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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
An investigation by Israel’s public broadcaster KAN has revealed that the Israeli military fabricated the discovery of a tunnel in the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border, claiming the structure was, in fact, a shallow canal, Anadolu Agency reports.
Last August, the army published photos of an alleged tunnel in the demilitarised area along the border. “There was never a tunnel, but a canal covered in dirt,” KAN said.
The purpose of this lie “was to exaggerate the importance of the Philadelphi Corridor and delay a hostage deal”, it added.
According to KAN, former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant backed the findings, saying, “It was not a tunnel, but rather an attempt to prevent a ceasefire agreement.”
Gallant clarified that the structure was only about one metre deep and was misleadingly presented to the public as a deep tunnel. “It was promoted to the public as a deep tunnel to prevent reaching a deal with Hamas,” he added.
Israeli cabinet ministers are expected to discuss a deadline with Hamas to reach an agreement to return the captives held in Gaza and the army’s next steps during a meeting later today, Al Jazeera reports quoting Israeli news outlet Ynet.
During tonight’s meeting, cabinet ministers will also discuss sending aid to Gaza.
Israeli settlers have assaulted a Palestinian man while he was driving near the al-Auja Spring area north of the city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera reports.
Local sources told the Wafa news agency that settlers had intercepted the resident’s vehicle, physically attacked him and pepper-sprayed him in the face.
The sources added that the assault occurred under the protection of Israeli soldiers, who did not intervene.
At least 28 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes on several areas across the Gaza Strip since dawn, medical sources have told Al Jazeera.
The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, has hailed Pope Francis’s support for Gazans and engagement with the small Catholic community in the battered Palestinian territory, AFP reports.
The Catholic church’s highest authority in the region, who is considered a potential successor to the late pontiff, Pizzaballa told journalists in Jerusalem that “Gaza represents, a little bit, all what was the heart of his pontificate.”
“He was very close to the community of Gaza, the parish of Gaza, he kept calling them many times — for a certain period, also every day, every evening at 7pm,” said the patriarch.
He added that by doing so, the pope “became for the community something stable, and also comforting for them, and he knew this”.
Read more here.
Hamas has condemned Israel’s attacks on equipment and facilities for rescue operations as “criminal”, Al Jazeera reports.
“The targeting of municipal headquarters by Israeli occupation aircraft and the bombing of heavy equipment designated for rescue and rubble removal, including bulldozers and other machinery, is a criminal continuation of the war of extermination,” the group said in a statement.
Nine bulldozers brought into Gaza from Egypt as part of the recent ceasefire agreement were also destroyed in the attacks, Hamas claimed.
The Palestinian group added: “The systematic destruction of livelihoods and civilian facilities in the Gaza Strip will not succeed in pushing our people to surrender to the malicious displacement plans, nor will it succeed in dissuading them from clinging to their land, their determination, and that of their sons in the valiant resistance, to confront and defeat the aggression, and to achieve our legitimate rights to freedom and self-determination.”
Hamas has slammed Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza, now in its 50th day, warning it is pushing more than two million residents towards famine and a deepening health disaster, Al Jazeera reports.
“The Gaza Strip is facing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” the group said in a statement, citing severe shortages of food, water, fuel, medicine and even children’s vaccines.
It added that the siege, which has also seen daily attacks on shelters, hospitals and residential areas, amounts to a “war crime” and a “premeditated crime” by the Israeli leadership.
Hamas accused the international community of “political, moral, and humanitarian failure” and called on the United Nations and others to pressure Israel to lift the blockade and allow aid into the territory.
The group also urged Arab and Muslim countries, along with global activists, to “break the siege” and support Gaza’s resistance against Israel’s “fascist plans”.
Two separate Israeli attacks have killed at least four Palestinians and wounded many others in central Gaza’s Nuseirat and Gaza City in the north, according to the Wafa news agency.
Medical sources speaking to Wafa confirmed three civilians, including two girls, were killed when Israeli warplanes targeted a group of people in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Another person was killed after Israeli forces bombed a house in the Wadi al-Aris area of Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood.
Gaza’s Civil Defence has condemned Israel for targeting bulldozers used in humanitarian operations, including rubble removal and the recovery of bodies, Al Jazeera reports.
Nine bulldozers were destroyed in an Israeli air attack on the Jabalia al-Nazlh municipality garage in northern Gaza, according to Civil Defence official Mohammed el-Mougher.
“An agreement had previously been reached with the Egyptian-Qatari committee regarding the location of the bulldozers’ shelters,” he said, noting that their coordinates had been shared with Israel.
El-Mougher described the attack as a “clear violation” of international law protecting civilian rescue equipment.
“This area had not been declared by the Israeli occupation as an evacuation or military danger zone,” he said.
Hamas has called for a wave of global protests, strikes, and sit-ins this weekend, urging continued mobilisation until Israel’s assault on Gaza ends and the siege is lifted, Al Jazeera reports.
“We value the global movement in support of Gaza and against the Zionist aggression,” the group said, urging people across the Arab world, as well as in Asia, the Americas, and Western countries, to step up their actions.
It praised the ongoing demonstrations as “a rejection of the genocidal war” against Palestinians being committed by Israel.
Hamas also backed a call by Islamic institutions naming Saturday, April 26, as a day of widespread strike action in shops and malls across the Muslim world.
Such actions, it said, represent “an expression of solidarity with our people and our right to freedom and independence”.
Gaza’s health ministry has warned that Israel’s continued blockade on medical supplies has prevented the entry of polio vaccines, putting more than half a million children at risk, Al Jazeera reports.
The ban has halted the implementation of Phase 4 of the ministry’s polio prevention campaign, a statement said, leaving 602,000 children vulnerable to “permanent paralysis and chronic disabilities”.
Officials say the health consequences could be catastrophic.
“Children in Gaza are at risk of serious and unprecedented health complications due to the lack of adequate nutrition and drinking water,” the ministry added.
At least 26 Palestinians have been killed and 60 wounded in Israeli attacks across Gaza in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s health ministry, Al Jazeera reports.
“A number of victims remain under the rubble and on the roads, unable to be reached by ambulances and civil defence crews,” the ministry said in a statement on Telegram.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 51,266 people and wounded 116,991, the ministry said.
Since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18, it has killed 1,890 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 4,950, the statement added.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza was facing deepening hunger 50 days into a total Israeli blockade on all aid entering the besieged Palestinian territory.
“Gaza has become a land of desperation,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, said on X. “Hunger is spreading and deepening, deliberate and manmade.”
In his post on X, Lazzarini questioned “how much longer until hollow words of condemnation will translate into action to lift the siege, resume a ceasefire and save whatever is left of humanity?”
The UNRWA chief decried that two million people in Gaza, most of them women and children, “are undergoing collective punishment”.
“The wounded, sick and elderly are deprived of medical supplies and care,” he said, even as humanitarian organisations like UNRWA have thousands of trucks waiting with supplies that risk expiring.
“Humanitarian aid is being used as a bargaining chip and a weapon of war,” he charged.
“The siege must be lifted, supplies must flow in, the hostages must be released, the ceasefire must resume.”
A senior Hamas official has told AFP that a delegation from the Palestinian militant group had departed for Cairo to discuss “new ideas” for achieving a ceasefire with Israel.
“The delegation will meet with Egyptian officials to discuss new ideas aimed at reaching a ceasefire,” the official said, following Hamas’ rejection of Israel’s most recent offer last week.
Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian activist who has been detained in the US pending his deportation, has missed the birth of his son after being refused temporary release to attend the birth, his wife has said, Al Jazeera reports.
Noor Abdalla said on Monday that she gave birth to the couple’s first child in New York without Khalil present, after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made the “purposeful decision” to make her family suffer.
“My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud,” Abdalla, a US citizen, said in a statement.
“ICE and the Trump administration have stolen these precious moments from our family in an attempt to silence Mahmoud’s support for Palestinian freedom.
“I will continue to fight every day for Mahmoud to come home to us,” Abdalla added. “I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate, just like his dad.”
The Israeli army has released the names of more than 60 Palestinians from Gaza who are held in Israeli prisons and camps, according to a joint statement by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society and Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, Al Jazeera reports.
The development comes after changes to Israel’s “Unlawful Combatant” law, the prisoners’ groups said on Telegram.
The statement said Israel still “deliberately” issues contradictory information and continues to commit “enforced disappearances” against Palestinians from Gaza.
As of April, Israel classifies at least 1,747 Gaza detainees as “unlawful combatants”, it said.
The Palestinian Civil Defence says Israeli forces have killed at least 25 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip since the early hours, Al Jazeera reports.
Dr Majed Nasr Ismail has been killed in an Israeli air attack on Deir el-Balah in central Gaza earlier this morning, Wafa and Quds News Network report.
According to figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israel has killed more than 1,060 healthcare workers in Gaza since launching its invasion in October of 2023.
Gaza’s civil defence agency has said that seven people were killed in fresh Israeli air strikes in Gaza.
“The occupation launched violent air strikes on Gaza City and the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Khan Younis, killing seven civilians,” civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Bassal told AFP.
Four people were killed in the Al-Rimal area near Gaza City, two in Al-Sabra west of Gaza City and one in Khan Younis.
Members of Gaza’s tiny Christian community said they were “heartbroken” at the death of Pope Francis, who campaigned for peace for the devastated enclave and spoke to them on the phone every evening throughout the Israeli onslaught, reports Reuters.
“We lost a saint who taught us every day how to be brave, how to keep patient and stay strong,” 44-year-old George Antone, head of the emergency committee at the Holy Family Church in Gaza, told Reuters.
Francis called the church hours after Israel’s offensive in Gaza began in October 2023, Antone said — the start of what the Vatican News Service would describe as a nightly routine. He would make sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone else in the room, Antone said.
“He (Pope Francis) used to tell each one: I am with you, don’t be afraid.”
US Senator Peter Welch, who represents the state of Vermont, has met with Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who was arrested earlier this month, Al Jazeera reports.
Mahdawi is being held at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St Albans as he fights the Trump administration’s effort to deport him, according to Al Jazeera.
Welch published a video of his meeting with Mahdawi and was quoted as saying: “He should be released so he can become a citizen.”
In the video, Mahdawi says: “He [Trump] is describing being antiwar as anti-Semitic. How could that be possible when most of my partners at Columbia’s campus and beyond are Jews and Israelis?
“My hope and my dream is to see this conflict, if one might say, to see an end to the war and end to the killing to see a peaceful resolution between Palestinians and Israelis. How could this be a threat to anybody except the war machine that is feeding this?”
Harvard University has sued to block US President Donald Trump from freezing billions of dollars in federal funding after the elite research institution rejected a list of White House demands that it said would undermine its independence, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston said Trump has launched a broad attack on funding for cutting-edge research at major universities as he seeks to rid them of what he describes as anti-Semitism and ideological bias.
“This case involves the Government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard,” the lawsuit said.
Harvard alleges the Trump administration’s actions were arbitrary and unlawful and violated the university’s First Amendment rights to free speech.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement that the “gravy train of federal assistance” to institutions like Harvard was coming to an end.
Read more here.
Eight Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces bombed a house in Khan Younis’s centre in southern Gaza, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.
It added that the victims included two women and two children.
They were killed when Israeli forces bombed a house in the centre of the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza
Unilever is threatening to halt funding to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, a US-based nonprofit that makes donations to social justice organisations, Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Unilever is asking Ben & Jerry’s Foundation to agree to an expedited audit of its donations to continue the funding, which amounts to roughly $5 million annually and is determined by a formula based on sales of the brand’s ice cream, the two sources said.
Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever in November to stop alleged efforts to dismantle its board and end its progressive social activism, which has included protesting Israel’s offensive in Gaza, supporting a movement to defund police, and attempting to criticise US President Donald Trump.
The sources said Unilever is threatening to halt the funding in retaliation for the lawsuit, and because one of the ice cream maker’s founders has tried to buy back the frozen dessert maker.
Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s and Ben & Jerry’s Foundation did not immediately return Reuters’ requests for comment.
