IDF says its troops have ended operations in eastern Jabaliya
The Israeli military says its troops have ended operations in eastern Jabaliya in the northern section of the Gaza Strip, having destroyed 10 kilometres of tunnels and several weapons production sites in days of fighting that included more than 200 airstrikes.
During the operation in the heavily built up area, the troops also located the bodies of seven hostages, Reuters reports.
Key events
Israeli forces have ended combat operations in the Jabalia area of north Gaza after destroying more than 10 kilometres of tunnels during days of intense fighting that included over 200 airstrikes, the military said on Friday.
At the south end of Gaza, Israeli forces pressing an offensive into Rafah found rocket launchers and other weapons as well as tunnel shafts built by Hamas in the city centre, the army said. Tank-led Israeli troops aim to break up Hamas’ fighting formations in the city on the border with Egypt, according to Reuters.
In an update on more than two weeks of intense fighting in Jabalia, the Israeli military said troops had completed their operation and withdrawn to prepare for other operations in Gaza.
During the operation, troops recovered the bodies of seven of the 250 hostages Hamas-led militants abducted when they stormed over the border into Israel on Oct. 7 last year and killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, over 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and land war in Gaza, its Hamas-run health ministry says, and much of the densely populated enclave lies in ruins.
In Jabalia, a densely packed urban district populated by refugees from the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and their descendants, Hamas turned the “civilian area into a fortified combat compound”, the military statement said.
It said Israeli troops killed hundreds of militants in close-quarter combat and seized large caches of weaponry and destroyed rocket launchers primed for use.
Underground, Israel forces disabled a weapons-filled tunnel network extending over 10 km and killed Hamas’ district battalion commander, it said.
Israel has blamed what it calls Hamas’ deliberate embedding of fighters in residential areas for the high civilian toll in the war. Hamas has denied using civilians as cover for fighters.
Jabalia has been battered by intense combat for weeks, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas units.
There were weeks of heavy fighting in Jabalia in the early stages of the Israeli campaign and in January, the military said it had killed all the Hamas commanders and eliminated the combat formations of Gaza’s ruling group in the area.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to eradicate Hamas as a fighting and political force has run up against the Islamist group’s deep roots in Gaza’s social fabric.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, urged Israel on Wednesday to come up with a postwar plan for Gaza, warning that without one, further military gains might not be durable, and lawlessness, chaos and a Hamas comeback could ensue.
Belgium’s Ghent University has severed ties with all Israeli universities and research institutions, as they no longer align with its human rights policy, the university said on Friday.
Pro-Palestinian protesters in Ghent have been protesting against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and have been occupying parts of the university campus since early May.
According to Reuters, an investigation by the Ghent University – known as UGent – highlighted concerns regarding connections between Israeli academic institutions and the Israeli government, military, or security services, according to a university statement.
The investigation also referenced a recent World Court ruling stating that the humanitarian situation in Gaza had worsened in recent months.
UGent, which already severed ties with three Israeli institutions two weeks ago, had 18 ongoing partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, it said.
The university will continue its research projects with six non-academic Israeli institutions, saying they could not find any links between them and human rights violations.
Protesters told Belgian broadcaster VRT they welcomed the decision but want to see it extended to include the six Israeli non-academic partners UGent currently partners with. They added they will continue their protest.
Here is an extract from a piece about a small group of Israelis stopping settlers obstructing aid trucks, by Lorenzo Tondo and Quique Kierszenbaum in Tarqumiya, with photographs by Alessio Mamo:
At approximately 10.30am on a scorching Monday, a group of five young Israeli settlers arrived at the Tarqumiya checkpoint, west of Hebron in the West Bank, where dozens of aid trucks bound for Gaza were expected.
The settlers had received detailed information about the timing, location, and number of trucks that would pass through the checkpoint that morning. What they had not anticipated was that dozens of peace activists had also gathered in Tarqumiya with a specific mission: to prevent the settlers from blocking the vehicles and ensure that the aid continued its journey to Gaza.
“We decided to form this humanitarian guard, because we understand that this a fight over the lives of innocent people in Gaza,” said Alon-Lee Green, the national co-director of the Jewish-Arab peace coalition Standing Together, a movement mobilising Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality and social justice. “These are people who have lost their homes [and] their land, people facing starvation.
“But it’s not only about on this, it’s also a battle over the soul of our society, over the question of whether we can remain human, in the face of fear, in the face of trauma, whether we can make sure that we choose life over death, or we choose solidarity over hatred and starvation.”
You are read the full story here.
Here are a few images from the news wires, showing some of the support for Palestinian people from across the globe.
Yemen’s Houthis launched a missile attack on the US aircraft carrier Eisenhower in the Red Sea in response to US-UK strikes on the Yemeni provinces of Sana’a, Hodeidah and Taiz, Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said in a televised statement on Friday.
Israel will not agree to any halt in fighting in Gaza that is not part of a deal that includes a return of hostages, a senior Israeli security official said on Friday.
The comment came after a statement from Hamas declaring that it would be ready to reach an agreement including an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, as long as Israel stopped the fighting in Gaza.
In comments sent to Reuters, an official said:
There will be no truce, or any halt in fighting whatsoever, in Gaza which is not part-and-parcel of a hostage-release deal.
Any ceasefire would arise solely within the framework of a deal.
The number of people fleeing their homes because of war, violence and persecution has reached 114 million and is climbing because nations have failed to tackle the causes and combatants are refusing to comply with international law, the UN refugee chief said Thursday.
In a hard-hitting speech, Filippo Grandi criticised the UN security council, which is charged with maintaining international peace and security, for failing to use its voice to try to resolve conflicts from Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan to Congo, Myanmar and many other places.
According to AP, he also accused unnamed countries of making “shortsighted foreign policy decisions, often founded on double standards, with lip service paid to compliance with the law, but little muscle flexed from the council to actually uphold it and – with it – peace and security.”
Grandi said non-compliance with international humanitarian law means that “parties to conflicts – increasingly everywhere, almost all of them – have stopped respecting the laws of war,” though some pretend to do so.
The result is more civilian deaths, sexual violence is used as a weapons of war, hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure are attacked and destroyed, and humanitarian workers become targets, he said.
Calling himself a frustrated humanitarian and looking directly at the 15 council members, Grandi said that instead of using its voice, “the council’s cacophony has meant that you have instead continued to preside over a broader cacophony of chaos around the world.”
The high commissioner for refugees told the council it’s too late for the tens of thousands who have been killed in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and other conflicts.
“But it is not too late to put your focus and energy on the crises and conflicts that remain unresolved, so that they are not allowed to fester and explode again,” Grandi said. “It is not too late to step up help for the millions who have been forcibly displaced to return home voluntarily, in safety and with dignity.”
IDF says its troops have ended operations in eastern Jabaliya
The Israeli military says its troops have ended operations in eastern Jabaliya in the northern section of the Gaza Strip, having destroyed 10 kilometres of tunnels and several weapons production sites in days of fighting that included more than 200 airstrikes.
During the operation in the heavily built up area, the troops also located the bodies of seven hostages, Reuters reports.
Spain rejects “restrictions” that Israel plans to impose on the activities of its consulate in Jerusalem in response to Madrid’s recognition of a Palestinian state, Spanish foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, said Friday.
During an interview with radio Onda Cero, he said:
This morning we sent a ’note verbale’ to the Israeli government in which we reject any restriction on the normal activity of the Spanish consulate general in Jerusalem, as its status is guaranteed by international law.
This status cannot therefore be changed unilaterally by Israel.
He added that Madrid had asked Israel “to reverse this decision”.
Israel’s foreign ministry said Monday it had told the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem to stop offering consular services to Palestinians from 1 June over Madrid’s recognition of a Palestinian state, AFP reports.
The ministry said that Spain’s consulate in Jerusalem is “authorised to provide consular services to residents of the consular district of Jerusalem only, and is not authorised to provide services or perform consular activity vis-a-vis residents of the Palestinian Authority”.
Israeli foreign minister called it a “punitive” measure after the Spanish government’s recognition of a Palestinian state.
Spain is one of the European countries that has been most critical of Israel over the war in Gaza.
Last week, Spain, Ireland and Norway announced their decision to recognise the State of Palestine from Tuesday, 28 May, drawing a strong rebuke from Israel.
Here are some of the latest images from the news wires.
US state department falsified report absolving Israel on Gaza aid – ex-official
Julian Borger
The state department falsified a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, overruling the advice of its own experts, according to a former senior US official who resigned this week.
Stacy Gilbert left her post as senior civil military adviser in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration, on Tuesday. She had been one of the department’s subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.
The NSM-20 report found that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used US weapons in a way that was “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, but that there was not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations.
Even more controversially, the report said the state department did not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance” in Gaza.
It was a high-stakes judgment because under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act, the US would be obliged to cut arms sales and security assistance to any country found to have blocked delivery of US aid.
Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the state department who has worked in several war zones, said that report’s conclusion went against the overwhelming view of state department experts who were consulted on the report.
Opening summary
We are restarting the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.
The US and UK struck 13 Houthi targets in several locations in Yemen on Thursday evening, in response to a recent surge in attacks by the Iran-backed militia group on ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, US officials said.
According to the officials, American and British fighter jets and US ships hit a wide range of underground facilities, missile launchers, command and control sites, a Houthi vessel and other facilities.
The Houthis’ Al Masirah satellite news said at least two people were killed and 10 others were wounded in one of the strikes. It’s the fifth time that the US and British militaries have conducted a combined operation against the Houthis since 12 January.
Elsewhere, a former US officials has accused the state department of falsifying a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza.
Stacy Gilbert left her post as senior civil military adviser in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration, on Tuesday. She had been one of the department’s subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.
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Israeli forces have killed about 300 Palestinian gunmen since an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was launched on 6 May, Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said on Thursday.
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Rafah residents reported intense artillery shelling and gunfire on Thursday. On the ground in the Gaza Strip, witnesses reported fighting in central and western Rafah, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). According to the news agency, witnesses also said Israeli forces had demolished several buildings in the city’s eastern areas.
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A car ramming attack killed two Israeli soldiers near the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli army said early on Thursday. According to Israeli media, the army has launched a manhunt for the perpetrator of the attack. Hamas welcomed the attack near Nablus, saying in a statement it was a “natural response” against the “crimes of the enemy”.
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An investigative reporter with Israel’s leading leftwing newspaper, Haaretz, has said unnamed senior security officials threatened actions against him if he reported on attempts by the former head of the Mossad to intimidate the ex-prosecutor of the international criminal court. In an article published on Thursday, the investigative reporter Gur Megiddo described how two years ago security officials blocked an attempt by the paper to report efforts by the then Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, to threaten the then ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. Details of the operation to influence Bensouda were revealed this week by the Guardian.
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EU workers staged a silent protest over the continuing attacks on Rafah outside the main institutional buildings in Brussels on Thursday. Some held banners declaring “civil servants demand ceasefire in Gaza” while others called for the end to “EU Israel agreements that don’t respect EU values”. It comes less than a week after 200 staffers wrote to protest against what they believe is an insufficient response by the EU to the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
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The charity, ActionAid described Israeli military pressing on with its ground invasion of Rafah as a “flagrant disregard of the binding ICJ ruling issued on 24 May”. Riham Jafari, communications and advocacy coordinator at ActionAid Palestine, said: “The last few days have been utterly harrowing. Our colleagues and partners in Gaza are at a total loss as to what they can do and where they can go, when death surrounds them everywhere they turn and nowhere is safe.”
