These college graduates in Gaza finished training just one week before the war began.
We reached out to everyone in the class WhatsApp group to see how they were doing.
It’s difficult to reach anybody in Gaza. Blackouts are common, and internet access is sporadic. But 34 responded.
They were among Gaza’s most ambitious students.
The dentistry program at Al-Azhar University was very selective, and very demanding, and they had big plans. “We dream a lot — more than a brain can imagine,” one said.
But instead of starting new jobs, they found themselves plunged into endless days of burying the dead and fearing for the living.
The students had hired a videographer to capture their celebrations on the final day of exams, about a year before they finished their internships, in 2022. “The most wonderful day in our lives,” one said. That was before the Israeli assault in the Gaza Strip began.
We reached members of the class of 117 students through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They wrote or talked to us from tents and balconies. Some even climbed on water tanks or walked long distances to grab a phone signal.
All told us they had lost loved ones. Two of their classmates were dead. And many feared they would be next.
Most of their homes lay in ruins. Many described being hungry, and losing drastic amounts of weight.
The survivors described how their loved ones were killed. The New York Times was not able to verify every attack or the circumstances of every death.
This is not the first time war has come to Gaza. Israel and the Hamas militants who made the territory their stronghold have fought repeatedly over the years, but Gaza has never seen this degree of destruction and death. Israel says that it is doing what is needed to defeat Hamas, and that it takes great efforts to protect civilians, but even its allies have begun to characterize the bombing as indiscriminate.
The graduates spoke with anger, desperation and bewilderment about how much Israel’s bombardment, now in its seventh month, has taken from them.
“We had a lot of wars before, but this one is just different,” one said. “Usually it would affect people, but not people that you know. This war took everyone.”
Loss came early for Madeha Alshayyah. She had fled her home in Gaza City, but her grandmother, uncles and cousins stayed behind, despite the bombs.
“They all died and are still under the rubble,” Madeha said.
Now, her sister is missing. She went to the market one day and never came back, she said.
Salem Shurrab had known his best friend, Mouayad Alrayyes, since they were children. They used to meet every night at a cafe at the same table.
Mouayad’s home was bombed while he was out, and his family was killed. He wrote to Salem that he wished he had died, too, “so I don’t feel the pain.”
“Your pain is mine,” Salem replied.
Hours later, Salem said, Mouayad was killed by a rocket when he went to retrieve the bodies.
Mirna Ismail’s home was destroyed, but that did not even come up in her WhatsApp groups.
Now, they discuss “only the urgent things, only who has been killed,” she said. “If someone lost his house, it is not an urgent thing now.”
Mirna lost two friends and a cousin. “We all know someone who has been killed,” she said. “And we can’t understand why they are killing them.”
The class WhatsApp group was how most of the graduates learned that two of their classmates were dead.
On Dec. 2, Aseel Taya was at home with her family, including her father, Sofyan Taya, a prominent researcher in physics and applied mathematics, when Israeli warplanes struck, the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education said. They were all killed.
Officially dentists 👩⚕️
Messages have been translated.
“Why Aseel? What did she do to deserve that?” Mirna recalled feeling. “At that time it’s not easy to cry,” she said. “You only think that this is a lie and I will see her again.”
Aseel Taya (via Rasha H. Zendah)
In February came word of another classmate’s death.
Officially dentists 👩⚕️
Messages have been translated.
Noor Yaghi was sheltering with her family in central Gaza when Israeli airstrikes hit their home. She was “like a flower,” said Asmaa Dwaima, who described her “laughing and making fun of herself and us in the labs.” The Feb. 22 strikes killed at least 40 people, according to local media.
Noor’s remains were never found, said her cousin Asil Yaghi. “Her body seems to have become small pieces,” she said. “My heart is squeezing and my tears don’t stop.”
Noor Yaghi (left) and her twin sister, Aya (via Asil Yaghi)
For many of the students, the talk is of bodies and body parts.
Muhammad Abdel Jawad was visiting an injured cousin at the hospital when he heard that the residential tower where he lived with his family had been hit. He returned home to find his sisters with “burns all over their bodies,” he said.
His father was missing.
Two days later, Muhammad went back to the remains of his home. “I found my father’s body in front of me,” he said. “I tried everything I could to get him out.” His 16-year-old sister was also killed, he said.
Ola Salama said her uncle’s body was found with no head and no feet after his house was bombed.
“The scenes I saw were more horrific than horror movies,” she said. “But they are all real.”
“The missile cut her body into pieces,” Alaa Jihad Hussain said of her 22-year-old cousin, who was killed alongside her husband and daughter. With communications often down, some of the graduates feared their loved ones might be dead without their knowing.
Only by chance did some learn about a relative’s death. When Mahmoud Naser ran into an acquaintance at a shelter in Rafah, he learned his uncle had been shot, apparently by an Israeli sniper.
“I am afraid of dying these days, and that my friends won’t find my name among the names of martyrs because there are too many,” said Asmaa Dwaima, who, already, can count three friends and four cousins among the dead.
“I’m also afraid they won’t find an internet connection to log in and publish a silly story to commemorate me.”
Mohammed Al-Baradei (right) grew up with Ahmad Al-Hourani, attending university and spending afternoons in the gym together.
But when the house next door was bombed, a wall fell on Ahmad as he slept, Mohammed said.
“All my life was with him,” he said. “All of it ended in a moment.”
Alaa AlAbadla (right) last saw his friend Basel Farwana in the seaside area where they were sheltering. Basel was killed when he went home to get a nylon sheet and some blankets for his family’s tent, Alaa said.
But Alaa has little time to mourn. He is busy looking for clean water to survive. “We don’t have time to be sad,” he said. When Israeli forces invaded Gaza from the north, most of the graduates fled south. Mazen Alwahidi was one of the few exceptions.
Food shortages are most severe in the north, and Mazen said he had lost 46 pounds and has resorted to eating donkey feed. “It was like garbage,” he said. “But we have no other choices.”
He said his aunt, a cancer patient, died without access to treatment. They buried her on a street, near a destroyed graveyard.
Noor Shehada also remains in the north. Her family was relying on wild herbs to survive, she said.
“We are starving. We are living in the 18th century.”
Before the war, her uncle traveled to Israel for chemotherapy. Without access to treatment, he died, she said.
Najat Shurrab said her cousin’s 2-year-old twins, Muhammad and Hamada, had been killed. “They were defenseless civilians,” she said.
Ms. Shurrab has a 7-month-old daughter, Masa, and they have been living in a tent in Rafah.
Every day is a struggle to find diapers and food for her baby, she said, and she fears what the future holds for the child.
Areej al-Astal was pregnant when she evacuated first to a tent in Rafah and then to an overcrowded house with her husband’s family. She slept on the floor for two months.
With food scarce, she said, she gained no weight during her whole pregnancy. Eventually, she escaped to Egypt and gave birth to a son. “The word ‘dreams’ has ended,” she said. “It no longer exists in our imagination at all.”
More than 100 members of Areej’s extended family have been killed in the Israeli assault, according to a Gazan health ministry spokesman. “I can’t count them,” Areej said.
After being displaced five times, Rabeha Nabeel and her family decided to return home, though it was missing walls.
“Even if it’s destroyed, it’s our house,” she said.
Rabeha said 27 members of her extended family were killed in the first week of the war. “I lost five of my close friends, my house, my job, my university, my happy memories and my city,” said Mohammed Zebdah.
Mohammed was supposed to pick up his certificate on Oct. 8, but then the bombs started falling.
Many of the graduates told The Times they had just gotten jobs at clinics that are now in ruins. One said he had recently begun working as a volunteer in Khan Younis, treating as many as 60 refugees a day. A few others managed to leave the country.
Months after the joyous celebrations of the graduates, the buildings of Al-Azhar University where they had their dentistry classes bear the scars of war.
“On Oct. 7, all hopes and dreams went with the wind,” Mohammed said.
new video loaded: Pakistan Launches Airstrikes on Afghanistan
By Monika Cvorak
February 27, 2026
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U.S.-Iran nuclear talks intensify in Switzerland as President Trump’s deadline approaches. Vice President JD Vance states there’s ‘no chance’ of endless war in the Middle East.
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The State Department is allowing non-essential personnel working at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to leave Israel ahead of possible strikes on Iran. The embassy announced the decision early Friday morning and said that “in response to security incidents and without advance notice” it could place further restrictions on where U.S. government employees can travel within Israel.
The decision came after meetings and phone calls through the night Thursday into Friday, according to The New York Times, which reviewed a copy of an email that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sent to embassy workers.
The Times reported that the ambassador said in his email that the move was a result of “an abundance of caution” and that those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY.” He reportedly urged them to look for flights out of Ben Gurion Airport to any destination, cautioning that the embassy’s move “will likely result in high demand for airline seats today.”
The U.S. has authorized non-essential embassy personnel to leave Israel amid escalating tensions with Iran. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Iranian Leader Press Office/Anadolu via Getty Images)
In the email, Huckabee also said that there was “no need to panic,” but he underscored that those looking to leave should “make plans to depart sooner rather than later,” the Times reported.
“Focus on getting a seat to anyplace from which you can then continue travel to D.C., but the first priority will be getting expeditiously out of country,” Huckabee said in the email, according to the Times.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, arrives to testify during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Mar. 25, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
TRUMP MEETS NETANYAHU, SAYS HE WANTS IRAN DEAL BUT REMINDS TEHRAN OF ‘MIDNIGHT HAMMER’ OPERATION
The embassy reiterated the State Department’s advisory for U.S. citizens to reconsider traveling to Israel and the West Bank “due to terrorism and civil unrest.” Additionally, the department advised that U.S. citizens not travel to Gaza because of terrorism and armed conflict, as well as northern Israel, particularly within 2.5 miles of the Lebanese and Syrian borders because of “continued military presence and activity.”
It also recommended that U.S. citizens not travel within 1.5 miles of the Egyptian border, with the exception of the Taba crossing, which remains open.
“Terrorist groups, lone-actor terrorists and other violent extremists continue plotting possible attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Terrorists and violent extremists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, and local government facilities,” the embassy said in its warning. “The security environment is complex and can change quickly, and violence can occur in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza without warning.”
Israeli and U.S. flags are placed on the road leading to the U.S. consulate in the Jewish neighborhood of Arnona, on the East-West Jerusalem line in Jerusalem, May 9, 2018. (Corinna Kern/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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While the embassy did not specifically mention Iran in its warning, it referenced “increased regional tensions” that could “cause airlines to cancel and/or curtail flights into and out of Israel.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department and the White House for comment on this matter.
Pakistan has accused Afghanistan’s Taliban of serving as a “proxy” for India, amid escalating hostilities between Islamabad and Kabul.
Just hours after Pakistan bombed locations in Kabul early on Friday, Pakistan’s Minister of Defence Khawaja Asif wrote on X that after NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan in July 2021, “it was expected that peace would prevail in Afghanistan and that the Taliban would focus on the interests of the Afghan people and regional stability”.
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“However, the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a colony of India,” he wrote and accused the Taliban of “exporting terrorism”.
“Pakistan made every effort, both directly and through friendly countries, to keep the situation stable. It carried out extensive diplomacy. However, the Taliban became a proxy of India,” he alleged as he declared an “open war” with Afghanistan.
This is not the first time that Asif has brought India into tensions with Afghanistan.
Last October, he alleged: “India wants to engage in a low-intensity war with Pakistan. To achieve this, they are using Kabul.”
So far, Asif has presented no evidence to back his claims and the Taliban has rejected accusations that it is being influenced by India.
But India has condemned the Pakistani military’s recent actions in Afghanistan, adding to Islamabad’s growing discernment that its nuclear rival and the Taliban are edging closer.
Earlier this week, after the Pakistani military carried out air raids inside Afghanistan on Sunday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement that New Delhi “strongly condemns Pakistan’s airstrikes on Afghan territory that have resulted in civilian casualties, including women and children, during the holy month of Ramadan”.
After Friday morning’s flare-up between Pakistan and Afghanistan, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal again said New Delhi “strongly” condemned Pakistan’s air strikes and also noted that they took place on a Friday during the holy month of Ramadan.
“It is another attempt by Pakistan to externalise its internal failures,” Jaiswal said in a statement on X.
Has India’s influence in Afghanistan grown under the Taliban and what is India’s endgame with Afghanistan?
Here’s what we know:
When the Taliban first rose to power in Afghanistan in 1996, India adopted a hostile policy towards the group and did not recognise its assumption of power. India also shunned all diplomatic relations with the Taliban.
At the time, New Delhi viewed the Taliban as a proxy for Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Pakistan, together with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were the only three countries to have also recognised the Taliban administration at that point.
Then, in 2001, India supported the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which toppled the Taliban administration. India then reopened its embassy in Kabul and embraced the new government led by Hamid Karzai. The Taliban, in response, attacked Indian embassies and consulates in Afghanistan. In 2008, at least 58 people were killed when the Taliban bombed India’s embassy in Kabul.
In 2021, after the Taliban returned to power, India closed its embassy in Afghanistan once again and also did not officially recognise the Taliban as the government of the country.
But a year later, as relations between Pakistan and the Taliban deteriorated over armed groups which Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of harbouring, India began engaging with the Taliban.
In 2022, India sent a team of “technical experts” to run its mission in Kabul and officially reopened its embassy in the Afghan capital last October. New Delhi also allowed the Taliban to operate Afghanistan consulates in the Indian cities of Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Over the past two years, officials from New Delhi and Afghanistan have also held meetings abroad, in Kabul and in New Delhi.
In January last year, the Taliban administration’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi met India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.
Then, in October 2025, he visited New Delhi and met Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
After this meeting, Muttaqi told journalists that Kabul “has always sought good relations with India” and, in a joint statement, Afghanistan and India pledged to have “close communication and continue regular engagement”.
Besides beefing up diplomatic ties, India has also offered humanitarian support to Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule.
After a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck northern Afghanistan in November last year, India shipped food, medicine and vaccines, and Jaishankar was also among the first foreign ministers to call Muttaqi and offer his support. Since last December, India has also approved and implemented several healthcare infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, according to a December 2025 report by the country’s press information bureau.
Praveen Donthi, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that the costs of avoiding engagement with the Taliban in the past have compelled the Indian government to adopt strategic pragmatism towards the Afghan leadership this time.
“New Delhi does not want to disregard this relationship on ideological grounds or create strategic space for India’s main strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, in its neighbourhood,” he said.
Raghav Sharma, professor and director at the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the OP Jindal Global University in India, added that the current engagement also stems from New Delhi’s pragmatic realisation that the Taliban is now in charge in Afghanistan and that there is no meaningful opposition.
“States engage in order to protect and further their interests. While there is little by way of ideological convergence, there are areas of strategic convergence, which is what has pushed India to engage with the Taliban, some of their unpalatable policies notwithstanding,” he said.
No. India’s growing influence and engagement with Afghanistan began well before the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.
Between December 2001 and September 2014, during the US presence in Afghanistan, New Delhi was a strong supporter of the Karzai government, and then of his successor, Ashraf Ghani’s government, which was in power from September 2014 until August 2021, when the US withdrew from the country.
In October 2011, under Karzai, India and Afghanistan renewed ties by signing an agreement to form a strategic partnership. New Delhi also pledged to support Afghanistan in the face of foreign troops in the nation as a part of this agreement.
Under both Karzai and his successor, Ghani, India invested more than $3bn in humanitarian aid and reconstruction work in Afghanistan. This included reconstruction projects like schools and hospitals, and also a new National Assembly building in Kabul, which was inaugurated in December 2015 when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Afghanistan for the first time.
India’s Border Road Organisation (BRO) also assisted Afghanistan in the development of infrastructure projects like the 218km Zaranj-Delaram highway in 2009 under Karzai’s government.
Under Ghani, New Delhi undertook building the Salma Dam project to help with irrigating Afghanistan. In June 2016, when Modi visited Afghanistan once again, he inaugurated this $290m dam project. In May 2016, Iran, India and Afghanistan also signed a trilateral trade and transit agreement on the Chabahar port.
During this period – 2001-2021 – Pakistan’s unease with New Delhi and Kabul’s new partnership grew.
In October 2011, after signing a strategic agreement with India, Karzai had assured Islamabad that while “India is a great friend, Pakistan is a twin brother”.
But Karzai was critical of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. In his last speech as president of Afghanistan in Kabul in September 2014, he stated that he believed most of the Taliban leadership lived in Pakistan.
In a 2011 report by a Washington, DC-based think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Amer Latif, former director for South Asian affairs in the US Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, noted that Karzai was walking a “fine line between criticising Pakistan’s activities while also referring to Pakistan as Afghanistan’s ‘twin brother’.”
“It is in this context that Karzai appears to be looking to solidify long-term partnerships with countries that will aid his stabilisation efforts,” he said, referring to Karzai’s visit to India and his efforts to improve relations with the subcontinent.
When Ghani rose to power in September 2014, he tried to reset ties with Pakistan and also visited the country in November that year. But his efforts did not result in improved ties due to border disputes with Pakistan continuing until his administration was overthrown by the Taliban in August 2021.
Initially, when the Taliban returned to power in 2021 following the withdrawal of the US, political analysts largely expected Pakistan to lead the way in recognising the Taliban administration as the official government of Afghanistan, improving bilateral relations which had turned icy under Karzai and Ghani.
But relations turned hostile, with Pakistan repeatedly accusing the Taliban of allowing anti-Pakistan armed groups like the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) to operate from Afghan soil. The Taliban denies this.
Then, the deportation of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees by Pakistan in recent years further strained ties between the two neighbours.
India has ultimately taken a pragmatic approach to the Taliban in order to maintain the good relations it built with Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and has somewhat leveraged poor relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan to cement these.
“With Pakistan’s increasingly strained relations with Afghanistan, the logic of ‘enemy’s enemy’ is acting as a glue between Kabul and New Delhi,” International Crisis Group’s Donthi said.
He added that despite the fact that India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government opposes Islamist organisations, “the strategic necessity to counter Pakistan has led it to engage with the Taliban proactively”.
India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed rivals which engaged in a four-day conflict in May 2025 after armed rebels killed Indian tourists in Pahalgam, a popular tourist spot in Indian-administered Kashmir, last April. New Delhi accused Pakistan of supporting rebel fighters, a charge Pakistan strongly denied.
For its part, Afghanistan took the opportunity to strongly condemn the Pahalgam attack and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs expressed “deep appreciation” to the Taliban for its “strong condemnation of the terrorist attack in Pahalgam … as well as for the sincere condolences”.
India has also condemned Pakistani military action in Afghanistan and has provided aid to thousands of Afghan refugees displaced from Pakistan.
Sharma, the OP Jindal Global University professor, said India wants to ensure that Pakistan and China, whose influence has grown in South Asia in recent years, “do not have a free run”, as “there is a divergence of interest on Afghanistan” with both Pakistan and its ally, China.
“There are security interests New Delhi is keen to further and protect for which engagement [with the Taliban] is the only option,” he added.
Anil Trigunayat, a former Indian diplomat, noted that while Afghanistan and Pakistan relations have their own dynamic, currently the Taliban leadership, even if not a monolith, refuses to play to the tunes of the Pakistan military and its intelligence agency.
“Hence they [Pakistan] accuse Indian complicity in Taliban actions in Pakistan,” he said.
But the Taliban, he said, “understands and appreciates India’s intent, policies and [humanitarian] contributions”, making its leaders keen to continue collaboration with New Delhi.
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