Live: Six more Palestinians die of famine as Israel blocks Gaza aid
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Israel has killed at least 31 Palestinians in Gaza since Friday morning, Al Jazeera has reported, citing medical sources.
The toll includes at least 13 aid seekers.
Israel has been accused of the crime of starving civilians since the beginning of its war on Gaza in October 2023.
In late July, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's leading hunger monitoring system, said that the "worst-case scenario of famine" is unfolding in Gaza due to the Israel-imposed famine and siege.
At the time of publication, more than 160 Palestinian children and adults in Gaza have died from starvation, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Even before the current war, which has killed at least 60,000 Palestinians and displaced almost all the 2.2m population, Israel blockaded Gaza's airspace, territorial waters and two of its three land crossings since 2007. Approximately 80 percent of the population depended on aid from the UN and international NGOs.
Israel decided who and what could enter and exit, and sought to control the amount of calories per person. As early as 2006, an adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert summed up the policy: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."
The situation has worsened during the war, with restrictions and bans on the essentials to sustain life.
The policy has drawn international outrage, even amongst Israel's allies. On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - the first for any leader of a Western ally. It was also the first time anyone had been charged for the crime of starvation.
Below, Middle East Eye explains the use of starvation in Gaza, the legal case against Israel, what the international courts are doing, and the reaction from Israel.
Read more: Why legal experts say that starvation in Gaza is a war crime
The Mujahideen Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement, reports that its fighters “destroyed” a group of Israeli soldiers and their vehicles using 60mm regular mortar shells in the al-Barasi region, located south of the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza City.
The group stated that the assault was completed in collaboration with the al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, which is the military branch of the Popular Resistance Committees, a coalition of armed factions in the Gaza Strip.
Far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the annexation of the occupied West Bank.
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) August 15, 2025
“I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apply Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, to abandon once and for all the idea of partitioning the country,” he said. pic.twitter.com/9HamNvG3Rg
Germany is open about its uninhibited support for Israel's war of extermination and genocide in Palestine, and wants to make sure the entire world sees it.
Recognition for its Zionist zeal enables Germany to rehabilitate its exceptionalism, or Sonderweg, with catastrophic consequences for Palestinians and international law.
Germany is not uniquely evil among liberal democracies in offering Israel unconditional support in killing starving Palestinians. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is no more morally bereft than British Prime Minister Keir Starmer or French President Emmanuel Macron. But Germany exalts Zionist radical evil to assert its uniqueness.
Germany remains as hungry for national identity as it has ever been, and nothing can stand in its way - least of all Palestinians, who appear in the German consciousness only when establishment forces fail to erase their existence.
Germany's pursuit of greatness has unleashed immense violence and destruction, from genocidal conquests in Africa to two world wars and the extermination of European Jews.
Its defeat and division after World War Two, and integration into Nato and the EU, seemed to put the German threat to rest.
Yet Germany has bounced back with a vengeance, thanks to economic prowess and global reordering.
While it has championed the rule of law and democracy within the EU like no other, it has not hesitated to set them aside when they conflict with its core interests - whether to impose its economic model and austerity on all member states, pursue energy policy at the expense of European partners (Nord Stream 2), or break fiscal rules it had imposed on the rest.
Read more: Germany's zeal for Israeli genocide revives its dangerous exceptionalism Opinion by Gjovalin Macaj
Israeli settlers have attacked two Palestinian villages, Abu Falah and Duma, according to local sources cited by Wafa news agency. The settlers cut down and uprooted olive trees, and threatened the Palestinian residents not to enter their lands.
Separately in Shallalat al-Auja, north of Jericho, settlers have stormed in and roamed provocatively through the village. The area has been repeatedly raided and attacked by settlers in anticipation of displacing the Bedouin residents, who rely on the land for their agriculture and water resources.
Israel's army has a special intelligence unit dedicated to smearing and targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza, according to a new investigation by Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972.
Referred to as the “Legitimisation Cell”, the unit was formed in October of 2023 at the onset of the genocide that Israel is waging in the Gaza Strip.
The +972 investigation, which interviewed three intelligence sources, revealed that the unit was meant to portray Palestinian journalists in Gaza as “as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel’s killing of reporters”.
The report comes days after the Israeli military assassinated Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif in an air strike, following a months-long campaign seeking to portray the journalist as a military operative in an attempt to justify his targeted killing.
The attack on Sunday night also targeted and killed Al Jazeera correspondent and Middle East Eye contributor Mohammed Qreiqeh, alongside camera operators Mohammed Noufal, Ibrahim Zaher, and Moamen Aliwa, and freelance journalist Mohammed al-Khalidi.
The Legitimisation Cell has played the role of a public relations body meant to declassify and produce counter-narratives when media criticism of Israel is heightened, a source told +972. This information has subsequently been shared with media outlets and “also passed regularly to the Americans through direct channels”, the report added.
The report revealed several ways in which the unit has operated to manufacture doubt against the credibility of Palestinian narratives.
Read more: Israeli army unit 'tasked with smearing and targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza'
Finland's biggest opposition party has said that it will seek a vote of no-confidence against the government if it does not clarify the country's position on the recognition of a Palestinian state, local media have reported.
Antti Lindtman, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), said that Finland is in "danger of being on the wrong side of history".
"There is at least one party in the Finnish government for which denying Palestinian rights has become a direct religious doctrine. And as a result, our foreign policy decision-making has been paralyzed, and our country's voice in the world is poorly heard and badly out of tune," Lindtman said.
He said that Finland's Prime Minister Petteri Orpo's government must take steps to put pressure on Israel.
He also said that Finland must push for the suspension of an EU-Israel trade deal and that the EU should "immediately pressure" Israel to end its attacks and allow aid trucks into Gaza.
In July, Finland's President Alexander Stubb said he is prepared to approve the recognition of Palestine, and the Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said that Finland has signed a statement encouraging the recognition of the state of Palestine.
United Kingdom, France, Canada, Portugal, and Malta have already announced plans to recognize the Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly meeting in September.
Medical sources have told Al Jazeera Arabic that at least 21 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza since dawn.
The sources said seven of the victims were shot dead by Israeli forces while they waited for aid in central and southern Gaza.
Julia Sebutinde, the Ugandan vice-president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has said God "is counting on me to stand on the side of Israel" and the signs of the "end times" are "being shown in the Middle East".
Early last year, Sebutinde was the only judge on a 17-member ICJ panel that ruled it was "plausible" that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, who voted against all six measures adopted by the court.
And in July 2024, she was again the sole dissenter when a 15-judge panel found that Israel's decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories was "unlawful".
In February 2025, a study accused her of directly lifting sentences almost word for word in her dissenting opinion written on 19 July 2024.
It alleged that “at least 32 percent of Sebutinde’s dissent was plagiarised”. Sebutinde declined to comment on the controversy to MEE at the time.
Read more: ICJ vice-president: 'The Lord is counting on me to stand on the side of Israel'
A Palestinian woman has been killed by Israeli fire in the al Mawasi area, southwest of Khan Younis, according to the Nasser Medical Complex.
The hospital reported that the shooting was carried out by Israeli forces on Friday.
The UN human rights office has said an Israeli plan to build thousands of new homes between a occupied West Bank settlement and East Jerusalem violates international law and could put nearby Palestinians at risk of forced eviction, which it said would be a war crime.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced on Thursday that he would push ahead with the long-delayed project, claiming it would “bury” the prospect of a Palestinian state.
A UN spokesperson said the plan would fragment the West Bank into isolated enclaves and noted: “It is a war crime for an occupying power to transfer its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Around 700,000 Israeli settlers currently live alongside 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, a move not recognised by most countries, but has not formally extended sovereignty over the West Bank.
The Gaza NGO Network has warned that more than 15,000 sick and wounded people urgently need medical evacuation from the besieged Gaza Strip.
“We call for urgent international action to rescue the sick and wounded and send field hospitals to the Gaza Strip,” the network’s director told Al Jazeera Arabic, stressing the critical humanitarian situation.
Senior Hamas official Izzat al-Risheq has denounced far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for visiting the prison cell of long-imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti.
“There is no longer any meaning to brutality except in the form of one of the leaders of this inhumane entity,” al-Risheq wrote on Telegram.
He criticised the minister for confronting a shackled and isolated Barghouti, saying: “A Zionist minister gathers his army, his guards, and the blood of his state and stands before a captive leader, shackled and isolated in solitary confinement, barely able to stand, and addresses him, saying: ‘You will not triumph over us!’”
“If Ben-Gvir had been victorious in Gaza, he would not have said what he said. But this is the arrogance of a criminal who failed to achieve his goal, whose prestige was defeated, and whose reputation was tarnished by the shame of the ages,” al-Risheq added.
Gaza hospital sources have reported that at least 11 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in various parts of the Gaza Strip since dawn on Friday, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.
