Closing summary
It is coming up to 6pm in Gaza and in Tel Aviv. We will be closing this blog soon, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Middle East coverage here.
Here is a recap of the latest developments:
All EU donors have now resumed their support to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), said Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, on Thursday. In a social media post, Borrell described Unrwa as “an indispensable lifeline in Gaza and the region”.
The Hostages Families Forum in Israel has released graphic footage of female Israeli soldiers captured by Hamas from a military base during the 7 October attacks. The three-minute video showed the women, all IDF personnel, sitting on the ground, some bruised and bloodied, with their hands tied after their capture from the Nahal Oz base in southern Israel.
Republican US House speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic US representative Pete Aguilar will deliver keynote speeches at the Israeli embassy’s Independence Day reception on Thursday.
At least 35,800 Palestinians have been killed and 80,011 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Thursday. The Hamas-run health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
Leaders of the Iran-led, so-called “axis of resistance”, including Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, discussed the war in Gaza during a meeting in Tehran on the sidelines of president Ebrahim Raisi’s funeral, reported state media.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said two pre-dawn Israeli airstrikes on Thursday killed 26 people in Gaza City, amid fierce battles between troops and militants across the Palestinian territory. Civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP that one strike hit a family’s house, killing 16 people, while 10 others died when a mosque was struck in the second strike. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, while AFP was unable to independently verify the details of the two reported strikes.
Four organisations, including the European Legal Support Center and The Rights Forum, have filed a criminal complaint to public prosecutors in the Netherlands over properties listed by the travel website, Booking.com, on occupied Palestinian territories. The legal challenge, made public on Thursday, points to the listings to accuse the travel website, headquartered in the Netherlands, of profiting from crime and alleges that the proceeds of crime are being brought into the Dutch financial system. Booking.com did not reply to a request for comment.
The US is concerned about Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation among countries that have traditionally supported it, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has said.
Israel will reprimand the ambassadors of Ireland, Norway and Spain on Thursday over their governments’ plan to recognise a Palestinian state next week, an Israeli official said.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule on Friday 24 May on South Africa’s request to order a halt to Israel’s Rafah offensive in Gaza, it said on Thursday. “No power on Earth will stop Israel from protecting its citizens and going after Hamas in Gaza,” said an Israeli government spokesperson when asked whether Israel would comply with a possible ICJ ruling against it.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is set to worsen once again as deliveries of aid and fuel to the Palestinian territory slow to a trickle in the wake of Israel’s two-week-old ground offensive in the southern city of Rafah.
A two-day Israeli raid on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin killed at least 12 Palestinians, health authorities and an Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondent reported. The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said Israeli forces had killed 12 people including four children, and injured 25 during the fighting which began on Tuesday morning.
Both Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian militant group Hamas condemned the raid. Israel’s army said on Wednesday troops had “exchanged fire with armed men and killed a number of terrorists, including two terrorists who threw explosives at the forces”.
Surgeon Usaeed Jabareen, from Jenin’s Khalil Suleiman government hospital, was among those killed on Tuesday said the official Palestinian news agency Wafa and medical charity Doctors Without Borders. An AFP correspondent on Thursday saw five bodies at the hospital morgue, including Jabareen’s.
Egypt has threatened to withdraw from its role as a mediator in Gaza ceasefire negotiations after a report by CNN that Egyptian intelligence changed the terms of a recent truce proposal, scuttling a deal. Quoting three people familiar with the discussions, CNN reported on Tuesday that Egyptian intelligence changed terms of a ceasefire proposal that Israel agreed to earlier in May.
Israeli forces killed 35 Palestinians in aerial and ground bombardments across the Gaza Strip on Thursday and battled in close combat with Hamas-led militants in areas of the southern city of Rafah, health officials and Hamas media said. Israeli tanks advanced in Rafah’s southeast, edged towards the city’s western district of Yibna and continued to operate in three eastern suburbs, residents told Reuters.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned of the risk of a “humanitarian crisis” if Israel cuts off a crucial financing channel to Palestinian banks. Ahead of a meeting of G7 finance ministers in Stresa in northern Italy, she told reporters: “I’m particularly concerned by Israel’s threats to take action that would lead to Palestinian banks being cut off from their Israeli correspondent banks.”
A United Nations expert called on Israel on Thursday to investigate multiple allegations of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees in the wake of the 7 October attack by Hamas. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, said in a statement she had received reports of some detainees being deprived of sleep, threatened with physical and sexual violence, insulted and exposed to humiliating acts, including “being photographed and filmed in degrading poses”. There was no immediate reaction from the Israeli government or military.
The US is worried that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may be willing to torpedo a potential normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia if it entails ending the war in Gaza and committing to working towards a two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lebanese schoolchildren on a minibus had a narrow escape on Thursday when a drone strike killed a Hezbollah fighter in the car ahead, blowing out the windscreen of their vehicle and injuring three pupils. The source close to Hezbollah told AFP that Israel was behind the strike, which killed a Hezbollah member who was named as Mohammad Ali Nasser Farran.
Later on Thursday, Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of rockets at a base in northern Israel. It said its katyusha barrage was “in response to the assassination carried out by the enemy in Kafardjal, and the injuring and terrorising of children”.
A merchant ship off the coast of Yemen reported a missile hitting the water nearby, the UK’s sea trade monitoring agency reported on Thursday, adding that the vessel and all crew were safe and proceeding to the next port of call.
Updated
Republican US House speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic US representative Pete Aguilar will deliver keynote speeches at the Israeli embassy’s Independence Day reception on Thursday, reports Reuters.
The gathering comes amid tensions between the Democratic US leader and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over a US push for Israel to do more to protect Palestinian civilians in the war against Hamas militants in Gaza.
Reuters reports that it will be a chance for Johnson, an outspoken critic of president Joe Biden’s Israel policy, and Aguilar, a Biden ally, to lay out their views more than seven months into the conflict.
Successive US administration have usually sent senior officials to the Independence Day celebrations in Washington.
Vice-president Kamala Harris, who has called in recent weeks for a Gaza ceasefire, delivered last year’s keynote, mostly extolling US support for Israel. Homeland secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spoke the year before.
According to Reuters, an Israeli official said this year the embassy wanted to honor lawmakers with speaking roles in appreciation for congressional approval of new US military aid to Israel.
“Their participation highlights the strong, bipartisan support for Israel in the United States, and the Congress in particular, and speaks to the enduring Israel-US alliance,” the embassy said in a statement.
The reception takes place on the same night as a White House state dinner for Kenyan president William Ruto, which the Israeli official said created a scheduling conflict for senior members of the administration.
Other more junior administration officials are on the embassy’s guest list, according to the Israeli official.
Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives and the highest-ranking Republican in Congress, and Aguilar, chair of the House Democratic caucus, have both been granted keynote speaking slots on Thursday night, the embassy said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Reuters on the absence of an administration official from the speakers’ list.
