Summary of the day …
Hamas has said there is no need for new ceasefire proposals for Gaza and pressure should be put on Israel to agree to a US plan that the Islamist group had already accepted. In a statement posted on Telegram early on Thursday, Hamas said that Netanyahu was attempting to thwart an agreement with demands about the Philadelphi corridor in southern Gaza
Several people were killed and others wounded when a reported Israeli airstrike hit tents housing displaced Palestinian people in Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip. An Al Jazeera journalist who visited the scene reported “The attack was sudden in an area that is supposed to be protected. The hospital has turned into a graveyard rather than a place of treatment”
Israel’s military has said that more than ten projectiles have been fired towards Israel from the direction of Lebanon during the day. The majority were intercepted and no Israeli injuries were reported. The IDF said it had struck at Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, and local media reported one operative was killed. The Israeli foreign ministry said “we hold the Lebanese government responsible for every Hezbollah rocket fired from its territory”
Israel’s Shin Bet security agency has released data claiming that more rocket launches from Lebanon aimed at Israel and Israeli-controlled territory were fired during August than in any other month since the 7 October Hamas attack inside southern Israel
Polio vaccinations continue in the Gaza Strip, with displaced families queueing for their children to receive doses after the first case of polion in 25 years was declared in the territory
Palestinian news agency Wafa reports medical teams from the emergency polio vaccination campaign have been denied access to areas east of Salah al-Din Street in the south of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s military. It says it is investigating the claim
Israel’s security forces continued widespread raids in the occupied West Bank. Five men and a 16-year-old child were killed in separate incidents in Tubas. One of the men killed was named by the Palestinian health ministry as Mohammed Zubeidi. His father, Zakaria Zubeidi, was a militant commander during the early 2000s and escaped Israeli jail in 2021, before being arrested and returned to prison days later
Egypt’s army chief of staff Lt Gen Ahmed Fathy Khalifa has visited the border with Gaza to inspect the security situation there. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently made control of the Philadelphi corridor strip between Gaza and Egypt a condition in ceasefire negotiations
Police in Germany have shot dead an 18-year-old Austrian man carrying a “long-barrelled gun” after an exchange of fire near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi history museum in Munich. Local media outlets were quick to point out that the incident took place on the 52nd anniversary of the assassination attacks at the Munich Olympics of 1972. The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, expressed “horror” at what he described as a terror attack
Julian Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, reports from Jerusalem
With the Gaza war and West Bank raids as a backdrop, there is a third arena of conflict stirring in Jerusalem, with just as much potential – arguably even greater potential – to spread conflict across the region.
Right-wing members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government are testing the boundaries of a religious arrangement that has been in place since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
According to that 57 year-old understanding between Israel and the Jordanian monarchy, only Muslims can pray in the compound containing the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock shrines (known to Jews as the Temple Mount). Non-Muslims can visit respectfully but not pray.
That arrangement is now on the point of collapse. With the encouragement of the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, messianic and other extremist Jews are praying increasingly openly on the sacred stone esplanade in the southeastern corner of Jerusalem’s old city.
On Wednesday the prayers went further than ever. A couple of dozen religious nationalists prayed out loud and prostrated themselves along the eastern wall of the esplanade. The scene was captured by Haaretz journalist, Nir Hasson, who posted the video on X.
עליתי להר הבית לראות את המהפכה. מה שקורה בהר מאז ט' באב זה ניצחון ענק של פעילי המקדש שלמעשה קיבלו בית כנסת על מלא בהר הבית רק בלי תקרה: תפילות בציבור, שירה, ריקודים, השתחוויות ושמחה אמיתית על התקופה הנפלאה שבה הם נמצאים. pic.twitter.com/epeBKALHz1
— نير حسون Nir Hasson ניר חסון (@nirhasson) September 4, 2024
For some while under the Netanyahu government, groups of religious Jews have been escorted to the secluded eastern wall of the al-Aqsa esplanade, but until now, they have mostly opted to pray silently and generally stay upright.
Wednesday was different, said Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer who is an expert on the issue and the founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an advocacy group which monitors the constant struggle over land and history in the city.
“A lot of this comes down to body language,” Seidemann told me. “It is a sizable group singing and praying loudly. It is a quorum, a minyan [10 men in traditional Judaism] getting down and prostrating themselves, to make the world know that the status quo is dead.”
I went to look today walking up the wooden ramp to the esplanade. There was a smaller turnout of Jews praying when I was there, separated into two groups of men and women, six in each in the same sunken eastern walkway facing the Mount of Olives.
I approached to within 30 metres of the worshippers before being shooed off by the police. Once I started moving away, the group quietly resumed their prayers, some laying themselves out flat on the flag stones.
Under Ben-Gvir’s control, the police are now protecting a violation of a status quo which Netanyahu’s office formally insists remains government policy.
“The police have transformed into something of a militia throughout Israel, even more so at the Mount right now,” Seidemann said.
“What happened yesterday I believe is a tipping point, because it’s just so blatant, it’s so unapologetic with such volume,” he added. “We in Israel and Palestine are still living under the pall of a possible regional war. It hasn’t gone away. A single event which could trigger such a war, would be an event like this, at al-Aqsa.”
