Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 241

After another airstrike pulverised Gaza, the two al-Breim sisters realised their mother Amira was missing and rushed to the scene, crying out her name and frantically sifting through the rubble for any sign of her, Reuters reports.

“It is like we’re in a nightmare. It is as though we are in a dream. A dream,” sobbed Samar al-Breim amid piles of collapsed concrete and twisted cables.

“I pray to God that I wake up and find out that it was only a dream and that it is not true,” she added.

“What did they do to deserve this?”

Children were also sleeping at the site of the airstrike in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, she said.

“The children were asleep, they are innocent, they were torn to pieces.”

Her sister Sahar said their uncles, along with their families, had perished, adding that she also should have been staying at her mother’s house overnight but had been unable to come due to a lack of transport.

“My mother is stuck underneath here,” she added, gesturing to the mounds of rubble.

“There is nowhere safe in all of Gaza.”

“We hope to God there will be a ceasefire because we have lost a lot — we have lost all our loved ones. We have nothing left,” said Sahar, continuing to call out her mother’s name.

Samar al-Breim clutched at a few random items amid the mounds of rubble.

“They (the Israelis) want to annihilate us […] Despite the pain, the death, the destruction they have caused, we will be victorious, God willing […] and we will be stronger than before,” Samar added.

On the same scorching day last month, Israeli troops fought street battles with Hamas militants in Gaza, its fighter jets struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and soldiers exchanged fire with Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank.

As the war in the Gaza Strip nears its ninth month, Israel’s military is getting pulled deeper into conflicts on multiple fronts and risks becoming overstretched, analysts told AFP.

“The Israeli military is stretched to the point right now where it’s operating in Gaza and in the north and in the West Bank — and that is having a strain on its capabilities,” Rami Dajani, an expert on Israel and the Palestinian territories at the International Crisis Group (ICG), told AFP.

Israel’s army is one of the world’s best-funded militaries but it relies on reservists for much of its fighting force.

According to the Gaza War Unit Tracker, an account on social media platform X, nearly all of Israel’s 15,000 active duty combat soldiers are currently engaged in fighting.

About 10,000 of them were deployed in and around Gaza, 2,500 stationed in northern border areas and 2,500 in the West Bank, the owner of the account told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Israel also has as many as 26,000 reservists currently mobilised in active combat roles, with most of them deployed in the West Bank, the account’s owner said.

The Israeli army declined to comment on the specific numbers of its forces.

The British airline will resume flights between London and Israel in September after pausing flights due to the offensive, Al Jazeera reports.

The airline said it will operate a daily flight in each direction between Heathrow and Tel Aviv using Airbus A330 aircraft from September 5.

“Our return to Tel Aviv on September 5 will be welcome news for customers who have enjoyed our service since 2019, and this time round it’ll be strengthened by our new codeshare partnership with El Al,” Juha Jarvinen, Virgin Atlantic’s chief commercial officer, said.

An Israeli government spokesman has said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu viewed a plan for a hostage release deal in Gaza presented by US President Joe Biden as a “partial” outline, AFP reports.

“The outline that President Biden presented is partial,” government spokesman David Mencer quoted Netanyahu as saying, adding that “the war will be stopped for the purpose of returning the hostages” after which discussions will follow on how to achieve the war’s goal of eliminating Hamas.

“The claims that we have agreed to a ceasefire without our conditions being met are incorrect,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying in a separate statement issued by his office.

Slovenia’s conservative opposition has filed a motion that delays the country’s recognition of a Palestinian state, a parliamentary spokeswoman said, following last month’s recognition by three other European states, AFP reports.

Slovenian lawmakers had been scheduled to vote on Tuesday whether to recognise a Palestinian state, just days after Spain, Ireland and Norway extended their recognition in response to the devastating Gaza offensive.

The three centre-left parties in the governing coalition, which hold 51 of the 90 seats in parliament, support the recognition of a state of Palestine as part of efforts to end the fighting as soon as possible.

But the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) led by former prime minister Janez Jansa filed a proposal to hold an advisory referendum on the decree for the recognition, the parliamentary spokeswoman told AFP — a procedure that effectively delays the vote by about 30 days.

Now parliament will have to decide on the SDS proposal at its next regular session — scheduled for June 17.

Though it is likely to be rejected, parliament might not then resume the debate about the recognition decree until its next session scheduled for July 8.

Lebanese official media said Israeli strikes on a car and a motorcycle in the country’s south have killed two people, with cross-border clashes intensifying in recent days, AFP reports.

“An enemy drone strike targeted a motorcycle in Naqura,” a coastal town near the Israeli border, Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) said, later reporting “one person was killed and another wounded”.

In another attack, “an enemy drone targeted a car” near the southern village of Zrariyeh, “killing one person”, the NNA said, also reporting Israeli strikes in the country’s east.

It did not say whether the dead were civilians or fighters.

Hezbollah said it launched “a squadron of explosive-laden drones” at northern Israeli army positions “in response to the assassination carried out by the Israeli enemy this afternoon in the Zrariyeh area”.

The violence came as Iran’s acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri was visiting Lebanon, where he was expected to meet Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

A far-right Israeli coalition partner accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of trying to “whitewash” a deal to wind down the Gaza war that is being advanced by US President Joe Biden, and repeated a threat to quit the government, Reuters reports.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told his parliamentary faction that Netanyahu invited him to read the proposal but the premier’s aides twice failed to produce the document. Any plan must entail toppling Hamas, Ben-Gvir said.

Israel’s top Gaza priority is destroying Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, adding that it would be pursued along with hostage recovery and that both goals were in a plan to wind down the offensive approved at the highest level of his government, Reuters reports.

“This is not something that I am adding now. This is not something that I am adding because I am under pressure within the coalition. It is something we agreed on unanimously in the war cabinet,” Netanyahu said in a video statement.

Ahead of the UK general election next month, opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer suggests his government would review legal advice on arms sales to Israel, Al Jazeera reports.

“It is for the government obviously to review the licences. They do it one by one. They have got legal advice. We’ve been pressing them to disclose that legal advice. And I still press them to disclose that legal advice,” Starmer said at a campaign event at the Fusilier Museum in Bury.

“Obviously, if we’re privileged to come into power, we’ll be able to see that advice or commission our own.

“But look, I will just add this, that the Rafah offensive should not go ahead. And that I think our government should follow the US lead on this in relation to arms sales and review the licences to see whether any of them would be or are being used in the Rafah offensive.”

He added that his “number one priority is to ensure we get a ceasefire”.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has called on Israel to agree to a recently unveiled ceasefire plan and send a delegation to Cairo today to hammer out the details, Al Jazeera reports.

In a post on X, Lapid reiterated to PM Netanyahu, whose right-wing coalition allies have threatened to collapse the government if the plan goes ahead, that he would step in and provide the government with a “political safety net” to save the deal.

Yossi Cohen, in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio, said Israel knows the whereabouts of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and “if we wanted to…could take him down”, Al Jazeera reports.

The message comes as conflict rages along the Israel-Lebanon border, with Hezbollah and the Israeli military trading near daily strikes.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised Hamas’ October 7 attack against Israel and predicted the “destruction” of their common enemy, AFP reports.

Khamenei, 85, was speaking at an event to mark 35 years since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic which replaced a US-backed monarchy.

He said the October 7 attack by Palestinian group Hamas “was a decisive blow to the Zionist regime” and put Israel “on the path that will only end in its destruction”.

Some 55 per cent of all structures in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, damaged or possibly damaged since war erupted in the Palestinian territory eight months ago, according to preliminary satellite analysis by the UN, AFP reports.

The analysis showed more than 137,000 buildings affected, UNOSAT, the United Nations satellite analysis agency, said on X, formerly Twitter.

The estimate is based on a satellite image taken on May 3, and compared with images taken in May a year earlier, last September, and on October 15.

The fresh satellite image was also compared to images taken during several dates in November, then again during the first months of this year, UNOSAT said.

Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 36,479 Palestinians and wounded 82,777 since Oct 7, the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry said, Reuters reports.

Forty Palestinians have been killed and 150 wounded in the past 24 hours, the ministry said in a statement.

A group of United Nations experts has called on all countries to recognise a Palestinian state to ensure peace in the Middle East, Reuters reports.

The call came less than a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway officially recognised a Palestinian state, prompting anger from Israel, which has found itself increasingly isolated after a nearly eight-month-long military campaign in Gaza.

The experts, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said recognition of a Palestinian state was an important acknowledgement of their rights and struggle towards freedom and independence.

“This is a pre-condition for lasting peace in Palestine and the entire Middle East, beginning with the immediate declaration of a ceasefire in Gaza and no further military incursions into Rafah,” they said.

“A two-state solution remains the only internationally agreed path to peace and security for both Palestine and Israel and a way out of generational cycles of violence and resentment.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry did not respond immediately to Reuters’ request for comment.

Medics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) have recovered the body of a woman who was killed in Abu al-Ajeen area, east of Deir el-Balah.

Footage posted by the group shows medics carrying the woman’s body, covered in a blanket, into a hospital to be prepared for burial.

She is among dozens of casualties reported in Israel’s latest wave of attacks on the Strip.

A war monitor has said 16 members of pro-Iran groups were killed in an Israeli strike near northern Syria’s Aleppo, with state media also reporting a deadly Israeli attack, AFP reports.

“The death toll of the Israeli strike on a factory in Hayyan in western Aleppo province has risen to 16 pro-Iran group members, including Syrian and foreigner fighters,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria, had initially reported 12 dead.

It said pro-Iranian groups composed of local and foreign fighters have considerable influence in government-controlled Hayyan.

The Syrian defence ministry said in a statement that “after midnight… the Israeli enemy launched an air attack from the southeast of Aleppo, targeting some positions” near the city, reporting “martyrs” and “some material damage”.

While Israel rarely comments on individual strikes in Syria, it has repeatedly said it will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence there.

The targets hit over the last 24 hours included fighters, military infrastructure and weapons depots, according to a military statement, Al Jazeera reports.

In central Gaza, Israeli warplanes struck a “sniper post” and killed fighters there, according to the military, while ground troops killed a Hamas “rocket operative”.

Israel’s latest attacks across Gaza have also killed numerous civilians, including six women and children in an air attack on the Bureij refugee camp.

Egypt is clear on rejecting an Israeli presence at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has said, Reuters reports.

“It is difficult for the Rafah crossing to continue operating without a Palestinian administration,” he said in a press conference with his Spanish counterpart in Madrid.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezazel Smotrich has threatened to quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government if he accepts the peace proposal presented by US President Joe Biden.

In a post on X, Smotrich wrote, “I have now spoken with the Prime Minister and made it clear to him that I will not be part of a government that will agree to the proposed outline and end the war without destroying Hamas and returning all the abductees.”

He demanded that the government continue its military campaign and achieve “the creation of a completely different security reality in Gaza and Lebanon”.

War cabinet member Benny Gantz says Israel views the release of captives in Gaza as a “moral responsibility” and a “priority” objective“, Al Jazeera reports.

In a post on X, he emphasised these points to US Secretary of State Blinken during their call yesterday, adding that Israel would “exhaust any opportunity to achieve the goal”.

Gantz also noted the importance of the US exerting pressure on negotiators “to ensure the implementation of the arrangement proposed by Israel”.

On Friday, Biden unveiled a three-stage ceasefire plan, framed as an Israeli proposal. However, the proposal has drawn backlash from some far-right members of the Israeli government, who are pressuring Netanyahu not to accept it.

Israeli military operations have displaced over a million people from the Gazan city of Rafah, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) has said, Reuters reports

The small city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip had been sheltering around 1 million Palestinians who fled Israeli assaults on other parts of the enclave, aid groups said.

Since early May, Israel’s military has been carrying out what it says is a limited operation in Rafah to root out Hamas fighters and dismantle infrastructure used by the group that runs Gaza. The Israeli military has told civilians to go to an “expanded humanitarian zone” some 20 kilometres away.

Many Palestinians have complained they are vulnerable to Israeli attacks wherever they go and have been moving up and down the Gaza Strip in the past few months.

UNRWA said thousands of families now shelter in damaged and destroyed facilities in the city of Khan Younis, where the agency is providing essential services despite “increasing challenges”. “Conditions are unspeakable”, the agency added.

An Israeli attack on a residential apartment in Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood has killed at least four people and injured others, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.

The attack follows a series of deadly overnight strikes in central and southern Gaza that killed a total of 22 people, including women and children.