Israel-Palestine live: Israel bombs Unrwa building in Gaza

A State Department spokesperson said on Thursday that the United States has been informed of the detention of two American citizens in Gaza.

The US government is actively pursuing further details regarding their situation, the spokesperson said.

Citing privacy concerns, the department refrained from disclosing the identities of the two American citizens.

According to Reuters, relatives of 20-year-old Hashem Alagha and 18-year-old Borak Alagha, both US-Palestinian dual nationals, reported that the siblings were apprehended during a morning operation targeting a residence to the west of Khan Younis city on Thursday.

In addition to the brothers, four family members were taken into custody, among them the brothers’ father, who holds Canadian citizenship, and an uncle with a mental disability, shared Yasmeen Elagha, a cousin residing near Chicago.

The Hague mayor Jan van Zanen announced on Thursday that additional security measures have been implemented at the Israeli embassy in The Hague following a threat "that must be taken extremely seriously", the Dutch news agency ANP reported.

ANP also reported that barriers have been established around the embassy, and it remains uncertain for how long these security precautions will be maintained.

Last month, an item suspected to be a bomb was discovered near the Israeli embassy in Sweden. Authorities are treating the incident as a potential act of terrorism and have launched an investigation.

An Australian-Lebanese professor who was sacked by the Max Planck Society in Germany over his pro-Palestinian comments has slammed the research body for accusing him of racism.

In their statement on Wednesday, the organisation said that they had severed their relationship with "highly acclaimed" academic Ghassan Hage over a set of social media posts which they said were "incompatible" with the society's values.

The statement add that "racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred, and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society."

In response, Hage - who is well-known for his work on anthropology - said that he could not accept being characterised as racist over his views.

"I really dislike ethno-nationalist states, and particularly colonially implanted ethno-nationalist states. They are the ones who have a long history of racial hatred, of censoring and burning books, of discriminating and burning stores, and putting peoples in concentration camps," he tweeted.

"Here I am living in the very cultures that elevated Jew-hating, the burning of Jewish books and stores, and the putting of Jews in concentration camps and mass murdering them, into a macabre fine art, and I am being moralised on how not to be anti-Semitic and what I should do to love ethno-religious states. It doesn't make sense but we know that certain political views don't have to make sense in order to thrive."

Israel's attempts to create a "buffer zone" in the Gaza Strip through the widespread destruction of buildings inside the enclave is a war crime, the UN rights chief warned on Thursday.

Volker Turk said in a statement that Israel's "extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, amounts to a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and a war crime."

A Hebrew University study cited by The Wall Street Journal in late January said Israel had razed nearly 40 percent of the 2,824 buildings in Gaza located within a kilometre of the border.

According to the report much of the land that has now been turned into a military zone, was agricultural land.

At least 27,840 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, the Palestinian health ministry said on Thursday. 

More than 67,317 have been wounded from Israel’s aggression on the blockaded territory the ministry added. 

In the past 24 hours, the ministry said Israeli forces have killed at least 130 people and wounded 170.

Thousands more are missing and presumed dead under the rubble or on roads that Israel has prevented ambulances and civil defence crews from accessing.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Thursday that its staff were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces on Wednesday as they carryied out a mission to evacuate a number of wounded people.

Paramedic Mohammed al-Omari was killed as a result, and two of his colleagues were wounded.

“This brings the number of colleagues killed while carrying out their humanitarian work since the beginning of the war on Gaza to 12,” the organisation said.

The spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry, Ashraf al-Qudra, says Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is enduring a “humanitarian catastrophe” as a result of the Israeli siege and targeted attacks.

“[There are] 300 medical staff, 450 wounded, and 10,000 displaced people in the Nasser Medical Complex being killed and starved,” he said.

The besieged hospital is suffering from an acute shortage of anaesthesia and intensive care medication as well as surgical supplies, added Qudra.

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation, has published a video showing violent masked Israeli settlers rampaging through Bizzariya, a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. 

The settlers can be seen through stones at moving vehicles. Such acts have become a common occurrence in the West Bank with Israeli authorities doing little to stop the violence, while senior politicians have even encouraged it.

France's former president, Francois Hollande, has called French citizens  killed in Gaza “collateral victims”, during an event paying tribute to people killed in Israel on 7 October.

The comments were made on Wednesday during a ceremony in Paris, after a journalist asked whether there was a double standard in the reaction to killings in Israel and in Gaza and whether the latter also deserved a tribute.

In a widely circulated response, Hollande said: “It cannot be the same tribute. A life is a life and one life is equivalent to another but there are victims of terrorism and victims of war. Being a victim of terrorism means being attacked as a French person or as a defender of a way of life. A collateral victim, you are in war… it’s not of the same nature.”

Read more: Former French president Hollande calls Gaza dead 'collateral victims'

In its latest press release the Palestinian Prisoners Society said that the number of Palestinians arrested by Israel in the occupied West Bank over the past four months is more than 6,920. 

“This includes those who were arrested from their homes, military checkpoints, and those who were forced to surrender themselves under pressure,” the group said.

The arrests are part of the “comprehensive aggression against the Palestinian people and the ongoing genocide in Gaza”, it added.

Iraq has reiterated its call to end the US military presence in the country following the death of a high-ranking militia commander in a "unilateral strike” in Baghdad.

The US strike killed at least three people, including senior Kataib Hezbollah commanders Abu Baqir al-Saadi and Arkan al-Alaywi. Video footage of the strike site in eastern Baghdad showed an SUV engulfed in flames. 

The US said the Kataib Hezbollah commander killed in Wednesday’s strike was “responsible for directly planning and participating in attacks on US forces in the region".

Wednesday's attack provoked an outcry in Baghdad, with the government again promising to remove US forces from Iraq in response.

Read more: Iraq restates call for removal of US troops following assassination of militia leader

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas's conditions for a deal to release the captives it holds in Gaza on Wednesday, as Israeli jets pounded the former 'safe zone' of Rafah, killing at least 12 people.

In a press conference late on Wednesday, Netanyahu instead vowed to continue Israel's military offensive until "total victory" was secured, saying his country would achieve this "within months".

"We won't settle for less," he said. "Surrendering to Hamas's delusional demands ... will not only not lead to the release of the hostages, but will invite another massacre."

Earlier on Wednesday, several news agencies, including Middle East Eye, said they had seen the Palestinian group's proposed three-stage ceasefire plan.

Acoording to the draft document, all Israeli women, children under 19, the elderly and sick would be released from Gaza during the first 45-day phase in exchange for the release of all Palestinian female, children, sick and elderly prisoners over 50 years old from Israeli jails. 

Read more: Netanyahu rejects Hamas terms for truce as air strikes pummel Rafah

Israeli forces demolished the family home of a Palestinian man on Tuesday who shot and killed an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint near Jerusalem, injuring five others.

According to the Israeli army, this is the third house to be demolished out of the three Hamas operatives who carried out the shooting on November 16, in which an Israeli soldier was killed. 

The Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem, has said that demolishing the homes of relatives of Palestinians who harmed or attempted to harm Israeli civilians or security personnel is prohibited collective punishment, and is one of the most extreme measures used by Israel. 

In accordance with international humanitarian law Palestinians as an occupied people have a protected and essential right to resist Israeli occupation.

Former students at a high school in the South African city of Cape Town have raised concerns that the seat of learning is serving as a recruitment tool for the Israeli army.

Three former students at the Herzlia High School told Middle East Eye that faculty, including the school's principal, along with guest speakers, would often encourage students to enlist in the Israeli army.

"The ethos of the school and the Jewish community is that that's just what you do," Ethan Jacobs, a former Herzlia student, told MEE.

"No one ever rocks up at school in uniform with a gun - it's not as on-the-nose as that. But there are often soldiers who come and talk about what it's like being in the Israeli army. 

"Many of our teachers were in the IDF [Israeli army]. You never hear the words 'you should go and serve in the IDF' but it's definitely a message that is sent by the school and received by the students."

Read more: Former students sound alarm over school's links to Israeli army