GAZA CITY, Gaza—Nahla Al-Majdob woke up in the middle of the night last week to her seven-year-old daughter, Aya, screaming in their tent. “I turned on my phone light but I didn’t see anything at first,” Al-Majdob told Drop Site News. “Then I noticed bite marks on Aya’s toe.” It was not the first time. “I’ve woken up many nights to find rats around our mattresses,” she said. “Sometimes they’re right next to us, sniffing.”

Like nearly all Palestinians in Gaza, Al-Majdob and her family were forced from their home by the war and have been living in a flimsy tent near what used to be the port on the shoreline of Gaza City. Compounding the hardships of displacement is a growing population of rodents menacing families across the enclave.

“The rats come out from the rubble and the garbage,” Al-Majdob said. “They crawl over our clothes and gather where we store food. If we leave anything out, it will be contaminated.”

Al-Majdob, her husband, and her daughter, are all diabetic, making them particularly vulnerable to infection from rat bites. Her family has come to fear the night, when the rats forage in the dark, chewing through tents, clothes, and flesh.

“Before the war, I would never eat anything touched by rodents, but now, if I find them in the white flour, I sift it and use it anyway,” she said. “If I throw everything away, we will starve.”

She added that the rodents also appear to have become bolder as their numbers have grown. “They’re not afraid of us anymore,” she said. “I push them away with a stick or anything I can find, but they keep coming back after a few minutes.”

Palestinian families in Gaza are living in overcrowded tents and makeshift shelters, surrounded by waste and debris, with limited access to safe water and sanitation services. Among the widespread and severe environmental health hazards that result from the conditions, the United Nations reported this month, is a proliferation of rodents as well as cockroaches, flies, and other pests, contributing to disease transmission.

In a rapid assessment of more than 1,600 displacement sites across Gaza this month, the UN found that, in over 80% of them, rodents and pests were frequently visible, affecting 1.45 million people. Practically all of the affected families reported skin infections, including scabies, lice and bedbugs, with more than 70,000 cases recorded so far in 2026.

On April 12, Amani Abu Selmi was absorbed in preparation for her upcoming wedding, which was just one week away. She has lived with her family of five in a makeshift tent near Nasser Hospital since 2024 after their home in Khan Younis was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. She went through the traditional rituals of a bride-to-be, checking and showing each piece of clothing to friends and relatives who stopped by. The next morning, her joy was shattered. Rats had chewed their way inside and shredded her belongings.

Abu Selmi’s mother, Ghalia, was returning from the market when she found her younger daughter, 13-year-old Samar, running toward her screaming that something terrible had happened. Inside the tent, Ghalia found Amani standing in shock, holding up pieces of her torn bridal dresses.

“The mice and rats spared nothing,” Ghalia told Drop Site. “These were new clothes for her, and now they were riddled with holes. I started crying because I knew how hard it had been for us to afford them in the first place.”

Amani had tried to protect her clothes from rodents, covering them with a wooden board weighed down by stones. But the rats and mice had burrowed underneath.

“She was especially heartbroken over her hand-embroidered Palestinian thobe,” Ghalia said. “She had dreamed of wearing it the morning of her wedding. It’s part of our tradition.” Rodents, fleas, and insects have long been an issue in their tent but Ghalia said the situation has deteriorated dramatically over the past three months.

Several days ago, Ghalia said she found her 19-year-old son’s eye had swollen shut. “There were small bite marks near his eye. He didn’t even realize what had happened until I asked him. He said he felt something on his face while sleeping,” she said. She took her son, Raef, to the nearest Red Crescent clinic, where doctors confirmed that the wound had become infected and prescribed him a course of antibiotics.

“They move all day inside the tent freely,” Ghalia said. “Even when it’s full of people, they dig tunnels underneath us.” She said she caught 20 mice in a single day using sticky traps, but it did little to contain the problem. “I tried to block their holes with mud again and again, but they always come back,” she said. “It’s terrifying. I can’t live like this anymore.”

Majd Sukar, the head of the Preventive Health Department for the Gaza Municipality, told Drop Site that complaints about rodents have significantly increased since the so-called ceasefire in October 2025, when the Israeli military halted its scorched earth bombing campaign even though it continues smaller scale attacks on an almost daily basis.

“The scale of destruction in Gaza has created ideal breeding grounds,” Sukar said. “The Israeli blockade on rodenticides, the mountains of uncollected waste, and untreated sewage are the primary drivers of this crisis.”

The municipality’s efforts to tackle the situation have also been severely limited by Israel. “We’ve lost most of our municipal vehicles in Israeli attacks,” Sukar said. “We simply don’t have the capacity to remove waste or respond effectively.”

Israeli restrictions on aid into Gaza have hampered efforts to deal with the growing rodent infestation. According to Doctors Without Borders, Israel has repeatedly denied the entry of multiple items needed for basic health sanitation, including rodenticide and insecticide.

“We’ve tried to find alternatives,” Sukar said. “We worked with Gaza’s university experts and tested different alternatives, but none were effective. Even many local initiatives have failed. Many people have brought us homemade poisons, but they don’t work either.”

The municipality has launched awareness campaigns, advising families to store food securely, clean their surroundings, and seek medical care immediately after bites, especially for children and those with chronic illnesses. Yet Sukar said they are fighting a losing battle.

“Rats are now everywhere in Gaza, in destroyed homes, shelters, hospitals, everywhere.” Reports have also grown of a large, particularly aggressive and adaptable rat known as the Norway rat. “We urgently appeal to the UN Secretary-General that we need waste removal equipment and pest control supplies. This is not a secondary issue, it’s a public health catastrophe,” Sukar said.

“We are suffering from two wars,” he added. “The war of bombs, and the war of rats.”

Saber Dawas, a 38-year-old father of six, has tried desperately to keep the rats at bay inside their tent in a displacement camp in Al-Yarmouk stadium in central Gaza City.

He tried storing food in plastic containers, sealed bags, and even a cleaned drum for storing flour. “It didn’t matter,” Dawas said. “A rat chewed straight through the drum.”

Even though food is expensive and scarce, he ends up throwing away whatever he suspects was contaminated. He now suspends most of his food supplies in plastic bags from a wooden stick wedged into the tent’s frame, hoping to keep it out of the reach of rodents.

He said he sleeps lightly, constantly on alert. “Sometimes I feel like I’m guarding my family all night,” he added. “We’re at the beginning of summer. This will only get worse.”

Kraut media is currently in an uproar over the fact that several high-ranking government officials had their data stolen after falling for phishing messages disguised as coming from the Signal messaging app. Deeply unserious headlines now accuse Russia of allegedly jeopardizing Germany’s national security by “hacking Signal,” even though the perpetrators have not yet been identified and the app itself was not actually compromised in any way.

According to media reports, several German politicians have fallen victim to a phishing campaign in recent weeks. According to information from Der Spiegel, Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU), Construction Minister Verena Hubertz (SPD), and Bundestag President Julia Klöckner (CDU) have been affected. Other politicians, journalists, and military personnel have also been targeted.

In the current phishing attack, the attackers are posing as Signal support staff, among other things. Users are asked to enter their PIN or scan a code. If they do so, the attackers gain access to messages, photos, and documents that have been shared via Signal. Despite lacking evidence, Russia is blamed for the attack.

While German government has not yet officially attributed the attack to Russia, media like Die Zeit has nonetheless set its sights on the country: Berlins reluctance could supposedly “be related to the fact that it might compromise intelligence gathered by allied intelligence services.” But according to the Die Zeit article, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is investigating the alleged espionage in Germany, has also not yet commented on a possible instigator. Die Zeit adds, however, without getting specific or offering citations, that the German government “apparently” assumes “presumed” Russian responsibility.

It can be noted: The perpetrators are apparently still unknown, and the methods they used (phishing messages) do not, in and of themselves, initially point to a “state actor” at all, as is now being claimed everywhere. The phishing scam is also not “sophisticated” or “perfidious” or in any way a Russian specialty: The scam is widely known and can be carried out without much effort (and without a “state actor” backing it).

It is just as easy to fend off such campaigns by following well-known rules. Given the apparent lack of IT security expertise among many politicians, one can only underscore what Linus Neumann of the Chaos Computer Club says about the incident:

It wasn’t Signal that was hacked, but Ms. Klöckner herself. For someone holding the second-highest office in the country, this is a significant personal failure, but it is part of a system that made it possible.

The fact that the circumstances regarding the perpetrators remain unclear has not stopped some politicians and journalists from exploiting the phishing campaign for their anti-Russian agenda and simply giving the impression that there is genuine evidence the campaign originated from the Russian government. For example, the Süddeutsche Zeitung is already reporting without any reservations of a “Russian espionage attack”:

Russia’s espionage attack on top German politicians has sparked a heated debate over the security of government communications.

The newspaper cites German security authorities as its source: they are reported to be “certain” that the phishing attack was “once again” orchestrated from Russia. The German government shares this assessment, though it’s not explained in what terms or on what factual basis. The U.S. FBI is cited as another source for the claim that the Russian state was responsible, and some media outlets also mention the Dutch intelligence agency. As usual, it remains unclear how these sources arrived at their supposedly certain identification of the perpetrators.

In some quarters, meanwhile, trust in such claims knows no bounds. There, the perpetrators are already deemed certain, even if this leads to contradictions: For instance, Konstantin von Notz, deputy leader of the Green Party parliamentary group, tells the ARD’s Berlin bureau that it is not easy to identify the source of the attacks. On the other hand, he declares with absolute conviction, as if a proper court had identified the guilty parties in a transparent proceeding:

This espionage attack must serve as a wake-up call for all security agencies. We must understand what Moscow’s agenda is here: Russia has declared Germany an enemy. These attacks are real and pose a genuine threat to our security. Every day, agents are operating here, spying and planning acts of sabotage.

CDU security policy specialist Roderich Kiesewetter goes a step further and, despite the nonexistant factual basis, is not surprisingly calling for radical measures. “Russia must be stopped, at every level,” he told the Handelsblatt. “We should implement every measure we can to credibly strengthen our deterrence.” Kiesewetter advocated, among other things, expelling Russian diplomats and supplying “Taurus” cruise missiles to Ukraine.

According to media reports, CDU lawmaker Marc Henrichmann, chairman of the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Control Panel (PKGr) for the oversight of intelligence services, became the first German politician to blame Russia for the phishing attempts on Friday:

The latest phishing attempt from Russia targeting German politicians and journalists is a wake-up call for all of us.

As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, government officials actually have access to extremely secure communication channels, such as specially encrypted devices and lines. However, according to the paper, these are considered complicated and impractical because popular apps cannot be used through them. Furthermore, according to the Federal Office for Information Security, 62 percent of Germans have received phishing messages at some point. Obviously, the method is neither new nor “sophisticated” nor “Russian,” and it doesn’t require a “state actor” either. The FBI could warn all governments (and all private citizens) year-round about such widespread attacks. And Russians are the only ones who are supposed to have mastered this trick?

Based on current information, it is much more likely that the German politicians involved fell victim to their own complacency and ignorance rather than to some sinister force. That would, of course, be very embarrassing for those involved; an exaggerated Russian bogeyman is thus conjured provide a welcome distraction from their own failures while simultaneously further entrenching anti-Russian hysteria.

On a different note, there is, thanks to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, hard evidence that another country has been conducting massive espionage operations against German politicians, including the Chancellors office, and is presumably still engaging in such practices.

Yesterday, the trial of the “Ulm Five” began in Stuttgart. They are accused of breaking into the premises of Elbit Systems Deutschland and causing property damage there as part of a protest against the genocide in Gaza last September. Elbit Systems Deutschland is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Elbit Systems Group, one of Israel’s three largest defense contractors. Elbit profits directly from the Israeli army’s war and the genocide in Gaza. “The act of which the defendants are accused on September 8, 2025, was an expression of deep moral conviction: Civil disobedience directed exclusively against property in order to save human lives,” reads a statement by the defendants’ attorneys, which was distributed outside the courthouse. The charges include property damage, trespassing, and membership in a criminal organization. For nearly eight months, the five young activists in solidarity with Palestine have been held in pretrial detention, scattered across various prisons throughout Baden-Württemberg.

More than 150 people gathered outside the building and in the courtroom to show solidarity with the defendants. The supporters came from France, England, Ireland, and Germany, making the group just as international as the defendants themselves. Forty activists traveled from Berlin alone. When the defendants were led into the courtroom in handcuffs an hour and a half late, there was applause that lasted several minutes along with chants of solidarity.

There was a heavy police presence in front of and inside the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart’s Stammheim district; the officers’ equipment was warlike, and the security checks extremely strict. The checks amounted to petty harassment, far more so than what is customary at other political trials. Nothing was allowed into the courtroom. Watches, belts, jewelry, everything had to be removed and stowed away. Even shoes had to be removed and the soles of the feet shown. A woman with a walking disability had her cane taken away. The statement distributed by the lawyers had to be handed in. Not even the press was allowed to bring their own pens, only pens provided by the court were permitted. Repression and intimidation permeated the entrance as well as the proceedings of the first day of the trial.

The five defendants sat behind bulletproof glass, separated from their lawyers and the interpreters. They were only allowed to communicate with their lawyers via microphones, some of which did not even work. The defense attorneys were not permitted to file motions; they were denied the floor, and their microphones were muted. For half an hour, they tried to make it clear to the judge that their clients had the right to sit next to them. The judge would not listen. She repeated over and over: “I have not given you the floor” and “I have not granted permission to file motions.” Motions were only to be allowed after the reading of the charges. The defense attorneys refused to accept this and left the courtroom. The judge then adjourned the hearing for two hours. When proceedings were set to resume at 1:00 p.m., the attorneys were standing behind the bulletproof glass with their clients. The judge gave them five minutes to take their seats. They were not willing to do so. The hearing was then adjourned again.

At the solidarity rally that followed, the lawyers reported that they had tried to speak with the judge during the recess, but she was unwilling to do so. They made it clear how essential it is for them that their clients be able to sit with them while the charges are read. They had never experienced anything like this before, not even in “terrorism”-related trials is there such a separation. They also wanted to discuss with the judge the schedule of the 16 scheduled trial dates: how long each individual session was planned to last, and why they were always set for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday instead of three consecutive days. Four of the attorneys are from Berlin; for them, the fragmented trial schedule is difficult to organize. The judge is blocking everything and giving no answers, making any exchange impossible. This first day of the trial was a lesson in how this state and its courts are becoming increasingly repressive and no longer even adhere to their own regulations.

For a long time afterward, supporters outside the building chanted slogans of solidarity. “Germany finances, Elbit Systems massacres,” “Free Palestine - Free Ulm Five,” “Freedom for all political prisoners,” “Free, free Gaza,” “Shut Elbit down,” “Germany finances, Israel massacres,” “German weapons, German money murder all over the world”. These slogans accompanied the defendants as they were driven past the rally, back to their cells.

The Higher Regional Court in Stammheim is where the trial against the RAF took place in the 1970s. Having become somewhat outdated, the original building was decommissioned and replaced ten years ago with a new structure equipped with state-of-the-art security technology, at a cost of 29 million euros. Spectators can watch the proceedings through a two-meter-high pane of bulletproof glass. For safety reasons, the chairs are bolted to the floor. The fact that the trial of the Ulm Five is taking place in Stammheim shows what category the defendants are being placed in.

amber

whataboutism

volcel police

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ