Israeli military announces 'tactical pause' in fighting in parts of Gaza amid hunger crisis
The IDF said it would halt fighting in three areas, Muwasi, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City, from 10am to 8pm local time until further notice, beginning today.
In a statement, the IDF said it would also establish secure routes to help the UN and aid agencies deliver food and other supplies.
Israel's announcement of what it calls a "tactical pause" in fighting comes after it resumed airdrops of aid into Gaza.
While the IDF reiterated claims there is "no starvation" in Gaza, it said the airdrops would include "seven pallets of aid containing flour, sugar and canned food to be provided by international organisations".
Reports suggest aid has already been dropped into Gaza, with some injured after fighting broke out.
In other developments, Bob Geldof has accused Israeli authorities of "lying" about starvation in the territory - telling Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips the IDF is "dangling food in front of starving, panicked, exhausted mothers".
He told Sky News: "This month, up to now, 1,000 children or 1,000 people have died of starvation. I'm really not interested in what either of these sides are saying."
1:06
Israel cut off all supplies to Gaza from the start of March. It then reopened it with new restrictions in May, but said the supply had to be controlled to prevent it from being stolen by Hamas militants.
On Saturday, reports referencing US government data said that there was no evidence Hamas had stolen aid from UN agencies.
The IDF's international spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, described such reports as "fake news" and said Hamas thefts have been "well documented".
3:49
Airdrops 'expensive and inefficient'
It comes as the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that, as of Saturday, 127 people have died from malnutrition-related causes, including 85 children.
They include a five-month-old girl who weighed less than when she was born, with a doctor at Nasser Hospital describing it as a case of "severe, severe starvation".
Health workers have also been weakened by hunger, with some putting themselves on IV drips so they can keep treating badly malnourished patients.
2:10
On Friday, Israel said it would allow foreign countries to airdrop aid into Gaza - but the UN Relief and Works Agency has warned this will not reverse "deepening starvation".
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini described the method as "expensive" and "inefficient", adding: "It is a distraction and screensmoke. A manmade hunger can only be addressed by political will.
"Lift the siege, open the gates and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need."
He added that UNRWA has the equivalent of 6,000 trucks in Jordan and Egypt waiting for permission to enter Gaza.
1:17
MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, warned on Friday that 25% of young children and pregnant women in Gaza are now malnourished, and said the lack of food and water on the ground was "unconscionable".
The UN also estimates that Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 people seeking food - the majority near the militarised distribution sites of the US-backed aid distribution scheme run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
reports of incidents at aid distribution sites were "under examination".
The GHF has also previously disputed
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Our country is committing genocide, say Israeli human rights groups
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza by taking 'coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society' in the strip, two Israeli human rights bodies have said. The claims by B'Tselem and Physicians For Human Rights – Israel (PHRI) mark the first time that major Israeli organisations have levelled the highly controversial accusation. Publishing coordinated reports in Jerusalem on Monday, they called on the international community to take action to prevent further bloodshed. It comes as Israel furiously denies causing mass starvation in Gaza, while also bowing to international pressure to facilitate more aid deliveries into the enclave. B'Tselem and PHRI are well-established NGOs whose work has previously been cited by international bodies, but they do not represent mainstream opinion in Israel. However, their use of the term genocide shatters what has been a major taboo in the Jewish state, which was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust. The International Court of Justice is currently deliberating whether Israel has committed genocide. 'Nothing prepares you for the realisation that you are part of a society committing genocide – this is a deeply painful moment for us,' said Yuli Novak, the B'Tselem executive director. 'But as Israelis and Palestinians who live here and witness the reality every day, we have a duty to speak the truth as clearly as possible – Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.' The group pointed to what it described as clear evidence of language inciting genocide among Israeli political and military leaders. 'No one is considered innocent in their eyes,' said Ms Novak, referring to Palestinian civilians. Meanwhile, PHRI's report claimed that Israel is 'knowingly destroying Gaza's health system'. For 22 months, hospital after hospital has been attacked, patients have been denied life-saving treatment, and aid has been blocked,' said Dr Guy Shalev, the executive director. 'This is a clear and consistent pattern of destruction,' he added. 'It is our duty as medical professionals, and to our colleagues in Gaza who are risking their lives to save others under impossible conditions, to face the truth and do everything we can to protect them.' Israel denies carrying out genocide and blames Hamas for hiding among the civilian population, including in hospitals. In recent days it has described claims of starvation in the strip – claims backed by the UN and dozens of major NGOs – as a 'Hamas narrative'. Twenty aid packages were parachuted into Gaza on Monday in a bid to alleviate the suffering. However, the UN and other bodies say only a dramatic increase in land-based deliveries will make a real impact. It came as Benny Gantz, a rival to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Arab soldiers would eventually have to manage Gaza, pointing to a potential softening amid mainstream Israeli politics on the future of the enclave. Meanwhile, Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general, described Israel's 'creeping annexation' of the West Bank as illegal, and called for it to stop.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say Israel-based human rights groups
Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country's western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it. In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society. A number of international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine's most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action. The reports detailed crimes including the killing of tens of thousands of women, children and elderly people, mass forced displacement and starvation, and the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure that have deprived Palestinians of healthcare, education and other basic rights. 'What we see is a clear, intentional attack on civilians in order to destroy a group,' said Yuli Novak, the director of B'Tselem, calling for urgent action. 'I think every human being has to ask himself: what do you do in the face of genocide?' It is vital to recognise that a genocide is under way even without a ruling in the case before the international court of justice, she said. 'Genocide is not just a legal crime. It's a social and political phenomenon.' Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) focuses in its report on a detailed chronological account of the assault on Gaza's health system, with many details documented directly by the group's own team, which worked regularly in Gaza before 7 October 2023. The destruction of the healthcare system alone makes the war genocidal under article 2c of the genocide convention, which prohibits deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group 'in whole or part', said its director, Guy Shalev. 'You don't have to have all five articles of the genocide convention to be fulfilled in order for something to be genocide,' he said, although the report also details other genocidal aspects of Israel's war. Both B'Tselem and PHR said Israel's western allies were enabling the genocidal campaign, and shared responsibility for suffering in Gaza. 'It couldn't happen without the support of the western world,' Novak said. 'Any leader that is not doing whatever they can to stop it is part of this horror.' The US and European countries have a legal responsibility to take stronger action than they have done so far, Shalev said. 'Every tool in the toolbox should be used. This is not what we think, this is what the genocide convention calls for.' Israel denies is it carrying out a genocide, and says the war in Gaza is one of self-defence after cross-border attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023 killed 1,200 people, the majority civilians. More than 250 others were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where 50 remain held hostage, with 20 of them believed to still be alive. On Monday a spokesperson for the Israeli government called the allegation made by the rights groups 'baseless'. 'There is no intent, [which is] key for the charge of genocide ... It simply doesn't make sense for a country to send in 1.9m tons of aid, most of that being food, if there is an intent of genocide,' said spokesperson David Mencer. A key element to the crime of genocide, as defined by the international convention, is showing intent by a state to destroy a target group in whole or part. Genocidal statements from politicians and military leaders, and a chronology of well-documented impacts on civilians after nearly two years of war are proof of that intent, even without a paper trail of orders from the top, both PHR and B'Tselem say. The PHR report details how 'genocidal intent may be inferred from the pattern of conduct', citing legal precedent from the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda. The extensive documentation, by medics, media and human rights organisations over a long period of time, meant Israel's government could not claim it did not understand the impact of its actions, Shalev said. 'There were enough times and enough opportunities for Israel to stop this gradual systematic attack.' Incitement to genocide has been recorded since the start of the war. It is one of two issues on which the Israeli judge hearing the case at the international court of justice voted with the majority when ordering emergency measures for the protection of Palestinians from the plausible risk of genocide. 'We don't need to guess what Israel is doing and what the Israeli army is doing, because from the first day of this attack, Israeli leaders, the highest leadership, political leadership, including the prime minister, the minister of defence, the president of Israel said exactly that,' Novak said. 'They talked about human animals. They talked about the fact that there are no civilians in Gaza or that there is an entire nation responsible for 7 October.' 'If the leadership of Israel, whether the army leadership and the political leadership, knows about the consequences of this policy and keep going, it is very clear that is intentional.' The destruction of health infrastructure, two years without medical care and the killing of medical workers also meant the toll from the genocide would continue to mount even after any ceasefire halts fighting, Shalev said. 'For example, there have been no MRI machines in Gaza for months now, so what about all the illnesses and diseases that were not diagnosed all that time. There are all the malnutrition and chronic diseases that went untreated, we're going to see the effects of that for months and years to come.' While medication can be brought in within days, there is no easy way to replace medical workers who have been killed, including specialists who took decades to train, he said. 'Looking at the conditions of life opens this kind of temporal scale that is frightening if we want to believe in a future where … the people of Gaza somehow get to live their lives safely and in good health. It's very hard to see that.' The death toll in Gaza from the war is approaching 60,000, or more than 2.5% of the prewar population. Some of those who defend Israel's war argue that is too low for the campaign to be considered genocide. That is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the crime of genocide, which the convention defines as targeting a group 'in whole or in part', Novak said. 'It doesn't mean that you need to kill each and every person.' A genocide targeting Palestinians as a group was possible only because Israel for decades dehumanised Palestinians and denied their rights, Novak said. Collective trauma was exploited by far-right politicians to accelerate an agenda they had been pursuing for years. '[7 October ] was a shocking moment and a turning point for Israelis because it instilled a real sincere feeling of existential threat. That was the moment that pushed a whole system and how it operates in Gaza from a policy of control and oppression into one of destruction and extermination.' Now Israel had launched a genocidal campaign in Gaza, there was an urgent risk that it could spread to target other Palestinians, the B'Tselem report warned. 'The Israeli regime now has a new tool that they didn't use before – genocide. And the fact that that this tool or this policy used in Gaza is not yet [deployed] in other areas is not something that we can count on for long,' Novak said. The West Bank is a particular concern, with almost 1,000 Palestinians killed and more than 40,000 displaced from communities including Jenin and Tulkarem, in a campaign of escalating attacks and ethnic cleansing since 7 October 2023. 'What we see is basically the same regime with the same logic, the same army, usually the same commanders and even the same soldiers who just fought in Gaza. They are now in the West Bank where violence is on the rise,' Novak said. 'What we worry about and want to warn about is the fact that any small trigger might make the genocide spill over from Gaza into the West Bank.'
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Can air drops solve the Gaza crisis? Aid agencies are sceptical
The UK is set to join Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in air dropping aid into Gaza as starvation and malnutrition have reached perilous levels in the war-torn strip. Following pressure from the international community, Israel has announced brief 'humanitarian pauses' between 10am and 8pm each day to allow more aid to be delivered to starving Palestinians, as US president Donald Trump said on Monday: 'They have to get food and safety right now.' The World Health Organisation has warned that malnutrition is on a 'dangerous trajectory' in the Gaza Strip, with 63 deaths in July. Around one in five small children in Gaza City are now acutely malnourished, according to the UN's Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa). Air dropping is a controversial method of aid distribution, as humanitarian organisations have cited a number of safety and efficiency issues. Medecins Sans Frontier (MSF) operations manager Jacob Burns called it 'humanitarian theatre', adding 'it's absolutely not the only way' to get aid into Gaza. 'For the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), air drops really are a last resort,' spokesperson Sarah Davies told The Independent, as the method comes with its own set of challenges. Here's all you need to know about the controversial aid distribution method. What is air dropping? Air dropping is usually reserved for instances where it is hard to get aid where it needs to go. It involves dropping food items or non food items into an area from an aeroplane. Usually they require a predetermined location with staff on the ground, who have cleared the area of other people, of buildings, or anything that could be damaged or damage the goods themselves. The aid then needs to be distributed on the ground. 'The most efficient way to do this is through things like international organisations who are experienced in this,' said Ms Davies. She added that the ICRC was not currently involved in the air drops. 'We can't deliver assistance in a way that risks people or exposing them to harm. We work by assessing the needs throughout the areas of Gaza, where we're present, and we respond directly to those needs.' The dangers of air dropping In the densely populated Gaza Strip, air dropping faces a new challenge of distributing aid without causing harm to individuals. 'The primary danger of the air drop is you cannot safely aim a pallet of aid,' said Mr Burns. 'People have already been killed by aid drops in Gaza.' Five people died in March last year after at least one parachute failed to deploy in an aid package air drop, leading a parcel to fall on people, according to Gaza's health ministry. As well as the spacial safety issues, the sheer desperation of citizens can put their safety at risk as they race to get to the food source first. 'If you're starving and suddenly you see food drop out of the sky, obviously you're going to run towards that aid and it's a situation where the strongest will win,' said Mr Burns. He added that separate to Israel's claims that Hamas has been stealing aid, criminal gangs have used violence to loot aid - and air dropping offers no further control over that problem. 'If you're just throwing aid randomly into the Gaza strip then you have no idea who can control that.' How effectively does it distribute food? According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, air drops are a less efficient form of transporting aid than land transportation. 'They're really quite unsustainable, because they are very expensive', said Ms Davies, who cited that aeroplanes require fuelling and mechanical requirements that can make it a more expensive operation to supply 'quite limited amounts of items in a way that, unfortunately, we see doesn't always reach those who really need it'. Mr Burns added that air drops don't allow for as much aid to get in as land transportation would as he called on Israel to 'let aid in in a flood rather than a trickle, which is what air drops are.' The ideal way of distributing aid The MSF worker then called for 'organised massive distributions of aid that can meet everyone's needs'. Land transportation, in which aid is brought into Gaza via trucks by humanitarian organisations, was named by the ICRC as a more effective approach to aid distribution because aid workers can bring in more supplies in a less time consuming, resource consuming way. The World Food Programme has said it has enough food to feed the entire population of 2.1 million people for almost three months. 'While we do welcome any decisions, any changes that mean that more aid reaches more people, we do reiterate that it needs to be done in a way where people are given dignified access to aid,' said Ms Davies. 'Doing aid entry and aid distribution from land transportation allows international organisations who have experience of decades of work in Gaza, who have the trust of the communities in Gaza to do so in this way.'
