Death toll in new Israeli air attack on displaced people in Rafah rises to 21 – reports
Al Jazeera reports that the death toll in a new Israeli airstrike on an area where displaced Palestinians are being forced to shelter in tents has risen to 21.
It said the air raid targeted al-Mawasi in western Rafah, an area which Israel’s military had designated as a humanitarian area.
For the news network, which this month was banned from operating inside Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Hind Khoudary reported that at least 13 of those killed were women.
She wrote “Israeli forces targeted another makeshift tent [area] where most of the people were women and children. All the injured and the dead bodies have been transferred to the International Medical Corps field hospital. There are no ambulances. It’s catastrophic and horrifying being injured and not being able to get transferred from one place to another because of lack of fuel.”
The claims have not been independently verified.
Key events
Rory Carroll
Ireland has said its recognition of a Palestinian state does not equal endorsement of Hamas and reiterated its support for the Palestinian Authority.
Micheál Martin, the foreign minister, condemned the “savagery” of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October last year and urged the international community to give full support to the PA, which rules the West Bank, but not Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas.
The decision to recognise Palestinian statehood created a rare day of unity in the Irish parliament on Tuesday, though opposition parties said it should have happened sooner. A Palestinian flag flew over Leinster House, which houses the Dail and Senate.
However some in the government worry the historic move will be seen as benefiting Hamas. Israel has repeatedly said so. Salman Rushdie recently warned that forming a Palestinian state “right now” would mean a “Taliban-like state”.
Seán Ó Fearghaíl, the Dail speaker, said the chamber wished to “clearly differentiate between Hamas and the Palestinian people”. He also said Ireland treasured its Jewish community.
Faisal Ali
Ireland’s prime minister, Simon Harris, announced his country’s decision to recognise Palestine in the Dáil on Tuesday, a week after Dublin joined Spain and Norway, pledging to do so. Addressing parliamentarians, Harris said: ‘Recognition is a message for those in Palestine who advocate for a future of peace and democracy.’ After he concluded his speech the chamber gave a round of applause.
The French parliament has suspended a lawmaker for two weeks after he held up a Palestinian flag during a debate over whether France should recognise Palestinian statehood.
Sébastien Delogu, a member of parliament for the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party from the southern city of Marseille, stood up with the flag during questions to the government.
Speaker Yael Braun-Pivet denounced what she called his “inadmissible” behaviour, and lawmakers voted to suspend him for two weeks and cut his parliamentary allowance by half for two months.
Haaretz reports that Islamic Jihad have published a video of Israeli hostage Sasha Trupanov. It is not clear when the video was filmed.
Trupanov, an employee of Amazon, was abducted on 7 October from kibbutz Nir Oz, along with his grandmother, Irena, his mother, Yelena and Trupanov’s partner, Sapir Cohen. The three women were released late last year.
At the time of her release, Cohen said “During the captivity, there were days when I didn’t know if I would be able to survive. I can’t expand too much, but the tunnels there are crazy things. Thank God I was saved and I hope the state will return the abductees who stayed there.”
Yelena had featured in a hostage video issued by Hamas in October, and her husband, Vitaly, was killed by Hamas on 7 October.
Death toll in new Israeli air attack on displaced people in Rafah rises to 21 – reports
Al Jazeera reports that the death toll in a new Israeli airstrike on an area where displaced Palestinians are being forced to shelter in tents has risen to 21.
It said the air raid targeted al-Mawasi in western Rafah, an area which Israel’s military had designated as a humanitarian area.
For the news network, which this month was banned from operating inside Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Hind Khoudary reported that at least 13 of those killed were women.
She wrote “Israeli forces targeted another makeshift tent [area] where most of the people were women and children. All the injured and the dead bodies have been transferred to the International Medical Corps field hospital. There are no ambulances. It’s catastrophic and horrifying being injured and not being able to get transferred from one place to another because of lack of fuel.”
The claims have not been independently verified.
Reuters reports, citing Egypt’s Al-Qahera News state-affiliated TV channel, that an Egyptian security delegation is trying to reactivate talks to reach a truce in Gaza and release hostages, in coordination with Qatar and the US.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday condemned the “abrupt halt” of desperately needed medical evacuations from Gaza, which came to a full stop when Israel launched its military offensive on Rafah three weeks ago.
The United Nations health agency has long been pleading for Israeli permission to evacuate more critically ill and severely wounded people from Gaza.
Thousands of Gazans are estimated to require urgent medical evacuation but few have been able to leave the besieged Palestinian territory since war erupted there nearly eight months ago.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said that since Israel launched its military offensive in the densely crowded southern city of Rafah in early May, “there’s been an abrupt halt to all medical evacuations”.
She warned that the cut-off obviously meant more people will die waiting for treatment.
Before the war in the Gaza Strip erupted after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, around 50 to 100 people left the enclave every day with medical referrals for complex treatments that were not available in the Palestinian territory, including for cancer.
“Those people didn’t go away simply because conflict started, so they all still need a referral,” Harris told reporters in Geneva.
And since services in Gaza have been disastrously disrupted by the conflict, far more people need to leave to get services they used to access inside the strip, like chemotherapy or dialysis, she said.
In addition, thousands now need to evacuate after suffering severe trauma injuries in the war.
WHO estimates that there are now typically at any given time “around 10,000 people who need to be evacuated… to receive the much-needed medical treatment elsewhere”, Harris said.
They include more than 6,000 trauma-related patients and at least 2,000 patients with serious chronic conditions, like cancer, she said. Since the complete halt to medical evacuations from Gaza on May 8, an additional 1,000 critically ill and wounded patients have been added to that list, Harris said.
Before the cut-off, WHO had received approval from Israel for 5,800 medical evacuations – around just half of the number it had requested since the war began.
Of those 5,800, only 4,900 patients had actually been able to leave, Harris said.
These are the latest images from Gaza and Israel:
Israeli army says it used small munitions in Rafah airstrike, and fire was caused by secondary blast
The Israeli military says an initial investigation into a strike that sparked a deadly weekend fire in a tent camp in the southern Gaza city of Rafah has found the blaze was caused by a secondary explosion.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesman, said Tuesday that the military fired two 17-kilogram (37-pound) munitions that targeted two senior Hamas militants. He said the munitions would have been too small to ignite a fire on their own and the military is looking into the possibility that weapons were stored in the area.
Palestinian health officials say at least 45 people, around half of them women and children, were killed in Sunday’s strike. The fire also could have ignited fuel, cooking gas canisters or other materials in the densely populated camp housing displaced people.
The strike caused widespread outrage, including from some of Israel’s closest allies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was the result of a “tragic mishap.”
New strikes in the same western Tel al-Sultan district of Rafah that was hit Sunday killed at least 16 Palestinians, the Palestinian Civil Defense and the Palestinian Red Crescent said Tuesday. Residents reported an escalation of fighting in the southern Gaza city once seen as the territory’s last refuge.
Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead, saying Israeli forces must enter Rafah to dismantle Hamas and return hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. Israel says it is carrying out limited operations in eastern Rafah along the Gaza-Egypt border. But residents reported heavy bombardment overnight in Tel al-Sultan.
Bethan McKernan
Bethan McKernan is Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian
Revelations that Israel’s intelligence agencies ran a secret “war” to derail the international criminal court’s investigation into war crimes committed in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories proved explosive in Israel on Tuesday, with the story followed up by all major news outlets.
The role played by the former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, in a campaign to pressure an ICC prosecutor, was of particular interest: the career spy, who stepped down in 2021, has long been touted as a potential steadying force, and even prime ministerial material, in Israel’s fractious political scene.
Cohen was for many years a close ally of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, although relations between the pair appear to have soured since 7 October and the ensuing war in Gaza.
In an interview with the Jerusalem Post last November, the former spy chief appeared to confirm rumours of a falling out, saying that he no longer visits the prime minister’s office in person for consultations. “At the moment my relationship with [Netanyahu] is professional and to the point,” he said.
Media personality Rani Rahav, who has previously advised various Israeli prime ministers and other government figures, praised Cohen’s actions regarding the ICC in posts on his social media accounts on Tuesday, saying: “Yossi Cohen deserves all possible appreciation in this matter. [He] acted heroically as expected from a hero of Israel”.
However others said the former Mossad head’s alleged threats against the former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda were an error of judgment.
Veteran investigative journalist and intelligence expert Yossi Melman alluded to there being more to the story published by the Guardian, and said it was “a mistake” that the spy chief “handled the issue personally instead of sending a junior intelligence officer and then in the event something goes wrong there is room for denial”.
Cohen has been accused of being indiscreet about his spycraft in the past, reportedly telling a mistress about his “strong grip” over agents in the Arab world, including the personal physician of a head of state.
He also attracted attention earlier this year for public comments about how the Israeli government had asked the Gulf petrostate Qatar to fund civilian life in the Gaza Strip, which involved negotiating money transfers to Hamas. The New York Times reported that Cohen believed “there was little oversight over where the money was going.”
Denmark’s parliament on Tuesday voted down a bill to recognise a Palestinian state, after the Danish foreign minister previously said the necessary preconditions for an independent country were lacking. The move comes on the same days that Ireland, Spain and Norway all formally recognised a Palestinian state.
Seven killed by new Israeli strikes on displaced Palestinians in tents in Rafah – reports
At least seven Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in new Israeli strikes on an area of tents housing displaced people West of Rafah on Tuesday, Gaza health authorities have said.
Reuters reports the new Israeli strikes targeted tents of displaced families in the designated humanitarian area in Mawasi in western Rafah, according to medics and residents. Other local media has given the number of casualties as at least 20 people killed. It has not been possible for journalists to independently verify the casualty figures being issued during the conflict.
The new strike comes just a day after a previous Israeli airstrike caused a huge blaze at a tented area for displaced people in Rafah which medics said killed at least 45 people. Images of charred and dismembered children from that assault prompting an outcry from global leaders. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in parliament that “something unfortunately went tragically wrong” with that airstrike.
Hani Mahmoud, reporting for Al Jazeera from inside Gaza, has written for the news network that:
Israeli tanks are pushing deeper into Rafah right now from two major axes – first, along the Philadelphi Corridor into the city centre, and second, from the eastern part of Rafah city all the way down to an area known as the al-Awda traffic circle.
Artillery shelling there has reached as far as the vicinity of the Kuwaiti hospital, which has been pushed out of service all day.
Palestinian news agency Wafa, citing the health ministry, said that all the hospitals in the Rafah region were out of service, with the exception of Tal Al-Sultan maternity hospital which was “struggling”.
Earlier this month Benjamin Netanyahu’s government shut down Al Jazeera from operating inside Israel, and last week Israel seized Associated Press camera and broadcasting kit after accusing the agency of violating the country’s new media law by providing content to Al Jazeera.
