Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 441

Israel has killed at least 21 Palestinians and injured 61 in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s health ministry, AFP reports.

The total death toll since October 7, 2023 has risen to 45,227, the ministry said.

It added that 107,573 people have also been injured in Israel’s war on Gaza.

There have been a string of new Israeli attacks across the occupied territories, Al Jazeera reports citing the Wafa news agency.

Israeli forces shot bullets and tear gas bombs after attacking the southeastern side of Qusra south of Nablus, leaving several people with suffocation injuries, the report adds.

Israeli soldiers also stormed the villages and towns of Beit Rima, Deir Ghassaneh, Aboud, and Kafr Ein, all north of Ramallah, without any arrests or clashes reported.

They also raided the town of Allar, north of Tulkarm, arresting at least one person after raiding his home.

A projectile fired from Yemen struck Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv, wounding 16 people, the military and emergency service providers said, according to AFP.

Israel’s military said it had failed to intercept the projectile, which struck a district of Tel Aviv municipality, forcing many residents to leave their homes.

Yemen’s Houthi later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it used a ballistic missile and was directed at “a military target of the Israeli enemy”.

Israeli forces have blown up several residential buildings east of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera reports.

Witnesses said Israeli forces blew up residential buildings in the al-Janina neighbourhood as they were supported by gunfire from military helicopters, according to the Wafa news agency.

The head of the Palestinian village council in the occupied West Bank’s village of Madra has said that the Israeli settlers who tried to burn down the local mosque on Friday were fully supported by the Israeli government, Al Jazeera reports citing the Associated Press.

Nasfat al-Khafash, the head of the council, said the settlers arrived early in the morning, setting the mosque on fire and spray-painted stars of David and the words in Hebrew, “the mosque will burn, the temple will be built” and “death to Arabs”.

“These slogans reflect their upbringing and hatred towards Palestinians and Arabs,” al-Khafash told the AP, adding that the settlers received “full support” from the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli military has said it failed to intercept a missile from Yemen that fell in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, and the ambulance service said 14 people received mild injuries, Reuters reports.

Paramedics were treating 14 people with minor shrapnel injuries and some were taken to hospital, the ambulance service said in a statement.

The Israeli police reported receiving reports of a fallen missile in a town in the Tel Aviv area.

Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 25 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip yesterday, medics said, including at least eight in an apartment in the Nuseirat refugee camp and at least 10, including seven children, in the town of Jabalia, according to Reuters.

Mediators have yet to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas after more than a year of conflict.

The Palestinian Civil Defence Agency has said that at least 10 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli attack on Jabalia, adding that the majority of those killed are children, Al Jazeera reports.

The strike targeted a house in Jabalia in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

An Israeli airstrike has killed at least eight Palestinians in an apartment in Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza strip, medics said.

Palestinian health officials told Reuters that Israeli military strikes across the enclave have killed a total of 15 people.

An Israeli airstrike has killed seven Palestinians in an apartment in Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza strip, medics have told Reuters.

The head of the UN refugee agency for Palestinians says Sweden’s move “comes at the worst time” for the refugees, Al Jazeera reports.

Philippe Lazzarini said on X: “Defunding UNRWA now will undermine decades of Sweden’s investment in human development including by denying access to education for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys across the region.”

“For the people of Gaza, this decision will double their suffering endured over the past 14 months since the horrendous Hamas attack on 7 October and the ongoing war,” he added.

More than 14 months of Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 45,206 Palestinians and among them are at least 644 athletes, including 359 football players, according to the Palestinian Football Association, Al Jazeera reports.

At least 91 of them were children, the federation said.

Al Jazeera Arabic reports that an Israeli drone was fired at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the town of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.

Separately, the Palestinian Information Center reported that the Israeli artillery targeted the hospital’s gate.

Senior Israeli military officers have presented army chief Herzi Halevi with the initial findings of an internal investigation into the buildup to the Hamas attack on October 7 last year, Al Jazeera reports according to Israeli media.

The Times of Israel newspaper said the probe looked into the functioning of the army’s top echelons on the night between October 6-7. Each senior officer presented their findings that will be cross-examined.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly planning to skip next month’s events in Poland marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, fearing potential arrest, Middle East Eye reports according to Polish news outlet Rzeczpospolita.

Rzeczpospolita adds that Israeli officials have not reached out to their Polish counterparts regarding Netanyahu’s attendance.

Warsaw believes the absence is tied to its commitment to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu “for crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed since October 7, 2023.

The report says Israeli President Isaac Herzog also does not plan to attend the event.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, has called for “political courage to defend and reinforce the multilateral system and the international rules-based order”, Al Jazeera reports.

In an article he wrote for The Guardian, he said the international community will have to choose between a world “where we have reneged on our commitment to provide a political answer to the question of Palestine”.

He called it “a dystopian world, where Israel, as the occupying power, is solely responsible for the population in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

Lazzarini stressed that in the other direction “lies a world where the guardrails of the rules-based order hold firm and the Palestinian question is resolved by political means”.

“This is the path currently being pursued by the global alliance for the implementation of the two-state solution,” the UNRWA chief added.

Lazzarini also stressed that Israel continued to claim that UNRWA is “infiltrated by Hamas, even though all allegations for which evidence has been offered have been thoroughly investigated”.

Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian residents said, and a video showed “Revenge”, “Death to Arabs” and other slogans had been spray-painted in Hebrew on the building’s facade, Reuters reports.

Black burn marks were visible at the entrance to the Muslim holy site in the northern West Bank village of Marda. The fire was put out before it could spread much further.

Israeli police said they were collecting testimonies and evidence at the scene. Nasfat al-Khufash, head of the Marda village council, said: “On Friday, Marda awoke to a systematic terror attack by a group of settlers who set fire to Bir al-Walideen mosque.”

“These attacks by settler groups are continuous and systematic,” he said.

The Israeli police and Shin Bet security services said in a joint statement: “We see this incident as extremely serious and will act resolutely to bring the perpetrators to justice for rigorous trial.”

Israeli settlers have stormed a village in the occupied West Bank, burning down a mosque and vandalising it, Al Jazeera reports.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has condemned the attack in Marda, north of Salfit, and called on the United Nations to “activate the international protection system”.

Al Jazeera Arabic reports injuries to people in the strike on a house in the city in northeastern Gaza.

The Gaza health ministry has said that at least 45,206 people have been killed during more than 14 months of conflict between Israel and Hamas, AFP reports.

The toll includes 77 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry, which said 107,512 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the onslaught began on October 7, 2023.

An Israeli government minister criticised Pope Francis for suggesting the international community should study whether Israel’s military offensive in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people, Reuters reports.

In an open letter published by Italian newspaper Il Foglio, Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli said the pope’s remarks — made in excerpts from a forthcoming book that were published last month — amounted to a “trivialisation” of the term genocide.

“As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialisation of the term ‘genocide’ — a trivialisation that comes dangerously close to Holocaust denial,” Chikli wrote.

Chikli, who ended the letter by calling Francis “a dear friend of the Jewish people,” asked the pope “to clarify your position regarding the new accusation of genocide against the Jewish state”.

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, has hailed the Nordic country’s decision to stop funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, claiming UNRWA “has lost its legitimacy to exist”, Al Jazeera reports.

“It has been relatively calm here in the central areas during the past hour. But the escalation continues to take place in the north of the Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports from Deir el-Balah, Gaza.

“We got reports coming from the town of Jabalia al-Balad confirming that Israeli quadcopter drones have been shooting civilians there.

“We saw earlier different videos emerging from the Israeli side showing how those quadcopter drones are equipped with grenades and even explosives that could be dropped on the rooftops of buildings, which can, in turn cause significant destruction in a residential building,” he said.

Earlier today, the Israeli military levelled to the ground residential buildings in the Sabra neighbourhood, killing at least four civilians.

Military operations are also still ongoing in the north, in particular in the town of Beit Lahiya with military confrontations there and in Jabalia between Palestinian groups and Israeli forces continuing to escalate, he added.

Al Jazeera Arabic, quoting Gaza’s civil defence, reports that four people have been killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike that targeted a house.

The attack took place in the Sabra neighbourhood in the south of Gaza City, the rescue agency said.