The Gaza Record, October 16: Fire in the Sky, No Water In The Taps, Polio Returns To Gaza
Every day during Israel's Genocide, new atrocities were forced on the people of Gaza
Written by Dominick Skinner | October 16 2025
We’ve seen so many atrocities in Gaza committed by Israel that they fade from memory. The Gaza Record is our attempt to bring these events under a fresh light as we look back each day on the crimes committed on that date. October 16 is remembered for its fire, a day when the sky burned red over Gaza and the word “precision” became meaningless.
On October 16, 2023, Israel issued one of the many mass evacuation orders that have been seen in Gaza. Completely illegal under international law, this order was an attempt to forcibly displace one million citizens from the North of Gaza. Many of those citizens are still under the rubble in the North, and much of the territory remains under Israeli control now in 2025.
Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza for the ninth straight day. Witnesses described a fireball rising above the horizon as another dense residential block vanished under airstrikes. The Health Ministry’s toll had already passed 2,750 dead and nearly 10,000 injured, while the UN reported that more than a million people had been displaced, forced south along broken roads under constant bombardment. Gaza’s hospitals, cut off from fuel and power, were treating the wounded on floors and in corridors. Journalists on the ground called it apocalyptic, this was only day 9.
At this point, Israel had already committed the illegal act of turning off the water supply to Gaza, and had halted aid. There is a legal obligation to supply Gaza with this water and aid, and that was true on October 16th of 2023 too. A day earlier, Israel promised to reopen southern water lines, however, that promise never reached most of the population. While officials spoke of humanitarian steps, the siege continued in full and the taps stayed dry. Troops had not yet entered Gaza, the death and destruction up to this point rained down from the sky.
Already, at this 9 day point, morgues were so full that ice-cream trucks had to be repurposed to hold the dead, many of those bodies never to be found again.
By October 16, 2024, the genocidal pattern had become routine. Strikes again tore through Gaza, killing at least sixty-five Palestinians in a single day, according to humanitarian updates. The UN’s field offices described the north as “beyond collapse.” Jabalia and Beit Lahia were reduced to rubble, and entire families were buried in their homes, Gaza’s hospitals were barely standing, its ambulances running without fuel. Medical staff reported using cell phone flashlights to operate.
Famine in Gaza, orchestrated as a weapon of war by Israel, had taken such a grip on the citizens there that even the USA had been warning Israel that they must stop using food as a weapon of war. The previous US administration being every so slightly less tolerant of Genocide than the US of today, although still highly complicit.
One strike that day hit Rafah, described by the Israeli military as a drone strike on a “militant cell,” while residents said it struck a cluster of tents where displaced people were staying.
Elsewhere, a UNRWA school was forced to evacuate, despite being used to shelter innocent people, most of whom were children. The only apartheid state in the Middle East went on to bomb the school, but the horrors for the children of Gaza would only increase, as an awful disease became another tool in the Genocide toolkit.
By October 16th of 2024, Polio had resurged in the Gaza Strip. The disease returned to Gaza as a direct result of the campaign of Genocide inflicted on the Strip by Israel. This day, we saw the regime allow some polio vaccinations to enter the destroyed Gaza, however, mass inoculation was still months away at this point.
October 16, 2023 was a warning of the horrors to come, with the ghetto uprising of the week before still being discussed and studied by much of the world. October 16, 2024 was a continuation of a Genocide that had long become the norm in Gaza, and the world had shifted from talking about the events of October 7, to asking when Israel would end their atrocities.
Each day in Israel’s Genocide against the Palestinians brings its own headlines, horrors and attempted justifications. But the rhythm of Genocide never changes. Promise relief. Drop bombs. Blame the victims.
The world may want to forget, but Gaza cannot forget, and for the rest of us, the Gaza Record remembers.