Closing summary
Israeli strikes killed at least 36 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Monday, including a pregnant woman and her newborn, local health officials said. Israel meanwhile eased some aid restrictions as it came under mounting pressure over the spiraling hunger crisis in the war-ravaged territory.
United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres on Monday said that Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank is illegal and the wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip is intolerable and both must stop. “Let’s be clear: The creeping annexation of the occupied West Bank is illegal. It must stop. The wholesale destruction of Gaza is intolerable. It must stop,” he told a conference at the UN on a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
US president Donald Trump said the US and others are giving money and food to Gaza and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “got to sort of like run it,” adding: “I want him to make sure they get the food. I want to make sure they get the food.”
The British prime minister Keir Starmer has said that Gaza is facing an “absolute catastrophe”. Speaking at Turnberry ahead of his talks with Donald Trump, the prime minister said: “It’s a humanitarian crisis, it’s an absolute catastrophe.”
At least 59,921 Palestinian people have been killed and 145,233 injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday. At least 100 Palestinian people were killed and 382 others injured in the last 24 hours alone, the ministry said, despite the Israeli military pause in parts of the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has called on Donald Trump to help stop Israel’s war on Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to the strip’s desperate population. In a televised speech, he said that Trump is “the one who is able to stop the war, deliver the aid and end this suffering”.
The number of hungry people around the world fell for a third straight year in 2024, retreating from a Covid-era spike, even as conflict and climate shocks deepened malnutrition across much of Africa and western Asia, a UN report said on Monday. Around 673 million people, or 8.2% of the world’s population, experienced hunger in 2024, down from 8.5% in 2023, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, jointly prepared by five UN agencies.
Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it. In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society.
In an update posted to Telegram this morning, Gaza’s health ministry said hospitals in the Strip recorded 14 new deaths in the past 24 hours due to famine and malnutrition. This brings the total number of deaths due to malnutrition to 147, including 88 children, since the start of the war in 2023.
The number of hungry people around the world fell for a third straight year in 2024, retreating from a Covid-era spike, even as conflict and climate shocks deepened malnutrition across much of Africa and western Asia, a UN report said on Monday.
Around 673 million people, or 8.2% of the world’s population, experienced hunger in 2024, down from 8.5% in 2023, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, jointly prepared by five UN agencies.
They said the report focused on chronic, long-term problems and did not fully reflect the impact of acute crises brought on by specific events and wars, including Gaza.
Maximo Torero, the chief economist for the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, said improved access to food in South America and India had driven the overall decline but cautioned that conflict and other factors in places such as Africa and the Middle East risked undoing those gains.
“If conflict continues to grow, of course, if vulnerabilities continue to grow, and the debt stress continues to increase, the numbers will increase again,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of a UN food summit in Ethiopia.
