Clossing summary
This blog will be closing shortly. Here is an overview of today’s developments:
Israel has granted two senior Christian leaders rare access to Gaza after an Israeli strike on the Palestinian territory’s only Roman Catholic church killed three people. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Catholic Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and his Greek Orthodox counterpart, Theophilos III, led a delegation on Friday to the Holy Family Church, whose shelling the day before sparked international condemnation.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called Pope Leo on Friday, the Vatican said, in relation to the Israeli strike on the Holy Family Church. During the call, the pope renewed his appeal for a ceasefire and an end to the war in Gaza, and expressed his concern over the “dramatic” humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territory, a Vatican statement said.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Friday that Israeli strikes killed 14 people in the north and south of the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
Israel will allow limited access by Syrian forces into the Sweida area of southern Syria for the next two days because of instability in the area, an Israeli official said on Friday, Reuters reports. A spokesperson for Syria’s interior ministry, Noureddin al-Baba, previously on Friday denied earlier reports that government forces are being deployed to Sweida province, Syrian state news agency reported, according to Reuters.
Armed tribes allied with Syria’s Islamist-led government clashed with Druze fighters outside Sweida on Friday a day after government troops withdrew from the Druze-majority city, a monitoring group said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported “clashes west of Sweida pitting tribal fighters and Bedouin supported by the authorities on one side, against Druze fighters on the other”.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi told his European counterparts on Friday they have no grounds for reactivating UN sanctions after they threatened to do so in coming months unless there is progress in nuclear talks. France, Britain and Germany told Iran on Thursday that they would restore UN sanctions unless it reopened talks on its nuclear programme immediately and produced concrete results by the end of August. The foreign ministers of the so-called E3, along with the EU’s foreign policy chief, held their first call with Araqchi since Israel and the US attacked Iranian nuclear facilities a month ago.
Updated
Al Jazeera reports that a one-year-old girl has died of malnutrition in Deir el-Balah in Gaza, a medical source at the city’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital said.
Doctors Without Borders warned last week that its teams on the ground in Gaza were witnessing surging levels of acute malnutrition in the besieged and war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
The medical charity said levels of acute malnutrition had reached an “all-time high” at two of its facilities in the Gaza Strip.
It said it now had more than 700 pregnant and breastfeeding women and nearly 500 children with severe and moderate malnutrition currently enrolled in ambulatory therapeutic feeding centres in both clinics.
