Closing summary
It is has gone 5pm in Gaza and Tel Aviv. We will be closing this blog soon, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Israel-Gaza war coverage here and on the Middle East here.
Here is a recap of the latest developments:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed that its negotiating team, led by the Mossad intelligence chief David Barnea, had returned to Israel after talks with mediators in Doha on Thursday. Speaking after the team’s return, Netanyahu said Israel needed control of the Palestinian side of Gaza’s border with Egypt to stop weapons reaching Hamas. It is a condition that conflicts with Hamas’s position that Israel must withdraw from all Gaza territory after a ceasefire.
US president, Joe Biden, acknowledged “difficult, complex issues” remain between Israel and Hamas, but that progress was being made in reaching a ceasefire deal. “There’s a lot of things in retrospect I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do, but the bottom line is we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war,” he said after a Nato summit in Washington DC.
A senior Hamas official has blamed Israel for a failure to build on momentum created when the group dropped a key demand in the US-drafted ceasefire offer a week ago to clear the way for a deal. “Israel hasn’t made a clear stance over Hamas proposal. After discussion with the mediators in Doha, Qatar, Israel told them the delegation would go back for consultation with the Israeli government,” the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “There is an attempt at stalling and wasting time,” the official said. There was no immediate comment from Israel.
Reuters reported on Friday that Israeli and Egyptian ceasefire negotiators were in talks about an electronic surveillance system along the border between Gaza and Egypt that could allow Israel to pull back its troops from the area if a ceasefire is agreed. According to the Times of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called the report “absolute fake news”. But despite the denial from Netanyahu’s office, the Times of Israel later reported that two officials involved in the hostage talks had told the publication “that Israeli negotiators have in fact been discussing the possibility of an IDF withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt as part of a potential ceasefire deal”.
Hamas is suggesting during ceasefire negotiations that an independent government of non-partisan figures run postwar Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a member of the Hamas political bureau said on Friday. Hossam Badran said in a statement: “The administration of Gaza after the war is a Palestinian internal matter without any external interference, and we will not discuss the day after the war in Gaza with any external parties.”
Israeli strikes killed another 32 people in the Gaza Strip, the health ministry in Gaza said on Friday. Hamas media reported “more than 70 airstrikes” in several parts of the territory, including locations in Gaza City in the north, Nuseirat refugee camp in the centre, along with Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.
Israel’s military on Friday said troops are continuing operations in Rafah, near the Egyptian border. “Over the past day, the troops eliminated numerous terrorists in close-quarters combat and aerial strikes, and dismantled terrorist infrastructure in the area,” an Israeli military statement said.
Joe Biden said on Thursday that he is “disappointed” with the problem-plagued effort to deliver aid to Gaza via a temporary pier, which US officials say will soon permanently end. The $230m military pier has repeatedly been detached from the shore because of weather conditions since its initial installation in mid-May. The project also faced issues with the distribution of assistance due to conditions onshore.
In central Gaza, Israeli troops said they killed an unspecified number of militants “who posed a threat” while soldiers “located a weapons production workshop” and “a large amount of funds used for terrorist activity,” according to the statement. In far-northern Gaza’s Beit Hanoun, Israeli aircraft struck targets in an area from which projectiles were fired into southern Israel on Thursday, the military added.
About 60 bodies were found under the rubble of Gaza City’s eastern Shujaiya neighbourhood, Gaza’s civil defence agency said. The discovery came after Israeli troops ended a two-week operation which Gaza’s civil defence and residents said had left the area in ruins. Civil defence spokesperson Mahmud Bassal said 85% of buildings are now uninhabitable and Shujaiya has been left a “disaster zone”.
The US has stepped up efforts to target violent Israeli settlers, adding new individuals and organisations to a growing sanctions list and warning banks to check transactions linked to all Israeli “outposts” in the occupied West Bank. The new sanctions cover the far-right group Lehava, already listed by the UK, and two founding members of Tsav9, a campaign group that blocked aid from reaching Gaza. The new measures also target outposts, suggesting the Biden administration is prepared to take at least some steps to confront Israel’s creeping land grab on the West Bank.
About 40 bodies were found in an initial search of two Gaza City districts after Israeli troops ended an offensive, said Gaza’s civil defence agency on Friday. Civil defence spokesperson Mahmud Bassal said the bodies were found in the Tal al-Hawa and al-Sinaa districts. “Up to now, about 40 bodies have been found,” Bassal said, adding that dozens more were feared buried under the rubble.
Bassal added that the Sabha medical centre, near the Gaza City district of Shujaiya, which provides care for 60,000 residents, had been destroyed in the new fighting. “And the corpses under the rubble speed up the spread of disease,” he said. The health ministry said 32 bodies had been taken to different hospitals across the territory after night-time Israeli airstrikes and bombing.
Dozens of residents returned to Gaza City on Friday to check the damage after civil emergency teams put out fires in the early hours. Reuters footage showed roads and buildings wrecked and the news agency reported of bodies wrapped in white shrouds and bearing the names of the dead women and men laying on the floor at al-Ahli hospital.
In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Hamas media said four people working for the al-Khair Foundation, a Muslim NGO based in the UK and Turkey, were killed in an airstrike at an aid distribution centre.
Israeli military acknowledged on Thursday that it had “failed” to protect the Be’eri kibbutz, where more than 100 people died during Hamas’s 7 October attacks. A summary of the inquiry, made public after being presented to kibbutz residents, said there had been a “lack of coordination” in the military response.
About 6,400 Palestinians reported as missing to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) since the outbreak of the war in Gaza on 7 October are yet to have been found, the group has said. Many are believed to be trapped under debris, buried without identification, or held in Israeli detention while others have been separated from their loved ones, who have been unable to contact them.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said it is not possible for Nato to continue its partnership with the Israeli administration, reports Reuters.“Until comprehensive, sustainable peace is established in Palestine, attempts at cooperation with Israel within Nato will not be approved by Turkey,” Erdoğan said at a news conference at the Nato summit in Washington DC.
The UN’s health agency has said that only five trucks carrying medical supplies were allowed into Gaza last week. “More than 34 of our trucks are waiting at the Al Arish crossing, and 850 pallets of medical supplies are awaiting collection. A further 40 trucks are waiting at Ismailiya in Egypt,” the World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday via the social media platform X.
Staff at Al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza say there has been a rise in injured patients from Gaza City in recent days since the Israeli military ramped up its attacks on the area, according to the development charity ActionAid. Doctors at the hospital are “working to treat the new arrivals despite experiencing a critical lack of vital medical supplies, equipment and fuel” the charity said.
The Israeli government’s security cabinet has approved a plan to extend compulsory military service for men to 36 months from the current 32 months, Israel’s Ynet news outlet reported on Friday. The 36-month rule will stay in force for the next eight years, Ynet reported. The measure is likely to be submitted to a vote in a meeting of the full cabinet on Sunday, it said.
Israel’s military said on Friday that one of its soldiers was killed in combat near the border with Lebanon a day earlier. The military identified the dead man as a 33-year-old sergeant. It did not specify how he died, but Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said he was killed in a drone strike. Israel’s military also said on Friday that a day earlier it had struck a military post in southern Syria in retaliation after a projectile was fired from Syria into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Dutch judges on Friday refused an urgent request by a trio of rights groups to penalise the Netherlands for not respecting a ban on supplying F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel. “It has not been demonstrated that the state is not complying with the ban or does not intend to continue to comply with the ban,” the judges said. “Therefore, there is no penalty for a violation.”
The Australian National University (ANU) is launching a review into its investment portfolio, acknowledging “changing expectations” in the community around deriving revenue from weapons manufacturers. It follows an announcement by the University of Sydney to hold a similar review after weeks of lobbying from pro-Palestine student encampments.
The Times of Israel reports that Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has responded to a Reuters report that Israel is discussing the option of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrawing from the Gaza-Egypt border as part of a potential ceasefire deal, by calling it “absolute fake news”.
But despite the denial from Netanyahu’s office, the Times of Israel later reported that two officials involved in the hostage talks had told the publication “that Israeli negotiators have in fact been discussing the possibility of an IDF withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt as part of a potential ceasefire deal”.
Updated
