Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! Here’s your wrap-up of the latest articles from our contributors, including our colleagues at Local Call.

Eight months after Israel invaded Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, forcibly displacing over 1 million Palestinians, the ceasefire has enabled some of the city’s former residents to return home. But as Ruwaida Kamal Amer reports, the devastation is so severe that Gazans barely recognize their own homes — while Israeli forces stationed along the border with Egypt continue to fire at civilians. 

In a groundbreaking investigation, Yuval Abraham revealed the Israeli army intensively bombarded residential areas in Gaza when it lacked intelligence on the exact location of Hamas commanders hiding underground, and intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to suffocate militants in their tunnels. When targeting senior Hamas commanders, the Israeli army authorized the killing of “triple-digit numbers” of Palestinian civilians — in coordination with U.S. officials — and some of these strikes are known to have killed Israeli hostages despite concerns raised ahead of time.

On Tuesday, at a joint White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his proposal to “take over and own the Gaza Strip,” while forcibly displacing its entire population. Mahmoud Mushtaha spoke with Palestinians in Gaza, who rejected Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan not only as absurd, but also as the latest iteration of a century-old campaign to erase Palestinian existence.

And Meron Rapoport argued that even if Trump’s plan is unlikely to be implemented, its damage has already been done: the idea of cleansing Gaza of Palestinians tapped into a deep undercurrent in Israeli society, gaining the support of politicians across the Israeli political spectrum, and endangering any chance for a peaceful future in the wider region. 

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