Live: Six more Palestinians die of famine as Israel blocks Gaza aid

Former Israeli lawmaker and military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said that he will join a massive strike on Sunday organised by the families of the captives to pressure the Israeli government into reaching a ceasefire deal with Hamas, according to Haaretz.

 Eisenkot called on "all those for whom the Israeli ethos and the values of Judaism are dear" to take part in the protest.

"Netanyahu's lack of leadership and refusal to make difficult decisions, out of personal and political considerations, are dragging Israel into the abyss," Eisenkot, who resigned from his seat in the Knesset in July, said.

Einav Zangauker, mother of the Israeli captive Matan, also asked for the support of the public to put the entire country on hold on Sunday.

We will wake up to the news of the deaths of 20 remaining captives "if we don't stop the decision to occupy the Strip," she said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Saturday that he would only agree to a ceasefire deal with the condition that all captives are released together according to Tel Aviv's "conditions for ending the war."

In a statement by his office, Netanyahu reiterated the conditions, including "the disarmament of Hamas, demilitarisation of Gaza, Israeli control of the territory, and the establishment of non-Hamas and non-Palestinian Authority governance."

The statement comes amid reports that the mediators, Qatar, Egypt, and the United States, have renewed pressure on Israel for a pause in the war.

Hamas condemned the Israeli military’s intensified assaults over the past week on the eastern and southern neighbourhoods of Gaza City, particularly Zeitoun.

In a statement on Saturday, the Palestinian group said the Israeli military is using artillery, explosive robots, and warplanes as part of a “systematic destruction of the area, a savage war of extermination, and a criminal plan aimed at destroying the Gaza Strip and all forms and means of life within it.”

The group's statement also said the “policy of displacement through the settlers’ terrorist attacks targeting Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank will fail”.

An 18-year-old Palestinian teenager was shot to death by Israeli forces in the al-Mughayyir village north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

The settlers had attacked the village hours before the killing of the teenager, identified as Hamdan Mussa Mohammed Abu Alia by the ministry.

Israeli forces stormed a village, shot Abu Alia in the back, and detained him while he was injured, Quds News Network reported. He later died of his injuries in a hospital.

الشهيد حمدان موسى أبو عليا الذي ارتقى قبل قليل بعد إصابته برصاص جيش الاحتلال واحتجازه مصابا في قرية المغير شمال شرق رام الله. pic.twitter.com/gifixpDYiS

— شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) August 16, 2025

The United States has recently been mediating between Israel and the United Nations to ease tensions over the controversial aid organisation Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Haaretz reported, citing a diplomatic source at the UN.

The GHF, backed by Tel Aviv and Washington, was created in May to oversee aid distribution across Gaza, replacing all existing aid structures.

Unrwa slammed the "lethal" GHF aid distribution system in Gaza as a 'war crime,' citing hundreds of Palestinians who were shot dead at or around distribution points while trying to receive aid.

"We are at an important point in talks between the parties," the UN source said.

Aryeh Lightstone, a confidant and close aide of US President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff is a central figure in both the dispute with the UN and the ongoing talks, the report said.

The former head of Israel's military intelligence, who resigned last year for failing to prevent the 7 October attacks, has said Palestinians need to face a Nakba "every now and then" and that the spiralling death toll in Gaza is "necessary" and will serve as "a message for future generations."

According to audio recordings broadcast on Ulpan Shishi, a TV programme which airs on Israel's Channel 12 on Friday, Retired General Aharon Haliva said that "50 Palestinians should die" for every victim of the 7 October attack on southern Israel.

"There's no choice, they need a Nakba every now and then to feel the consequences," Haliva said, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

"I'm not saying this out of revenge, but as a message for future generations," he added.

It's unclear how many Israelis were killed by Hamas-led fighter on 7 October but according to the Israeli military at least 1,195 people died on that day.

Read more: 'They need a Nakba': Former Israeli intelligence chief calls Gaza death toll 'necessary'

Israeli attacks have killed at least three people and injured others in Gaza, the Wafa news agency reported.

Two people were killed when an Israeli drone targeted a group of people in the Asqaula area of the Zeitoun neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City, the news agency said.

Another person was killed and three were injured in an air strike on a house near the al-Alami Mosque on az-Zarqa Street, also in eastern Gaza City.

The UN agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa) warned on Saturday that children in Gaza are "starving to death", calling for the "war on children" to end.

"Across the Gaza Strip, most children examined by Unrwa health teams are emaciated, weak, and at risk of dying, if they do not get the treatment they urgently need," the agency said in a post on X.

"According to Unicef, more than 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured (combined) in Gaza since October 2023. It’s time to stop this war on children."

Children in #Gaza are starving to death.

Across the Gaza Strip, most children examined by UNRWA health teams are emaciated, weak, and at risk of dying, if they do not get the treatment they urgently need.

According to @‌UNICEF, more than 50,000 children have reportedly been… pic.twitter.com/7hFHV0kjy1

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) August 16, 2025

The Palestinian health ministry said on Saturday that 61,897 people have been killed and 155,660 wounded since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.

It said hospitals received the bodies of 70 Palestinians killed in the past 24 hours, including eight recovered from under rubble and other locations across Gaza. At least 26 people were killed and 175 injured while seeking aid during the same period.

A total of 1,924 Palestinians have now been confirmed killed and 14,288 wounded while trying to access aid.

Since 18 March, when Israel broke the ceasefire and imposed a full blockade with heavy air strikes, at least 10,362 people have been killed and 43,619 wounded, according to the ministry.

A young Palestinian woman flown from Gaza to an Italian hospital in a severely emaciated state for treatment has died, the hospital said Saturday.

The 20-year-old, identified by Italian media reports as Marah Abu Zuhri, arrived in Pisa on an Italian government humanitarian flight overnight between Wednesday and Thursday.

The University Hospital of Pisa said she had a "very complex clinical picture" and was suffering from severe wasting, a condition marked by extreme weight and muscle loss.

She was flown to Italy with her mother on one of three Italian Air Force flights that arrived this week in Rome, Milan and Pisa, carrying a total of 31 patients and their companions.

France's foreign ministry has called on Israel to drop a plan to build thousands of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, calling the project "a serious violation of international law".

A ministry spokesman said on Saturday that France "condemns with the utmost firmness" Israel's decision to build 3,400 homes in an area that aims to connect existing settlements in Maale Adumim in the occupied West Bank with occupied East Jerusalem.

Several countries have said that project, called E1, undermines hopes for a contiguous future Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, declared on Thursday that he will proceed with the E1 settlement project because it “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.

“Approval of construction plans in E1 buries the idea of a Palestinian state and continues the many steps we are taking on the ground as part of the de facto sovereignty plan that we began implementing with the establishment of the government,” the finance minister said.

“After decades of international pressure and freezes, we are breaking conventions and connecting Maale Adumim to Jerusalem. This is Zionism at its best - building, settling, and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.” 

The isolation of East Jerusalem from parts of the West Bank will force Palestinians to take lengthy detours to travel between several cities and towns. 

The plan has been likened to fragmenting occupied Palestine into "Bantustans", a reference to Black-only ghettos created across apartheid South Africa. 

“Hebron and Bethlehem will become another Gaza - a strip isolated from the West Bank. Ramallah will be the same,” Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Stop the Wall campaign, told Middle East Eye earlier this week. 

The US State Department has said on Saturday that it will halt all visitor visas for people from Gaza.

It said it would do so while it conducts "a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days". 

Gaza's civil defence agency has said that Israeli attacks killed at least 22 people on Saturday.

According to the agency, at least 13 of the Palestinians killed were shot by troops as they were waiting to collect food aid near distribution sites in the north and in the south.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that conditions in the Zeitun neighbourhood in Gaza City were rapidly deteriorating, with residents having little to no access to food and water due to heavy Israeli bombardment. He said Israel were carrying out ethnic cleansing there. 

Bassal said about 50,000 people are estimated to be in the area, "the majority of whom are without food or water" and lacking "the basic necessities of life".

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet approved plans to sieze control of Gaza City, one of the most densely populated parts of the territory.

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In a column for Middle East Eye, academic and author Kyle J Anderson argues that supporting Israel is not just a matter of American foreign policy, but is serving a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler-colonialism. 

He writes: "The Maga-Israel alliance should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress the memory of colonialism’s atrocities and to create a sanitised narrative of colonial history in order to resuscitate colonialism in the present.

"In the Maga version of modern global history, Israel has come to represent the symbolic last vestige of European colonialism still allowed to flourish, and Palestine stands in for the last unresolved case of anti-colonial resistance. Supporting Israel, then, is not just a normal matter of American foreign policy; it is a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler colonialism.

"The Maga movement has mobilised around a common sense of nostalgia for a past in which white, western, Christian civilisation exercised global dominance. Commentators reflecting on Trump’s first term often associated this notion with a desire to re-establish the belief systems of the United States in the 1950s, the dawn of the so-called “American century”.

"In his second term, it seems more appropriate to interpret Maga nostalgia as invoking, not the era beginning in the 1950s, but rather the one that began a century earlier at the peak of Euro-American colonialism."

Opinion: Israel is the last vestige of European colonialism - so Trump defends it at all costs