Live: UK halts trade deal talks with Israel, summons ambassador over Gaza

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said aid must reach civilians in Gaza "immediately", Al Jazeera reported on Monday. Von der Leyen called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “unacceptable” and demanded aid to reach civilians in the strip immediately.

“For two months now, no humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza," she told reporters in London during a trip there. "Aid must reach civilians in need immediately, and the blockade on Gaza must be lifted now”.

In a televised speech last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas crudely lashed out at Hamas, calling them “sons of dogs” and demanding that they disarm and release the remaining Israeli captives. 

In his speech, he seemed to forget his previous plea to the “international community” for protection from the occupiers’ aggression in May 2023, when he addressed the United Nations. 

“People of the world, protect us,” Abbas said. “Aren’t we human beings? Even animals should be protected. If you have an animal, won’t you protect it?” 

This past February, Israeli media reported that Saudi Arabia had put forward a plan for Gaza centred on disarming Hamas and removing the group from power.

Arab and American sources told the Israel Hayom newspaper that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would not participate financially or practically in the reconstruction of Gaza unless it was guaranteed that Hamas would surrender its weapons and play no role in postwar governance.

Read more: Gaza genocide: How Arab regimes became the enemy within

Israel said Monday it would allow baby food into Gaza, marking the first delivery of humanitarian aid since it imposed a full blockade on the territory on March 2.

“Today, Israel is facilitating the entry of trucks with baby food into Gaza,” Eden Bar Tal, director general of the Foreign Ministry, told reporters.
“In the coming days, Israel will facilitate the entry of dozens of aid trucks.”

Asked how many trucks had already entered, ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein said the exact number still needed to be confirmed with COGAT, the Defense Ministry body that manages civil affairs in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

UN agencies and international NGOs have for weeks warned of severe shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medicine in Gaza.

Rights group Amnesty International urged the United States on Monday to investigate possible violations of international law in a deadly strike on a migrant detention facility in rebel-held Yemen.

Last month's attack, which prompted international alarm and was part of the US bombardment campaign against the Iran-backed Huthis, killed 68 people held at a centre for irregular migrants in Saada, the rebel authorities said at the time.

Agnes Callamard, Amnesty's secretary-general, said that "the US attacked a well-known detention facility where the Huthis have been detaining migrants".

The dead were all migrants from African countries, the Huthis had said.

To Callamard, "the major loss of civilian life in this attack raises serious concerns about whether the US complied with its obligations under international humanitarian law".

"The US must conduct a prompt, independent and transparent investigation into this air strike," she added.

Reporting by AFP

Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli attacks on Monday killed at least 52 people, as the military pressed a newly intensified campaign in the war-ravaged territory.

"The Israeli bombardment on Gaza has continued since midnight and throughout the early morning hours, resulting in 52 martyrs," civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP, adding that the bombing was ongoing in the afternoon and that Israeli forces had "expanded their ground operation".

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported Monday that hospitals have received the bodies of 136 people killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past 24 hours. An additional 364 people were wounded, according to the ministry’s daily update.

The ministry said these casualties bring the total death toll in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 53,486, with 121,398 others wounded.

Since Israel resumed its offensive on March 18, at least 3,340 people have been killed and 9,357 wounded, the ministry added.

"Two million people are starving" in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Monday, adding that 160,000 metric tonnes of food "is blocked at the border just minutes away".

"The risk of famine in Gaza is increasing with the deliberate withholding of humanitarian aid, including food, in the ongoing blockade," he added.

Speaking at the opening of the annual World Health Assembly, Tedros said that increasing hostilities, evacuation orders, shrinking humanitarian space and the Gaza aid blockade were "driving an influx of casualties to a health system that is already on its knees".

"People are dying from preventable diseases as medicines wait at the border, while attacks on hospitals deny people care, and deter them from seeking it," he said.

Meanwhile, the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said Monday that it was in talks with Israeli authorities on the resumption of aid to Gaza, after Israel announced it would allow a limited amount of food into the besieged territory.

"We have been approached by Israeli authorities to resume limited aid delivery, and we are in discussions with them now on how this would take place given the conditions on the ground," OCHA said in a statement. 

Israeli forces killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who witnessed the mass execution of medics in southern Gaza earlier this year, his father told Middle East Eye.

Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil was shot dead by Israeli naval forces on 10 May while fishing with his father off the coast of Rafah.

His death came just weeks after he survived the point-blank Israeli execution of 15 paramedics and Civil Defence workers responding to a strike in western Rafah on 23 March. 

In that incident, his father, Saeed al-Bardawil, states he was walking with his son in the Tal al-Sultan area when special Israeli forces suddenly appeared and detained them.

Along with some others, they were stripped, bound and held at gunpoint by soldiers who ordered them to lie face down just metres from a smouldering Red Crescent ambulance that had been struck earlier.

Read more: Israeli forces kill Palestinian boy who witnessed Rafah medics massacre

Israeli attacks in Gaza on Monday have killed at least 46 Palestinians, Al Jazeera reported, citing the health ministry officials.

Many of the victims are in Khan Younis, where Israel has ordered forced displacement today ahead of an “unprecedented” assault.

At least five Palestinians, the majority of them children, who were displaced people sheltering in a school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat, were among those killed by Israeli attacks today, according to Wafa news agency.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said in a post on X that families in Gaza are facing “unimaginable devastation”, with 92 percent of homes damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks.

“The siege must be lifted,” the agency said, adding that countless people have been displaced multiple times and that shelter is increasingly scarce.

Families in #Gaza face unimaginable devastation. According to the Protection Cluster, 92 percent of homes have been damaged or destroyed, countless people have been displaced multiple times, and shelter is scarce.

Unrwa remains on the ground, providing critical aid.

The siege must be… pic.twitter.com/eSiNAOESyY

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) May 19, 2025

Ahmed Sarhan, a leader of the Al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, was killed in an Israeli raid in Gaza on Monday, the group said, according to Al Jazeera.

The group said Israeli special forces tried to capture the commander, but he was killed in a shoot-out after he fought back.

Israeli forces detained his wife and child, according to witnesses.

The Israeli army ordered "immediate" forced displacement orders in the main southern city of Khan Younis and the nearby areas of Bani Suheila and Abasan on Monday ahead of what it said will be an "unprecedented attack".

The army told Palestinian civilians to move to the Mawasi area in the west as it expands its offensive. 

“From this moment, Khan Younis governorate will be considered a dangerous combat zone,” the military’s Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X.

Israeli strikes have killed at least 32 Palestinians in Gaza since dawn on Monday amid escalated Israeli attacks across the strip, Al Jazeera reported.

Many of the victims are reportedly women and children, the outlet said.

Israeli forces will "take control of all" of the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday, as his military pressed a newly expanded offensive in the territory.

"The fighting is intense and we are making progress. We will take control of all the territory of the Strip," he said in a video posted to his Telegram channel.

Netanyahu also said it was necessary for Israel to prevent a famine in Gaza for "for practical and diplomatic reasons" after his government announced it would allow limited food aid into the territory yesterday.

Israel’s Security Cabinet has approved a plan to construct a separation wall along the eastern border with Jordan, according to Israeli Army Radio.

The plan, presented by the Ministry of Defence, includes what it calls “the establishment of a multi-layered ‘defence’ system along a 425-kilometre stretch, from the southern occupied Syrian Golan Heights to the city of Eilat in the south.”

The broadcaster also reported that the project aims to strengthen Israel’s control over the Jordan Valley through the creation of settlements and military training camps.

Rescuers in Gaza said Israeli air strikes killed at least 22 people across the Palestinian territory on Monday as the military pressed an expanded offensive.

There were heavy strikes in and around the main southern city of Khan Younis, where civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said 11 people were killed and several others wounded, along with one more killed in nearby Abasan.

Five people were killed in an air strike near a market west of the northern town of Jabaliya, he said.

In Nuseirat, in the centre of Gaza, three members of the same family were killed in an air strike on their tent, while two people were killed by another strike on a tent in Gaza City, in the north.

Bassal said there were also reports of deaths at the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia, but the bodies could not be retrieved due to ongoing shelling.