Israel's Gaza invasion - Day 540

Younis al-Khatib, president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, has condemned the “Israeli targeting of paramedics as they carried out their humanitarian mission in Gaza a week ago”, Al Jazeera reports.

Addressing a press conference in Ramallah, he said the PRCS condemned “deliberate attempts” by Israeli forces to “cripple” rescue attempts.

“A Palestinian life is not merely a number. The nine missing members of the Red Crescent team and the six missing members of the Civil Defence agency have families waiting for them,” Khatib was quoted as saying.

The Red Crescent contacted the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to identify the exact location of the missing members, according to Khatib.

However, he added, they turned down “repeated requests” until two days ago, when OCHA managed to arrange for Red Crescent members to visit the site, where one body was recovered.

Israeli forces have violently raided several homes in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, breaking down doors and ransacking them, reports the Wafa news agency.

Troops apprehended three people during the incursion including a 16-year-old and two former prisoners. Israeli forces also set up more checkpoints and closed roads in and around Hebron.

Israel refused to fully open the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to worshippers for the Eid al-Fitr holiday on Saturday, the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs said.

Palestinians in Gaza have held prayers to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan and the start of Eidul Fitr, Al Jazeera reports.

Just as they have throughout the Israeli invasion, they prayed amid the rubble caused by Israel’s strikes on the Strip.

In one video posted by the Palestinian Information Centre, the sound of gunfire could be heard as the prayers were held.

Israeli forces killed at least nine people on the morning of Eid. The victims included five children.

The tear gas targeted Palestinians paying respects to loved ones at a Jenin cemetery on Eidul Fitr, causing “suffocation injuries”, Al Jazeera reports citing local media reports.

Verified footage from Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking unit captures crowds scrambling for safety as clouds of tear gas spread in the area.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says its remaining food stock in Gaza could be depleted in about 10 days, leaving hundreds of thousands without meals, Al Jazeera reports.

The WFP said that its flour supply in Gaza – where Israel has blocked aid from entering for over four weeks – can sustain bakeries serving 800,000 people only until Tuesday. Without restocking, overall food supplies could be exhausted within 10 days.

As a “last resort” once all other food is exhausted, it has emergency stocks of fortified nutritional biscuits for 415,000 people.

“WFP urges all parties to prioritize the needs of civilians, the protection of humanitarian workers and UN personnel, and access for aid to enter Gaza immediately,” the agency said in a statement.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed the 22-year-old man in the town of Tammun and are withholding his body, according to the Wafa news agency.

The ministry identified the slain man as Ahmad Qasem Suleiman Bani Odeh.

Staff at the kitchen, run by the Wefaq Association for Women and Childcare (WEFAQ), say they have been forced to stop preparing hot meals for displaced Palestinians because they have no means to cook with, Al Jazeera reports.

“We have returned to a more difficult situation than before… Nothing has entered Gaza, neither food supplies, gas, nor flour: nothing at all. Many organisations have stopped working because there is basically no gas or firewood [to use] as fuel for cooking,” Buthaina Subeh, director of WEFAQ, said in a statement.

“There are calls from women and families who are now suffering from hunger; children screaming from hunger because there is no food,” she added.

The closure of WEFAQ’s kitchen comes as the UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, announced that at least 10 kitchens across Gaza have been forced to shut down because of depleted fuel supplies as well as danger from Israeli attacks.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says it is standing with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and “calling for urgent access and information following seven days of silence on the fate of nine medics in Gaza”, Al Jazeera reports.

The ambulance crews of the PRCS came under heavy gunfire while responding to an Israeli attack in the early hours of March 23 in the al-Hashaashin area of Rafah in southern Gaza.

“Since then, there has been no communication with the teams,” it said.

“It is vital that there is information and access to ensure the safe return of these humanitarians to their families who are living in a nightmare without knowing if their loved ones are alive,” it added.

Witnesses have told Al Jazeera that Israeli troops killed and buried the rescue team, while PRCS staff searching for their colleagues have found the wreckage of their vehicles under the sand. Click here to share on social media

Al Jazeera reports that at least five children are among the victims from an Israeli attack that killed four Palestinians sheltering in their tents in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

In Gaza City, Israeli forces launched a drone attack on vehicles in the Tuffah neighbourhood, killing at least one person and wounding several more.

In Jabalia, Israeli forces bombed a residential building, killing at least two Palestinians and wounding many more.

Ismail Al-Thawabta, the spokesman for Gaza’s Government’s Media Office, says “starvation is on the rise” in the enclave as Israel’s total blockade on the territory nears one month, Al Jazeera reports.

“We are talking about around 20,000 aid trucks that are supposed to enter Gaza but the Israelis didn’t allow a single one to go in,” Al-Thawabta said. “Not to mention two thousand trucks of fuel and even the cooking oil.”

The spokesman said the shortages have now “caused many bakeries to shut down all across Gaza” and that this closure is taking place alongside Israeli attacks on community kitchens.

“We hold the US administration and the Israeli army responsible for malnutrition and famine in Gaza and we urge the international community to force the Israeli occupation to open the crossings, withdraw its troops and allow aid to be delivered before it is too late,” he added.

The Israeli military says that ground operations have begun in al-Jnaina, a neighbourhood in southern Gaza’s Rafah, Al Jazeera reports.

The military says that the aim of the operation is to expand a “security zone” in southern Gaza.

Hamas’s armed wing released a video showing an Israeli hostage in Gaza, calling on Israeli authorities to secure his release, AFP reports.

The footage lasts more than three minutes, showing the hostage speaking in Hebrew and repeatedly raising his hands in desperation as he makes an appeal for his freedom.

AFP was unable to verify when or where in the Gaza Strip the video was taken.

Medical sources tell Al Jazeera that at least 21 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since dawn.

Thirteen of the victims died in southern Gaza.

Meanwhile, Palestine’s Wafa news agency says six Palestinians — including three women — have been killed in Israeli bombardment in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya area.

Israel has destroyed dozens of community kitchens and aid distribution centres in a continuation of its “systematic starvation policy” during its military offensive on Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

The Gaza Media Office said the Israeli army since October 2023 has directly targeted 26 charity kitchens and 37 aid distribution centres across Gaza.

“These food kitchens were providing meals to displaced and starving civilians,” it said in a statement. The attacks reaffirm “to the world that it (Israel) deliberately pursues a systematic starvation policy as a tool of war and genocide against over 2.4 million Palestinians trapped under siege in Gaza”.

Rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has issued a statement on Israel’s targeting ambulances, stating that the laws of conflict protect them in all circumstances, Al Jazeera reports.

International humanitarian law, or the laws of conflict, “provides that ambulances used exclusively for medical transportation must be respected and protected in all circumstances”, HRW said in a statement after Israel’s army attacked an ambulance near al-Shifa Hospital in 2023, killing and wounding dozens.

“Ambulances, like hospitals, have special protection,” HRW said. “They may not be targeted if being used to provide medical care of any kind, including to treat enemy fighters.”

Without providing evidence, Israel’s army alleged the ambulances and firetrucks in Rafah’s Tal as-Sultan were driven by Hamas fighters.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who voiced support for Palestinians amid Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and was detained by immigration officials in the United States this week.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was taken into custody by US immigration authorities near her Massachusetts home on Tuesday, according to a video showing the arrest by masked federal agents. US officials revoked her visa and the Department of Homeland Security accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas”.

In Friday’s order, US District Judge Denise Casper in Boston said that to provide time to resolve whether her court retained jurisdiction over the case, she was barring Ozturk’s deportation temporarily.

Ozturk’s arrest came a year after she co-authored an opinion piece in Tufts’ student newspaper criticising the university’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.

Read more here.

The health ministry in Gaza has said that 921 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since Israel resumed large-scale strikes on March 18, AFP.

According to the ministry’s statement, the figure included 25 people killed in the past 24 hours. It also reported that the overall death toll had reached 50,277 since fighting began on October 7, 2023.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reports that Palestinian rescuers who went missing last week were “executed” by Israeli forces, according to witnesses.

“Other than the sounds of heavy artillery fire and constant buzz of attack drones, people here are also dealing with a heart-wrenching story of a missing rescue team who disappeared seven days ago,” Mahmoud reports, adding that the paramedics went to the Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah to save Palestinians wounded during Israeli strikes.

Those who managed to escape reported executions of many people by Israeli troops.

“Over the past few days, in cooperation with the United Nations, the Palestine Red Crescent Society managed to get close to the area where the ambulances went missing,” Mahmoud reports.

“What they found was the wreckage of the vehicles, largely buried under piles of sand,” he adds. “Testimonies from people who happened to be at the site said the rescue team was executed and buried by the Israeli military. There are no signs they’re still alive.”

Mahmoud adds that the Israeli army is not providing answers and deliberately prevented coordination among international organisations for a proper search for the 14 missing civil defence and Red Crescent workers.

Israel’s army has acknowledged it attacked ambulances and firetrucks in the southern Gaza Strip after identifying them as “suspicious vehicles”.

Israeli forces “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”, the military said in a statement.

“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops … The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”

It added: “After an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles … were ambulances and fire trucks”. It condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes”.

The incident took place last Sunday in the Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.

Palestine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has released a statement condemning the attack in the occupied West Bank’s Masafer Yatta area — which it said was “carried out under the protection and supervision” of Israeli forces — and calling for international action, Al Jazeera reports.

“Settlers brutally assaulted several Palestinian shepherds in an attempt to expel them and forcibly depopulate the entire area of its Palestinian residents. This represents one of the most egregious forms of ethnic cleansing targeting Palestinians,” it said.

The ministry said the purpose of such attacks is to “annex this land as a strategic reserve for colonial settlement expansion, deliberately destroying any prospects for the realisation of a Palestinian state”.

“The Ministry views the ongoing brutality against our people in Gaza, Massafer Yatta, the northern West Bank, and the Jordan Valley as an escalated colonial campaign of racial persecution, genocide, forced displacement, and annexation,” it continued.

The Jenin municipality has said the refugee camp “has become completely uninhabitable” after the Israeli military laid siege to it for 68 days.

Al Jazeera Arabic quoted the municipality as saying about 600 homes were destroyed in the camp, which housed more than 360,000 people.

Israel’s military has admitted it had fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip after identifying them as “suspicious vehicles”, with Hamas condemning it as a “war crime” that killed at least one person.

The incident took place last week in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.

Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists”, the military said in a statement to AFP.

“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops … The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.” The military did not say if there was fire coming from the vehicles.

It added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles… were ambulances and fire trucks”, and condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes”.