Summary of the day …
Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of its claims that employees of the UN relief agency Unrwa are members of terrorist organisations, an independent review led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna has said. Israeli allegations of the involvement of Unrwa staff in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel led major donors in January to cut their funding to the agency.
Gaza authorities say over 200 bodies have been recovered so far from a temporary mass grave at what is left of Nasser hospital, which was beseiged and raided by Israeli troops. Residents said Israeli troops fought their way back into an eastern section of Khan Younis in a surprise raid on Monday. Israel’s military has said that it remains operational during the Passover holiday and “is at full readiness in all areas”.
The head of the World Health Organization on Monday again called for safe passage for humanitarian aid missions throughout Gaza after an aid team failed to complete its most recent trip to hard-hit northern Gaza.
Doctors in Gaza have saved a baby from the womb of her mother as she lay dying from head injuries sustained in an in Israeli airstrike. The girl was delivered via an emergency caesarean section at a hospital in Rafah.
At least 34,151 Palestinians have been killed and 77,084 wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Hamas-led Gaza health ministry said on Monday. Israel says that over the same period 260 of its troops have been killed inside the Gaza Strip during its ground operation. 1,582 have been wounded. It has not been possible for journalists to independently verify the casualty figures being issued during the conflict.
In a resignation letter, Aharon Haliva, the general in command of the IDF’s military intelligence directorate on 7 October, has described the Hamas attack inside southern Israel as a “black day” that he has carried with him ever since. Haliva said he was proud of the way that the men and women of the IDF had responded since that day, but that in failing to prevent the assault his team had not “lived up to the task”. He will stay in post until a replacement is appointed.
Jerusalem police say they have arrested 13 settlers carrying lambs and goats, including one concealed in a shopping bag and another hidden in a baby carriage, as they attempted to access the al-Aqsa mosque compound and sacrifice them as part of a religious ritual.
Two suspects have been arrested after a car rammed into a crowd of ultra-Orthodox men on a Jerusalem street early Monday morning, wounding three.
Israeli forces conducted raids across the Israeli-occupied West Bank early Monday, wounding a man in the Balata refugee camp and detaining at least 25 more according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
Overnight the Israeli armed forces have said that one of their drones, which was staging an incursion inside Lebanon’s airspace, had been taken down by a surface-to-air missile.
Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi has arrived in Islamabad on a three-day trip to Pakistan.
An initial account of an exchange between a police officer and an antisemitism campaigner adjacent to a pro-Palestinian demonstration that sparked heavy criticism of London’s police did not show the full picture, a former senior officer has said.
The UN secretary general António Guterres said on Monday that he accepted the recommendations from the Colonna report, about ways to improve Unrwa’s capacity to monitor and address neutrality issues.
“Moving forward, the Secretary-General appeals to all stakeholders to actively support Unrwa, as it is a lifeline for Palestine refugees in the region,” the UN chief spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said in a statement.
The Colonna review makes clear that Unrwa is “indispensable” to Palestinians across the region.
“In the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, Unrwa remains pivotal in providing life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank,” the review says.
“As such, Unrwa is irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic development. In addition, many view Unrwa as a humanitarian lifeline.”
The Colonna review suggests a number of ways that neutrality safeguards for Unrwa’s more than 32,000 staff could be improved, such as expanding the capacity of the internal oversight service, providing more in-person training and more support from donor countries. But it notes that they are already more rigorous than most other comparable institutions.
“The review revealed that Unrwa has established a significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the humanitarian principles, with emphasis on the principle of neutrality and that it possesses a more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or NGO entities,” it says.
