Israel PM’s comments follow reports that the US was planning measures against an IDF battalion
At least 34,097 Palestinian people have been killed and 76,980 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
An estimated 48 Palestinians were killed and 79 others injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry added.
Most of the casualties have been women and children, the ministry has said, and thousands more bodies are likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.
Overnight Israeli strikes on Rafah killed 18 people, including 14 children, health officials have said in an update (earlier we reported that 13 people, including 9 children, were killed in the overnight strikes).
The first strike killed a man, his wife and their three-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti hospital, which received the bodies. The woman was pregnant and the doctors managed to save the baby, the hospital said.
The second strike killed 13 children and two women, all from the same family, hospital records showed, according to the Associated Press.
Israel has carried out near-daily air raids on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from Israeli bombardment elsewhere.
Israel has reportedly deployed extra artillery and armoured personnel carriers to the Gaza Strip periphery, suggesting that the military is preparing for its long-threatened ground offensive on Rafah, where Israeli officials say Hamas has its last stronghold in Gaza.
The US president, Joe Biden, and officials with the UN, have warned that an Israeli military ground offensive in the southern Gaza city would lead to a “bloodbath”.
Peter Beaumont is a senior international reporter for the Guardian
Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, described the conflict Israel was engaged in as a “multi-front war” earlier this month.
Israeli forces were fighting Hamas inside Gaza and engaged in daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah on the northern border with Lebanon. A low-level conflict, mainly consisting of airstrikes, was continuing with Iranian-backed forces in Syria. Israel had also been targeted – albeit ineffectively – by drones fired by the Houthis in Yemen.
But the date of Gallant’s comments was significant. He was speaking on 2 April, the day after Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Within a fortnight, Israel would add another front to Gallant’s multi-front conflict after Iran launched 300 missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for that attack.
While Israel has been here before – not least in 1967 and 1973, when it fought wars with conventional Arab armies pressing from several directions – this conflict, or series of interrelated conflicts, is very different.
The opening of a new front with Iran raises serious new questions, and not just about whether the country has the capacity to fight multiple adversaries in what – for now at least – appears to be an open-ended state of conflict.
The Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors have issued a joint statement condemning Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s crackdowns on student-led pro-Palestinian protests.
In the statement released on Friday, the chapters said: “We are shocked at her failure to mount any defence of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs.”
“She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students,” the statement added.
The chapters’ statement comes after Shafik’s testimony to Congress earlier this week, in which she was grilled by lawmakers over a reported rise in antisemitism on campus following Israel’s war on Gaza. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, Israel launched a war on Gaza, killing approximately 34,000 Palestinians across the narrow strip while leaving 2 million survivors forcibly displaced amid a famine caused by Israeli aid restrictions.
You can read the full story by my colleague, Maya Yang, here:
Two Palestinian attackers tried to shoot and stab Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank on Sunday and the soldiers responded with live fire, the military said. Israel’s Army Radio said one of the attackers was killed.
“One of the terrorists attempted to stab IDF soldiers that were in the area, who responded with live fire and neutralized him,” the military said.
“At the same time, the other terrorist opened fire at the soldiers, who responded with live fire and neutralized him too.”
A Reuters cameraman saw a body at the scene of the incident – a junction near the Palestinian city of Hebron. These claims have not yet been independently verified by the Guardian.
Since 7 October, settler violence across the West Bank has intensified, displacing entire villages for the first time, and the IDF conducts raids on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad cells as well as local brigades in Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarem on a near-nightly basis.
Israeli strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight killed 13 people, including nine children, health officials have said.
The first strike killed a man, his wife and their three-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti hospital, which received the bodies.
The woman was pregnant and the doctors managed to save the baby, the Associated Press has cited the hospital as saying.
The second strike killed eight children and two women, all from the same family, according to hospital records.
An airstrike in Rafah the night before reportedly killed nine people, including six children.
Israel has carried out near-daily air raids on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from Israeli bombardment elsewhere.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told western diplomats this week that he intended to push ahead with a ground assault on Rafah, despite warnings that any attack on the city is likely to cause many more civilian casualties and worsen an already acute humanitarian crisis across Gaza.
Israeli military officials say Rafah is Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza. The US president, Joe Biden, has called an attack on Rafah a “red line” if undertaken without sufficient precautions to protect civilians.
Here are some images from the newswires taken over the past 24 hours:
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has welcomed the US House of Representatives finally approving billions of dollars in new US military aid to Israel.
After months of stalling, the House finally approved more than $61bn worth of military assistance to help Ukraine in its desperate defence against Russia, as well as billions for other allies including Israel and Taiwan.
The foreign aid package includes $26.4bn (£21.34bn) in military support for Israel.
Netanyahu wrote on X that it “demonstrates strong bipartisan support for Israel and defends western civilization”.
The US Congress just overwhelmingly passed a much appreciated aid bill that demonstrates strong bipartisan support for Israel and defends Western civilization. Thank you friends, thank you America!
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 20, 2024
The vote on granting additional funding for Israel easily passed the House on Saturday, with 365 in favour and only 57 opposed: 36 Democrats and 21 Republicans.
The aid package will now go to the Senate, which is expected to pass it before the US president, Joe Biden, who is a Democrat, signs it into law.
Reuters has some further detail on the recent violence in the West Bank, where Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians during a raid on Saturday, according to Palestinian authorities. An ambulance driver was also reportedly killed as he went to collect injured people from a separate attack by Jewish settlers.
Israeli forces began an extended raid in the early hours of Friday in the Nur Shams area, near the flashpoint Palestinian city of Tulkarm and were still exchanging fire with armed fighters well into Saturday.
Israeli military vehicles massed and bursts of gunfire were heard, while at least three drones were seen hovering above Nur Shams, an area housing refugees and their descendants from the 1948 war that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel.
The Tulkarm Brigades, which groups forces from numerous Palestinian factions, said its fighters exchanged fire with Israeli forces on Saturday.The West Bank, a kidney shaped area about 100km (60 miles) long and 50km wide that has been at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
On Saturday, Palestinian health authorities said at least 14 Palestinians, two of whom were identified by Palestinian sources and officials as a gunman and a 16 year-old boy, were killed during the raid, one of the heaviest casualty totals in the West Bank in months. Another man was killed on Friday.
The Israeli military said a number of militants were killed or arrested during the raid, and at least four soldiers were wounded in exchanges of fire.
In a separate incident, the Palestinian health ministry said a 50-year-old ambulance driver was killed by Israeli gunfire near the village of Al-Sawiya, south of the city of Nablus, as he was making his way to transport people injured during the attack on the village. It was not immediately clear whether he was shot by settlers. There was no immediate comment from the military.
Welcome to our latest live news blog on Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis.
Here’s a rundown on the latest news:
Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, while an ambulance driver was killed as he went to pick up injured people from a separate attack by violent Jewish settlers, according to Palestinian authorities cited by Reuters.
The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza climbed to more than 34,000 on Saturday, with the majority of victims women and children. Nearly 77,000 people have also been injured, according to the Gaza health ministry.
The US House of Representatives passed a $95bn legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Israel will receive roughly $26bn. The package also includes about $9bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians in war zones, such as Haiti, Sudan and Gaza. However, it includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025.
A member of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) was killed and eight others were injured in a blast at a military base about 50 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad, according to a ministry of interior official. The force commander said it was an attack while the Iraqi military said a technical committee was looking into the cause of an explosion and fire at the Kalso military base that occurred at 1am on Saturday (10pm GMT/11pm BST Friday).
The US military’s Central Command (Centcom), in a post on X early on Saturday, denied what it said were reports that the US had carried out airstrikes in Iraq. “Those reports are not true. The United States has not conducted airstrikes in Iraq today,” it said in a social media post.
Thousands of Israeli demonstrators took to the streets on Saturday to call for new elections and demand more action from the government to bring the hostages held in Gaza home, in the latest round of protests against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan urged Palestinians to unite amid Israel’s war in Gaza after hours-long talks with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Istanbul on Saturday, his office said. With Qatar saying it will reassess its role as a mediator between Hamas and Israel, Erdoğan sent foreign minister Hakan Fidan to Doha on Wednesday in a new sign that he wants a role.
Mourners attended the funeral of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) volunteer Damian Soból, who was one of seven aid workers killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, on Saturday. Before the mass on Saturday, an adviser to Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, addressed the congregation and conveyed the president’s posthumous tribute to Soból, according to the Polish public broadcaster TVP.
A spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry condemned the US’s veto of a Palestinian request to the UN security council, blocking the world body’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Iranian diplomat Nasser Kanani called Washington’s veto “irresponsible” and “unconstructive”.
China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said efforts to admit a Palestinian state into the UN were a move to rectify a prolonged injustice, state media Xinhua reported. He made the comments at a joint press conference with his Papua New Guinea counterpart during a visit to country.