Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 594

United States Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren has urged the Trump administration to pressure Israel to “open up aid routes and stop starving Palestinians … instead of trying to do a Gaza real estate deal”, Al Jazeera reports.

“In Gaza, hospitals have collapsed. Babies have run out of formula. Clean drinking water is gone,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, trucks filled with aid are waiting idle by the border.”

Gaza’s civil defence agency has said that an Israeli strike in the southern city of Khan Younis killed nine children belonging to a pair of married doctors, with the Israeli army saying it was reviewing the reports, according to AFP.

Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said civil defence “crews transported the bodies of nine child martyrs, some of them charred, from the home of Hamdi al-Najjar and his wife, Alaa al-Najjar, all of whom were their children,” adding that the father and another son were also seriously wounded in the strike yesterday.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says that more than 70,000 children in Gaza face acute levels of malnutrition, as Israel continues to only allow a minuscule amount of aid to enter the devastated territory, Al Jazeera reports.

“WFP is taking every opportunity to deliver food and nutrition assistance — but this is just a drop in the bucket,” the United Nations agency posted on X. “To avert famine and save lives, we need immediate, unrestricted and safe access to deliver.”

Gaza’s Government Media Office has registered 300 cases of miscarriages in pregnant women in the enclave due to a lack of food, Al Jazeera reports.

At least 58 Palestinians died due to malnutrition and 242 due to a lack of food and medicine, it added.

Several healthcare workers and others at the European Hospital in Khan Younis cannot be evacuated because of repeated Israeli fire, Al Jazeera reports citing Gaza’s health ministry.

In a statement shared on Telegram, the ministry called on “the relevant authorities to provide protection for healthcare facilities” and their staff.

At least 94 per cent of Gaza’s hospitals have been damaged or destroyed in Israel’s military offensive on the enclave, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

Originally set to begin on Sunday, US-led aid distribution has been delayed until Monday to Tuesday due to logistical reasons, Al Jazeera reports citing Israeli outlet Ynet.

Three aid distribution points have been established in the enclave: In Rafah, between the Morag and Philadelphi axes, and on the Saladin axis, the outlet said.

The aid will be distributed to Palestinians through family representatives, Ynet reported.

Israeli settlers have damaged water pipes supplying Palestinian families in the al-Auja waterfall area, located north of Jericho in the occupied West Bank, according to a local rights organisation, Al Jazeera reports.

Hassan Mleihat, general supervisor of the Al-Baidar Organisation for the Defence of Bedouin Rights, told Wafa news agency that settlers tampered with the water supply to force Palestinian residents into leaving their land.

Gaza’s civil defence agency has said Israeli strikes killed at least 15 people across the Palestinian territory, where Israel has ramped up its military offensive in recent days.

Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP the dead included a couple who were killed with their two young children in a pre-dawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of the southern city of Khan Younis.

To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he said.

At Khan Younis’s Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered around white-shrouded bodies outside.

“Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians — my sister, her husband and their children,” said Wissam Al-Madhoun. “We found them lying in the street. What did this child do to (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu?”

The Israeli military said it was unable to comment on individual strikes without their “precise geographical coordinates”.

Martin Griffiths, the former head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza are “the worst” that have been experienced in the conflict so far.

“It is worse than ever,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that this is visible in the daily death toll in the enclave.

He said what is going on in Gaza is “unequivocally weaponisation of aid to create starvation and children are dying because of it”.

“There is no way you can look at it in any other way,” Griffiths, who is currently with private diplomacy firm Mediation Group International, stressed.

He said the amount of aid that recently went into the enclave is “tiny”, and it was kept in the south, adding that it is part of Israel and the US’s new plan for aid distribution. He stressed that the aid is kept in the south to draw people from the north to make a “dangerous journey”.

“Surely IDF (Israeli army) will check identities, and actually it is going to be a one-way trip,” Griffiths said. “It is aid with displacement, it is aid with victimisation, and not enough aid anyway.”

The Israeli military claims its aircraft struck 100 targets in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, Al Jazeera reports.

An army update claims one of the targets was a rocket launcher that was used to fire at southern Israel.

Palestinian fighters, as well as tunnels and infrastructure used by them, were among the other targets hit, according to the statement.

The director of medical relief in Gaza has said only 92 aid trucks have entered the enclave in three days, according to Al Jazeera.

He added that the healthcare, water and food situation in Gaza is very difficult, and that no food or medical aid has reached northern Gaza.

The statement contradicts Israel’s claim of 83 trucks entering Gaza yesterday, and 107 trucks being allowed on Thursday.

Al-Awda Hospital’s director tells Al Jazeera that Israeli forces have bombed the perimeter of the facility in Gaza, with shrapnel scattering in the area.

He said the hospital has been targeted for days and also reported attacks against ambulances transporting the sick and wounded.

Al Jazeera correspondents reported artillery shelling in the vicinity of the hospital in northern Gaza.

The Israeli military has said its forces have “neutralised” an assailant who attempted to carry out a stabbing attack at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, Al Jazeera reports.

No casualties were reported, it said in a statement, without offering further details.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 11 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks since dawn across the territory, Al Jazeera reports.

Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat) has said it allowed “83 trucks belonging to the UN and the international community” to carry humanitarian aid into Gaza yesterday.

In a post on X, it said the trucks “carrying humanitarian aid, including flour, food, medical equipment and pharmaceutical drugs, were transferred today (Friday) via the Kerem Shalom Crossing into the Gaza Strip”.

“All aid was transferred only after a thorough security inspection by personnel from the Ministry of Defence’s Crossing Points Authority,” the statement added.

“The IDF will continue to facilitate humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip while making every effort to ensure that the aid does not reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organisation,” Cogat vowed.

Hamas has called US House of Representatives member Randy Fine’s suggestion to use a nuclear bomb in Gaza “an incitement to genocide and a crime against humanity”, Al Jazeera reports.

Hamas said in a statement on Telegram that “this rhetoric is filled with hatred and incitement to genocide”.

“This extremist call is a full-fledged crime and evidence of the fascist racism that governs the thinking of some American politicians.”

In a statement yesterday, Republican legislator Randy Fine told Fox News: “In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get [an] unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.”

At least eight people have been confirmed dead since midnight local time (2am PKT), an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent on the ground in Gaza reports.

A new poll, carried out by Israeli television network Channel 12, asked respondents whether Prime Minister Netanyahu was more interested in remaining in power than winning the Gaza offensive or freeing the remaining captives, Al Jazeera reports.

Some 55 per cent of respondents said they believed Netanyahu saw staying in power as his main goal, while only 36pc said they believed returning the captives was paramount for the prime minister.

When returning the captives was exchanged for “winning the war”, responses remained roughly the same.

When asked why there hadn’t been another captives-for-ceasefire deal, some 53 pc of respondents said they believed it was due to political reasons.

The Israeli military carried out a drone strike targeting “several armed Palestinians” in central Gaza, The Times of Israel reports, citing an unnamed Israeli military source.

The source said some of those hit were “Hamas operatives, who were spotted next to humanitarian aid trucks”.

However, Gaza’s Government Media Office has confirmed six people were killed by Israeli air strikes in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, but denied the men were members of Hamas, Al Jazeera stated, citing Anadolu Agency and Middle East Monitor.

In a statement, the office said they were “aid security and protection teams … who were performing purely humanitarian tasks”.

The statement continued that the men were “securing two trucks carrying vital medicines and medical supplies for the health sector, to ensure their delivery to hospitals in devastated areas”.

It added that Israel “targeting them is a full-fledged crime”.

A spokesman for the UN’s World Food Programme tells Al Jazeera that Palestinians are travelling roughly 25 kilometres to get life-sustaining aid, two days after Israel allowed the first trucks into the enclave in months.

The aid, however, the spokesman said, is not nearly enough.

Gaza requires at least 500 trucks per day to adequately feed and care for the population.

Israeli forces have attacked a tent housing displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, wounding at least two people, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.

Two people have also been wounded after Israeli fighter jets bombed a location north of the town of Abasan al-Kabira near Khan Younis, according to AJA.

Israeli forces have also detonated explosive-laden robots in Khan Younis, the Quds News Network reports. No casualties have been reported so far.