Gaza live: Israeli protesters demand ceasefire as war enters 10th month

The United States is maintaining a pause on a shipment of heavy munitions for Israel, senior US officials told visiting Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday.

One official said that the two governments remain in discussions about a shipment of heavy bombs, which was paused by US President Joe Biden in early May over concerns the weapons could cause more Palestinian deaths in Gaza after Israel began its invasion of Rafah.

Amid escalating cross-border attacks between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Turkey stands in solidarity with Lebanon.

He also called on regional countries to support Beirut.

The rise in tensions have stoked fears of an all out Israel-Hezbollah war as shelling across Israel’s northern border has led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from areas on both sides of the frontier.

Yemen's Houthis said on Wednesday they targeted a ship in the Israeli port of Haifa in a joint military operation with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

The operation targeted the MSC Manzanillo, the Houthi’s military spokesman Yahya Saree said in a televised speech.

Palestine solidarity activists and tech workers disrupted keynote speeches at Wednesday's Amazon Web Services Summit to protest the alliance between Big Tech and Israel’s military, known as Project Nimbus.

Referred to as the "deadly alliance" between Big Tech and Israel’s military, Project Nimbus is a $1.2bn contract with Amazon and Google to provide cloud services for the Israeli military and government, facilitating surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians and the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

This past spring, Amazon and Google renewed the Project Nimbus contract, months after Israel’s bombing campaign on Gaza started.

“Amazon and Google’s collaboration with Israeli apartheid is part of a larger pattern of Big Tech fueling state violence across the globe,” the No Tech for Apartheid campaign stated on its website.

Wednesday’s disruption follows a wave of protests and actions led by Amazon and Google tech workers, STEM students and allies since the war on Gaza broke out on 7 October.

Seventeen structures were destroyed by Israeli forces throughout the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, the Ramallah-based Wafa news agency reported.

The demolished houses include four east of Jericho, 11 homes and other structures in the Masafer Yatta community, south of Hebron, one home in Beitillu village west of Ramallah, and another in the Silwan neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem.

This month alone, Israeli forces demolished 47 Palestinian structures, including 35 inhabited homes, in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli parliament has approved the preliminary stage of a bill that would make permanent currently temporary powers held by the Communications Minister to shut down foreign media outlets.

The "Al-Jazeera Law" as it has been branded, due to the Qatari media outlet being the primary target, was passed in April and allowed for the closure of outlets in Israel that risked “harm to the state’s security."

The new bill will cancel the original July 31 expiration date and make the law permanent.

Applicants for German citizenship will be required to explicitly affirm Israel's right to exist under a new citizenship law which came into effect on Tuesday. 

The new law shortened the number of years that a person must have lived in Germany in order to obtain a passport, from eight to five years. It will also allow first-generation migrants to be dual citizens. 

As part of the shake-up, new questions were added to the country's citizenship test, including about Judaism and Israel's right to exist. 

“New test questions have been added on the topics of antisemitism, the right of the state of Israel to exist, and Jewish life in Germany,” the German interior ministry confirmed on Tuesday.

READ MORE: New German citizens required to affirm Israel's right to exist

Gaza's health ministry said that 60 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on the enclave in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 37,718 killed since 7 October.

An additional 86,377 people have been wounded, 140 of them in the past 24 hours.

Last week, in a major televised address, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened Cyprus with military action if it continues its military cooperation with Israel, whose army has been training on the island nation for an attack on Lebanon.

Nasrallah did not mince words: "Opening Cypriot airports and bases to the Israeli enemy to target Lebanon would mean that the Cypriot government is part of the war, and the resistance will deal with it as part of the war."

Indeed, the Cypriots have not only become Israel's close friend but also a major US ally. Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos visited the US on 17 June and coordinated with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on whatever role the Americans have assigned to Cyprus in the ongoing situation in the Middle East.

READ MORE: Cyprus: From early Zionist colony to military base for Israel's war on Gaza, opinion by Joseph Massad

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that his country stands in solidarity with Lebanon in light of growing tensions between Hezbollah and Israel.

"Israel is now setting its sights on Lebanon and we see that Western powers behind the scenes are patting Israel on the back and even supporting them," he told lawmakers of his ruling Justice and Development party (AKP).

Erdogan says Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu's war plans will "lead to a great disaster" and called on regional countries to also support Beirut.

After meeting Lebanese and Israeli leaders in Beirut and Jerusalem, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock warned that "another war would mean a regional escalation on a scale that we can hardly imagine".

Speaking to Germany's Deutschlandfunk public radio, Baerbock said that "more rockets are flying, large parts on both sides do not want this war, but we are slipping into it".

The minister emphasised on the need to have a ceasefire in Gaza, which would calm the situation between Hezbollah and Israel.

While Lebanese leaders seem to agree, Baerbock says they do not have any effective access on the ground, "not even to Hezbollah".

More than 60 percent of people in Europe believe the EU should suspend free trade with Israel enabled by the EU-Israel Association Agreement and uphold human rights, a poll released by corporate watchdog Eko shows.

The polling, which was conducted by YouGov from 5 to 10 June, found broad public support for the idea in all surveyed countries.

Even in Hungary, Israel's staunchest European ally, only 39 percent of respondents opposed the suspension of trade with Israel. The results are even lower in France (29 percent), the Netherlands (27 percent) and Belgium (23 percent).

On polling day on 12 December 2019, activist and writer Sonali Bhattacharyya was out in the rain until the evening, knocking on doors to get people out to vote.

“I’d been there since morning. I remember coming back to the local Labour party office just as the exit poll was dropping. And we were all in tears,” she recalled.

“I put a lot of hours in… sort of seems quite unthinkable now, actually.”

Bhattacharyya joined Labour after its defeat in the 2015 general election, as the situation seemed “desperate”.

“I’ve never been a party political person, I never thought I'd be active in the Labour Party, never really had much truck with electoral politics, never really thought that it was worth putting time into,” she said.

But Bhattacharyya quickly worked out that the party was “impenetrable” for campaigners like her.

READ MORE: How Gaza became the final straw for UK Labour's Corbyn wing

The death toll from Israel's strike on the Abu Awad family home in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza has risen to 15 people, Al Jazeera reports.

It was previously reported that four people had died in the strike.

Rescuers are still trying to pull victims from under the rubble.

Doctors Without Borders (known by their French acronym MSF) have announced the killing of their sixth staff member in Gaza.

Physiotherapist Fadi al-Wadiya, 33, was killed in an Israeli drone attack near an MSF clinic on Gaza City on Tuesday along with five other people, including three children.

Al-Wadiya was cycling to work at the time of the Israeli strike.

In the US, progressive congressman and Israeli critic Jamaal Bowman lost his primary Democratic race to George Latimer, who received heavy funding and support from pro-Israel lobby groups in New York’s 16th Congressional District.

READ MORE: Israeli drone strike kills sixth MSF member in Gaza