Live: Israel and Hamas claim victory as fragile ceasefire holds
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An anti-tank missile fired into Israel from Gaza has hit a civilian vehicle and wounded an Israeli civilian, the military said.
The civlian sustained light injuries and has been taken to hosptial, the military added.
Israel's Channel 12 is reporting that at least six rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip towards Jerusalem.
Israeli police told MEE rockets have been fired towards Beit Shemesh and Neve Ilan. Sirens are being heard across southern Israel.
There are no known casualties or damage. Israel's military has made no statement.
The military is investigating if a rocket had fallen in an inhabited area near the city, according to Channel 12.
One rocket fell on an open field, the Times of Israel reported.
The Qassam Brigades said the rockets were in response to “crimes and aggression in the Holy City, and its harassment of our people in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa Mosque. This is a message that the enemy should understand well”.
As Israelis gather to march, air raid sirens have been heard in Jerusalem.
MEE's Lubna Masarwa reports police are encouraging Israeli youth to head off the streets into a shopping centre. The Israelis are dancing and singing "death to the Arabs" nonetheless.
Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military wing, said it has fired rockets from Gaza towards Jersualem, according to Al Jazeera Arabic. But there is no evidence seen so far that any rockets have been fired.
Despite sky-high tensions and a brutal Israeli assualt on Palestinian worshippers at al-Aqsa Mosque this morning, thousands of Israelis are marching in Jerusalem.
They are celebrating Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of Israel's victory in the 1967 war.
The vast majority of Israelis participating are right-wing religious nationalists, and the procession is always provocative - this year especially.
The route has been moved from the Damascus Gate, where Palestinians are massing after being assualted by Israeli police in al-Aqsa Mosque, and is now beginning at the Jaffa Gate.
Middle East Eye's Jerusalem bureau chief Lubna Masarwa is on the scene. Follow her live footage here:
Just half an hour before thousands of Israelis are set to begin their Jerusalem Day flag march, the event's organisers have said they are calling it off - but that doesn't mean the procession will go away.
The march's organsiers say they are "ceding responsibilty" to the police, Haaretz reported.
Thousands of nationalist Israeli youth have gathered nonetheless.
Hamas, the Palestinian movement that controls the Gaza Strip, has told Israel it has until 6pm to withdraw from al-Aqsa Mosque and Sheikh Jarrah, and to release all detainees during the recent Jerusalem tensions.
The ultimatum was issued by Abu Ubaida, the spokesman of its military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.
Israel is nervy over security around Gaza, and has sent reinforcements to the besieged enclave.
You may have noticed criticism online of the way many, if not most, western media outlets are covering events in Jerusalem.
Many had totally ignored the Sheikh Jarrah evictions until Israeli police began cracking down on Palestinians on Friday night.
And even then, much reporting has been framed as two equal sides "clashing", and downplaying Israel's culpability and its violations of international law.
MEE columnist Belen Fernandez takes a swing at this form of misinformation in her latest piece. Read an extract here and the full piece below:
For the media, it’s all in a day’s "scuffle". There were "scuffles" and "clashes" galore in the Washington Post, on the ABC News website, in the Guardian, at Fox News, and again at the Post.
The BBC, for its part, has dutifully kept its audience updated about “clashes” and “confrontations” - while insisting that, in firing stun grenades and the like, Israeli police have simply been acting “in response” to Palestinian provocations (just as Israel is always acting “in response” when it, like, slaughters thousands of people in Gaza).
A New York Times article published on 7 May on Israeli police "confrontations with Palestinian protesters", meanwhile, noted that “the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorists were ‘presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties as a nationalistic cause in order to incite violence in Jerusalem’”.
In actuality, of course, the whole Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" is Sheikh Jarrah writ large: a "real-estate dispute" in which the party that violently usurped the bulk of Palestinian real estate in 1948 - and that continues to illegally occupy the rest - must cast Palestinians as terrorists in order to justify terrorising, killing and expelling them (pardon, “clashing” with them).
Sheikh Jarrah: Clashes, scuffles, conflict - western media's euphemisms for Israel's violence
After Israel's violent crackdown in al-Aqsa Mosque this morning, Palestinians are now massing at the Damascus Gate.
Israel has beefed up its police presence at the Old City's entrance, too.
You can watch live scenes here, as MEE correspondent Latifeh Abdellatif interviews Palestinians caught up in today's shocking scenes.
We are minutes away from the beginning of Israel's Flag March, and the Israeli police have decided to slightly reroute the tens of thousands of Israelis set to walk through Jerusalem's Old City.
The march will no longer pass through the Damascus Gate, and instead the flag-waving nationalists will enter the Old City from the Jaffa Gate before heading through to the Western Wall.
That means the procession will no longer pass through the Muslim Quarter's main streets, but the march will be hugely provocative nonetheless.
It's no wonder police are altering the route last minute. Palestinians have gathered at the grand entrance of the Old City, one of the chief routes in from other occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah.
Meanwhile, Israel's security cabinet is meeting at 5pm Jerusalem time.
As Israeli journalist Barak Ravid notes in the above tweet, Israel is concerned about the situation in the besieged Gaza Strip.
In recent days Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting in solidarity with Jerusalem, and the Israeli military sent reinforcements to the enclave's boundary earlier.
Ravid adds that Netanyahu personally made the decision to alter the route, not the police chiefs.
"The flags parade was one of the issues raised by U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan in his phone call with his Israeli counterpart on Sunday. Sullivan proposed changing the route but the Israeli side rejected it. Later Netanyahu changed his mind," Ravid says on Twitter.
Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two far-right Israeli MPs belonging to the Religious Zionism political alliance, have turned up in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Of course this district is at the centre of tensions in the city. Some 40 Palestinians, including 10 children, have been handed eviction notices with Israeli settlers set to take their homes. This displacement and resettling is illegal under international law.
For weeks, Palestinians have protested against the evictions, which are the subject of a legal battle in Israel's Supreme Court. As the repeatedly delayed judgement has approached, protests and settler counter-protests have stepped up.
According to Mohammed al-Kurd, a Palestinian belonging to a family threatened with eviction, no Palestinians are currently allowed in the part of Sheikh Jarrah threatened with evictions - not even journalists.
Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren't the only Israeli MPs there. Ayman Odeh, Ahmed Tibi and other MPs from the Joint List, the party representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, have also headed to the flashpoint neighbourhood.
"Everything that's happening here is part of the nefarious occupation. There is a nation of people here that deserve self-determination – the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel," Haaretz reported Odeh saying in Sheikh Jarrah.
"What has happened in the past month constitutes a direct attack on the worshippers – disconnecting the speakers and the roadblocks constitute an attempt to transfer the population of Sheikh Jarrah," he added.
"Whoever wants to live in peace needs to see themselves as part of the just struggle of East Jerusalem against this nefarious occupation. There is nothing that justifies the control of a whole people. The Palestinian people are a people like any other people in the world."
Israeli forces and settlers have violently cracked down on peaceful Palestinian protests in Sheikh Jarrah over recent days. Settlers have even fired live rounds at protesters.
Today is Israel's Jerusalem Day, when the country celebrates its capture of the city's eastern neighbourhoods in the 1967 Middle East war, with Israelis marching through the Old City annually.
The so-called Flag March usually brings together thousands of young, far-right religious Israelis chanting anti-Palestinian slogans.
According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli security officials have urged politicians to either postpone the march or limit the number of attendees and shorten the route in order to avoid adding fuel to the fire after a week of confrontations in the city between Palestinians and Israeli settlers and security forces.
However Israeli media is reporting that the march will go ahead as planned, with tens of thousands of Israelis set to head into occupied East Jerusalem's Old City through the Nablus Gate. It is set to kick off around 4pm Jerusalem time, just over an hour away.
Israeli settlers were seen this morning attempting to storm al-Aqsa Mosque through its Moroccan Gate. Jewish prayer in the mosque's courtyard is forbidden, but settlers often flout the rules.
Far-right Israelis believe Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel, while the Palestinian Authority and the vast majority of the international community have pushed for East Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine as part of a two-state solution.
Efforts to displace Palestinians in favour of Israeli settlers - a move in violation of international law - have been described as seeking to erase Palestinian presence and identity from Jerusalem. This displacement - a war crime under international law - is at the heart of the Sheikh Jarrah dispute.
Israeli forces are no longer in al-Aqsa Mosque's complex, and some Palestinians are able to return to the courtyard. But not everyone.
MEE correspondent Latifeh Abdellatif reports that only Palestinians above the age of 40 are being allowed by Israeli police into al-Aqsa Mosque's courtyard via the Lions' Gate.
Other gates appear to have different restrictions, however. Abdellatif says at some entrances to the mosque, Palestinians under 40 are being given access - particualrly women.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released a statement on the violent raid on al-Aqsa Mosque this morning.
He said: "A struggle is now being waged for the heart of Jerusalem. It is not a new struggle. It is the struggle between intolerance and tolerance, between law-breaking violence and law and order."
The prime minister does not, however, address why Israeli armed police brutally stormed the mosque while thousands of Palestinians were at prayer.
Palestinians were taken by complete surprise. Though tensions were high over a planned Israeli march later, assurances by authorities that no Israelis would be allowed in al-Aqsa Mosque was interpreted as a message they would be able to pray in peace this morning.
"We insist on ensuring the rights of everyone, this occasionally requires taking a strong stand as the officers of the Israel police, and our security forces, are doing at the moment. We back them in this just struggle," Netanyahu added.
"Of course, these things are being expressed erroneously and misleadingly in the global media. In the end truth will win but we must constantly reiterate it."
The casualities keep rising. So far, the Red Crescent has reported 305 wounded Palestinians, 228 of which have been rushed to hospital.
Seven Palestinians have critical injuries, and some have been operated on, the Red Crescent said.
Israeli police said 21 of their number were hurt as they stormed al-Aqsa Mosque, three of which were taken to hospital. -
