Closing summary
A member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October last year has been reunited with his family amid conflicting accounts about his rescue from Gaza. The Israeli military said it had rescued Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, from a tunnel “in a complex operation in the southern Gaza Strip”.
Alkadi is only the eighth hostage the Israeli military claims to have rescued during months of operations in Gaza, including during two operations that killed scores of Palestinians. Israel believes there are still 108 hostages inside Gaza and that more than 40 of them are dead.
An Israeli delegation of working-level officials from the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet will travel to Doha on Wednesday to continue talks with US, Qatari and Egyptian officials with the aim of closing the remaining gaps in the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, according to multiple reports.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has said that cyberspace needed to be regulated, citing the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Reuters reported. “There need to be laws to regulate cyberspace. Everyone does it. Look at the French, they arrested this man and threatened him with 20 years in prison for breaching their laws,” Khamenei said.
The UN has said its ability to function in Gaza is being crippled by a flurry of Israeli evacuation orders, herding Palestinians into ever smaller and remote areas, days before a critical effort to contain a polio outbreak. Aid workers warn that without a humanitarian pause, a vaccination drive due to begin this weekend could fail to reach enough children to stop the spread of the virus, which was detected there this month for the first time in 25 years.
The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers. A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.
Jen Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office OCHA, has given some details on an uptick in the number of evacuation orders Israel’s military has issued over the past month. Speaking at a UN briefing, Laerke said Israel has issued three evacuation orders since Friday and 16 mass evacuation orders throughout this month. The three issued since Friday have affected 8,000 people in 19 neighbourhoods, Laerke said.
At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children. The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right extremist Israeli national security minister, threatened that he would build a Jewish synagogue on al-Aqsa mosque compound, the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem. The comments by Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and champion of the settler movement, were condemned by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Israeli officials.
The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said. Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.
Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel. “And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”
The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised. Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has denied reports that it discovered the hostage Qaid Farhan Alkadi “by chance” during an Israeli military operation in southern Gaza.
As we reported earlier, the New York Times cited senior Israeli officials as saying that Alkadi, a member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October, was found during an operation to capture a Hamas tunnel network.
The IDF has been operating in an area of southern Gaza for several days, with the assumption that hostages could be held in the area, the Times of Israel is reporting.
The IDF said there was no planned operation to specifically rescue Alkadi, but the military was looking for hostages in the area, it said.
