Summary of the day
Donald Trump has said he is not sure whether the Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will hold. Trump is expected to issue an executive order withdrawing the US from the UN human rights council and prohibiting future funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), according to a report. US funding to Unrwa was suspended in 2024 under Joe Biden’s administration.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to begin talks today on brokering a second phase of the ceasefire with Hamas, his office said, as he visits the new Trump administration in Washington. Ahead of his departure, Netanyahu told reporters he would discuss “victory over Hamas”, without defining what this would mean in practical terms, contending with Iran and freeing all hostages when he meets with the US President on Tuesday.
Hamas is ready to begin talks on the details of a second phase of the ongoing truce in Gaza, two officials from the Palestinian militant group told Agence France-Presse on Monday. “Hamas has informed the mediators, during ongoing communications and meetings held with Egyptian mediators last week in Cairo, that we are ready to start the negotiations for the second phase,” one official said on condition of anonymity. “We are waiting for the mediators to initiate the next round of negotiation,” said another.
The head of Amnesty International, Agnes Callamard, says Israel must be held accountable for the “genocide” that has been “committed,” adding that the current ceasefire must not mean that we forget what happened over the last 15 months. “In fact, if you have any sense of the future, you need a reckoning for the past. Amnesty’s primary message is that genocide has been committed, and accountability must be delivered for it,” the secretary-general told Al Jazeera.
Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the Israeli military is continuing its raid on the West Bank city of Jenin for the 14th consecutive day, which the outlet says has killed at least 25 Palestinian people, injured dozens of others and has involved the demolition of dozens of homes.
The office of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has said the ongoing Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank amounts to “ethnic cleansing” and urged the US to intervene. In a statement, spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the presidency “condemned the occupation authorities’ expansion of their comprehensive war on our Palestinian people in the West Bank to implement their plans aimed at displacing citizens and ethnic cleansing”.
The Palestinian ministry of health says the Israeli military have killed at least 70 people, including 10 children in the West Bank since the beginning of 2025. Thirty eight were killed in Jenin; 15 in Tubas; six in Nablus; five in Tulkarem; three in Hebron; two in Bethlehem; and one in Jerusalem.
A car bomb killed at least 15 people in the northern Syrian city of Manbij on Monday The attack is the second there in three days; Syria’s deadliest since Bashar al-Assad was unseated from power in December 2024. No one has claimed responsibility for the car bombing in the relatively small city, located 30km (19 miles) from the Turkish border.
Updated
The Trump administration has asked congressional leaders to approve new transfers of roughly $1bn worth of bombs and other military hardware to Israel, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The planned weapons sales include 4,700 1,000-pound bombs, worth more than $700m, as well as armored bulldozers built by Caterpillar, worth more than $300m, the outlet reports, citing US officials.
The new arms requests come as Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is visiting Washington and set to meet the US president, Donald Trump, on Tuesday to discuss the ceasefire in Gaza, a separate truce in Lebanon and tensions in the wider Middle East region.
