Live: Hamas agrees to release 10 Israeli captives

More than 30 people were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip since Thursday at midnight, according to a report by the Palestinian Shehab News Agency.

Hamas is satisfied with the guarantees to end the Gaza war included in the ceasefire proposal it received, the Saudi news outlet Asharq reported, citing a knowledgeable source.

According to the report, the proposal assures that the mediators that both sides will not resume fighting as long as negotiations are ongoing.

However, another source close to Hamas tells the outlet that the new proposal presented to the group only includes minor changes from the previously submitted one by US mediator Steve Witkoff.

Hamas is expected to deliver its response to the proposed framework on Friday, the report said.

A new directive from the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has banned dozens of political and legal advocates from the US, UK, Canada, and Europe from entering Israel due to their "intentional delegitimisation of the State of Israel and its defence forces", the document said. 

Entry visas will no longer be granted to those who "knowingly" and "publicly" called for a boycott of Israel; disseminated Holocaust denial content; denied the impact of the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023; or "supported or publicised" initiatives to hold Israeli citizens or soldiers accountable in a non-Israeli court of law, according to the text. 

Among the targeted organisations is the Hind Rajab Foundation, named after the five-year-old girl in Gaza who was killed by a spray of Israeli gunfire as she waited for first responders. She had spent hours inside a besieged vehicle as the only survivor among the dead bodies of her relatives. 

The group has been instrumental in tracking down members of the Israeli military, using their social media accounts and alerting international governments as to their whereabouts so they may be apprehended.

Read more: 'Unprecedented': Israeli directive bans dozens of Americans, Europeans for advocacy

Good morning Middle East Eye readers,

Here are the latest updates on Israel's war on Gaza and developments in the occupied West Bank:

• The proposed cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas would see the release of 10 of the remaining living captives and return 18 bodies it holds in five stages over a 60-day period, according to a report from The New York Times.

• Gaza's health ministry said on Wednesday that 139 Palestinians were killed and 487 wounded by Israeli strikes in the last 24 hours.

• President Donald Trump's administration is withholding previously approved funding to schools during what the White House calls an ongoing review process, with a non-profit research group saying $6.2 billion is being withheld. 

  The administration has threatened schools, universities and colleges with withholding federal funds over issues including pro-Palestinian protests against Israel's war on Gaza.

• Cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party called on Wednesday for Israel to annex the Israeli-occupied West Bank by the end of the month, as they issued a petition ahead of Netanyahu's meeting next week with US President Donald Trump.

• The Metropolitan Police has said four people have been arrested following a Westminster protest by Palestine Action, during a protest outside of Parliament as MPs gave their approval to the UK government's decision to ban the activist group as a terror group.

English punk-rap duo Bob Vylan addressed accusations by the UK government and others that they were antisemitic after their Glastonbury performnce at the weekend, and said that the controversy surrounding them was a distraction from the real issue at hand: Gaza.

“We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people" they said in a statement issued on Tuesday. "We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine. A machine who's own soldiers were told to use 'unnecessary force' against civilians waiting for aid. A machine that has destroyed much of Gaza. We, like those in the spotlight before us, are not the story. We are a distraction....The government doesn't want us to ask them why they are silent in the face of this atrocity. To ask why they aren't doing more to stop the killing. We are being targeted for speaking up".

Doctors Without Borders said that 40,000 Palestinians in the West Bank remain forcibly displaced five months after the launch of the Israeli military operation ‘Iron Wall’. 

The charity said the large-scale military campaign has seen Israeli soldiers raid and violently empty well-established refugee camps in the northern West Bank, and cause widespread destruction (including demolitons) as they occupy the three refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams, preventing people from returning.

“After five months, the military operation continues,” said Simona Onidi, MSF project coordinator in Jenin and Tulkarem in a statement on Tuesday.

“The camps remain sealed off, with Israeli soldiers actively preventing anyone from entering. Families are still in limbo, and we’re worried that humanitarian needs will keep escalating.” 

She warned that people remain cut off from their homes and are left with very limited access to basic services, and healthcare.

Israeli strikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed 14 Palestinian civilians and injured numerous others, Wafa news agency reported, citing local sources.

An Israeli combat drone targeted a falafel kiosk near Al-Awda Hospital in the refugee camp, claiming the lives of five civilians and injuring others.

Meanwhile, another combat drone targeted a group of people gathered in front of a school in al-Mukhayyam al-Jadid - an extension of the refugee camp - claiming the lives of nine peoople, including three children, and injuring others.

Israel has killing 57,012 Palestinians, mostly women and children in the last 20 months, a figure considered to be an undercount as thousands of people remain unaccounted for, and are presumed to be dead under rubble.

What Israel, Washington, the UK and others have been forced to do to sustain the genocide is to create theatre - in a series of deflection dramas - to distract from the central crime.

Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, the film director who specialised in what he termed “MacGuffins” - narrative dead-ends to throw viewers off the scent - might have appreciated the skill with which this has been done. 

The aim has been to get the western media to focus on, and therefore western audiences to think about, not the main drama - either the genocide itself, or the inherently violent, apartheid nature of the Israeli state carrying it out - but to invest instead in separate plot twists and turns. Ones, of course, that don’t make western capitals look so obviously complicit and depraved...

The frenzied production of MacGuffins is necessary to stop western publics from thinking about the only issue that really matters: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians because it is a settler-colonial state that wants to rid itself of the “wrong” ethnic group. 

What European settler-colonial states have done throughout modern history - from the US, to Australia and South Africa - is replace the native population through strategies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and extermination. Israel is simply following in that tradition....

As Israel’s actions in Gaza become ever more indefensible - not least, the starvation of the population by blocking aid - the deflection dramas have needed to grow more lavish.

The recent attacks by Israel and the US on Iran, and before them, Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, are the most egregious of these set-pieces. 

You can read more here.

At least 111 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli air strikes across the Gaza Strip since dawn on Wednesday, including 24 people waiting for aid, Al Jazeera reported.

Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party is pressing for the formal annexation of the West Bank before the Israeli parliament’s summer recess on 27 July, the Times of Israel reported on Wednesday.

The party justified the annexation in a letter citing Israel’s “historic achievements” in its conflict with Iran, and claiming an “existential threat from within must be eliminated, to prevent another massacre in the heart of the country”. The letter was signed by all 15 Likud ministers in government. 

The letter also said the “strategic partnership, backing and support" from the US and President Donald Trump "made it a propitious time to move forward with it now, and ensure Israel’s security for generations”.

Former Deputy Prime Minister of Palestine, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, rejected such calls, saying they would only contribute to destabilisation and would not bring security to anyone, Wafa News Agency reported on Wednesday.  

Egypt also condemned the calls by the Likud party.

Annexing the West Bank would be illegal under international law.

The head of the controversial US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) insisted on Wednesday that the programme would not be shut down, and denied that Palestinians had been killed at its sites.

The US-based private group with opaque funding began operations on 27 May after Israel halted supplies into Gaza for nearly three months, sparking warnings by human rights organisations around the world that there would be an outbreak of mass famine.

Now, Palestinian civilians risk death trying to obtain food from GHF sites in central and southern Gaza as Israeli forces fire on aid seekers on an almost daily basis. A report by Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that soldiers are targeting aid seekers. More than 600 people have reportedly been killed in just over a month.

However, GHF's chairman, Johnnie Moore, a Christian evangelical leader aligned with US President Donald Trump, rebuffed calls from a range of NGOs for the efforts to be halted.

"We will not be shut down. We have one job to do. It's very simple, every day to provide free food to the people of Gaza. That's it," he told journalists in Brussels, including AFP.

"We have not had a single violent incident in our distribution sites. We haven't had a violent incident in close proximity to our distribution sites," he said.

The United Nations and major aid groups have refused to work with it, saying it serves Israeli military goals and violates basic humanitarian principles.

The World Health Organisation's chief said on Friday that in the previous two weeks, 500 people had been killed "at non-UN militarised food-distribution sites".

The same day, the medical charity MSF (Doctors Without Borders) said that "every day, MSF teams see patients who have been killed or wounded trying to get food at one of these sites" and called for the scheme to be "immediately dismantled".

Moore said his organisation remained intent on continuing work in Gaza if a ceasefire is agreed. 

"We have no intention, unless we're forced to do so somehow, we have no intention at all to abandon these people," Moore added. 

The death of Dr Marwan al-Sultan will leave a "devastating impact" on Gaza's healthcare system, said Muath Alser, director of the Palestinian medical organisation, Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW), on Wednesday. 

Sultan was one of only two cardiologists left in the Gaza Strip, and the director of the Indonesian hospital in north Gaza. He was killed in an Israeli air strike on his apartment on Wednesday, along with his wife and at least three of his children. 

Paying homage to the renowned cardiologist, Alser told The Guardian: “The killing of Dr Marwan al-Sultan by the Israeli military is a catastrophic loss to Gaza and the entire medical community, and will have a devastating impact on Gaza’s healthcare system.

“This is part of a much longer and systematic atrocious targeting of healthcare workers sanctioned by impunity.

"This is a tragic loss of life, but also an obliteration of their decades of lifesaving medical expertise and care at a time when the situation facing Palestinian civilians is unfathomably catastrophic,” Alser added.

His surviving daughter, Lubna Sultan, paid tribute to her father at the hospital. "His whole life was devoted to medicine and the struggle to treat patients," she told AFP. "There is no justification for targeting him and his martyrdom," she added.

Alser said al-Sultan was the 70th healthcare worker to be killed in Israeli attacks in the last 50 days. Healthcare workers have been disproportionately targeted by Israel.

British MPs have voted 385 to 26 in favour of legislation to designate Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

The designation makes it a criminal act to support the group and places it in the same category as violent groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

The order is expected to come into effect later this week. Once it does, supporting Palestine Action will become a criminal offence, with membership or expressing support for the direct action group punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Legal action is being taken to temporarily block the order, with a hearing scheduled for Friday at London's High Court.

 Civil liberties and human rights advocates have criticised the ban and said it is criminalising dissent against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Palestine Action is a direct action group that has predominantly targeted arms companies.

Former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and a group of four other Independent MPs that make up the Independent Alliance, said they “unequivocally oppose” the banning of direct action group Palestine Action on Wednesday.

In a statement that Corbyn posted on his social media accounts, the group said, "The real crime is the government's complicity in genocide - and the proscription of Palestine Action is a shameful attempt to silence dissent".

“The use of the Terrorism Act is an outrageous clampdown on civil disobedience. We implore MPs to recognise this gross misuse of state power for what it is: an assault on the democratic rights of us all,” the statement went on to say.

They also expressed concern that Palestine Action was being lumped with foreign neo-Nazi groups. 

MPs are due to debate and vote on the ban on Wednesday. 

The Revolutionary Court of the Military Judiciary in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday gave militia leader Yasser Abu Shabab 10 days to surrender himself for trial.

In a statement, the court said: "In accordance with the provisions of Palestinian Penal Code No. 16 of 1960 and the Revolutionary Procedures Law of 1979, the accused, Yasser Jihad Mansour Abu Shabab, born on February 27, 1990 a resident of Rafah, has been given ten days from today, Wednesday, to surrender himself to the competent authorities for trial before judicial authorities."

Who is Abu Shahab?

Abu Shahab, 35, was convicted of drug trafficking and was in a Hamas-run prison on 7 October 2023. He was able to get out of prison, even though the circumstances of his release remain unclear, The Guardian reported in June.

Israeli defence officials said they had begun arming Abu Shahab - nicknamed “the Israeli agent” - and about 100 armed men who operate under him in eastern Rafah. Members of his group have been accused of looting trucks containing humanitarian aid.

In June, Jonathan Whittall, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in occupied Palestinian territories, said the looting was happening under Israeli control: “Theft of aid since the beginning of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, under the watch of Israeli forces and they were allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point into Gaza.”

Whittall told The Guardian that he was referring to militias such as Abu Shahab's.

The Guardian also said the officials said the goal of arming Abu Shahab's militia is to reduce Israeli military casualties and undermine Hamas, leading to concerns that the backing of the militia might push Gaza into a civil war.