Here’s how things stand on Tuesday, March 5, 2024:
Fighting and humanitarian crisis
- An Israeli air attack on a home in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Tuesday morning killed at least eight people and injured several more, the Wafa news agency reported.
- Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s director for Israel and Palestine, said attacks by Israeli forces on people seeking aid in Gaza were part of a “decades-long pattern” of deadly abuses against Palestinians.
- Using their bare hands, people have been digging through the rubble of destroyed homes to rescue victims of another Israeli bombing in Rafah. In the east of the city, there are similar scenes as crowds search through what remains of a building pulverised by Israeli air attacks.
Regional tensions and diplomacy
- United States Vice President Kamala Harris reiterated her country’s support for Israel and pushed for more humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip in talks with Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz a day after calling for a ceasefire.
- Pro-Palestine protesters confronted US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outside a movie theatre in Brooklyn, New York, demanding that she call Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide.
- In Australia, a group of lawyers accused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of being an “accessory to genocide in Gaza” and asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch an investigation.
- In Lebanon, US special envoy Amos Hochstein visited the capital, Beirut, to mediate talks aimed at ending escalating fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
- Al Jazeera Arabic shared a video authenticated by the Sanad verification agency showing the interception of incoming fire from southern Lebanon into the north of Israel.
- Israel ramped up its criticism of the embattled UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, on Monday, saying 450 of its employees were members of groups in the Gaza Strip, though it provided no evidence to back up its accusation.
