Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 220

The group has called US Senator Lindsey Graham’s suggestion that Israel strike Gaza with a nuclear bomb “shocking” and “reflective of the depth of his immorality”, Al Jazeera reports.

“It is also reflective of his inherent mentality of colonialism, as well as that of a group of high-ranking politicians in the US, who support the genocide being perpetrated by an occupation army against civilians,” Hamas said in a statement.

Hamas said Graham’s stated position “makes him complicit in the genocidal war on Gaza”.

The group “urged people to denounce such positions and continue pushing for an end to the war against Palestinians in Gaza”.

The Government Media Office in Gaza has condemned the Israeli army for killing a foreign UN employee and injuring another staffer in Rafah while they were riding in a United Nations vehicle, Al Jazeera reports.

“They were targeted while they were riding in a United Nations vehicle bearing the United Nations flag and United Nations insignia”, a statement from the office says.

The statement shared on Telegram demanded “an end to the war of genocide” and blamed the US administration for Israel’s “war crimes”.

Greece and Turkey cannot agree on all issues related to the bombardment in Gaza but they can agree that violence must end and a long-term ceasefire is needed, Greece’s prime minister said after meeting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.

“Let’s agree to disagree,” Kyriakos Mitsotakis said according to Reuters, responding to Erdogan who said that he was saddened by the Greek view that deems Hamas a terrorist organisation.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that “more than 1,000 members” of the Palestinian fighter group Hamas were being treated in Turkish hospitals amid the ongoing bombardment in Gaza, AFP reports.

Erdoga nmade the announcement to reporters, adding that he considered Hamas “a resistance organisation”.

The board of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a brand owned by Unilever, said that the pro-Palestinian protests sweeping US college campuses and graduation ceremonies are “essential” to democracy, Reuters reports.

Lunch counter sit-ins, student-led protests against the Vietnam War and Apartheid South Africa, and now the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza, all are part of our rich history of free speech and non-violent protest that makes change and is essential to a strong democracy, the independent board said in a statement.

London-based Unilever did not immediately return a request for comment.

Hamas’ armed wing Al Qassam Brigades have lost contact with fighters guarding four Israeli hostages in Gaza, including Hersh Golberg-Poline, they said in a statement according to Reuters.

Mai Anseir and her extended family of 25 — who already had to move three times in the face of Israeli bombardment — say they have run out of options as Israeli troops get closer to the last sanctuary on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, Reuters reports.

“We are here, we do not know how to leave. Our financial capabilities do not allow us to get transportation so that we can leave,” said the mother of five at an abandoned UN school where the family had taken shelter.

“And we cannot stay in [this] place because it is ‘zero’. The place is miserable. There are no services, no water, no electricity. There is no life in the place that we were at.”

Read more here.

The health ministry in Gaza has said that at least 35,091 people have been killed in the territory during more than seven months of Israeli bombardment, AFP reports.

The toll includes at least 57 deaths over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 78,827 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since October 7.

Amnesty International has criticised an inconclusive US report on whether Israel’s operations in Gaza violate international law, calling the findings an “international version of ‘thoughts and prayers’”, Al Jazeera reports.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview for NBC News: “We don’t have double standards.

“We treat Israel, one of our closest allies and partners, just as we would treat any other country, including assessing something like international humanitarian law and its compliance with that law,” he said.

“[People] can see for themselves, everything we’ve laid out in the report. The report also makes clear that this is an incredibly complex military environment.”

Blinken added that making such an assessment during a conflict about individual incidents is “difficult”.

“You have an enemy that intentionally embeds itself with civilians, hiding under and within schools, mosques, apartment buildings, firing at Israeli forces from those places,” he said.

Israeli forces have pushed deep into the ruins of Gaza’s northern edge to recapture an area where they had claimed to have defeated Hamas months ago, while at the opposite end of the enclave tanks and troops pushed across a highway into Rafah, Reuters reports.

With some of the most intense fighting for weeks now taking place on both the northern and southern edges of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have again taken flight, and aid groups warn that a humanitarian crisis could sharply worsen.

Israel described its latest return to the north, where it pulled out most of its troops five months ago, as part of a “mop-up” stage of the onslaught to prevent fighters from returning, and said such operations had always been part of its plan. Palestinians say the need to keep fighting amid the ruins of previous battles is proof Israel’s military objectives are unattainable.

In sprawling Jabalia, the biggest of Gaza’s eight camps built 75 years ago to house Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel, tanks pushed towards the heart of the district. Residents said tank shells were landing at the centre of the camp and air strikes had destroyed clusters of houses.

Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, Sarah Bracke, spoke to Al Jazeera about the student and staff protests against Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in the Netherlands.

She said the staff at three higher education institutions in Amsterdam witnessed police “violently” attempting to disperse a peaceful student encampment last Monday.

She said the staff today are protesting as they want to end the university’s complicity in “the ongoing genocide” in Gaza, but also want to call out the violent methods that police have used to suppress peaceful protests.

She also noted that there were Jewish staff and student protesters beaten by police despite the educational institutions claiming that police are needed to protect the safety of Jewish students on campus.

Israel has battled Hamas in Gaza, including in far-southern Rafah, despite US warnings against a full-scale invasion of the crowded city and of the threat of post-conflict “anarchy” across the Palestinian territory, AFP reports.

Clashes also raged in northern and central areas of the besieged Gaza Strip, AFP correspondents and witnesses said, as Israel prepared to mark a sombre Independence Day, beginning Monday night.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Memorial Day event that “our war of independence is not over yet. It continues even today … We are determined to win this struggle.”

AFP correspondents reported helicopter strikes and heavy artillery shelling in the east of Rafah, as well as battles in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City’s Zeitun neighbourhood.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip, says medical staff at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah have received an evacuation order from Israeli forces.

He said although the situation in the area has been “dire”, until today, the Israeli forces had not placed a call to the hospital’s director.

Medics based at the hospital fear that an attack on the hospital would mean a “complete collapse” of the limited medical system in Rafah, he added.

The health ministry in Gaza has said that the besieged Palestinian territory’s health system is “hours away” from collapse, after fighting has blocked fuel shipments through key crossings, AFP reports.

“We are just hours away from the collapse of the health system in the Gaza Strip due to the lack of the necessary fuel to operate generators in hospitals, ambulances, and (for vehicles to) transport staff,” the ministry said in a statement.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) says nearly 360,000 people have now fled Gaza’s Rafah since Israel issued evacuation orders on May 6.

“There’s nowhere to go. There’s no safety without a ceasefire,” the agency said in a post on X.

Pro-Palestine student protesters briefly interrupted Pomona College’s graduation at a venue in downtown Los Angeles, United States, demanding their school divest from companies and weapons manufacturers linked to Israel, according to local media.

The protesters attempted to block the entrance to the venue, the Los Angeles Police Department said on X, adding that one person at the rally tried to “strike an officer”.

The protest resulted in the University of Southern California announcing that it would close its University Park Campus, which is located next to the venue hosting the Pomona graduation.

Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant says the military offensive in Gaza will continue until the captives are freed and the rule of Hamas and its military capabilities are dismantled, Al Jazeera reports quoting Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Speaking at a ceremony on Mount Herzl, he added that the campaign will shape the lives of Israelis “for decades to come”.

An Israeli air attack on a house in the Brazil neighbourhood of Rafah has killed four people, including a young girl, according to Wafa news agency.

Earlier, the Palestinian Civil Defence said Israeli drones fired on rescue workers trying to reach a building after it was bombed in the Brazil neighbourhood, which is located in southeast Rafah.

A series of air raid alerts have been issued this morning in Israel, Al Jazeera reports.

The Israeli military reported two alerts in northern Israel, with one being determined to be a false alarm.

Sirens have also sounded in two areas near the boundary between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Israeli tanks, under cover from heavy fire from air and ground, have pushed further into Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, residents and Hamas media said, while airstrikes hammered Rafah in the south, Reuters reports.

In Jabalia, tanks were trying to advance towards the heart of the camp, the biggest of Gaza’s eight historic refugee camps. Residents said tank shells were landing at the centre of the camp and that air strikes had destroyed clusters of houses.

Israeli troops forced hundreds of Palestinians housed in shelters to leave. In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, Israel stepped up aerial and ground bombardments on the eastern areas of the city, killing people in an air strike on a house in the Brazil neighbourhood.

Residents said Israeli tanks are now stationed east of the Salahuddin Road that bisects the eastern part of the city, with the highway cut off by intense fighting. Residents added the eastern part of Rafah remained a “ghost town”.

Hamas armed wing said their fighters were engaged in gun battles with Israeli forces in one of the streets east of Rafah, and in the east of Jabalia.

About a dozen students arrested by police clearing a sit-in at a Denver college campus emerged from detainment to cheers from fellow pro-Palestinian protesters, several waving yellow court summons like tiny victory flags and imploring fellow demonstrators not to let their energy fade, Reuters reports.

Just how much staying power the student demonstrations over the crisis in Gaza that have sprung up in Denver and at dozens of universities across the United States will have is a key question for protesters, school administrators and police, with graduation ceremonies being held, summer break coming and high-profile encampments dismantled.

The student protesters passionately say they will continue until administrators meet demands that include a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, university divestment from arms suppliers and other companies profiting from the conflict, and amnesty for students and faculty members who have been disciplined or fired for protesting.

Academics who study protest movements and the history of civil disobedience say it’s difficult to maintain the people-power energy on campus if most of the people are gone.

But they also point out that university demonstrations are just one tactic in the wider pro-Palestinian movement that has existed for decades, and that this summer will provide many opportunities for the energy that started on campuses to migrate to the streets.

Read more here.

Pupils sitting cross-legged on the sand take classes in a tent near Khan Younis in Gaza. Two sisters connect online to a West Bank school from Cairo. A professor in Germany helps Palestinian students link up with European universities.

After watching their schools and universities be closed, damaged or destroyed in more than seven months of onslaught, Gazans sheltering inside and outside the territory are doing what they can to restart some learning.

“We are receiving students, and we have a very large number of them still waiting,” said Asmaa al-Astal, a volunteer teacher at the tent school near the coast in al-Mawasi, which opened in late April.

Instead of letting children lose a whole year of schooling as they cower from Israeli bombardment, “we will be with them, we will bring them here, and we will teach them,” she said.

Gaza and the occupied West Bank have internationally high literacy levels, but Israel’s blockade of the coastal Palestinian enclave and repeated rounds of conflict left education fragile and under-resourced.

Read the full story by Reuters here