Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 197

Hamas political leader Imsail Haniyeh will meet Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday with Middle East tensions at a high after Israel’s reported attack on Iran and Gaza bracing for a new Israeli offensive, AFP reports.

Erdogan has sought but failed to establish a foothold as a mediator in the Palestinian conflict. And he has remained discreet about his meetings with the Hamas head.

“We will keep the agenda between us and Mr Haniyeh,” Erdogan said when questioned by journalists on Friday.

But with Qatar saying it will reassess its role as a mediator between Hamas and Israel, Erdogan sent his Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to Doha on Wednesday in a new sign that he wants a role.

“Even if only I, Tayyip Erdogan, remain, I will continue as long as God gives me my life, to defend the Palestinian struggle and to be the voice of the oppressed Palestinian people,” the president said Wednesday when he announced Hamiyeh’s looming visit.

Hamas has had an office in Turkey since 2011 when Turkey helped secure the agreement for the group to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Erdogan has maintained links with Haniyeh, who has been a frequent visitor.

Foreign Minister Fidan was a past head of Turkish intelligence and the country provided information and passports to Hamas officials, including Haniyeh, according to Sinan Ciddi, a Turkey specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. This has never been confirmed by Turkish authorities, however.

Al Jazeera reports that the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has agreed to help deliver aid for the starving people of Gaza via sea when a US military-built pier is complete, according to a report.

WFP will be partnering with USAID to carry out the humanitarian effort, but it remains unclear when the US will complete the construction of the pier in Gaza, The Associated Press (AP) news agency reports.

“This is a complex operation that requires coordination between many partners, and our conversations are ongoing,” USAID said in a statement to AP.

US and WFP officials are working on how to deliver aid to Palestinian civilians “in an independent, neutral, and impartial manner”, the agency said.

Nearly 34 hours later, the Israeli army is still operating in the Nur Shams refugee camp, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut reports from occupied East Jerusalem.

At around 3am local time, confrontations between Palestinian fighters and the Israeli military broke out once again.

We are looking at, at least, five people killed and more than 60 military vehicles and bulldozers that have gone in and wreaked havoc on the Palestinian refugee camp.

Residents are saying that this is some of the worst destruction that they have seen in decades.

Since the onslaught in Gaza started, the Israeli army has really stepped up these raids. Since all of the attention was on Gaza, there wasn’t really a lot of focus on the West Bank. So the Israeli military has been going in and killing Palestinians — at least 473 have been killed in these near-nightly raids that the Israeli military has been engaged in.

You are also looking at nearly 8,300 arrests and nearly 5,000 people who have been wounded as well.

The UAE has said it has launched a major relief operation in the Gaza Strip’s bombed out second city of Khan Younis, where it plans to rehabilitate a key hospital, AFP reports.

In a statement carried by the official WAM news agency, the UAE said it was the first foreign government to deliver aid to the city whose residents have begun to return after Israeli troops pulled back in early April ending months of heavy fighting.

“A team of volunteers headed to Khan Younis on a wide-scale field relief tour, during which they provided the necessary support to Palestinian families with the support of the UAE,” WAM said.

“The United Arab Emirates was the first country to reach the city of Khan Younis … to deliver thousands of food parcels, basic supplies, food, and bread,” it added.

“The UAE is seeking to rehabilitate the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis city in the coming period, so that it can return to work,” WAM said.

It said that the hospital’s “departments, equipment, and medical staff stopped working” due to the fighting.

An international humanitarian relief effort in the form of a Freedom Flotilla Coalition is getting ready to leave the western Turkish port of Tuzla and bring much-needed relief to residents of Gaza, AFP reports.

At least three vessels carrying some 5,000 tonnes of food, drinking water and medical aid are awaiting the green light from Turkish authorities to set sail from the port on the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul, organisers said.

Some 280 activists, rights campaigners, lawyers and doctors from more than 30 countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Norway, Spain, Malaysia and Germany, have joined the mission to Gaza.

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The organising committee of a Jewish pilgrimage to Tunisia’s Djerba synagogue cancelled the annual celebration due to the fighting in Gaza, the head of the organising committee Perez Trabelsi has told Reuters.

Trabelsi added that the annual pilgrimage will be reduced to limited rituals only inside the temple and expects a very small number to arrive from France due to the tense situation in the Middle East.

“How do we celebrate when people die every day?” he said.

Sitting around a fire in the hills of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Ibrahim Abu Alyah and some friends stood watch over his herd in the aftermath of a settler raid on their village.

“We are here so that we can put away the sheep and tell people to protect their homes in case settlers come,” Abu Alyah told AFP.

After 14-year-old Israeli herder Benjamin Achimeir went missing on April 12 in the nearby illegal settler outpost of Malachi Hashalom, dozens of Jewish settlers stormed his village of Al-Mughayyir, north of Ramallah.

Armed with rifles and Molotov cocktails, they set houses ablaze, killed sheep, wounded 23 people and displaced 86, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA.

One Palestinian was also killed in the violence.

Abu Alyah, a shepherd, lost “20 or 30 sheep” and the cash he made from selling milk products when his house was set alight.

Al-Mughayyir mayor Amin Abu Alyah said the settlers, who were part of the search party for Achimeir, burnt “everything they found in front of them”, including houses, a bulldozer and vehicles.

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Tehran has said that Washington’s use of its veto to block full United Nations membership for Palestine was “irresponsible” given the lack of opposition from any other Security Council member, AFP reports.

“Washington’s action exposed the fraudulent nature of US foreign policy and its isolated position,” foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said.

He described the US move as “irresponsible” and “unconstructive”.

Gazans in the besieged southern city of Rafah have told AFP that they believe Israel’s reported strike against Iran is little more than a show — and called for peace in the region.

“As everybody knows, this is all staged and agreed upon in advance from both sides,” resident Alaa Abu Taha said. “If someone wants to strike, they don’t give prior warning or threaten before.”

Rafah resident Iyad Labbad thinks “nothing will happen” after the reported strikes. “There will be no regional conflict. It’s just a show,” he said.

He said Iran struck “empty areas” in Israel, which had chosen to “retaliate by striking empty areas” in Iran. “The war between Iran and Israel will halt soon,” he said. “This is all for nothing.”

The United States has imposed sanctions on two entities that it says helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for two violent extremists in the West Bank already targeted with US sanctions, Reuters reports, quoting a Treasury Department statement.

One entity, Mount Hebron Fund, launched an online fundraising campaign that raised $140,000 for settler Yinon Levi, the Treasury said, after he was sanctioned on February 1.

The second entity, Shlom Asiraich, raised $31,000 on a crowdfunding website for David Chai Chasdai, who the US says initiated and led a riot.

The Treasury also designated Ben-Zion Gopstein, founder and leader of the right-wing group Lehava, which opposes Jewish assimilation with non-Jews.

The United Nations has decried the intentional destruction of complex and hard-to-obtain medical equipment in Gaza’s beleaguered hospitals and maternity wards, further deepening risks to women already giving birth in “inhumane, unimaginable conditions”, AFP reports.

Recent UN-led missions to 10 Gaza hospitals found many “in ruins” and just a couple capable of providing any level of maternal health services, says Dominic Allen, the UN Population Fund representative for the State of Palestine.

He said what teams found at the Nasser hospital complex, long besieged by Israeli forces, “breaks my heart”.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem, he described seeing “medical equipment purposefully broken, ultrasounds — which you will know, is a very important tool for helping ensure safe births — with cables that have been cut”.

“Screens of complex medical equipment, like ultrasounds and others with the screens smashed,” he added.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said he has made “determinations” regarding accusations that Israel violated a set of US laws that prohibit providing military assistance to individuals or security force units that commit gross violations of human rights, Reuters reports.

Asked at a news conference in Italy about reports that the State Department has recommended the cutting off of military aid to certain Israeli security force units over possible human rights violations in the West Bank, Blinken has not outright confirmed the reports but promises results very soon.

Read more [here].1

Gaza’s health ministry has said that Israel’s military offensive in the besieged enclave has killed at least 34,012 Palestinians and injured 76,833 others since October 7, Reuters reports.

The G7 foreign ministers have called on Israel “to do more to ensure protection of international and local humanitarian aid workers, journalists, and Palestinian civilians”.

In a statement, ministers from Italy, the UK, US, France, Germany, Japan and Canada further called on Israel “to improve humanitarian deconfliction, including communications, and to pursue full accountability, as appropriate, for incidents of harm against aid workers and civilians”.

“We call on all parties to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid, including food, water, medical care, electricity, fuel, shelter, as well as facilitate the restoration of basic services and ensure access for humanitarian workers,” the G7 said.

Pakistan has expressed its disappointment at the United Nations Security Council’s inability to reach a consensus on Palestine’s full membership of the United Nations, APP reports.

Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch also regretted the US decision to veto the draft resolution.

“Pakistan is deeply disappointed by the result of last night’s debate at UNSC and its inability to reach a consensus and recommend Palestine’s membership to UNGA. We regret the US decision to veto the draft resolution granting full membership of the UN to Palestine,” Baloch said in her weekly press briefing.

Read more here.

The Group of Seven industrialised nations has called for an “immediate release of hostages and a sustainable ceasefire” in Gaza.

In a statement, the G7 foreign ministers called for a ceasefire that “allows for a surge of the urgently needed humanitarian assistance to be delivered safely throughout Gaza”.

They further said that “all parties must refrain from unilateral actions that undermine the prospect of a two-state solution” to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The G7 stressed that the “final territory of a Palestinian state should be defined through negotiations based on 1967-lines”.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven nations have said that aid corridors to Gaza “must complement and not be a substitute to expanded and sustained assistance flows by land”.

“We welcome efforts to establish a maritime corridor to further increase the flow of much-needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza, in coordination with the United Nations,” ministers from Italy, the UK, US, France, Germany, Japan and Canada said in a joint statement.

They urged a “rapid implementation of steps announced by the government of Israel, including the commitment to expand flow of aid through existing land crossings, opening new land crossings, and facilitating aid to northern Gaza where humanitarian needs are most acute, including by opening more routes into Gaza”.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven nations have said that “in exerting its right to defend itself, Israel must fully comply with international law, including international humanitarian law”.

Ministers from Italy, the UK, US, France, Germany, Japan and Canada also slammed the “unacceptable number of civilians” killed in Gaza during Israel’s military offensive, according to AFP.

“We deplore all losses of civilian lives,” the G7 ministers said at a meeting on Italy’s island of Capri.

They said they “note with great concern the unacceptable number of civilians, including thousands of women, children and persons in vulnerable situations who have been killed in Gaza”.

The Group of Seven industrialised nations has said it opposes a “full-scale military operation in Rafah” by Israel as that would have “catastrophic consequences on the civilian population”, AFP reports.

“We reiterate our call for a credible and actionable plan to protect the civilian population there,” the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations said in a statement after a meeting on the Italian island of Capri.

Airlines changed flight paths over Iran, cancelled some flights, diverted others to alternate airports or returned planes to their departure points in response to airspace and airport closures after the attack on Iran, flight tracking data showed, according to Reuters.

Iran closed its airports in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan and cleared flights from the western portion of its airspace for a few hours after the attack, according to flight tracking website [FlightRadar24][8]. By 4:45am GMT, the airports and airspace had reopened, and closure notices posted on a US Federal Aviation Administration database had been removed.

Before the airports reopened, Flydubai said it had cancelled its Friday flights to Iran. One of its earlier flights turned back to Dubai, it said. An Iran Air flight from Rome to Tehran was diverted to Ankara, Turkiye, Flightradar 24 showed.

Germany’s Lufthansa cancelled all flights to Tel Aviv and Erbil until Saturday and said it would fly around Iraqi airspace during the same period. “The safety of passengers and crews is always the top priority,” it said.

Emirates, Flydubai, Turkish Air, Wizz Air Abu Dhabi and Belavia were among the carriers continuing to fly over the part of Iran’s airspace that remained open in the initial hours after the attack early on Friday, the tracking website showed.

As concerns mount over a potential Israeli military incursion into Rafah, many Palestinians sheltering there are at a loss over where they could turn next, as much of the rest of the enclave is in shambles, reports Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum from Rafah.

Evacuating displaced Palestinians in Rafah to other areas of Gaza, as Israel has proposed, would be especially catastrophic for those who need medical care, which is sparsely available in the rest of the enclave, the report said.

“If people are transferred to other parts of the Gaza Strip, it will be a full collapse of medical services,” said Abu Azzoum.

Israeli strikes have targeted a Syrian army position in the country’s south, Syria’s government and a monitor said, as US media reported Israel had hit its arch-rival Iran, according to AFP.

In a statement, Syria’s defence ministry said “the Israeli enemy carried out an attack using missiles… targeting our air defence sites in the southern region” and causing material damage.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Israel targeted an army radar position in the southern province of Daraa that had detected the entry of Israeli planes into Syria’s airspace.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Observatory, said the strikes took place “at a time when the Israeli air force was flying intensively over the Daraa region” without Syrian air defences taking any action.

Rayan Maarouf, who runs the Suwayda24 anti-government new website, had earlier told AFP there had been strikes on a Syrian army radar position in Sweida province, without specifying their origin.