Afternoon summary
A US citizen taking part in a protest against settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank died of her wounds on Friday after being shot in the head by Israeli troops, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. The Israeli military said it was looking into the report. There was no immediate comment from the US embassy. Fouad Nafaa, the head of the Rafidia hospital in Nablus, told Reuters the woman arrived at the hospital in a very critical condition, with a serious head injury.
Israeli military strikes killed at least 12 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Friday, medics said. In Nuseirat, one of the territory’s eight historic refugee camps, an Israeli strike killed two women and two children, while eight other people were killed in two other strikes in Gaza City, the medics said.
Israeli forces have withdrawn from the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, the Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting, after a 10-day raid in which 21 people were killed according to the Palestinian health ministry. A Reuters witness said the Israeli forces left behind extensive damage to infrastructure. In a statement on Facebook, the Palestinian foreign ministry accused Israel of transferring to the occupied West Bank its brutal destruction and devastation in the Gaza Strip, as evidenced by the situation in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm, and the refugee camps there.
The United Nations said the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “beyond catastrophic”, with more than a million Palestinians not receiving any food rations in August and a 35% drop in people getting daily cooked meals. Meanwhile, health workers resumed vaccinating children against polio in the southern Gaza Strip early on Friday for the second phase of a massive immunisation campaign.
The parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a prominent Israeli American hostage whose body was recovered from Gaza, said they want a Hamas propaganda video of him to serve as a “wake-up call to the world” to free the remaining hostages, the Associated Press reports. “No other family should go through what our family [and the families of the other recently executed hostages] have endured,” wrote Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, the parents of the 23-year-old hostage whose body was recovered last Saturday.
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties, already at odds with coalition partners over demands to draft young religious men into the army, are again testing the unity of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with a challenge over education funding. The latest rift centres on an ultra-Orthodox push for schools in their separate education system to receive the same benefits as state-run schools, especially their ‘New Horizon’ programme that adds school hours and sharply hikes teacher pay, Reuters reports.
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said it had been forced to suspend its activities in the occupied West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarem since the start of Israel’s “recent incursions” and accused the Israeli military of “repeated attacks” on health workers, ambulances and medical facilities. In a statement on Thursday it said Israeli forces had caused “wide-scale damage to road infrastructure, electricity networks and water supplies.”
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Thursday it was incumbent on both Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to say yes on remaining issues to reach a Gaza ceasefire deal, which has faced obstacles in negotiations across months. “Based on what I have seen, 90% is agreed but there are a few critical issues that remain,” including the so-called Philadelphi corridor on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt, Blinken said at a press briefing in Haiti.
At least 40,878 Palestinians have been killed and 94,454 injured in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the territory’s health ministry said in a statement on Thursday. The figure does not include the thousands buried under the rubble or those who have died of curable diseases and illnesses but who could not access appropriate healthcare due to Israel’s destruction of the health system.
Five Palestinians were killed by an Israeli airstrike that struck a tent encampment inside the al-Aqsa hospital compound where displaced people have sought shelter, according to Gaza health officials. The Israeli military claimed the airstrike had hit a command centre used by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
Amnesty International on Thursday urged a war crimes probe into Israel razing homes and farms in eastern Gaza to expand a so-called buffer zone between it and the Palestinian territory. “Using bulldozers and manually laid explosives, the Israeli military has unlawfully destroyed agricultural land and civilian buildings, razing entire neighbourhoods, including homes, schools and mosques,” it said. The London-based rights group said the levelling since the start of the war on 7 October “should be investigated as war crimes of wanton destruction and of collective punishment”.
