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October 7, 2023: Israel begins bombarding Gaza in retaliation to Hamas attacks
Israel resumes massive attacks on March 18, killing over 400 in a day — two months after ceasefire ending 15 months of relentless attacks began
Future governance of Gaza remains unclear as Trump suggests US takeover but Arab countries propose alternative plan, which UK, others back
Hamas and Israel exchange 25 hostages, bodies and 1,700 detainees in seven swaps
Over 57,000 Palestinians, 400 Israeli soldiers dead; nearly all of Gaza displaced
Multi-billion dollar challenges ahead to reconstruct decimated enclave
Al Jazeera Arabic reports that at least 20 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza since the early hours of this morning.
Israeli forces have continued to bombard Gaza overnight, killing at least 11 Palestinians in the early hours of the morning, Al Jazeera reports.
Four of the victims, including two children, were killed in an Israeli attack on tents in al-Mawasi camp in southern Gaza.
The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) has said that “10 children per day lose one or both of their legs,” in Gaza.
In total, “134,105 people including over 40,500 children have new war-related injuries,” OHCHR said in a post on X.
This includes more than 35,000 people “believed to have significant hearing damage due to explosions”.
The UN’s unflinching expert on Palestinian affairs Francesca Albanese said on Tuesday that Washington’s sanctions following her criticism of the White House’s stance on Gaza are a “violation” of her immunity, AFP reports.
The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories made the comments while visiting Bogota, nearly a week after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions, calling her work “biased and malicious.”
“It’s a very serious measure. It’s unprecedented. And I take it very seriously,” Albanese told an audience in the Colombian capital.
US President Donald Trump will meet with Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani to discuss negotiations over the Gaza ceasefire deal, Axios reporter Barak Ravid posted on X, Reuters reports.
The two are also expected to discuss efforts to resume talks between the US and Iran to reach a new nuclear agreement, Ravid said.
An Israeli scheme to move hundreds of thousands of already uprooted Palestinians to a so-called “humanitarian city” in Gaza has led politicians to spar with the defence establishment, but officials say a practical plan has yet to be crafted, Reuters reports.
Even without a clear blueprint, opposition critics have denounced the proposal, with some likening the suggested site to a “concentration camp”, which could lead to ethnic cleansing in the coastal enclave devastated by 21 months of conflict.
Read more here.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has said that Israel needs to take more concrete steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza and fully implement the agreement it made with the EU last week, Reuters reports.
“Israel needs to take more concrete steps to improve the humanitarian situation on the ground. The European Union will keep a close watch,” Kallas told reporters after meeting EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
A video has come to light showing Israeli soldiers shooting at hungry Palestinians in Gaza queuing up for food, Al Jazeera reports.
Bullets can be seen hitting close to where people are lying down on the ground.
At least 875 Palestinians have been confirmed killed while attempting to secure food from US-Israel-backed aid distribution sites since May, Al Jazeera reports, citing a United Nations statement.
“As of 13 July, we have recorded 875 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food; 674 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites,” said UN human rights office spokesperson Thameen al-Kheetan.
The GHF is the US- and Israel-backed group that has bypassed UN-led humanitarian operations.
Al-Kheetan said the latest deadly incident happened yesterday, with reports indicating the Israeli army “shelled and fired towards Palestinians seeking food” at the GHF site in al-Shakoush area, northwestern Rafah.
“Our teams on the ground … have spoken to survivors of these killings, these starving children included, who were shot at while on their way to pick up very little food,” said UNRWA’s director of communications Juliette Touma.
European Union aid chief Hadja Lahbib says Israel has not yet fully implemented an agreement between the bloc and Israel, but that there have been “some positive developments”, Al Jazeera reports.
“We have [seen] some positive developments. It’s true that we have trucks that are able to enter, but we don’t know exactly how many. And what is clear is that the agreement is not fully implemented,” she told reporters ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
Last week, the EU reached an agreement with Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including increasing aid trucks and opening crossing points and certain aid routes.
Israeli attacks since dawn have killed at least 30 people, including 25 in Gaza City, Al Jazeera reports, citing medical sources.
The bodies of four people were brought to the al-Ahli Hospital after an Israeli air strike on a house in the Zeitoun neighbourhood.
The death toll continues to rise a day after Israeli attacks killed at least 78 Palestinians across Gaza.
At least 12 people were killed and eight wounded by an Israeli air strike on eastern Lebanon that hit a camp for displaced Syrians in the northern Bekaa Valley, Lebanon’s National News Agency reports.
Seven Syrians were among those killed in the attack that took place in the Wadi Fara area.
The Israeli army earlier claimed it conducted a series of attacks on Hezbollah targets.
Hospital sources in Gaza have told Al Jazeera that at least 23 people have been killed by Israeli attacks across the besieged enclave since dawn.
At least three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli attack on the vicinity of Shaaban al-Rayyes School in Tuffah neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, Al Jazeera reports, citing a source at the al-Ahli Hospital.
Another 14 people are trapped under the rubble of a destroyed house in the same area.
Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Omer Bartov has said that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” in an opinion-editorial for the New York Times.
The op-ed titled ‘I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,’ was published in the American daily today.
“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people … I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one,” Bartov said in his article.
Bartov had previously explained why he believed Israel was committing genocide in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has assailed Israel’s “reckless disregard” for humanity through its bombardment of Gaza at the ministerial meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in China.
“Israel has shown a reckless disregard for international norms and humanity through its relentless and disproportionate use of force in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, causing the worst humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” Dar said.
“We call for an immediate halt to Israel’s atrocities. The only viable remedy for the Palestinian dispute is the realisation of the two-state solution, which includes the establishment of Palestine as a viable, secure and contiguous state on the basis of pre-1967 borders with Al Quds as its capital,” he added.
The deputy premier also slammed Israel’s attacks on Iran, which sparked the recent war between the two countries.
“We are increasingly concerned at the […] of using aggression as a tool of policy. We have strongly condemned the unjustified and illegitimate aggression by Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the US strikes on its nuclear facilities,” Dar told the SCO meeting.
“Such illegal actions directed against SCO member states are unacceptable.”
EU foreign ministers have discussed options for action against Israel over the war in Gaza — but looked unlikely to agree on any, AFP reports.
The bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has put forward 10 potential steps after Israel was found to have breached a cooperation deal between the two sides on human rights grounds.
The measures range from suspending the entire accord or curbing trade ties to sanctioning Israeli ministers, imposing an arms embargo and halting visa-free travel.
Despite growing anger over the devastation in Gaza, EU states remain divided over how to tackle Israel, and diplomats say there appears to be no critical mass for any move.
“I can’t predict how the discussion will go,” Kallas said, ahead of the foreign ministers’ talks in Brussels.
She said the main focus would likely be on how the EU could leverage improvements to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has called for an arms embargo on Israel after an American citizen was killed by Israeli settlers.
“An American was beaten to death by Israeli settlers backed by the military. Instead of pursuing justice for Sayfollah, our government continues to send billions to prop up the apartheid system that killed him and kills Palestinians like him every day,” Tlaib said in a post on X.
She called for an immediate arms embargo on Tel-Aviv.
Palestinian sources say Israeli forces have continued their raids on the Qalandia camp, north of Jerusalem, and attacked and destroyed residents’ property, Al Jazeera reports.
At least 32 Palestinians have been detained across the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces today.
The UN rights office has said it recorded at least 875 killings within the past six weeks at aid points in Gaza run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and convoys run by other relief groups, including the United Nations, Reuters reports.
The majority of those killed were in the vicinity of GHF sites, while the remaining 201 were killed on the routes of other aid convoys.
“The data we have is based on our own information gathering through various reliable sources, including medical human rights and humanitarian organisations,” Thameen Al Kheetan, a spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.
The UN has called the GHF aid model “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality standards.
Ceasefire talks and negotiations are currently underway, a spokesperson for the Qatar Foreign Ministry said, Al Jazeera reports.
The spokesperson added that Israeli and Hamas delegations were both in Doha. However, no more details were given or whether an agreement was imminent.
He also condemned Israel’s latest strikes on Suwayda in Syria. “The international community must take steps towards Israeli provocative actions in addition to what’s happening in Gaza.”
One in 10 children screened in clinics run by the United Nations refugee agency in Gaza (UNRWA) since 2024 has been malnourished, the agency says, according to Reuters.
“Our health teams are confirming that malnutrition rates are increasing in Gaza, especially since the siege was tightened more than four months ago on the second of March,” UNRWA’s Director of Communications Juliette Touma told reporters in Geneva via a video link from Amman, Jordan.
“One nurse that we spoke to told us that in the past, he only saw these cases of malnutrition in textbooks and documentaries,” Touma said.
“Medicine, nutrition supplies, hygiene material, fuel are all rapidly running out,” Touma said.
Since January 2024, UNRWA said it had screened more than 240,000 boys and girls under the age of five in its clinics, adding that before the conflict, acute malnutrition was rarely seen in the Gaza Strip.
The administrative court of Berlin has ruled that an order imposed on Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah preventing him from speaking in Germany was unlawful, a court spokesperson has told Al Jazeera.
The court ruled that it was not to be expected that Abu Sittah, a surgeon who has worked in Gaza, would commit a criminal offence or pose a threat to the democratic order in Germany by speaking at the Palestine Congress, where he had been invited to speak in April 2024.
The judges said they could not find any statements by Abu Sittah since October 7, 2023 that were of a criminal nature, or indications of support for terrorist organisations.
The court added that Abu Sittah’s status as a historical eyewitness, whose testimony has been heard by the International Criminal Court, should also have been taken into account by the Berlin authorities, as well as his right to freedom of expression.
The state of Berlin had argued that Abu Sittah was a supporter of Hamas, inter alia because he participated in a press conference organised by the Palestinian Health Ministry outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
