Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 222

At least 35,233 Palestinians have been killed and 79,141 injured in Israeli bombardment in Gaza since October 7, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement according to Reuters.

Biden’s decision to go ahead with a $1 billion weapons package to Israel was a U-turn driven by pressure from pro-Israel lobbies, hardline Christian groups and criticism from the Republican Party at a crucial time when the “election clock is ticking”, Gershon Baskin, the Middle East director for the International Communities Organization and a former hostage negotiator, says.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from West Jerusalem, Baskin added that Israel appears to be determined to continue its war on Gaza, and its approach to negations with Hamas has “no political end game”.

He said the demands laid out by Hamas and Israel have left an “unbridgeable gap”, with Qatari and Egyptian mediators having “second thoughts” over their ability to mediate.

There is a belief within the Israeli army and the government that only military pressure will bring the release of the captives, he said, adding that the reality over the last seven months has shown military pressure only puts the captives at risk.

Israel’s military has arrested 20 Palestinians, including two children and two former prisoners, in raids throughout the occupied West Bank since Tuesday evening, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, Al Jazeera reports.

Most arrests took place in Hebron governorate, while others were in the governorates of Tulkarem, Bethlehem, Qalqilya and Jerusalem, according to the Prisoner’s Society.

This brings the total number of Israeli arrests in the West Bank since October 7 to 8,745, according to the group.

The Israeli army released drone footage showing armed men standing next to UN-marked vehicles at a United Nations compound in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and called on the UN to investigate, Reuters reports.

A UNRWA spokesperson said the agency was examining the footage and would share information once it became available.

Reuters located the footage by matching nearby buildings, poles, railings, tanks on a roof and greenery to satellite and file images, but was not able to verify the date it was filmed or the identity of the armed men.

Read more here.

Gun battles between Israel and fighters from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and smaller Palestinian factions intensified overnight into some of the fiercest in months in both northern and southern Gaza, Reuters reports.

Israeli tanks reached densely populated neighbourhoods and narrow alleyways of Jabalia in the northeast, facing heavy resistance. Residents said the army destroyed clusters of homes there in areas where they had not invaded before.

Gaza’s Civil Emergency Service and health ministry said rescue teams have been unable to reach areas where the army was operating to respond to calls for help.

In Rafah — the city in southernmost Gaza where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering from fighting elsewhere, troops continued to operate in the eastern Al-Salam and Jeneina neighbourhoods and also in the southeast, residents said.

Read more here.

The European Union has urged Israel to end its military operation in Gaza’s Rafah “immediately”, warning that a failure to do so would undermine ties with the bloc, AFP reports.

“Should Israel continue its military operation in Rafah, it would inevitably put a heavy strain on the EU’s relationship with Israel,” said the statement issued in the EU’s name by its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.

Senator Fatima Payman has become the first member of the Australian Labor Party to call Israel’s onslaught on Gaza a “genocide”, and called for her colleagues to “stand for what is right”, Al Jazeera reports.

In a thinly veiled swipe at her party leader, Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese, Payman criticised “performative gestures” on the issue and “gaslighting” about Israel’s right to self-defence.

“My conscience has been uneasy for far too long and I must call this out for what it is,” she said. “This is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise. The lack of clarity, the moral confusion, the indecisiveness is eating at the heart of this nation.”

Zvi Sukkot, a member of Israel’s Knesset representing the far-right Religious Zionism Party, says it may be impossible to free all Israeli captives in Gaza and that “national security” concerns should take precedent, Al Jazeera reports.

“I wish it were possible to return all the hostages. I’m not sure that’s possible,” Sukkot told Israel’s Radio 103FM. “We need to do everything to return them but not anything that will critically harm national security.

“We think the way to return [the captives] is when Hamas understands it doesn’t have a choice but to return them,” Sukkot added, saying that he believes Israel should intensify its Rafah operation to put more pressure on the group.

Swiss police moved in early on Wednesday to remove dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters holed up in the University of Bern, the school said in a statement, AFP reports.

Swiss police acted following a request by the Bern university’s management, which had described the student occupation as “unacceptable”.

The last of around 30 protesters left the Bern university early Wednesday. They chanted pro-Palestinian slogans outside the building before leaving the area, a journalist from the Keystone-ATS agency said.

Dozens of demonstrators had been occupying university premises, including the restaurant, since Sunday night.

They were demanding an “academic boycott of Israel institutions” and had ignored a university ultimatum to leave the premises.

University rector Christian Leumann said in a statement published on Wednesday that he was open to talks but that “an occupation with politically-motivated demands does not create an environment for constructive dialogue”.

On Tuesday, police in Geneva removed around 50 pro-Palestinian protesters from a university there.

The electricity generators at the European Hospital near Rafah have stopped working due to fuel shortages, putting the hospital “out of service”, Wafa news agency reports, citing medical sources.

It said the fuel shortages were “threatening the lives of hundreds of wounded and sick people inside” the medical complex in southern Gaza.

Yesterday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society warned of the “deterioration of humanitarian conditions” in Gaza amid Israel’s closure of border crossings, blocking aid and fuel from entering the besieged enclave.

The United Nations has launched an investigation into an unidentified strike on a UN car in Rafah on Monday that killed its first international staff in Gaza since Oct 7, a spokesperson for the UN Secretary General said, Reuters reports.

The staff member, a retired Indian Army officer named Waibhav Anil Kale, was working with the UN Department of Safety and Security and was on route to the European Hospital in Rafah along with a colleague, who was also injured in the attack.

In a statement on Monday after Kale’s death, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres reiterated an “urgent appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and for the release of all hostages,” saying the conflict in Gaza was continuing to take a heavy toll “not only on civilians, but also on humanitarian workers”.

His deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Tuesday the UN has established a fact-finding panel to determine the responsibility for the attack.

“Its very early in the investigation, and details of the incident are still being verified with the Israeli Defence Force,” he said.

There are 71 international UN staff members in Gaza currently, he said.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territory, said sanitised jargon used by the Israeli military during its onslaught against civilians in Gaza is designed to “camouflage” killing.

Albanese said in a post on X that Israel’s use of terms from international humanitarian law — such as “evacuation orders” and “safe zones” — “create the illusion that its military operations ensure protection of civilians”.

The reality could not be further from the truth, she said.

“This ‘humanitarian camouflage’ has de facto turned Gaza into a place ‘without civilians’, where everything is destroyable & everyone is killable.”

Gilad Erdan told Israeli Army Radio that the UN “has become a terrorist body itself”, Al Jazeera reports.

“Since Israel withdrew from Gaza — the UN cooperates with Hamas, it covers for it, and the Secretary-General is quick to condemn Israel for everything that gets published,” he claimed.

Following the attack by Hamas, Guterres said: “I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel. Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians — or the launching of rockets against civilian targets”.

Guterres has also repeatedly criticised Israel for its onslaught on Gaza. He recently said Israel has brought “relentless death and destruction” to Palestinians in the strip.

Tens of thousands of civilians fled the southern Gaza city of Rafah ahead of a threatened Israeli ground offensive, as Palestinians mark the anniversary of their “Nakba” or “catastrophe” of 1948, AFP reports.

During the offensive that accompanied Israel’s creation, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes and many took refuge in what would later become the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Wednesday’s commemoration of the “Nakba” comes as multiple battles between Israeli troops and Hamas across the Gaza Strip force waves of Palestinian mass displacement.

Nearly 450,000 Palestinians have been displaced from Rafah since May 6, and around 100,000 from northern Gaza, UN agencies said.

That means around a quarter of Gaza’s population of 2.4 million people have been displaced again in about one week.

UN chief Antonio Guterres repeated his call for a humanitarian ceasefire to allow more aid into the besieged territory.

Parliament in Australia’s state of Victoria has voted to ban members from wearing the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh and other symbols representing Palestine in the legislative chamber, members of the Australian Greens party said, Al Jazeera reports.

Members of Parliament for the Greens took to social media to protest the ruling, which one MP said was designed to “silence us”.

Greens party leader in Victoria Ellen Sandell said the ban “makes us one of the only parliaments in the world to ban the keffiyeh — on Nakba day, a day that marks the displacement of Palestinian people”.

“Victorians have watched in horror at the atrocities unfolding in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military. Yet Labor has signed a secretive MoU with Israeli Ministry of Defence & given $ to Israeli weapons companies,” Sandell said on social media.

Sandell said the Greens will move in parliament to make the memorandum of understanding with the Israeli military public.

Lebanese state media said an Israeli strike on a car in the country’s south killed two people on Tuesday, with a source close to Iran-backed Hezbollah saying a field commander was among the dead, AFP reports.

“The enemy drone strike that targeted a car on the Tyre-Al-Hush main road martyred two people,” the official National News Agency said, also reporting that ambulances had headed towards the site of the strike.

A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that a field commander had been killed in the strike, without identifying who.

The group said in a statement that one of its fighters, Hussein Makki, was “martyred on the road to Jerusalem”, the phrase it uses to refer to members killed in Israeli fire.

According to several Lebanese news outlets, Makki was a Hezbollah field commander and was killed in an Israeli strike on a car in southern Lebanon on Tuesday night.

The Israeli military has ordered more residents to evacuate large parts of northern Gaza, where battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters are raging months after Israel claimed it had defeated Hamas there.

In Rafah, which borders Egypt in the south, Palestinian residents said they could see smoke billowing above the city’s eastern districts amid the sound of explosions.

The UN says at least 450,000 Palestinians have been driven out of Rafah over the past week as Israeli tanks and troops push deeper in their long-feared ground invasion of what was the last refuge of Palestinian civilians until Israel said it would invade to destroy all remaining Palestinian resistance.

Read the full story by Al Jazeera here

US President Joe Biden’s administration informed Congress on Tuesday of a $1 billion weapons package for Israel, official sources told AFP, a week after threatening to withhold some arms over concerns of a Rafah assault.

The administration informally notified the weapons package to Congress, which will need to approve it, a US official said, while a congressional aide who also requested anonymity said the weapons bought from US weapons makers amounted to around $1bn.

The weapons would come out of a major $95bn package recently approved by Congress in defense support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and the Biden administration has repeatedly said it planned to go ahead and appropriate the funds through purchases from US manufacturers.

But the deal comes a week after Biden warned he may withhold bombs and artillery shells to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went ahead in defiance of US warnings with an assault on Rafah.

Congress could still block the weapons sale to Israel, with left-leaning members of Biden’s Democratic Party outraged by the toll on civilians in the Gaza onslaught.

But the overall package passed despite opposition from the left, with the rival Republican Party almost unanimously in support of arms for Israel.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club has said that the number of female prisoners “administratively” detained by Israel has risen to 25, Al Jazeera reports.

“Among the administratively detained female prisoners are four female journalists and a lawyer,” the right group said.

Female administrative detainees are among 82 women detained in Damoun Prison, it added, noting this figure doesn’t include all female detainees in Gaza camps “as a result of the continuing crime of enforced disappearance”.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has denounced what he called Israel’s attempt to blame Egypt for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

Shoukry said in a statement that Israel’s seizure of the Rafah border crossing from Gaza into Egypt, as well as its military operations in the area, were the main reasons for aid being unable to enter Gaza.

UN chief Antonio Guterres is “appalled” by Israel’s escalating military activity in and around Rafah, a spokesperson said, as clashes have rocked the densely crowded southern Gaza city.

“These developments are further impeding humanitarian access and worsening an already dire situation,” Farhan Haq said according to AFP, while also criticising Hamas for “firing rockets indiscriminately. “

The Palestinian Authority’s Majed Abu Ramadan has said that responsibility for the dire state of Gaza Strip healthcare can be placed at the feet of Israel’s continued assault on the enclave, Al Jazeera reports.

Abu Ramadan also called for international intervention to save the health system in the Strip.

He added that the Palestinian Authority is working to send medical teams into Gaza to treat “difficult cases”, in light of Israel’s refusal to allow a “sufficient” number of wounded and ill Palestinians to leave the Strip for medical treatment.

Israel’s foreign affairs minister has said Egypt must be “persuaded” to reopen the Rafah border crossing with Gaza to “allow the continued delivery of international humanitarian aid”, Reuters reports.

Israel Katz said in a statement, “the key to preventing a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip is now in the hands of our Egyptian friends”, adding foreign critics blaming Israel for the humanitarian situation in the strip are misguided.

He also said the Palestinian fighter group Hamas will “not control the Rafah crossing — this is a security necessity on which we will not compromise”.

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said that Turkiye has decided to submit its declaration of official intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Reuters reports.

“We condemned civilians being killed on October 7,” he told a press conference with his Austrian counterpart.

“But Israel systematically killing thousands of innocent Palestinians and rendering a whole residential area uninhabitable is a crime against humanity, attempted genocide, and the manifestation of genocide,” he added.

A foreign ministry official said Turkiye had not yet submitted the formal application to the ICJ.