Closing summary
At least 798 people have been killed while trying to receive food aid in Gaza since the end of May, the UN human rights office said on Friday. Of the total number of people killed while receiving food assistance since 27 May, 615 were in the vicinity of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, a spokesperson for the Office of the high commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) told reporters.
The number of people killed by strikes in Gaza on Friday has risen to seven, according to the region’s civil defence agency, including five at a school-turned-shelter. “Five martyrs and others injured in an Israeli strike on Halima al-Saadia school, which was sheltering displaced persons in Jabalia al-Nazla, northern Gaza,” the agency said in a brief statement.
In a separate strike on Gaza City, to the south, the agency said at least one person was killed and several others wounded. In central Gaza on Friday, the Al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat said it received several casualties after Israeli forces had opened fire at civilians near an aid distribution point.
An Iranian attack on an airbase in Qatar key to the US military likely hit a geodesic dome housing equipment used by the Americans for secure communications, satellite images analysed by the Associated Press (AP) show. The US military and Qatar did not immediately respond to requests for comment over the damage, which so far has not been publicly acknowledged.
Lebanese president Joseph Aoun ruled out normalisation between his country and Israel on Friday, while expressing hope for peaceful relations with Beirut’s southern neighbour, which still occupies parts of southern Lebanon, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports. Aoun’s statement is the first official reaction to Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar’s statement last week in which he expressed his country’s interest in normalising ties with Lebanon and Syria.
Iran’s foreign minister has confirmed that his country is detaining a teenage French-German cyclist who disappeared last month, French newspaper Le Monde reported on Friday. The cyclist, Lennart Monterlos, “was detained for having committed an infraction,” the newspaper quoted Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi as saying, AP reports.
Al Jazeera reports that Hamas has criticised the decision by the US to impose sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza. The group described the move as a “blatant expression of the US administration’s blatant bias toward Zionist war crimes” and called for the country’s administration to reverse its actions.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has condemned an attack which it claims wounded one of its staff members and a Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) volunteer during a rescue mission in Gaza. The committee said the individuals were injured by gunshots and immediately evacuated to receive treatment. Both are reportedly in a stable condition.
Commercial ships still sailing through the Red Sea are broadcasting messages about their nationality and even religion on their public tracking systems to avoid being targeted by Yemen’s Houthis after deadly attacks this week by the militia. The Red Sea is a critical waterway for oil and commodities but traffic has dropped sharply since Houthi attacks off Yemen’s coast began in November 2023 in what the Iran-aligned group said was in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza war, Reuters reported.
The EU’s diplomatic service has drawn up a list of options to sanction Israel, after finding “indications” that the Middle Eastern country had breached its human rights obligations over its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. A document for EU foreign ministers to discuss next week outlines 10 options, such as suspending the EU-Israel association agreement or visa-free-travel for Israelis, freezing preferential trade terms, or terminating Israel’s participation in Europe’s research and student exchange programmes.
A UN team got about 75,000 litres of fuel into Gaza on Wednesday, the first such delivery in 130 days, said UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric on Thursday. “The amount entered yesterday isn’t sufficient to cover even one day of energy requirements. Fuel is still running out and services will shut down if far greater volumes do not enter immediately,” Dujarric told reporters. It comes as doctors at Gaza’s largest hospital say crippling fuel shortages have led them to put several premature babies in single incubators as they struggle to keep the newborns alive while Israel presses on with its military campaign.
The EU has reached an agreement with Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, including increasing trucks for aid and opening crossing points and certain aid routes, the EU’s top diplomat said on Thursday. “These measures are or will be implemented in the coming days, with the common understanding that aid at scale must be delivered directly to the population and that measures will continue to be taken to ensure that there is no aid diversion to Hamas,” Kaja Kallas said in a statement.
Militant fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) began handing over their weapons near the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah on Friday, marking a symbolic but significant step in the decades-long conflict between Turkey and the outlawed group. The disarmament ceremony marks a turning point in the transition of the PKK from armed insurgency to democratic politics, as part of a broader effort to draw a line under one of the region’s longest-running conflicts.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, has responded to news that she will be sanctioned by the Trump administration with a post on X saying “the powerful punishing those who speak for the powerless, it is not a sign of strength, but of guilt”. On Wednesday, as part of its effort to punish critics of Israel’s 21-month war in Gaza, the state department sanctioned Albanese, an independent official tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.
At least 798 people have been killed while seeking food at distribution points operated by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and other humanitarian convoys since the end of May, the UN human rights office (OHCHR) said on Friday.
The GHF, proposed by Israel as an alternative to the UN aid system in Gaza, has been almost universally condemned by rights groups for its violation of principles of humanitarian impartiality and what they have said could be complicity in war crimes.
“Up until the seventh of July, we’ve recorded now 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and 183 presumably on the route of aid convoys,” the OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
Israel backed the GHF after claiming that Hamas diverted aid from the UN-led aid system, a claim for which the UN said there was no evidence. The private company employs American mercenaries to oversee four food distribution zones, as opposed to the previous 400 non-militarised zones run under the UN system.
The GHF said the UN figures were “false and misleading” and denied that deadly incidents occurred at its sites. “The fact is the most deadly attacks on aid sites have been linked to UN convoys,” a GHF spokesperson said.
In Gaza, the GHF has become infamous for the near-daily shootings of people seeking food who have queued to receive meals since the group started operating in early May. Palestinians seeking food have to navigate a complicated set of instructions and stick to specific routes, as well as walk long distances to access the food sites. Even then there is no guarantee they will be safe.
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