Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 647

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, spoke to TRT Balkan about the sanctions imposed on her by the United States.

“The personal attacks, the reputational damage, the threats,” she told TRT. “This was not really unexpected but unnecessary.

“By sanctioning me, the US is violating the 1946 Vienna Convention on Privileges and Immunities, which is immediately self-executing in US courts.”

The health of Dr Hussam Abu Safia, a prominent paediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, has deteriorated significantly while in Israeli detention, his lawyer said in a statement posted on social media, Al Jazeera reports.

Abu Safia was detained in December last year, when Israeli forces raided Kamal Adwan Hospital, taking him, other medical staff and patients into custody, and forcing the last major hospital in northern Gaza out of service.

According to his lawyer, Abu Safia has lost more than 40 kilogrammes (88 pounds) since his arrest, dropping from 100 kilogrammes (220 pounds) to about 60 kilogrammes (132 pounds). He was reportedly severely beaten on June 24 at Ofer Prison, sustaining injuries to his ribs, face and back. Despite requesting medical care and cardiology tests for an irregular heartbeat, his requests were denied.

He remains in solitary confinement under harsh conditions, deprived of sunlight, and still wearing winter clothes in the summer heat. His lawyer warned that Abu Safia and many other Palestinian detainees are in grave condition.

The foreign minister of Palestine, Varsen Aghabekian Shahin, is scheduled to hold meetings with a number of European foreign ministers, including Kaja Kallas, in an EU meeting in Brussels, where Israel’s foreign minister will be present as well, AFP reports.

Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers were also due to meet in Brussels today, but the Palestinian Authority denied that the two would meet.

According to a statement by the Palestinian Authority, “The minister will demand an immediate halt to the crimes of genocide, displacement and annexation, and to compel the Israeli government to comply with the international will for peace and open a political negotiation process to end the occupation and enable our people to exercise their right to self-determination,”.

Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar is also expected to meet with foreign ministers on the sidelines of the event and will hold talks with the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas.

An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces indictment on security charges pending a hearing, Israel’s attorney general has said, for allegedly leaking top secret military information during Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, Reuters reports.

Netanyahu’s close adviser, Jonatan Urich, has denied any wrongdoing in the case, which legal authorities began investigating in late 2024. Netanyahu has described probes against Urich and other aides as politically motivated and said that Urich had not harmed state security. Urich’s attorneys said the charges were baseless and that their client’s innocence would be proven beyond doubt.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said in a statement late on Sunday that Urich and another aide had extracted secret information from the Israeli military and leaked it to German newspaper Bild. Their intent, she said, was to shape public opinion of Netanyahu and influence the discourse about the slaying of six Israeli hostages by their Palestinian captors in Gaza in late August 2024.

In his statement, Netanyahu said Baharav-Miara’s announcement was “appalling” and that its timing raised serious questions.

Netanyahu’s government has for months been seeking the dismissal of Baharav-Miara. The attorney general, appointed by the previous government, has sparred with Netanyahu’s cabinet over the legality of some of its policies.

Read the full Reuters story here.

At least 12 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since dawn, medical sources told Al Jazeera Arabic.

Among those, one person was killed, and several others were injured in an Israeli airstrike on a water tanker in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

According to a source at the Baptist Hospital, two people were killed in an attack on the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood east of Gaza City.

A medical source at Al-Shifa Hospital, northern Gaza, said that five Palestinians were killed in an attack on the Al-Saftawi area.

The Israeli army says its warplanes have attacked Gaza more than 100 times in the past 24 hours, claiming “terrorist organisations” are the targets, Al Jazeera reports.

It added that ground advances are also continuing across the besieged enclave, especially in the north.

The Israeli army said fighting is ongoing in the mostly destroyed Shujayea and Zeitoun neighbourhoods of Gaza City and in Beit Hanoon and Jabalia in the North Gaza governorate.

Israeli forces have detained four Palestinians during a series of raids across Hebron governorate in the southern occupied West Bank, Middle East Eye reports, citing local sources speaking to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Troops stormed the town of Halhul, north of Hebron, and arrested Muhammad Khaled Da’dara, Qusay Akram Abu Rayyan, and Mo’tasim Walid Mar’ab after raiding their homes.

In a separate raid in the town of Sa’ir, northeast of Hebron, Israeli forces also arrested Yousef al-Tarwa.

Sources told Wafa that soldiers vandalised homes and physically assaulted several detainees during the arrests.

Military checkpoints were also set up at multiple entry points to Hebron and its surrounding areas, with several main and side roads blocked by concrete barriers, iron gates, and earth mounds.

Al Jazeera Arabic reports that Israeli forces have bombed tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in Khan Younis, killing at least one person and wounding several.

Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sats the so-called “humanitarian city” that the Israeli government wants to build on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, Al Jazeera reports.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” he told the Guardian newspaper.

“If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing. It hasn’t yet happened,” Olmert said.

“When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have, at least,” he added.

The New York Times on Sunday rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s denial of its report alleging he prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power, saying his office “does not refute the facts” of the investigation.

The report, published on Friday, was based on more than 110 interviews and internal documents. It alleged that Netanyahu delayed a ceasefire and blocked a normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia to maintain the support of his far-right coalition partners and protect his political position.

In a statement, the Israeli PM’s Office dismissed the story, calling it a “rehash of long discredited claims of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political opponents.”

In response, a spokesperson for The New York Times said: “The statement from the Prime Minister’s office does not refute the facts of that reporting.”

“Our role as independent journalists is to report and disclose information vital to the public interest, and to hold leaders to account regardless of party,” the spokesperson said. “What our investigation shows in detail is how prolonging the Gaza war helped Mr Netanyahu to stay in power.”

At least 95 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids across the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, Middle East Eye reports, citing hospital sources who spoke to Al Jazeera Arabic.

Medical staff say the casualties were recorded since dawn on Sunday, as bombardment intensified in several areas of the besieged enclave.

Demolition operations being conducted by Israel in Gaza’s southern Rafah Governorate have been stepped up sharply, an investigation by Al Jazeera’s Sanad investigations unit has found.

Israel’s defence ministry has announced a plan to relocate 600,000 people into what observers say would be “concentration camps” in the area in southern Gaza, with plans to expand this to the Strip’s entire population.

Sanad’s analysis of satellite imagery up to July 4, 2025, shows the number of demolished buildings in Rafah rising to about 28,600, up from 15,800 on April 4, 2025, according to data from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT).

This means that approximately 12,800 buildings were destroyed between early April and early July alone — a marked acceleration in demolitions that has coincided with Israel’s new push into Rafah launched in late March 2025.

Read the full Al Jazeera story here.

US President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday that talks are ongoing over Israel’s conflict in Gaza and he hopes for progress in the next week, even as ceasefire negotiations in Doha stalled, AFP reports.

“Gaza — we are talking and hopefully we’re going to get that straightened out over the next week,” Trump said, echoing similarly optimistic comments he made July 4.

US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff says that he is “hopeful” about Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Reuters reports.

In a joint statement, eight UN agencies have warned that Gaza’s worsening fuel shortage is threatening to shut down critical humanitarian operations, Al Jazeera reports.

Unicef, WHO, WFP, Unrwa, UNFPA, UNDP, OCHA, and UNOPS said that without immediate fuel deliveries, essential services — including hospitals, water desalination, food distribution, and sanitation — could come to a halt.

“Without fuel, these lifelines will vanish for 2.1 million people,” the statement read, adding that hospitals are “already going dark”.

“Fuel must be allowed into Gaza in sufficient quantities and consistently to sustain life-saving operations.”

Families of Israeli captives held in Gaza have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of once again trying to create a “false impression” that reaching a comprehensive ceasefire agreement is impossible, Al Jazeera reports.

They say the government has “failed time and time again” in securing the return of captives due to “narrow political interests”.

“Over 80 per cent of the people want an agreement that will bring an end to the fighting and the return of all the hostages,” they said in a statement. “Whoever sabotages such an agreement is acting maliciously against the will of the people of Israel for the sake of political survival.”

The director of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, has warned that hospitals in the besieged enclave will cease operations tomorrow if they are not supplied with the necessary fuel.

Speaking to Al Jazeera Arabic, Abu Salmiya said the Israeli army withholds much-needed fuel “up to the point of death”, and only then are hospitals given a very small amount of fuel.

“Hospitals cannot function properly in this way. We have patients, medical teams who want to work in full force. Instead, they are all on edge … the fuel crisis is a massive one,” Abu Salmiya said.

Medical supplies and medicines are also running “dangerously low”, he said.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees says in a post on X that without urgent care, children in Gaza can die, as it urged Israeli authorities to allow thousands of trucks waiting to bring lifesaving aid into Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

In a separate post, it said that a 7-month-old girl, Salam, suffering from serious acute malnutrition and being treated by UNRWA’s teams, had died today while being treated by its teams.

It says she is one of thousands of malnourished children in Gaza, with more cases detected every day.

Gaza’s Government Media office says the Israeli army and private US security contractors managing aid distribution sites are “systematically killing starving civilians”, Al Jazeera reports.

In a strongly worded statement, the office said that “genocide engineering is taking place under US sponsorship and with the participation of complicit states”, calling the aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) “death traps”.

According to an updated toll provided by the office, 805 people have been killed and 5,252 have been wounded while approaching the sites.

The statement added that 42 people have been reported missing since GHF began operating in Gaza on May 27.

Israeli attacks across Gaza have killed at least 70 people today, Al Jazeera reports, citing medical sources.

At least 35 of them have been killed in attacks on Gaza City, where Israeli forces have stepped up their bombing campaign.