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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 50,000 Palestinians, 400 Israeli soldiers dead; nearly all of Gaza displaced
Multi-billion dollar challenges ahead to reconstruct decimated enclave
Jonathan Whittall, an official with the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA), said in a video message recorded yesterday that Israel’s continuous blockade of Gaza has been disastrous for all areas of life in the Strip, Al Jazeera reports.
“In Gaza today, people are being deprived of the basic necessities of life,” he said from Rafah, in southern Gaza.
A spokesperson for Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, says the fate of the Israeli-American captive, Edan Alexander, is unknown after they found the body of the guard looking after the captive, Al Jazeera reports.
“We are trying to protect all prisoners and preserve their lives despite the brutality of the aggression. The lives of prisoners are in danger due to the criminal bombing operations carried out by the enemy army,” Abu Obeida said.
He added that Israeli forces “lie” that Hamas are treating the captives inhumanely and “fabricate false testimonies” from former captives to cover up Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza that hinder the safety of Israelis being held in the enclave.
Hamas has said that the fate of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander remains unknown since the body of a guard assigned to him had been recovered from the site of a recent Israeli strike, AFP reports.
“We managed to retrieve the body of a martyr who was tasked with securing the prisoner Edan Alexander, but the fate of the prisoner and the rest of the captors remains unknown,” Hamas’s armed wing said in a statement, days after announcing it had “lost contact” with the unit holding Alexander following an Israeli air strike on their location in the Gaza Strip.
With food scarce in the besieged Gaza Strip, some desperate families have turned to eating sea turtles as a rare source of protein, AFP reports.
Once the shell has been removed, the meat is cut up, boiled and cooked in a mix of onion, pepper, tomato and spices.
“The children were afraid of the turtle, and we told them it tasted as delicious as veal,” said Majida Qanan, keeping an eye on the chunks of red meat simmering in a pot over a wood fire. “Some of them ate it, but others refused.”
For lack of a better alternative, this is the third time 61-year-old Qanan has prepared a turtle-based meal for her family who were displaced and now live in a tent in Khan Younis, southern Gaza largest city.
Read more here.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates has warned of plans by Israeli settler organisations circulating on Hebrew-language platforms that discuss attacking and demolishing Al-Aqsa Mosque and constructing a temple in its place, Al Jazeera reports.
In a statement published on X, the ministry said it considers the plans a “systematic incitement to escalate the targeting of Christian and Islamic holy sites in occupied Jerusalem”.
“The Ministry calls on the international community and its relevant UN institutions to deal with this incitement with utmost seriousness, and to take the measures required by international law,” it said.
Israeli settlers regularly storm Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third-holiest site, in occupied East Jerusalem and perform religious rituals under the protection of Israeli forces.
In addition to the 92 deaths caused by Israeli attacks in the last 48 hours, 219 wounded people also arrived at hospitals in the Gaza strip, * Al Jazeera* reports, citing the Ministry of Health.
“The death toll from the Israeli aggression has risen to 51,157 martyrs and 116,724 injuries since October 7, 2023,” the ministry said in its statement, adding that since Israel resumed hostilities on March 18, 1,783 have been killed.
Israeli forces have continued deadly strikes across the Gaza Strip, according to Al Jazeera:
A woman and her child were killed and others injured in an Israeli drone attack on the Maen area in Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera reports.
Several people have been also injured in an Israeli drone attack near al-Khalidi Mosque, northwest of Gaza City.
A Hazem Musleh, paediatrician at the Kuwaiti Hospital in southern Gaza’s Rafah, explained how more children are losing their lives or at risk due to the expanding effect of Israeli attacks, Al Jazeera reports citing Palestinian media.
The hospital, along with dozens of others, has suffered multiple Israeli air raids since the start of the conflict.
The 12-year-old Ahmed Abu al-Rous was born paralysed. He was killed in an Israeli attack on a tent camp for forcibly displaced people that killed 10 others, including his mother, sister and four more children, Al Jazeera reports.
Ahmed’s wheelchair was burned to ash in the Israeli attack.
“He used to smile at everyone,” a family friend said of Ahmed.
Watch the full report here.
At least four were killed and several others injured as Israeli attacks across various areas of the Gaza Strip continued, according to Al Jazeera reports.
In the most recent incident, an attack on the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza killed a young man.
Separately, Israeli fighter jets bombed a group of Palestinians in the al-Musaddar area, north of the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, killing at least one person and injuring others.
Earlier today, Al Jazeera quoted Gaza’s Civil Defence as saying that two people were killed and several were wounded in an attack earlier on the Abu Shamala family home in Khan Younis.
An attack on the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza has killed a young man, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.
It said the Palestinian Information Centre reported that a young man, identified as Akram al-Hawajri, was killed by the drone near the al-Fazb market, located to the north of the entrance to Bureij camp.
Israeli artillery is reported to be shelling the nearby Maghazi refugee camp, located south of Bureij camp in central Gaza.
Marking World Heritage Day, human rights group Al-Haq has said Israel has targeted several Palestinian sites — including those on Unesco’s World Heritage List — in its ongoing attempt to suppress Palestinian culture and heritage, Al Jazeera reports.
The al-Makhrour region, located in the occupied West Bank’s northern Bethlehem governorate and inscribed on the UN’s World Heritage List in 2014, faces increased threats of land grabbing by Israeli settlers, Al-Haq said.
Palestinians have long “farmed the landmark ancient terraced slopes of the Al-Makhrour and Battir area with vegetables, fruit trees, olives and vines, an area marked out for its unique cultural and agricultural landscape, irrigation system, and archaeological remains”, the rights group said in a statement.
“With the construction and expansion of illegal settlements and related infrastructure in Al-Makhrour, Israel’s settlement enterprise has been disrupting the area’s biodiversity and incredible potential as one of the few remaining farming areas for Palestinians, sustaining Palestinian life,” Al-Haq was quoted as saying.
The death toll from US strikes on a Yemeni fuel port has risen to at least 80, Houthi rebels say, in the deadliest attack of Washington’s 15-month campaign against the group, AFP reports.
Houthi media reported fresh strikes in and around the capital Sanaa last night.
Houthi health ministry spokesman Anees Alasbahi said rescuers were still searching for bodies at the fuel terminal on the Red Sea, suggesting the number of dead could rise.
The rebels’ Al-Masirah TV, citing local officials, said the toll from the strike had “risen to 80 dead and 150 wounded”.
Hezbollah “will not let anyone disarm” it, the Lebanese group’s leader Naim Qassem said, as Washington presses Beirut to compel the movement to hand over its weapons, AFP reports.
“We will not let anyone disarm Hezbollah or disarm the resistance” against Israel, Qassem said in remarks on a Hezbollah-affiliated TV channel.
“We must cut this idea of disarmament from the dictionary.”
Qassem said his group was ready for dialogue on a “defence strategy”, “but not under the pressure of occupation” by Israel.
“Israel must withdraw (from south Lebanon) and cease its aggression, and the Lebanese state must begin the process of reconstruction,” he added.
An Israeli military helicopter has attacked a tent housing displaced Palestinians in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing at least five people, according to an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent on the ground.
Medical sources in Gaza have told Al Jazeera that at least 64 people have now been killed in Israeli raids across the Strip over the past day.
The Israeli forces have bombed a home in the Khan Younis area in southern Gaza, killing at least two people, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.
A federal judge has ordered US President Donald Trump’s administration to transfer Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk being held in Louisiana to Vermont while he weighs her claims that US immigration authorities unlawfully arrested her based on her pro-Palestinian advocacy, Reuters reports.
The decision by US District Judge William Sessions in Burlington marked an early victory for Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, in her continuing bid to be released from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s custody and return to her studies following her March 25 arrest in Massachusetts.
The case has become a flashpoint in the administration’s rapid moves to revoke the visas and legal status of hundreds of international students, including pro-Palestinian activists, as part of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration.
The night before Ozturk was transferred to Louisiana, a lawyer for her sued in Massachusetts to challenge her arrest. A judge quickly ordered authorities not to remove Ozturk from Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice.
Read more here.
Al Jazeera has reported that at least 50 people have now been killed by Israeli attacks since dawn.
Citing medical sources, the news agency said that more than half of the casualties were in Gaza City and northern Gaza, but deadly attacks have occurred throughout the Palestinian enclave, including in Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.
Summer Aljamal, a Palestinian woman who works with Medical Aid for Palestinians, and her family have spent nearly a year displaced from their home in Rafah, Al Jazeera reports.
“Throughout that time, my family and I have had to move multiple times,” she said in a video shared by the organisation.
“We were never able to settle, never able to feel truly safe.”
She described returning to Rafah during the short-lived ceasefire in Gaza, which ended on March 18, and seeing that her home was “seriously damaged but somehow still standing”.
“Today, we live with the unbearable uncertainty of not knowing what’s next. We do not know if we will ever be able to go back, or if the place we once called home will still be there.”
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports that the prolonged and systematic Israeli policy of siege and blockade of the entire Gaza Strip has led to severe repercussions at the humanitarian level.
“Gaza’s hospitals are operating beyond capacity. In light of chronic shortages of medical supplies, the situation is now unprecedented,” he adds. “The situation is very difficult for every single person here in Gaza – you have 200,000 Palestinians suffering from chronic diseases in very desperate need of essential medicines.”
Azzoum reports that Palestinians are forced to cut down on the number of daily meals and are eating only canned goods and vegetables that they can afford. Prices of those have skyrocketed.
“We can see the very psychological toll of the city on the faces of everyone here, people are walking very exhausted, traumatised,” Azzoum adds. “They are thinking about the dark future that awaits them.
“People are not just dying here from bombardment, but they have started to die from malnutrition, and many of them feel psychologically broken due to their inability to provide meals for their children.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei has condemned the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza in what he described as Israel’s “relentless brutal bombardment” and “cruel starvation”.
“These are not only morally outrageous; they are the most heinous acts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide under international law,” Baghaei said in a post on X.
“The Israeli regime, its enablers & apologists, must be held accountable.”
In a post on X, the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) stated that it estimates “nearly 420,000 people have been displaced yet again since the breakdown of the ceasefire,” Al Jazeera reports.
Al Jazeera reports that 45 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since dawn.
Six Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air raid that hit a makeshift barber shop in central Khan Younis, while at least 10 people were killed after Israel bombed a home in Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
Meanwhile, a Palestinian woman was killed in Israeli bombardment of an area northeast of Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, while two Palestinians were killed in an attack on a tent housing displaced people in the at-Twam area in the north.
Three Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air attack on a house on as-Sikka Street in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City.
Hamas has urged the international community to exert immediate pressure to end Israel’s complete blockade of the Gaza Strip that has been in place since March 2, AFP reports.
“The international community is required to intervene immediately and exert the necessary pressure to end the unjust blockade imposed on our people in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya said in a statement.
