I have a big Palestinian family. I grew up in a household full of children: We are eight brothers and sisters. As my older siblings started getting married and having children, our family grew even bigger. Every weekend, our family home would fill up with children’s laughter.

I used to wait impatiently for Thursday to come, the day my married sisters would come to visit us with their children. My father would be out shopping, my mother – busy cooking her daughters’ favourite dishes, and I would be playing with the kids. I have nine nieces and nephews in total, and I have beautiful memories playing with and cuddling each one of them. They are the treasure of my family because a home without children is like a tree without leaves.

Despite the difficult life of occupation and siege in Gaza, my sisters and brothers did their best to provide for their children and give them the best opportunity to study and pursue their dreams.

Then the genocide started. The relentless bombing, the constant displacement, the starvation.

I do not have children of my own, but I feel the excruciating pain of my sisters when they face the cries of their hungry children.

“I no longer have the strength to endure. I am tired of thinking about how to fill my children’s empty stomachs. What can I prepare for them?” my sister Samah shared recently.

She has seven children: Abdulaziz, 20, Sondos, 17, Raghad, 15, Ali, 11, twins Mahmoud and Lana, 8, and Tasneem, 3. Like most other Palestinian families, they have been displaced so many times that they have lost most of their possessions. The last time they saw their home in Shujayea neighbourhood, its walls were blown off, but its roof was still standing on the pillars. The plot of land in front of their house, which was planted with olive and lemon trees, had been bulldozed.

Samah’s family has relied on canned food since the beginning of the war. Since Israel blocked aid in early March and aid distribution stopped, they have struggled to find cans of beans or chickpeas. Now, they are lucky if they manage to find a bowl of lentil soup or a loaf of bread.

Day after day, Samah has had to watch her children suffer, losing weight and falling sick.

Lana is suffering the most. She is 110cm (3 feet 7 inches), but weighs just 13kg (28.7 pounds). Her parents took her to a clinic where she was examined and confirmed to have severe malnutrition. She was registered in a programme for the distribution of nutritional supplements, but she has not received anything yet. There are none available.

Lana’s yellow body is so weak that she is unable to stand for long periods or walk in the event that they are suddenly forced to flee. All she wants is to sleep and sit without being able to play with her brother. I cannot believe what has become of her: she used to be a red-cheeked girl full of energy, who used to play with her siblings all the time.

We regularly hear news about children dying from malnutrition, and this is Samah’s worst fear: that she could lose her daughter.

Despite struggling to feed her family, Samah refuses to allow her husband, Mohammed, to go to one of the aid distribution points of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. She knows this is a death trap. She would not have him risk his life for a parcel of food he may not even be able to obtain.

Amid the starvation, my other sister, Asma, gave birth to her second child, Wateen. She is now two months old, and because of a lack of nutrition, she is suffering from jaundice. I have only seen Wateen in photos. She weighed two and a half kilograms (5.5 pounds) when she was born. She looked yellow and sleepy in all her photos.

The doctors said her mother, who is breastfeeding, cannot provide her with the nutrients she needs because she herself is undernourished. Wateen needs to be fed with highly saturated formula milk, which is not available because Israel has been blocking the delivery of all baby formula into Gaza.

Asmaa is now worried that Wateen may develop malnutrition because she is unable to provide her with nutritious milk. “I’m melting like a candle! When will this suffering end?” she told me recently.

My heart is tearing apart when I talk with my sisters and hear about their pain and the hunger that is ravaging their children.

The Israeli occupation forces have already killed more than 18,000 children since it embarked on the genocide. Some 1.1 million are still surviving. Israel wants to make sure they have no future.

This is not an unfortunate consequence of war; it is a war strategy.

Malnutrition is not just a severe loss of weight. It is a devastating condition that damages the body’s vital internal organs, such as the liver, kidneys, and stomach. It affects the growth and development of children and results in higher predisposition to disease, learning difficulties, cognitive impairment and psychological issues.

By starving Palestinian children, depriving them of education and health care, the occupier aims to achieve one goal: creating a fragile generation, weak in mind and constitution, unable to think, and with no horizon other than searching for food, drink, and shelter. This means a generation that is unable to defend the right to its land and stand up to the occupier. A generation that does not understand the existential struggle of its people.

The war plan is clear, and the goal has been stated publicly by Israeli officials. The question now is, will the world let Israel destroy Gaza’s children?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

A building collapse that killed 34 construction workers and injured dozens more in the Western Cape, town of George last May was “entirely preventable”, South Africa’s government says.

A newly released report into the 2024 tragedy revealed that serious safety concerns had been raised well before the partially-built five-storey apartment block came crashing down.

Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson said the collapse was the result of multiple failures including the use of substandard materials, structural cracks, and visible gaps.

“There were a number of red flags that were continually raised about this project,” said a visibly angry Macpherson.

Some of the defects in the building were detected a year before the building collapsed. The health and safety officer even resigned in protest but work continued the report found.

“The work should have stopped” Macpherson said.

Macpherson added that these signs were a chance to turn back but instead, problems with the building were “covered up”.

Workers reported feeling vibrations in the partially built structure, and being told to cover up holes with sand and substandard concrete, the report revealed.

Following what the minister described as an “emotional and painful” private meeting with survivors and families of victims, he called for criminal accountability for those found to have been negligent.

A police investigation is still ongoing but no arrests have been made.

Many survivors are still facing trauma, medical bills and struggling to put food on the table, Macpherson said.

One survivor of the disaster, Elelwani, tearfully told local media, that her life had changed dramatically in the last year.

She lost many of her teeth, struggles to eat and has been the subject of bullying. She appealed for money from well wishers.

Macpherson pledged to introduce regulations to improve oversight in construction and reform outdated legislation.

The probe was conducted by the Council for the Built Environment and a parallel investigation by the Engineering Council of South Africa.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Nadiya escaped the rapists and killers only because her father hid her in a haystack amidst the shooting, shouting and bloodshed that took place 82 years ago.

“He covered me with hay and told me not to get out no matter what,” the 94-year-old woman told Al Jazeera – and asked to withhold her last name and personal details.

On July 11, 1943, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA), a nationalist paramilitary group armed with axes, knives and guns, stormed Nadiya’s village on the Polish-Ukrainian border, killing ethnic Polish men and raping women.

“They also killed anyone who tried to protect the Poles,” Nadiya said.

The nonagenarian is frail and doesn’t go out much, but her face, framed by milky white hair, lights up when she recalls the names and birthdays of her grand- and great-grandchildren.

She also remembers the names of her neighbours who were killed or forced to flee to Poland, even though her parents never spoke about the attack, now known as the Volyn massacre.

“The Soviets forbade it,” Nadiya said, noting how Moscow demonised the UIA, which kept fighting the Soviets until the early 1950s.

Nadiya said her account may enrage today’s Ukrainian nationalists who lionise fighters of the UIA for having championed freedom from Moscow during World War II.

After Communist purges, violent atheism, forced collectivisation and a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, the UIA leaders chose what they thought was the lesser of two evils. They sided with Nazi Germany, which invaded the USSR in 1941.

In the end, though, the Nazis refused to carve out an independent Ukraine and threw one of the UIA’s leaders, Stepan Bandera, into a concentration camp.

But another UIA leader, Roman Shukhevych, was accused of playing a role in the Holocaust – and in the mass killings of ethnic Poles in what is now the western Ukrainian region of Volyn and adjacent areas in 1943.

Genocide?

Up to 100,000 civilian Poles, including women and children, were stabbed, axed, beaten or burned to death during the Volyn massacre, according to survivors, Polish historians and officials who consider it a “genocide”.

“What’s horrifying isn’t the numbers but the way the murders were carried out,” Robert Derevenda of the Polish Institute of National Memory told Polskie Radio on July 11.

This year, the Polish parliament decreed July 11 as “The Volyn Massacre Day” in remembrance of the 1943 killings.

“A martyr’s death for just being Polish deserves to be commemorated,” the bill said.

“From Poland’s viewpoint, yes, this is a tragedy of the Polish people, and Poland is fully entitled to commemorate it,” Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevych told Al Jazeera.

However, rightist Polish politicians may use the day to promote anti-Ukrainian narratives, and a harsh response from Kyiv may further trigger tensions, he said.

“All of these processes ideally should be a matter of discussion among historians, not politicians,” he added.

Ukrainian politicians and historians, meanwhile, call the Volyn massacre a “tragedy”. They cite a lower death toll and accuse the Polish army of the reciprocal killing of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

In post-Soviet Ukraine, UIA leaders Bandera and Shukhevych have often been hailed as national heroes, and hundreds of streets, city squares and other landmarks are named after them.

Evolving views and politics

“[The USSR] branded ‘Banderite’ any proponent of Ukraine’s independence or even any average person who stood for the legitimacy of public representation of Ukrainian culture,” Kyiv-based human rights advocate Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.

The demonisation backfired when many advocates of Ukraine’s independence began to sympathise with Bandera and the UIA, “turning a blind eye to their radicalism, xenophobia and political violence”, he said.

In the 2000s, anti-Russian Ukrainian leaders began to celebrate the UIA, despite objections from many Ukrainians, especially in the eastern and southern regions.

These days, the UIA is seen through a somewhat myopic prism of Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia, according to Likhachyov.

Ukraine’s political establishment sees the Volyn massacre and armed skirmishes between Ukrainians and Poles as only “a war related to the Ukrainians’ ‘fight for their land’”, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at Bremen University in Germany.

“And during a war, they say, anything happens, and a village, where the majority is on the enemy’s side, is considered a ‘legitimate target’,” he explained.

Many right-leaning Ukrainian youngsters “fully accepted” Bandera’s radicalism and the cult of militant nationalism, he said.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, thousands of far-right nationalists rallied throughout Ukraine to commemorate Bandera’s January 1 birthday.

“Bandera is our father, Ukraine is our mother,” they chanted.

Within hours, the Polish and Israeli embassies issued declarations in protest, reminding them of the UIA’s role in the Holocaust and the Volyn massacre.

Far-right activists began volunteering to fight Moscow-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine in 2014 and enlisted in droves in 2022.

“In the situational threat to [Ukraine’s] very existence, there’s no room for reflection and self-analysis,” rights advocate Likhachyov said.

Warsaw, meanwhile, will keep using the Volyn massacre to make demands for concessions while threatening to oppose Ukraine’s integration into the European Union, he said.

As for Moscow, it “traditionally plays” the dispute to sow discord between Kyiv and Warsaw, analyst Tyshkevych said, and to accuse Ukrainian leaders of “neo-Nazi” proclivities.

Is reconciliation possible?

Today, memories of the Volyn massacre remain deeply contested. For many Ukrainians, the UIA’s image as freedom fighters has been bolstered by Russia’s 2022 invasion, somewhat pushing aside reflection on the group’s role in the World War II atrocities.

For Poland, commemoration of the massacre has become a marker of national trauma and, at times, a point of leverage in political disputes with Ukraine.

In April, Polish experts began exhuming the remnants of the Volyn massacre victims in the western Ukrainian village of Puzhniky after Kyiv lifted a seven-year moratorium on such exhumations. Some believe this may be a first step in overcoming the tensions over the Volyn massacre.

Reconciliation, historians say, won’t come easily.

“The way to reconciliation is often painful and requires people to accept historical realities they’re uncomfortable with,” Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog, told Al Jazeera.

“Both [Poland and Ukraine] are modern European democracies that  can handle an objective investigation of past atrocities in ways that a country like Russia unfortunately can not,” he said.