Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 333

The Gazan health ministry announced that a new shipment of polio vaccines totaling 350,000 doses had arrived in Gaza, Anadolu reports.

It came as the vaccination campaign in the enclave continued amid a devastating Israeli conflict.

“An additional 350,000 doses of polio vaccines arrived in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday evening and have been stored in refrigerators at the Ministry of Health warehouses in Deir al-Balah,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said in a statement.

He said these measures were coordinated with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will meet his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara today, the Turkish presidency said, as the two seal their reconciliation, AFP reports.

After a decade of frosty relations, the two leaders said they had turned over a “new leaf” in their ties during Erdogan’s visit to Cairo in February. Wednesday’s visit comes in response to that diplomatic meeting, during which they pledged greater cooperation in the Middle East and bolstered trade, the Turkish presidency said on Tuesday.

In 2013, Ankara and Cairo cut ties after Sisi, then defence minister, ousted president Mohamed Morsi, an ally of Turkiye and part of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Erdogan said at the time he would never speak to “anyone” like Sisi, who in 2014 became president of the Arab world’s most populous nation.

But relations between the two men have warmed over the past two years, with their interests aligning on several issues, including the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Despite the decade of estrangement, trade between the two countries never ceased: Turkiye is Egypt’s fifth-largest trading partner, while Egypt is Turkiye’s largest in Africa.

A Texas woman has been formally indicted by a grand jury in the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian-American Muslim girl in a May incident that local police said was motivated by racial bias, Reuters reports.

The suspect, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, aged 42, was charged by a Tarrant County grand jury in an indictment filed last month that included a hate crime enhancement, according to court records that came to light on Tuesday. The enhancement may raise the severity of Wolf’s sentence if she is found guilty.

Wolf, whose representative could not immediately be reached for comment, was charged with attempted capital murder of a person under 10 years of age and intentionally causing bodily injury to a child.

According to a police report, the incident in May occurred at an apartment complex swimming pool in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless, when the suspect argued with the mother of the three-year-old girl, who was also at the pool with her six-year-old son, and asked where they were from.

The suspect tried to drown the three-year-old and attempted to grab the six-year-old boy, the police report said. The mother was able to pull her daughter from the water, police said, and local medics responded to the scene and the children were medically cleared.

Human rights advocates have warned about rising threats against American Muslims, Arabs and Jews since the eruption of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Saudi shipping company Bahri has refuted the US military’s claim that its tanker Amjad was hit in the Houthis’s most recent attack on vessels in the Red Sea, Al Jazeera reports.

“We unequivocally affirm that AMJAD was not targeted and sustained no injuries or damage. The vessel remains fully operational and is proceeding to her planned destination without interruption,” Bahri said in a statement.

Patience is running out among United Nations Security Council (UNSC) members and the 15-member body will likely consider taking action if a ceasefire cannot soon be brokered between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Slovenia’s UN envoy — council president for September — said.

“There is a raising anxiousness in the council that it has to move one way or the other — either there is a ceasefire or that the council then reflects on what else we can do to bring the ceasefire,” said Slovenia’s UN Ambassador Samuel Zbogar.

“I’m pretty sure that in September it will have to go […] one way or the other, not because we want (it to), but because I think the patience is out,” he told reporters.

The United States has charged leaders of the armed Palestinian group Hamas with a raft of “terrorism” offences, federal court documents unsealed revealed, AFP reports.

Six men — including Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and late political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in late July in Tehran — were named in the charging document dated February 1, accused of “conspiracy to provide material support for acts of terrorism resulting in death” along with six other counts.

“The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’s operations. These actions will not be our last,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

“Yahya Sinwar and the other senior leaders of Hamas are charged today with orchestrating this terrorist organisation’s decades-long campaign of mass violence and terror — including on October 7th.”

Palestinian officials have said Israeli forces have killed at least 35 Palestinians across Gaza as they battled Hamas but brief pauses in fighting have allowed medics to conduct a third day of polio vaccinations for children, Reuters reports.

Among those killed were four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in Gaza City in the north, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said.

Later, an Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians inside a house near Omar Al-Mokhtar Street in the middle of Gaza City, medics said.

Another strike hit near a college in Sheikh Radwan, a northern suburb of the city.

Others were killed in separate air strikes across the territory, medics said.

Read more here.

The United States has called for urgency and flexibility to finalise an agreement between Israel and Hamas for a truce in Gaza, after the recent deaths of six hostages, AFP reports.

“There are dozens of hostages still remaining in Gaza, still waiting for a deal that will bring them home. It is time to finalise that deal,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.

“The people of Israel cannot afford to wait any longer. The Palestinian people, who are also suffering the terrible effects of this war, cannot afford to wait any longer. The world cannot afford to wait any longer,” Miller said.

Miller said that the United States will work “over the coming days” with mediators Egypt and Qatar “to push for a final agreement”.

“Finalising an agreement will require both sides to show flexibility. It will require that both sides look for reasons to get to yes rather than reasons to say no.”

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza to allow children to be vaccinated against polio as a “rare ray of hope and humanity in the cascade of horror,” his spokesperson said, Reuters reports.

“If the parties can act to protect children from a deadly virus … surely they can and must act to protect children and all innocents from the horrors of war,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.

The Palestine Football Association (PFA) has written a letter to FIFA President Gianni Infantino expressing “grave concern over a disturbing incident of racism and violence within the Israeli football league,” Al Jazeera reports.

The association said there exists “a systemic issue of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic racism that has been persistently overlooked by the Israeli Football Association”.

In the letter, the PFA specified an incident that took place on Sunday when supporters of Hapoel Be’er Sheva, an Israeli professional football club, stormed the field with batons, targeting players, staff and fans of Bnei Sakhnin, which represents the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Hapoel Be’er Sheva supporters chanted against the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including the burning of their villages and towns.

UN human rights chief Volker Turk called for an independent investigation into reports that Palestinian armed groups summarily executed six Israeli hostages, AFP reports.

Israel’s military said the six were all captured alive during Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the conflict, and were shot dead shortly before troops found them.

“We are horrified by reports that Palestinian armed groups summarily executed six Israeli hostages, which would constitute a war crime,” the UN Human Rights Office said on X.

It added that Turk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, “calls for independent, impartial and transparent investigation and for perpetrators to be held to account”.

Hamas’s armed wing said on Monday that hostages would return to Israel “inside coffins” if military pressure continued.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini says Jenin has been “ravaged by violence (and) destruction” for a seventh day due to the Israeli military’s operation in the Palestinian territory.

“Over more than 150 hours, people have been undergoing an Israeli military operation, armed clashes & the use of explosives by Palestinian armed groups. Residents have limited access to food, water & medicine,” Lazzarini wrote on X.

He added that UNRWA was working alongside humanitarian and local groups to help deliver aid to the occupied West Bank and called for the “immediate protection of civilians”.

Initial injuries arrived at the hospital, and a civilian vehicle arrived with two children in bad condition; we could see them soaked in blood and dust, and really terrible scenes to look at here at the hospital, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reports from Deir el-Balah, Gaza.

Within a span of a few minutes, the ambulance came back with more seriously injured individuals from the bombed house that were already covered in dust and blood, and one of them was in really bad shape.

We believe that one child is in the operating theatre right now as we were told by one of the doctors that there is a high possibility that they’ll lose one of their limbs as bones were shredded completely by the explosions.

Just to remind you, the kind of bombs used by the Israeli military in these attacks are quite lethal. They’re packed with nails, with shrapnel, with little pieces of metal that, when they explode, fly at high speed and cut through the flesh. They cause severe bleeding.

So far, five children have arrived at the hospital.

Israeli forces killed 33 Palestinians across Gaza in the past 24 hours as they battled Hamas-led fighters, Palestinian officials said, but brief pauses in fighting allowed medics to conduct a third day of polio vaccinations for children.

Among those killed were four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in Gaza City in the north, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said. Others were killed in separate air strikes across the territory, it said.

The Israeli military said it killed eight Palestinian gunmen, including a senior Hamas commander who took part in the October 7 attacks in Israel, at a command centre near the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.

A statement said Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia had taken command of a “massacre of civilians carried out by Hamas terrorists” in Israel’s Netiv HaAsara community near the Gaza border. There was no response from Hamas.

Read the full story by Reuters here.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the British government made a “shameful decision” when it suspended some arms export licences to Israel, Reuters reports.

Britain’s foreign minister David Lammy said on Monday that the government had suspended 30 of 350 arms export licences with Israel due to a risk the equipment could be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.

“This shameful decision will not change Israel’s determination to defeat Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1,200 people on October 7, including 14 British citizens,” Netanyahu said in a social media post.

“Hamas is still holding over 100 hostages, including 5 British citizens. Instead of standing with Israel, a fellow democracy defending itself against barbarism, Britains misguided decision will only embolden Hamas,” Netanyahu said.

“With or without British arms, Israel will win this war and secure our common future.”

The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) in the Ramon and Nafha prisons told lawyers that scheduled visits were cancelled for quarantine reasons due to the spread of scabies among the prisoners on a large scale, the Palestinian Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) said, Al Jazeera reports.

The two organisations explained that scabies had spread widely among the detainees in several prisons, specifically in Naqab, Megiddo, Nafha and Rimon, due to harsh measures imposed by the IPS on the prisoners after October 7.

The organisations added that according to testimonies from detainees inside the prisons, conveyed to their lawyers, the IPS had turned scabies into a tool of “torture and abuse” by deliberately committing medical crimes against them, depriving them of treatment, and not taking any of the necessary measures to prevent the spread of the disease.

IPS measures imposed on prisoners, including the lack of necessary quantities of shower materials, a lack of ventilation and the isolation of prisoners in cells that lack sunlight, have contributed significantly to the spread of diseases, the organisations said.

Gaza schoolgirl Rama Abu Seif longs to return to a classroom to study but it is now a dormitory for families displaced by conflict. Her books were burned to light fires in clay ovens. Her school bag is stuffed with clothes in case she needs to flee an Israeli bombardment quickly.

The 12-year-old missed grade six last year and will be deprived of grade seven as the fighting between Israel and Hamas rages on.

“Of course, the children who are my age and younger than me, they all want to go back to northern (Gaza) and relive their school days, study and play at school, but all of that is gone and we lost two years because of the war,” she said.

There are no prospects for Rama and many other children to return to school any time soon in the Gaza Strip, which has been laid to waste by Israeli bombardments.

Read the full story by Reuters here.

Officials here in Tulkarem say that after Israeli forces withdrew from this area temporarily, they started fixing some of the roads and attempted to return electricity, water and other facilities to the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps, Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim reports from Tulkarem, occupied West Bank.

Now that Israeli forces have come back again, there has been more destruction to the infrastructure. One of the roads and main entrance to the Tulkarem refugee camp has been completely dug up by Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli forces usually say they are after the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) … which are sometimes planted by the Palestinian fighting groups to thwart the raids of the Israeli army.

However, people here say that this is intentional. This is done to remind Palestinians who controls their lives and who has the ultimate say if they choose to resist the Israeli occupation.

Lujain Osama Musleh, 16, was killed in the town of Kafr Dan in Jenin by Israeli forces amid ongoing military operations, the Wafa news agency reported.

According to Palestine Red Crescent Society, its crew was stopped from reaching the area of the shooting for around 30 minutes, Wafa added.

At least 16 people have been killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks since dawn, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera reported that 10 bodies were recovered from the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah and brought to Khan Younis’s Nasser Hospital.

More than 40,819 Palestinians have been killed and 94,291 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since October 7, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement, Reuters reports.

The toll includes 33 deaths in the previous 24 hours, the statement added.

A Saudi maritime shipping company denied US reports that one of its ships was attacked by Yemen’s Houthi group in the Red Sea, Anadolu reports.

The US Central Command (CENTCOM) said Monday that the Houthis attacked two crude oil-laden tankers — the Panama- flagged/owned, Greek-operated MV Blue Lagoon I and the Saudi-flagged, owned and operated MV Amjad — with two ballistic missiles.

“We unequivocally confirm that Amjad was not targeted and suffered no injuries or damage,” the Saudi National Shipping Company (Bahri) said in a statement.

“The ship remains fully operational and is heading to its planned destination without interruption,” it added.

The health ministry in Gaza announced that nearly 159,000 children received polio vaccination in the central area of the Gaza Strip, Anadolu reports.

“Medical teams were able to vaccinate 158,992 children within two days of the start of the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza,” the Health Ministry said in a statement.

It added that there was a high turnout by the citizens on the second day of the campaign in Gaza’s central area.

According to medical teams supervising the vaccination campaign at centers in Deir al-Balah, signs of fatigue and malnutrition were observed in hundreds of children who received vaccinations due to the difficult conditions they are living through amid the ongoing Israeli war on the Gaza Strip for nearly 11 months.

The World Health Organisation in Gaza has said that it is ahead of its targets for polio vaccinations in Gaza on day three of the mass campaign, Reuters reports.

Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters that it had vaccinated over 161,000 children under 10 in the central area in the first two days of its campaign versus a projected 150,000.

“Up until now things are going well,” he said. “These humanitarian pauses, up until now they work. We still have ten days to go.”