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Ceasefire talks 'expected to resume tomorrow'
A source has told Reuters that David Barnea, head of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, is expected to resume Gaza ceasefire talks with Qatar’s prime minister and Egyptian officials in Doha on Sunday.
The source said the discussions would cover the remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas on the ceasefire negotiations, including the number of Palestinian prisoners who could potentially be released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza.
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A second cargo of food aid was ready to depart by sea from Cyprus to Gaza on Saturday, the island’s president said, after a first aid shipment landed in the besieged Palestinian enclave overnight.
“The first ship has started its return to Cyprus, and we are ready to dispatch the second ship,” the Cypriot president, Nikos Christodoulides, told journalists.
The second ship, with 240 tonnes of aid, was moored at Larnaca port awaiting a signal to sail. US based charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), which arranged the mission with the UAE and Spanish charity Open Arms with support from the Cypriot government, said the new shipment included pallets of canned goods and bulk products.
WCK said the second boat also had two forklifts and a crane to assist with future maritime deliveries to Gaza. A crew ship would accompany the cargo boat with eight workers to operate the machinery and offload the aid, it said. In the first mission, the charity offloaded aid onto a makeshift jetty WCK had built from the rubble of destroyed buildings.
Ceasefire talks 'expected to resume tomorrow'
A source has told Reuters that David Barnea, head of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, is expected to resume Gaza ceasefire talks with Qatar’s prime minister and Egyptian officials in Doha on Sunday.
The source said the discussions would cover the remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas on the ceasefire negotiations, including the number of Palestinian prisoners who could potentially be released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Palestinian gunman killed after opening fire on settlement, Israeli military says
A Palestinian gunman opened fire toward a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on Saturday and was then shot dead by Israeli soldiers there, reports Reuters citing Israel’s military.
The man opened fire from the Palestinian cemetery in Hebron at the adjacent Jewish settlement, Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported. It aired footage that showed a man standing between graves and firing an assault rifle.
There was no immediate comment from Palestinian officials, said Reuters.
Violence in the West Bank has risen since the war in Gaza began, almost six months ago, with stepped-up Israeli raids and Palestinian street attacks.
The absence of a breakthrough in Gaza ceasefire negotiations has added to fears that violence in the region will further flare during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, which began this week.
PRCS says 16 of its ambulances have been taken out of service due to Israeli forces 'deliberately' targeting them
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Friday that 16 of its ambulances had been taken out of service due to Israeli attacks.
In a social media post on X, the PRCS said: “The occupation forces deliberately target the PRCS’s ambulances, despite their internationally protected Red Crescent embelm.”
“Those working in the medical field, facilities, and medical transportation are entitled to protection under international humanitarian law,” it added.
Since the beginning of the war on #Gaza, 16 PRCS ambulances have been taken out of service due to the Israeli occupation's attacks. The occupation forces deliberately target the PRCS's ambulances, despite their internationally protected Red Crescent emblem.
📍Those working in… pic.twitter.com/48VlWSogaB
At least seven Palestinians killed on new attacks on Nuseirat camp this morning, says Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera are reporting that the “latest Israeli attacks have focused on the Nuseirat camp in the central part of Gaza”.
A spokesperson for the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry said early on Saturday that 123 people had been killed across Gaza in the past 24 hours, including 36 people in a strike on a house sheltering displaced people in central Nuseirat.
Al Jazeera say that there have been more attacks on the Nuseirat camp this morning, killing at least seven people.
Lauren Gambino
Joe Biden should use his leverage and the law to pressure Israel to change how it is prosecuting the war in Gaza, the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen said.
Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, is among a group of senators urging Biden to stop providing Israel with offensive weapons until it lifts restrictions on the delivery of food and medicine into Gaza, where children are now dying of hunger and famine looms.
“We need the president and the Biden administration to push harder and to use all the levers of US policy to ensure people don’t die of starvation,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Friday.
This week, Van Hollen and seven of his colleagues sent a letter to the president arguing that Israel was in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act, a section of which prohibits the sale and transfer of military weapons to any nation that restricts the delivery of US aid.
You can read the full piece by Lauren Gambino in Washington here:
Reuters have a short explainer on how a famine is declared:
The international food insecurity watchdog, the IPC, is expected to report soon on the extent of the hunger crisis in Gaza after saying in December there was a risk of famine in the projection period through May.
For the IPC to declare famine, at least 20% of the population must be suffering extreme food shortages, with one in three children acutely malnourished and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or malnutrition and disease.
63 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, says health ministry
The latest figures from the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said 63 Palestinians were killed and 112 injured in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours.
According to the statement, at least 31,553 Palestinians have been killed and 73,5469 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October.
The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
Here are some of the latest images on the newswires:
Ceasefire talks with Israel and Hamas expected to restart, say Egyptian officials
Stalled talks aimed at securing a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas are expected to restart in earnest in Qatar as soon as Sunday, according to Egyptian officials reports the Associated Press (AP).
The talks would mark the first time both Israeli officials and Hamas leaders joined the indirect negotiations since the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
mediators had hoped to secure a six-week truce before Ramadan started earlier this week, but Hamas refused any deal that wouldn’t lead to a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, a demand Israel rejected.
In recent days, however, both sides have made moves aimed at getting the talks, which never fully broke off, back on track.
Hamas gave mediators a new proposal for a three-stage plan that would end the fighting, according to two Egyptian officials, one who is involved in the talks and a second who was briefed on them. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to the AP because they were not authorised to reveal the contents of the sensitive discussions.
The first stage would be a six-week ceasefire that would include the release of 35 hostages – women, those who are ill and older people – being held by militants in Gaza in exchange for 350 Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel.
Hamas would also release at least five female soldiers in exchange for 50 prisoners, including some serving long sentences on terror charges, for each soldier. Israeli forces would withdraw from two main roads in Gaza, let displaced Palestinians return to north Gaza, which has been devastated by the fighting, and allow the free flow of aid to the area, the officials said.
In the second phase, the two sides would declare a permanent ceasefire and Hamas would free the remaining Israeli soldiers held hostage in exchange for more prisoners, the officials said.
In the third phase, Hamas would hand over the bodies it is holding in exchange for Israel lifting the blockade of Gaza and allowing reconstruction to start, the officials said.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the proposal “unrealistic.” However, he agreed to send Israeli negotiators to Qatar for more talks.
Those talks were expected to resume Sunday afternoon, though they could get pushed to Monday, the Egyptian officials said.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party hit back at criticism on Friday by Hamas and other factions over his appointment of a new prime minister they said could deepen divisions as the war with Israel in Gaza rages, reports AFP.
Abbas appointed Mohammed Mustafa, a long-trusted adviser on economic affairs, as prime minister on Thursday and tasked him with forming a new government.
But the factions said in a statement Friday that “making individual decisions, and engaging in formal steps that are devoid of substance, like forming a new government without national consensus, is a reinforcement of a policy of exclusion and the deepening of division”.
Such steps point to a “huge gap between the [Palestinian] Authority and the people, their concerns and their aspirations,” they said.
According to AFP, the other signatories were Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Initiative, a political party which seeks a third way between Fatah and Hamas.
Mustafa replaces Mohammed Shtayyeh, who resigned less than three weeks ago citing the need for change after the Hamas attack of 7 October triggered war with Israel in Gaza.
He accepted the appointment and said in a letter to Abbas published on Friday that he was “well aware of the severity of the … dire circumstances that the Palestinian people are going through”.
Fatah hit back at Hamas late on Friday, accusing the Islamist movement in a statement of “having caused the return of the Israeli occupation of Gaza” by “undertaking the 7 October adventure”.
This led to a “catastrophe even more horrible and cruel than that of 1948,” they said. “The real disconnection from reality and the Palestinian people is that of the Hamas leadership,” said Fatah, accusing Hamas of not having itself “consulted” the other Palestinian leaders before launching its attack on Israel.
At least 27 Palestinians have reportedly died inside military camps holding those detained inside Gaza, since October said Tal Steiner, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI). Steiner told AFP that this was “unprecedented and extremely severe”.
There was no access to the camps, nor had her organisation, or foreign journalists, been permitted to enter Gaza to speak with those released, she said.
Reports relying on testimony from former camp inmates suggest that detainees are often held “in open-air cages”, where “they are handcuffed and blindfolded 24 hours a day”. Prisoners reportedly had to sleep on the floor of the cages in the cold, were beaten, and deprived of medical care, she added.
While there are no official numbers, NGOs estimate that about 1,000 people are now detained in the camps.
Another 600 people from Gaza arrested on Israeli soil on 7 October are being held in the Israeli prison system.
Steiner told AFP that all those detained in Gaza, including children and reportedly even an 82-year-old woman, were being held under Israel’s unlawful combatants law. That law denies protections typically granted to detainees and prisoners of war. “The law in its current form is unconstitutional,” she said.
Steiner and Miriam Azem of the Adalah legal centre, both Israeli nationals, said defending Palestinians’ rights in Israel had become increasingly difficult since 7 October, and that they had faced threats and verbal abuse. Steiner and Azem travelled to Geneva this week to raise concerns before the UN about a major “crisis” inside Israel’s prisons
“It’s not an easy place to be,” Steiner said. The trauma caused by Hamas’s attack and the frantic concern over the fate of the hostages is understandable, she said, but “that does not give you an excuse to torture”.
“This is not just the question of us versus them. This is us versus us,” Steiner said. “If Israel can prove that it holds even the worst of its enemies in humane conditions, that will be a triumph.”
