The Guardian

Israel-Gaza war: new evacuation orders in Gaza as 15 reported killed in Israeli strike – as it happens

By Charlie Moloney,

3 days ago

https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2YpxyW_0v1DVn8p00 — Injured Palestinians are brought to the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

3.09pm BST

This blog is now closed. Here is a summary of today's events:

A senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed optimistic talk by US President Joe Biden that a Gaza truce is nearer after negotiations in the Gulf emirate of Qatar.
An SNP MSP has had the whip removed following “utterly abhorrent” comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that at least 40,074 Palestinians have been killed in the war. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 Hamas militants, without providing evidence.
The number of people from the same family who died in an Israeli strike in Gaza on Saturday has now been put at 18 by the Associated Press.
The threat of polio is rising fast in the Gaza Strip, prompting aid groups to call for an urgent pause in the war so they can ramp up vaccinations and head off a full-blown outbreak.
The death toll following an Israeli strike in the city of Nabatieh city in south Lebanon has risen to 10, according to the country’s state news agency.
New evacuation orders have been issued by Israel’s military spokesperson for people in parts of central Gaza to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.

2.33pm BST

Next week’s Democratic convention will put the capstone on the dramatic turnaround. Harris and running mate Tim Walz , who have been drawing huge crowds at rallies and millions of dollars in donations, will be formally nominated and deliver the most important speeches of their careers – probably resulting in a further polling bump.

But the carefully stage-managed event – also featuring Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and A-list celebrities – could yet go off script. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to gather outside to demand that the US end military aid to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed 40,000, according to the healthy ministry there.

Read how the Chicago event will occur amid striking parallels with the 1968 protests:

2.23pm BST

An SNP MSP has had the whip removed following “utterly abhorrent” comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The party confirmed it has taken action following social media comments from Glasgow Shettleston MSP John Mason.

The whip has been removed with “immediate effect”, officials said.

It comes after Mr Mason reacted to criticism over Scottish External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson’s meeting with Israel’s deputy ambassador Daniela Grudsky.

Mr Mason had also met with the Israeli ambassador and attracted fury from members of his own party after he posted on social media: “If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed ten times as many.”

1.59pm BST

Hamas official dismisses "illusion" that Gaze truce nearer

A senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed optimistic talk by US President Joe Biden that a Gaza truce is nearer after negotiations in the Gulf emirate of Qatar.

“To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP. “We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”

He was responding to Biden’s comment on Friday that, “We are closer than we have ever been.”

Biden spoke after two days of talks in Qatar where Washington tried to bridge differences between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants. The two sides have been at war for more than 10 months in the Gaza Strip.

1.41pm BST

The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that at least 40,074 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.

Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 Hamas militants, without providing evidence.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 250 to Gaza. More than 100 were released in a November cease-fire, and around 110 are believed to still be inside Gaza, though Israeli authorities believe around a third are dead.

1.17pm BST

In the central part of the enclave, residents said that Israeli tanks advanced further on Saturday into the eastern area of Deir Al-Balah, an area they had not invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

It comes after two sections of the southern city of Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military on Friday, which ordered people to evacuate them saying that militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.

The Israeli military said that since Friday its forces had killed dozens of militants, including some who had fired rockets from central and southern Gaza.

12.41pm BST

At least 40,074 Palestinians have been killed and 92,537 injured in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the enclave’s health ministry has now said.

12.28pm BST

Here are some of the latest images from photographers on the ground in Gaza:

11.54am BST

Hezbollah later announced it had fired a volley of rockets at the community of Ayelet HaShahar, near Safad in northern Israel in retaliation for the Nabatieh strike. The statement said that all 10 victims in Lebanon were civilians. Hezbollah typically issues death notices when its members are killed.

Two soldiers were wounded in a rocket attack from Lebanon, the Israeli military said, adding that a total of 55 rockets had been fired in latest strikes from Lebanon.

Also on Saturday, an Israeli drone targeted a motorcycle in the Qadmous area east of Tyre in south Lebanon, state news agency NNA reported, adding that one person was injured. A security source said one person was killed in the motorcycle attack.

Updated at 11.58am BST

11.52am BST

Here is a summary of today's events so far:

The number of people from the same family who died in an Israeli strike in Gaza has now been put at 18 by the Associated Press. The airstrike in Gaza early Saturday morning hit a house and an adjacent warehouse sheltering displaced people at the entrance of the town of Zawaida, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where the casualties were taken.
The threat of polio is rising fast in the Gaza Strip, prompting aid groups to call for an urgent pause in the war so they can ramp up vaccinations and head off a full-blown outbreak. One case has been confirmed, others are suspected and the virus was detected in wastewater in six different locations in July.
The death toll following an Israeli strike in the city of Nabatieh city in south Lebanon has risen to 10, according to the country’s state news agency. Around 10 people were killed, including two children, and five were wounded by the strike on a residential building, state news agency NNA said on Saturday.
New evacuation orders have been issued by Israel’s military spokesperson, who in Arabic posted instructions on X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.

11.32am BST

Rarely has a head of state received a more hostile welcome than that which met the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu , when he arrived in Washington DC to speak before a joint session of Congress last month. While no senior US officials turned up to greet him on the tarmac, thousands of demonstrators marched in protest of his speech, including 200 from the group Jewish Voice for Peace who were arrested during an occupation on Capitol Hill, and others who burned him in effigy and replaced the American flag flying in front of Union Station with a Palestinian flag.

Perhaps more telling was the decision of roughly half of congressional Democrats to boycott the address altogether. “A dozen years ago, that would have been unthinkable,” noted Peter Frey, board chair of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that supports Israeli security as well as a Palestinian state. One lawmaker who did attend, the representative Rashida Tlaib, wore a keffiyeh and held a sign calling Netanyahu a “war criminal” who was “guilty of genocide”. Meanwhile, a number of labor unions , including the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and United Auto Workers sent a letter to Joe Biden calling for an end to US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

The disconnect between what US voters want and what the Biden administration does seems to widen daily, as Aaron Gell explains:

11.04am BST

The number of people from the same family who died in an Israeli strike in Gaza has now been put at 18 by the Associated Press.

The airstrike in Gaza early Saturday morning hit a house and an adjacent warehouse sheltering displaced people at the entrance of the town of Zawaida, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where the casualties were taken. An Associated Press reporter at the hospital counted the fatalities as they were brought in.

Among those killed was a wholesaler identified as Sami Jawad al-Ejlah, who coordinated with the Israeli military to bring meat and fish to Gaza. The dead also included his two wives, 11 of their children ages 2 to 22, the children’s grandmother, and three other relatives, according to a fatality list provided by the hospital.

“He was a peaceful man,” said Abu Ahmed, a neighbor who was slightly wounded in the attack.

10.48am BST

The uncle of three of the people killed in the strike in southern Lebanon early Saturday said they were factory workers who were in their housing accomodation when they were hit. He denied that there were weapons at the facility.

“There was nothing at all like that,” Hussein Shahoud told AP. “There was metal for construction, for building, for all kinds of purposes.”

An Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli military, Avichay Adraee, said the strike in the southern province targeted a weapons depot belonging to Hezbollah.

Mohammad Shoaib, who runs a slaughterhouse in Wadi al-Kfour, said the area struck was an “industrial and civilian area” that contained factories producing bricks, metal, and aluminum, as well as a dairy farm.

10.24am BST

New evacuation orders in Gaza as 15 reported killed in Israeli strike

Israel’s military spokesperson in Arabic posted instructions on X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.

He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.

Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of the Gaza town of Zawayda – where at least 15 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike - were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military’s instructions.

Updated at 11.04am BST

9.43am BST

According to the UN, Gaza, now in its 11th month of war, has not registered a polio case for 25 years, although type 2 poliovirus was detected in samples collected from the territory’s wastewater in June .

“Doctors suspected the presence of symptoms consistent with polio,” the health ministry said. “After conducting the necessary tests in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the infection was confirmed.”

Read more about the polio outbreak in the Gaza strip here:

9.20am BST

The threat of polio is rising fast in the Gaza Strip, prompting aid groups to call for an urgent pause in the war so they can ramp up vaccinations and head off a full-blown outbreak. One case has been confirmed, others are suspected and the virus was detected in wastewater in six different locations in July.

Polio was eradicated in Gaza 25 years ago, but vaccinations plunged after the war began 10 months ago and the territory has become a breeding ground for the virus, aid groups say. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are crowded into tent camps lacking clean water or proper disposal of sewage and garbage.

To avert a widespread outbreak, aid groups are preparing to vaccinate more than 600,000 children in the coming weeks. They say the ambitious vaccination plans are impossible, though, without a pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

“We are anticipating and preparing for the worst-case scenario of a polio outbreak in the coming weeks or month,” Francis Hughes, the Gaza Response Director at CARE International, told The Associated Press.

9.04am BST

Ten reported killed in Israeli strike in south Lebanon

The death toll following an Israeli strike in the city of Nabatieh city in south Lebanon has risen to 10, according to the country’s state news agency.

Around 10 people were killed, including two children, and five were wounded by the strike on a residential building, state news agency NNA said on Saturday.

The victims were all Syrian citizens, NNA said, adding that a final toll of the strike would be announced after DNA tests were conducted to determine the identity of the victims.

The Israeli military said the airstrike targeted a weapons depot used by Hezbollah militants.

Updated at 9.32am BST

8.54am BST

The latest round of Gaza ceasefire talks have ended in Doha without a breakthrough, but a new date next week has been set for further negotiations to attempt to end the 10-month-old war.

A White House statement signed by the co-mediators Qatar and Egypt described a fresh proposal that built “on areas of agreement” and bridged remaining gaps in a manner that allowed for “a swift implementation of the deal”.

In another statement late on Friday, Joe Biden said the “bridging proposal” offered the basis for a final agreement on a ceasefire and hostage release deal, adding: “With the comprehensive ceasefire and hostage release deal now in sight, no one in the region should take actions to undermine this process.”

Though the two statements struck an optimistic tone, dozens of rounds of indirect talks between Hamas and Israel have failed to achieve a deal since a short-lived truce collapsed in December.

Israeli strike kills 15 from same family, Gaza rescuers say

Gaza’s civil defence agency said an Israeli air strike early Saturday killed 15 people from a Palestinian family, including nine children and three women.

The strike hit the home of the Ajlah family in Al-Zawaida neighbourhood of central Gaza, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP. The Israeli military did not offer an immediate comment to the agency.

8.33am BST

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s policies will undergo an independent review after the decision to cancel a performance by acclaimed pianist Jayson Gillham shortly after he made comments on the killing of journalists in Gaza.

It comes after the orchestra’s musicians passed a vote of no confidence in their senior management on Friday over the cancellation of Gillham’s performance, according to a letter sent by staff to the board seen by Guardian Australia.

Read the full article here:

8.26am BST

Israel’s military, on its Telegram channel, said the air force had struck a weapons storage facility of Lebanon’s Hezbollah overnight “in the area of Nabatieh”, which is about 12 kilometres (seven miles) from the nearest point of the Israeli border.

Israeli artillery struck other targets near the border in southern Lebanon, the military said, after air strikes Friday on “Hezbollah military structures” near Hanine and Maroun el-Ras in southern Lebanon.

The killings in quick succession in late July of Fuad Shukr, a top operations chief of Hezbollah in south Lebanon, and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, led to vows of vengeance from Hezbollah, Iran and other Tehran-backed groups in the region which blamed Israel.

Israel claimed the killing of Shukr, in a strike on south Beirut, but has not commented directly on the killing of Haniyeh while he visited Tehran.

8.20am BST

Opening summary

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and wider crisis in the Middle East . Here’s an overview of the latest.

The US secretary of state will travel to Israel on Saturday to push for a Gaza ceasefire agreement as the US tries to bridge the gaps in talks for a deal, the state department said, while nine people including children were killed in an Israeli strike on Lebanon, the country’s health ministry said.

Antony Blinken will try to secure a truce and hostage-release agreement through the “bridging proposal” presented by the US on Friday during talks in Doha, the state department said.

President Joe Biden said on Friday that “we are closer than we have ever been” to a ceasefire after two days of talks in the Qatari capital. The talks were paused on Friday with negotiators set to meet again next week .

However, Agence France-Presse reported that Hamas – which did not attend the Doha talks – announced its opposition to what it said were “new conditions” from Israel in the latest plan.

A senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, told Reuters that Israel “did not abide by what was agreed upon” in earlier talks, citing what mediators had told them.

Blinken and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, are expected to meet on Monday, an Israeli official said.

A US official, meanwhile, warned that Iran would face “cataclysmic” consequences and derail momentum towards a Gaza truce if it strikes Israel in response to the killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July.

The US encouraged Iran “not to move down that road because the consequences could be quite cataclysmic, particularly for Iran”, the senior US official said on condition of anonymity in Washington on Friday, amid concerns that Tehran’s threatened counterstrike on Israel could lead to all-out war in the Middle East.

In Lebanon, nine people including a woman and her two children were killed by an Israeli strike on a residential building in the southern city of Nabatieh, the Lebanese health ministry said early on Saturday. Five people were wounded, two critically, it said.

The toll from the strike in the Nabatieh area is one of the largest in southern Lebanon since Hezbollah and Israeli forces began exchanging near-daily fire over their border after war in Gaza began in October.

The Israeli military claimed the airstrike targeted a weapons storage facility used by Hezbollah militants.

In other developments:

Ten Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the town of Zawayda in central Gaza , the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on Saturday.
Israeli leaders roundly condemned a deadly settler rampage in the Israeli-occupied West Bank , in a rare move. The settler riot in the village of Jit, near the city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, killed one Palestinian and badly injured others late on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said. Benjamin Netanyahu said he took the riots “seriously” and that Israelis who carried out criminal acts would be prosecuted. President Isaac Herzog also condemned the attack, as did the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who said the settlers had “attacked innocent people”, adding that they did not “represent the values” of settler communities.
The office of the UN high commissioner for human rights described the incident as “horrific” , with spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani’s comments echoing widespread condemnation internationally. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he would propose sanctions against Israeli government “enablers” of Jewish settler violence.
The Palestinian foreign ministry said the “armed collective attack” by Israeli settlers on Jit village was “organised state terrorism” .

Peace activists from several countries are setting out on a converted trawler to defy an Israeli blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip . “The purpose of this mission is to send a message that civil society is not OK with what’s happening in Gaza,” said Fellipe Lopes, the Portuguese media coordinator of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on board the ship Handala during a stopover in Malta.
The UN secretary general has called for parties to the Gaza war to provide concrete assurances guaranteeing humanitarian pauses in order for a polio vaccine campaign to be conducted. António Guterres, speaking at the UN, appealed for assurances to be provided right away as he warned that preventing and containing the spread of polio in the enclave would take a huge, coordinated and urgent effort. He said the UN was poised to launch a polio vaccine campaign in Gaza for children aged 10 but the “challenges are grave”. Gaza’s health ministry declared a polio epidemic in the territory last month, blaming Israel’s ongoing military offensive.
The UN special rapporteur on torture has condemned what she called a “particularly gruesome” case of the alleged sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli soldiers and said the perpetrators of such crimes must be held accountable.