Israel Atrocities
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‘Up to 800 patients and thousands of displaced people’ crammed inside Al-Aqsa Hospital
Dr Bushra Othman, a surgeon working at Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital, has warned of extreme overcrowding and limited resources in the emergency department of the hospital, particularly when there are attacks nearby.
In a conversation with Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud from inside the hospital, Othman said there were only three doctors working in the emergency department.
“This is a hospital that would normally have a couple of hundred beds and doesn’t necessarily get to treat a lot of patients. There are now up to 800 patients and thousands of displaced people,” Othman said, adding that the increased number of displaced makes it challenging for doctors to identify patients.
“Unfortunately, because there’s no structure and there’s no system, you actually don’t know always where your patients end up or where you might be able to find them in order to provide the treatment that they require.
“There are only a couple of hospitals that are still partially in control and this will be one of them.”
‘There is a war within each individual’
Arwa Damon, founder and president of NGO Inara, is in Gaza on a humanitarian mission for the second time.
She told Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah that children are exhibiting signs of severe and traumatic psychological distress and pointed to a conversation told to her by a father with his five-year-old boy.
“Maybe it would have been better if we had just died and stayed at home rather than having to live like this,” she quoted the boy as saying. “[The father] was talking about how the next war is going to happen once the bombs stop.
“You hear this repeatedly over and over again. There is a war within each individual. Despite all of this madness and tragedy, it’s also providing a certain level of distraction from the true measure, scale and scope of everything that has been lost,” Damon said.
Nearly half of Israelis support early Knesset elections: Report
According to a poll published by Israeli daily Maariv, 53 percent of the Israeli public believes that, due to the political and security situation in Israel, the Knesset elections should be held earlier.
Eighty-seven percent of those who support early elections are of the centre-left bloc, while 77 percent of the right-wing block opposes early elections, according to the poll.
The poll comes after this week’s nationwide protests calling for early elections and an end to Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
The next Israeli legislative elections are scheduled for October 2026.
Hamas battalions in Rafah not ‘fully defeated or degraded’: Monitors
Two Palestinian armed factions used mortars against Israeli forces who had gathered east of the Zeitoun area of Gaza City on Thursday, while Hamas fighters conducted “tactically sophisticated” attacks in central and western Rafah on the same day, war monitors report.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP), two US-based think tanks, did not provide casualties for the Zeitoun attack, but Israel’s military said on Friday that two soldiers were killed in a mortar attack in Gaza’s north.
According to the latest ISW/CTP joint report, the attack in western Rafah on Thursday involved Hamas fighters studying Israeli operations for days in the city’s Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood before using a buried improvised explosive device to attack a tank.
And in central Rafah, Hamas fighters carried out a “complex multistage attack” that involved targeting four Israeli armoured vehicles with rocket-propelled grenades and then pursuing the Israeli troops that dismounted from the vehicles into narrow alleyways of the Shaboura refugee camp.
“The sophisticated nature of these attacks required planning, coordination, and organisation, further underscoring that the two Hamas battalions in Shaboura and western Rafah remain cohesive fighting units that have not been fully defeated or seriously degraded,” the ISW/CTP report states.
UN experts warn investment firms of legal risk related to Israeli arms supplies
A group of UN experts has warned weapons manufacturers and investment companies of the legal risks posed by supplying Israeli forces with munitions as the country faces alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The group of independent UN experts said the “sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel” must cease, and banks and investment companies investing in weapons manufacturers are also at risk of prosecution under international law.
While arms manufacturers who supply Israel with weapons are at “risk of being complicit in serious violations of international human rights and international humanitarian laws”, their financial investors must also be “called to account”, the experts said.
“Failure to prevent or mitigate their business relationships with these arms manufacturers transferring arms to Israel could move from being directly linked to human rights abuses to contributing to them, with repercussions for complicity in potential atrocity crimes,” the experts said in a statement.
Among some of the better-known institutional investors named and “urged to take action” were Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Norges Bank Investment Management, and Wells Fargo & Company.
Israeli military announces two soldiers killed in northern Gaza
The Israeli military has announced that two soldiers were killed in a mortar attack in northern Gaza on Thursday.
Both men, a 25-year-old and a 27-year-old, were reservists fighting in the Alexandroni Brigade. A further three soldiers from the same brigade were seriously wounded in the same incident.
Hamas has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it targeted a military position with mortar fire near the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City.
The latest deaths bring the total number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza – or along its border – to at least 312 since the start of the ground invasion of the Palestinian territory in October.
A further 1,950 Israeli soldiers have been injured in the war so far.
US says 656 metric tonnes of aid delivered through humanitarian pier
The Pentagon has said that more than 656 metric tonnes (1.4 million pounds) of aid was delivered through a US-built aid pier off the coast of Gaza on Thursday, only hours after it resumed operations.
The pier, which was temporarily removed last week due to poor weather conditions, was re-anchored and resumed operations on Wednesday, according to Pentagon press secretary, Pat Ryder.
The faltering $320m project has been widely criticised by aid groups as an ineffective substitute for Israel reopening land, border crossings for humanitarian supplies to enter Gaza.
US military says 6 Houthi surface, aerial drones destroyed in Red Sea
US Central Command (CENTCOM) said the Houthi drones posed “an imminent threat”, but there was no damage or injuries reported by US and coalition forces or by merchant vessels, following the US operations, which were carried out over a 24-hour period.
Four Houthi “uncrewed surface vessels” and two “uncrewed aerial systems” were destroyed on and over the Red Sea, CENTCOM said in a post on social media.
CENTCOM, which is responsible for US forces deployed in the Middle East, reports near-daily military operations against Yemen’s Houthi forces, which have carried out months of attacks on Israel-linked shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in response to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Houthi officials have said their Red Sea military operation will end when Israel stops its war on Gaza.
Israeli military carries out arrests, raids in the occupied West Bank
The Israeli military has arrested four Palestinians in different locations across the occupied West Bank, according to local media.
Israeli forces arrested one man after storming his house in the town of Silwad, northeast of Ramallah, while a second man was arrested in the town of Azmut, east of Nablus.
Two Palestinians have also been arrested in the city of Qalqilya, including the father of a man wanted by the Israeli military. He has reportedly been detained to pressure his son to turn himself in.
Israeli raids have been reported in other locations across the occupied West Bank, including:
The town of Seneria, south of Qalqilya
The town of Bizzariya, northwest of Nablus
The city of Dura, south of Hebron
The Jalazone refugee camp, north of Ramallah
UN expert calls on arms companies to cease exports to Israel
Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur for the right to food, has urged arms companies to “cease all arms exports to Israel now”.
“They are complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” he wrote in a post on X.
Fakhri’s comments come following a call from the UN for the US, Germany, the UK and arms manufacturers – including Boeing and Lockheed Martin – to halt weapons exports to the country, saying they “risk complicity in violations of international law”.
Blinken tells Israeli officials to avoid escalation with Hezbollah in Lebanon
During a meeting on Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli officials of the need to prevent further escalation of its conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon amid Israel’s war on Gaza, Reuters news agency reports.
Blinken made his remark during a meeting with Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi and Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, the State Department said.
The meeting between the US and Israeli officials follows after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that a major Israeli military offensive against Lebanon would be met with a war without “restraint and no rules and no ceilings”.
Lawlessness hampering aid delivery in southern Gaza: Report
Lawlessness is a major obstacle to humanitarian aid distribution for southern and central Gaza, a United Nations official has told The Associated Press (AP) news agency.
Armed men are regularly blocking convoys, holding drivers at gunpoint and rifling through their cargo, according to a UN official who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
An estimated 1.3 million Palestinians – more than half of Gaza’s entire population – who were displaced from Rafah by Israel’s ground invasion of the city are now sheltering in tent camps and cramped apartments without adequate food, water or medical supplies in southern and central Gaza.
At least eight people have been killed after the Israeli military bombed a house in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, southeast of Gaza City.
Israel pounds central Gaza camps, deepens invasion of Rafah
CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli forces pounded areas in the central Gaza Strip overnight, killing three people and wounding dozens of others, according to medics, while tanks deepened their invasion into Rafah in the south, residents said.
Israeli planes struck a house in Al-Nuseirat camp, killing two people and wounding 12 others, while tanks shelled areas in Al-Maghazi and Al-Bureij camps, wounding many other people, health officials said. Nuseirat, Maghazi, and Bureij are three of Gaza's eight historic refugee camps.
