Middleboro Review 2: 10/31/25

Across Gaza, underneath the millions of tons of torn concrete, and twisted rebar, lie not only thousands of bodies, but thousands of unexploded munitions.

The next day, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) called attention to the incident. “Yesterday, five children were reportedly injured, two of them very seriously, while encountering unexploded ordnance in rubble near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza,” the group said in a statement. “Following the ceasefire in Gaza, the explosive ordnance threat remains. As hundreds of thousands of displaced people and humanitarian personnel are on the move, the risk of encountering explosive ordnance increases.”

UNMAS had documented at least 52 Palestinians killed and 267 wounded by explosive ordnance in Gaza since October 2023.

Israel has dropped tens of thousands of tons of mostly U.S.-made bombs on Gaza, more than the combined weight of the bombs dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg in all of World War II. And UNMAS has warned that between 5-10% of weapons fired into Gaza have failed to detonate, effectively turning the enclave into a minefield.

The Israeli news site, The Marker—the financial supplement to Haaretz—reported that the Israeli Air Force was aware of at least 3,000 unexploded bombs in Gaza as of April 2025. So far, UNMAS has been able to identify at least 560 unexploded ordnance in areas the group has been able to access.

Along with its continued bombings and shootings of Palestinians on an almost daily basis since the ceasefire went into effect, Israel has prevented the minimum amount of humanitarian aid, equipment, and resources from entering Gaza in violation of the agreement, making it nearly impossible to begin dealing with the vast amounts of unexploded ordnance that have turned Gaza’s geography into a lethal landscape.

“We are talking about 71,000 tons of explosives currently present in the Gaza Strip,” Mahmoud Bassal, the spokesperson for Civil Defense, told Drop Site. “These explosives still exist, and at any moment they could explode,” he said. “It could happen when children tamper with them, or while civil defense teams work to recover bodies. A collision might happen and could lead to an explosion.”

Civil Defense teams are not tasked with removing unexploded ordnance but do help in coordination efforts and are the primary group in Gaza working on trying to retrieve the thousands of bodies buried under the rubble. “The Israeli occupation has killed 90 percent of the engineering unit’s personnel that used to operate in Gaza. The occupation destroyed the resources needed to transport these bomb remnants from one area to another,” Bassal said. “The current demand now is that specialized teams must be formed to address this issue, and they must be provided with the necessary equipment, capabilities, and vehicles to transport these highly explosive and large missiles that remain in Gaza.”

He added: “It is truly intolerable for these explosives to remain inside the Strip. [Along] with the corpses, with the rubble… there are explosives that threaten the lives of the population, and this is indeed a major problem in the Strip.”

BREAKING: Judge Orders Trump Administration to Use Contingency Funds to Cover SNAP

NOTICE THAT IT IS DEMOCRATS FIGHTING TO FEED HUNGRY AMERICANS!

The administration argued it could not use a $5 billion contingency reserve to sustain benefits, reversing a pre-shutdown USDA plan to tap those funds. The plaintiffs, a coalition of 25 states and the District of Columbia, countered that not only could those funds be used, but that federal law requires it, citing an additional $23 billion reserve that could be legally accessed to keep the program running.

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AARON PARNAS: COURT ORDERS

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