airstrike targeting the entrance of a residential building near the Municipality Park in Gaza City.<\/p>\n Hospitals were hit as well. A drone struck a medicine warehouse<\/a> inside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah on August 29, wounding three. Hospital officials also reported that cancer medicines had run out entirely after a strike damaged the hospital\u2019s water tanks and laboratory equipment.<\/p>\n Beyond the daily strikes, Israeli journalist Amir Bohbot reported in Walla News that Israel\u2019s military leadership now views a ground operation to reoccupy Gaza City as \u201cunavoidable\u201d. The plan, presented by the chief of the Israeli miltary\u2019s Southern Command which oversees military operations on the Gaza border, would involve evacuating residents to new \u201chumanitarian zones\u201d but is timed for after the October election.<\/p>\n Gaza\u2019s Ministry of Health reported 32 additional deaths last week, bringing the toll since the October \u201cceasefire\u201d to at least 1,320 by August 31, and the cumulative death toll since October 2023 to 73,456. Some 58 percent of Gaza\u2019s population still faces \u201ccritical or catastrophic\u201d shelter conditions, according to the latest humanitarian situation report from the UN\u2019s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).<\/p>\n A widening map of settler violence<\/p>\n In the West Bank, meanwhile, settlers\u2019 efforts to forcefully remove Palestinians from their own homes as part of the ongoing pogrom<\/a> there continued, including in al-Mughayyir, a village northeast of Ramallah, which soldiers and masked settlers jointly raided on the evening of August 30.<\/p>\n Soldiers shot four residents, sealing the village\u2019s only entrance while settlers besieged a home and loaded stolen property onto a pickup truck.<\/p>\n Beyond al-Mughayyir and Qusra \u2013 where Israeli authorities erected three new metal roadblocks<\/a> encircling the Ras al-Ain hilltop on August 27 \u2013 settler violence spanned dozens of incidents this week, according to reports by the Palestinian news agency Wafa and OCHA. In al-Karmel, south of Hebron, soldiers opened fire on a vehicle carrying women home from a wedding on August 27, wounding Sanaa Abu Aram, Doaa al-Hroush and 14-year-old Lana al-Hroush.<\/p>\n In Beita, south of Nablus, settlers attacked and ransacked homes on August 30; Israeli NGO B\u2019Tselem said such vandalism is \u201croutine\u201d and \u201ccarried out with the full backing of the Israeli authorities\u201d, with soldiers sometimes participating and other times simply standing by.<\/p>\n![\"interactive](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Gaza-death-count-1788179873.png\")
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