Summary of the day …
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will enter the city of Rafah in southern Gaza to eliminate Hamas, with or without a ceasefire and hostage release deal. He added that the notion of ending the war before Israel has reached its objectives is not an option.
Hamas officials have left Cairo after talks with Egyptian officials on a new ceasefire proposal in Gaza, according to Egypt’s state-owned Al-Qahera News satellite channel. The channel, which has close ties with Egyptian security agencies, said a Hamas delegation will return to Cairo with a written response to the ceasefire proposal, without saying when. Israeli media has reported that Israel will not be sending a delegation to Cairo for ceasefire talks until it has a reply from Hamas on the latest proposal.
The UK’s deputy foreign secretary, Andrew Mitchell, has told lawmakers in parliament in London that in the present circumstances, it was “not easy to see” how an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip could be “compliant with international humanitarian law”.
The top UN court has rejected a request by Nicaragua to order Germany to halt military and other aid to Israel and to renew funding to the UN aid agency in Gaza. The International Court of Justice said that legal conditions for making such an order weren’t met. However, it did not throw out the case entirely, as Germany had requested. The court said it remained deeply concerned about conditions in Gaza.
More than 34,535 Palestinians have been killed and 77,704 have been wounded during the Israeli military offensive in Gaza since 7 October, the Hamas-led Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. The Gaza Civil Emergency Service has estimated that the bodies of a further 10,000 Palestinians were under the rubble of hundreds of destroyed buildings. It said those figures had not been included in the updated health ministry death toll, which only registers bodies that are taken to hospitals.
An Israeli police officer has been “moderately wounded” in a stabbing incident in near Herod’s Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City. The suspect, believed to be a Turkish national who had entered Israel as a tourist, was shot and killed.
Unrwa commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini has said that Unrwa staff who have been interrogated by Israeli security forces are being “pressured to state that the agency is politically affiliated”.
In the wider region, it has been announced that Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will visit Iran on 6-8 May.
