Live: Hamas agrees to release 10 Israeli captives

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) announced on Wednesday it had notified the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) of being potentially legally liable for complicity in Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Palestinians.

In a letter to GHF’s executive chairman, Johnnie Moore, CCR warned GHF that if it did not cease its operations in Gaza, it could face civil litigation or criminal prosecution in different countries and legal action before international bodies. 

CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher said Israel had “used the denial of food, water, and other basic necessities to carry out its genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza” for the last 20 months.

“As Palestinians now face mass starvation, Israel has teamed up with GHF to make accessing food not only dangerous and potentially deadly but also a tool of forced displacement,” she said.

“If GHF continues its militarized aid operations, it must be prepared to face the legal consequences, whether in the US or beyond.”  

In late May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would allow a limited amount of aid into Gaza and turned over distribution efforts to GHF, whose four sites are primarily located in the south.

United Nations experts have said the plan aligns with Israel’s goal of the forced displacement of Palestinians as well as shrinking, if not eradicating, the UN’s role in Gaza.

Nonetheless, the US State Department is considering giving GHF, whose funding remains opaque, $500m.

GHF, unlike the UN-run system it was designed to replace, coordinates its operations closely with the Israeli government.

Since it started operating at the end of May, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded while seeking food at sites, which are guarded by US private military contractors and overseen by Israeli forces. 

From the beginning of its war on Gaza, Israel has denied residents basic necessities, including food, water, and electricity. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, including starvation as a method of war. 

More than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel’s war on Gaza, which several countries, as well as many international rights groups and experts, now qualify as an act of genocide.

Israeli air strikes killed 10 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, according to the Wafa news agency.

Israeli fighter jets targeted tents sheltering displaced people in the Tabaria refugee camp, west of Khan Younis, claiming the lives of four people, including a minor, and injuring multiple others.

Both the dead and injured were rushed to the Kuwait Speciality Hospital in Rafah.

Another air strike targeted a house in Jabalia, killing three people, including two minors, and injuring multiple others.

In a third incident, a combat drone conducted an air strike in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip, killing three people and injuring multiple others.

Two of the crew members from the Gaza-bound aid boat, the Madleen, have been placed in solitary confinement in Israel, reported AFP on Wednesday.

Human rights group Adalah, which is representing most of the crew from the Madleen, released a statement saying that both Thiago Avila and European Parliament member Rima Hassan were transferred to solitary confinement on Wednesday.

"Israeli authorities transferred two of the volunteers - the Brazilian volunteer Thiago Avila and the French-Palestinian European Parliament member Rima Hassan - to separate prison facilities, away from the others, and placed them in solitary confinement." 

The Madleen was intercepted and forced to abort its mission to deliver aid to Gaza in international waters by the Israeli military on Monday.

When asked for comment, Israel's prison authority referred AFP to the foreign ministry, which said it was checking its reports.

Former British foreign secretary David Cameron may be liable for prosecution under international law and within the UK for his attempts to obstruct the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC), experts have said. 

Middle East Eye revealed on Monday that Cameron privately threatened Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor at the ICC, in April 2024, to defund and withdraw from the ICC if it issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.

"A threat against the ICC, direct or indirect, is an obstruction of justice," Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur on Palestine, told MEE's live show on Tuesday.

"It's incredibly serious that someone in a position of power might have had the audacity to do that."

And professor Sergey Vasiliev of the Open University of the Netherlands reacted: "If the reports are confirmed, David Cameron did cross the legal line when he threatened the Prosecutor with all kinds of consequences for applying for the warrants.

"This is a serious matter that shows Cameron's utter lack of respect for the ICC's judicial and prosecutorial independence."

You can read more here.

The Israeli military uprooted an olive grove belonging to a Palestinian villager in the West Bank, Wafa news agency reported on Wednesday.

The act of property destruction took place in Odala, south of Nablus, on Wednesday evening local time, according to local sources. Soldiers took bulldozers to an area close to the Odala bridge, where the heavy machinery was used to uproot olive trees from the villagers’ plot of land.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated incident, the Israeli military seized a bulldozer from a Palestinian villager living in Khirbet Yarza, east of Tubas, Wafa reported.

Since 1967, almost a million olive trees have been uprooted and destroyed by Israelis, according to an article in The Yale Review of International Studies, as a means of economic control and land expansion.

Olive trees have been an important part of the Palestinian economy for years and are said to contribute 14 percent to the Palestinian economy at the time the article was written in 2021.

Israeli attacks on Gaza’s education and cultural infrastructure amount to war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination, a United Nations investigation body has said. 

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, published its findings in a new report on Tuesday. 

It found that Israeli air strikes, shelling, burning and controlled demolitions had damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of schools and university buildings across the Gaza Strip. 

That destruction has made it impossible for 658,000 children in Gaza to have an education over the past two years. 

“We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza,” said Navi Pillay, chair of the commission.

“Israel’s targeting of the educational, cultural and religious life of the Palestinian people will harm the present generations and generations to come, hindering their right to self-determination.”

The report said Israeli forces had committed war crimes, “including directing attacks against civilians and wilful killing, in their attacks on educational facilities that caused civilian casualties”.

It also documented cases in which Israeli forces used educational buildings as military bases.

One example cited was the conversion of al-Azhar University’s al-Mughraqa campus into a synagogue for Israeli troops. 

More can be read here. 

The Russian government donated 30,000 tonnes of wheat in humanitarian aid to Palestine on Wednesday, Wafa news agency reported.

The donated grain will be allocated and redirected to the Gaza Strip once the process of grinding the wheat into flour and packaging the flour is complete.

The Palestinian Authority's minister of national economy, Mohammad Alamour, received the grain from the head of the representative office of the Russian Federation to the Palestinian Authority, Buachidze Gocha Levanovich.

Levanovich affirmed his country’s long-standing position in support of the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in line with international law.

Alamour said the donation was an embodiment of the historical Palestinian-Russian relations and an expression of Russia’s support for Palestinian rights.

More than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel’s war on Gaza, which several countries, as well as many international rights groups and experts, now qualify as an act of “genocide”.

Israel's defence minister on Wednesday called on Egypt to block a pro-Palestinian activist convoy, said to be made up of more than 1,000 people, from reaching Gaza, as the group arrived in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, AFP reported on Wednesday. 

"I expect the Egyptian authorities to prevent the arrival of jihadist protesters at the Egypt-Israel border and not to allow them to carry out provocations or attempt to enter Gaza - an act that would endanger the safety of (Israeli) soldiers and will not be allowed," Israel Katz said in a statement.

French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou accused French citizens who sailed on a Gaza-bound aid boat of capitalising on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for political attention, reported AFP on Wednesday.

The crew members, who hoped to raise awareness about the humanitarian situation in war-torn Gaza, included Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament who is of Palestinian descent.

She is among four French citizens still detained in Israel, after Israeli forces intercepted the Madleen boat and detained its 12 crew members in international waters off the Palestinian territory on Monday.

Another four, who are not French, were also taken into custody. The remaining four, including two French citizens and Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg, agreed to be deported immediately after being banned from Israel for 100 years.

Mathilde Panot, the leader of the La France Insoumise party, accused the prime minister of failing to condemn Israel's actions. "These activists obtained the effect they wanted, but it's a form of instrumentalisation to which we should not lend ourselves," Bayrou responded in the National Assembly.

It's "through diplomatic action, and efforts to bring together several states to pressure the Israeli government, that we can obtain the only possible solution", he added.

France and Saudi Arabia are co-hosting a United Nations meeting later this month in New York on steps towards recognising a Palestinian state and reaching a two-state solution to the conflict.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told parliament the priority in Gaza should be "an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages held by Hamas, as well as immediate, unimpeded and massive humanitarian aid access to abridge the suffering of civilian populations".

"In no way whatsoever do the gesticulations of Rima Hassan, her instrumentalisation of the suffering of Gazans, help to achieve these goals," he added.

He said the French consul had visited all four French activists in Israeli detention.

The Israeli ambassador in Paris said earlier that the Israeli authorities aimed to put them onto a plane back home "as soon as possible".

Israel is facing mounting pressure to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza after it implemented a total blockade of food, clean water, fuel, and medicine at the beginning of March.

The United Nations has warned that the entire population is at risk of famine.

Palestinians in Gaza City and the north of Gaza are facing a total communications blackout for the second day in a row, Wafa news agency reported on Wednesday.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said in an official statement on its Facebook page that the internet blackout arose after Israel bombed the main internet line connecting Gaza to Israeli networks, cutting off journalists, emergency responders, and humanitarian organisations from the outside world.

The blackout has been exacerbated by Israel's ongoing war in Gaza and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

The TRA said it was doing everything it could to have the main fibre line and infrastructure route repaired, which resulted in the blackout, and urged all relevant authorities to intervene immediately to help achieve this goal.

Since the onset of Israel's war on Gaza in October 2023, it has bombed internet and landline services and prevented the entry of fuel into the strip, which is necessary to operate the electrical generators, resulting in such blackouts. 

Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinians, including the genocide in Gaza, have left many searching for historical and moral frameworks to make sense of the brutality. 

The works of Martinique-born anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon from the mid-20th century offer a valuable tool. Although none of his major works directly address Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, they offer timeless observations about the axioms of political and armed struggle within the context of decolonisation.

From a Fanonian perspective, the war on Gaza is fundamentally a colonial war, coming decades after Europeans shattered and displaced a pre-existing community from their land. 

Better known as the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine led to the destruction of around 530 villages and towns, as 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees to facilitate the creation of Israel.

The Nakba was not an isolated historical moment, but the foundation of a continuing project. Today, 77 years later, Palestinians continue to endure siege, bombing and deprivation - conditions made possible by a Zionist ideology that sees them not as human beings, but as obstacles.

Read more: War on Gaza: Why Frantz Fanon's words are more relevant today than ever: Opinion by Ismail Patel

A Gaza-bound convoy consisting of over 7,000 pro-Palestine activists from North Africa has reached the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

The 300-vehicle "Sumoud" convoy, meaning steadfastness in Arabic, left Tunis on Monday before crossing the Libyan border on Tuesday.

They plan to cross to Egypt by Thursday, and continue on to the city of Rafah near the Gaza border in order to spotlight Israel's crippling siege on the territory.

Organisers have said Egyptian authorities have not yet provided passage to enter the country.

The NGO Medecins du Monde has said that an Israeli attack on one of their Gaza offices "constitutes a serious violation of international humanitarian law".

In a statement, the charity said at least eight people were killed in the attack on the building in Deir al-Balah on Tuesday.

"Medecins du Monde had informed the Israeli military of the presence of its office, which had officially been declared 'deconflicted', or shielded from Israeli military attacks under humanitarian coordination agreements," it said.

"However, as during previous Israeli attacks, the team received no forward warning that would have allowed it to evacuate the building or take measures to protect anyone inside," it added.

The EU has warned that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s order to cancel a waiver on cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian banks could “devastate” the Palestinian economy and precipitate the collapse of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

“The European Union is deeply concerned by the instruction by Israel’s finance minister Smotrich to cancel the waiver on cooperation with Palestinian banks, which could cut them off from the Israeli financial system, devastate an already crippled Palestinian economy, and may lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority,” EU spokesman Anouar El Anouni said.

He added that the EU was urging Israel “to revert this decision immediately and to refrain from any action that could lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority”.

Cancelling the waiver would require approval by Israel’s security cabinet. No date for a vote has been set and it was not clear whether it would pass.

A report accuses France of "regularly and continuously" delivering military equipment to Israel since the start of its war on Gaza.

According to the study by a coalition of NGOs released on Tuesday, deliveries have been continuous, both by sea and by air, since October 2023.

They include more than 15 million "bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles and other munitions of war" worth more than $8m, as well as 1,868 "parts and accessories for rocket launchers, grenades, flamethrowers, artillery, military rifles and hunting rifles" worth more than $2m.

The report was produced by the activist network Progressive International (PI) in cooperation with a coalition of NGOs including the Palestinian Youth Movement, the French Jewish Union for Peace, BDS France and Stop Arming Israel France.

To compile the report, the organisations say they relied on data from the Israel Tax Authority, verifying imports that corresponded to French-made military equipment.

Read more: New report accuses France of 'continuously' delivering military equipment to Israel