🧵NEW: Armed gangs are looting food warehouses across Gaza—and Israeli drones are reportedly targeting the police and volunteers trying to stop them.
Multiple sources, including eyewitnesses and journalists, say the gangs are backed by Israel.
Here’s what’s being reported: 🔽
2/ @TareqAzzom Gaza correspondent for Al Jazeera English, reports:
▪️ “Local gangs, reportedly backed by Israel, are looting what remains of Gaza’s food warehouses.”
▪️ Israeli forces, he says, have struck police officers who were trying to stop the thefts.
3/ One of the clearest firsthand accounts comes from a volunteer at a community kitchen in western Gaza.
He says armed gangs attacked their facility twice in one day.
The second time, they fired live rounds and broke into a food store serving 1,500+ families.
[Instagram story from @madhoun95]
4/ “This wasn’t just theft,” the volunteer wrote. “It was an organized effort to spread fear and dismantle what little safety remains.”
“They are the hands of the Mossad and sedition,” he adds.
He says most community kitchens and food storage facilities in western Gaza have been similarly targeted by looters.
5/ Investigative journalist Mohamed Elzanin has documented three Israeli drone strikes in a single hour on patrols attempting to stop the looting at Al-Thawra and Al-Wahda Streets in Gaza City.
Those targeted, he reports, were community volunteers and local police.
6/ Al Jazeera’s Anas Al-Sharif reports: “Horrifying footage shows Israeli occupation forces targeting civilians and members of local security teams as they attempted to protect their shops from looting and chaos.”
7/ In response, Gaza’s major families are speaking out. The Madhoun family released a formal statement denouncing the looting and calling it part of a broader destabilization strategy. They also called for the formation of a national leadership consisting of heads of municipalities, national institution and popular committees to put an end to these attacks. They warned: “These gangs act in alignment with the goals of the occupation.”
8/ Drop Site contributor @AbubakerAbedW, recently evacuated from Gaza, writes:
▪️ “The Israeli military has assigned gangs to cause chaos and break down public order.”
▪️ He says looting has spread across Gaza. Main targets: warehouses and stores.
9/ Officer Asaad Yahya Al-Kafarna was killed in an Israeli airstrike while leading a police patrol pursuing looters in Gaza City, near the Thai Restaurant. According to his family, he was tasked with confronting gangs accused of collaborating with the Israeli military to raid food and flour storage sites in the Al-Nasr area of northern Gaza.
10/ Together, the pattern appears to be:
▪️Israel’s blockade creates famine
▪️Israeli forces then systematically bombs community kitchens
▪️ Organized gangs try to loot remaining supplies at warehouses and storage sites
▪️ Local efforts to stop the chaos—by police and volunteers—are then bombed by Israel
Israeli forces appear to be systematically engineering the collapse of Gaza’s internal order, and the ability to feed Palestinians.
11/ Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas shared a statement through the state-run WAFA outlet placing the blame on Hamas for the lootings:
“The Presidency expressed its rejection and strong condemnation of the robbery and theft operations carried out by gangs, targeting warehouses of humanitarian aid provided to our people in the Gaza Strip, foremost amongst them the Hamas gangs, stressing that our Palestinian people will not forgive these gangs for their heinous crimes committed in these difficult times they are going through, specifically in the Strip.”
12/ Gaza’s Interior Ministry has condemned the “actions of collaborators” working with Israel amid the 63-day siege and an 18-month genocide.
The Ministry said Israeli forces struck one of its police units shortly after they thwarted a theft attempt—calling the attack an effort to undermine Palestinian unity. It vowed to intensify operations to pursue and punish those working with the occupation.
A resistance source told Al-Araby that Israel is now actively deploying armed collaborators to loot remaining food supplies across Gaza. The source said these theft attempts have sharply increased in recent days and form part of Israel’s “starvation war.”
🧵 1/
Human Rights Watch shelved a report concluding that Israel’s decades-long denial of Palestinians’ right of return constitutes a “crime against humanity,” prompting the resignation of its entire Israel-Palestine team: Israel-Palestine director Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari.
Drop Site News spoke directly with Shakir and reviewed internal HRW emails and other documents. The story: 🧵🔽
2/ The 43-page report had completed Human Rights Watch’s full internal review process over seven months, including sign-off from HRW’s legal team and divisions covering refugees, international justice, women’s rights, and children’s rights.
It was halted roughly two weeks before its scheduled publication on December 4.
3/ Shakir said the report traced Israel’s policies from the 1948 expulsions through the present-day emptying of refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.
It was based on interviews with 53 Palestinian refugees and fieldwork across Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Shakir said he hoped it would open “a path to justice for Palestinian refugees.”
⭕️ Only 12 of 50 Palestinians approved to return to Gaza were allowed through the Rafah crossing on Monday, as returnees described being transferred by the armed Abu Shabab militia to Israeli checkpoints and subjected to hours-long interrogations, threats, and confiscation of personal belongings.
Israel blocked 38 of the 50 Palestinians attempting to enter Gaza and sent them back to Egypt, various outlets report today. On the outbound side, just five patients were allowed to leave for medical treatment. Reuters reported that ten companions accompanied them, while Gaza’s Ministry of Health said the total number of people who exited was just eight. An Israeli security source confirmed to Haaretz that members of the Israel-backed Abu Shabab militia, operating as the so-called “Popular Forces” now under Ghassan Duhine, escorted civilians from Rafah and handed them over to Israeli authorities at a newly installed inspection point.
Palestinian National Initiative Secretary General Mustafa Barghouti said returnees faced “horrific inspection procedures.” One woman, Sabah al-Raqab, said Abu Shabab gunmen beat, humiliated, strip-searched, handcuffed, and threatened women with arrest and death. Of six buses waiting to enter Gaza, she said, only one was allowed through.
The 12 who entered, nine women and three children, told Arab media they were questioned at multiple locations along the crossing. Several said masked Abu Shabab gunmen handed them over for Israeli interrogation. One woman said Israeli officials seized all their belongings, “even the children’s toys,” and denied them food and water. Another said she was questioned for more than two hours and told: “We won’t let you in. We’ll take you as prisoners until you tell us who entered on October 7.”
Middle East Eye shared footage of a Palestinian woman who said Israeli forces blindfolded and restrained returnees. “They don’t want large numbers to return; they want large numbers to leave,” she said.
Read Mustafa Barghouti’s full comments below documenting the ordeal for the 12 Palestinian returnees:
In February 2024, the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem suppressed an internal report meant for wider circulation among senior Biden administration officials, saying it “lacked balance.” Reuters recently reported that the internal cable included photos from northern Gaza warning the area had become an “apocalyptic wasteland,” but U.S. ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the images from distribution.
Jonathan Whittall @_jwhittall, who was on the UN fact-finding trip and is the former head of UN OCHA in the OPT, now shares a selection of those photos with Drop Site for the first time.
The images were taken during the January 2024 visit, which followed a three-month total siege on northern Gaza. Whittall says the mission’s purpose was to reflect reality, not political balance. “Many of these scenes had already been captured by Palestinian journalists, but they too had been dismissed as biased,” he writes. 🧵
📸 Photo 1: A partially destroyed school with piles of garbage and rubble lining the streets in Jabaliya. The school had no clean water or sanitation available and was being used as an emergency shelter by displaced Palestinians. January 31, 2024. (Photo by Jonathan Whittall.)
📸 Photo 2: The same partially destroyed school in Jabaliya. January 31, 2024.
📸 Photo 3: The inside of the school in Jabaliya with burnt out vehicles and rubble in the courtyard.
🚨 Jared Kushner presented a “master plan” for redeveloping Gaza into a high-tech metropolis during a speech at the Board of Peace charter signing ceremony in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
Watch his full remarks here. We break down some key points in the thread below: 🧵
1/ Senior White House adviser and Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner said the administration has moved from securing a ceasefire to what he described as the far harder task of implementing peace, framing the effort as a shift in mindset after years of war in Israel and decades of despair in Gaza.
He credited President Donald Trump’s “first principles” approach for pushing the team to aim for outcomes others considered impossible, arguing that peace required changing behavior, habits, and expectations on both sides.
2/ Kushner said the next phase centers on security and demilitarization, arguing that no reconstruction or investment is possible without it. He said the United States is working with Israel and a new technocratic Palestinian governing committee to “work with Hamas on demilitarization,” describing security as the foundation for rebuilding Gaza’s economy and ending what he called long-term dependence on aid.
🇻🇪 How popular was Trump’s move to intervene militarily to depose Maduro among Venezuelans?
Two pre-intervention surveys suggested a sharp split between Venezuelans inside the country and those abroad, with deep opposition at home and high support in the diaspora.
1. Datanálisis poll, Dec 2025
(Caracas-based firm)
▪️ Foreign military intervention (inside Venezuela)
➤ 55% opposed
➤ 23% supported
➤ 22% unsure / other
▪️Political alignment of those polled
➤ 60% politically unaffiliated
➤ 13% support the government
➤ 19% support the opposition
Page 1/5.
Thread continues below ⬇️
2. AtlasIntel Intel Poll, October 22-28, 2025, published by Bloomberg
(Brazil-based polling firm)
▪️ Support for U.S. military intervention
➤ 64% support among Venezuelans abroad
➤ 34% support among Venezuelans living in the country
3. AtlasIntel Intel Poll, October 22-28, 2025
▪️ Is US intervention the “most viable pathway for topping the Maduro regime and re-establishing democracy?”
➤ 55% of migrants say yes
➤ Only 25% of those in Venezuela say yes
🚨 BREAKING: New footage shows explosions around Caracas, Venezuela, as parts of the city’s south near a major military base lost electricity. Low-flying aircraft were seen and heard from across the capital, according to Reuters.
Agence France-Presse and Associated Press said the blasts were heard around 2 a.m. local time, with an AP reporter counting at least seven explosions over several neighborhoods. Residents rushed into the streets, some watching the sky as aircraft flew at low altitude. The site of the explosions remains unclear, and Venezuelan authorities have not issued an official explanation or confirmed any casualties.