Israel-Palestine live: Israel’s response to South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ ends

Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said on Tuesday that steps taken by Israel are aimed at displacing Palestinians. 

Speaking at a news conference in Cairo with his German counterpart, Shoukry added that the immediate priority was to get a ceasefire for other political and humanitarian issues to be resolved, including the release of Israeli captives and the entry of aid into Gaza. 

All the steps that are being taken (by Israel) are to push towards displacement," said Shoukry. 

"We are under the illusion that efforts are being made to prevent displacement, but we have not seen real efforts to prevent displacement."

Shoukry also blamed the slow and limited entry of aid into Gaza on Israeli inspections.  

The UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) fears that hospitals in the southern and central Gaza Strip will collapse the way they did in the north. 

"What we're seeing is really worrying around a lot of the hospitals and an intensification of hostilities, very close to the European Gaza hospital," Sean Casey, WHO Emergency Medical Teams coordinator in Gaza, told a Geneva press briefing by video link.

"We are seeing the health system collapse at a very rapid pace," he added, saying that an estimated 600 patients had fled one facility.

He also said that the referrals of patients out of Gaza are "not working" and expressed "huge concern" about 66 health workers detained by Israeli forces.

Reporting by Reuters. 

The Israeli military announced the death of five additional soldiers in Gaza on Monday, bringing the death toll in a single day to nine. 

Nearly 590 members of Israel's security forces have been killed by Palestinians since 7 October. 

Israeli forces have killed at least 126 Palestinians in air strikes and ground attacks across the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Tuesday. 

This brings the death toll since 7 October to at least 23,210 with 59,167 wounded and more than 7,000 missing who are believed to be dead and buried under rubble. 

Overall, four percent of Gaza's population has been killed, wounded or gone missing in three months of bombardment. 

The majority of victims are children and women, according to health officials.

It's just after 11 am in Palestine and Israel. Here are the latest developments:

• Hezbollah drones attacked a key Israeli base in the northern city of Safad housing a command centre of the military.

• The attack came shortly after a targeted Israeli strike reportedly killed three Hezbollah members in southern Lebanon.

• The UN said three Gaza hospitals in the south and central areas are at risk of closure, while aid missions to the north are being denied.

• Israel released the names of four soldiers killed in Gaza on Monday, bringing the death toll among security forces to over 580. 

• Blinken is holding talks with Israeli officials today amid reports that the US is pressuring Israel to scale back its offensive in Gaza.

• During his meeting with Blinken, Israel's president called South Africa's genocide claim "atrocious and preposterous".

Hezbollah said it targeted the Israeli military's northern command in Safad with a number of combat drones on Tuesday. 

Israeli media reported earlier that sirens were sounded in northern Israel, including in Safad, due to possible drone infiltration. 

An Israeli army vehicle was seen running over the body of a Palestinian man killed by troops earlier in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm. 

The man was shot dead along with two other Palestinians during a military raid on Monday night. 

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said the Israeli military is failing to achieve any of its stated goals after nearly 100 days of attacking Gaza. 

Instead, he added, the only success has been revealing its "bloody, murderous face to the whole world after committing all these massacres".

Speaking from Doha at the conference of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, the Palestinian leader said Gaza's population's steadfastness had stopped Israel from achieving its goals.

"The declared goals of the war on Gaza are to eliminate the Hamas movement, retrieve the prisoners, and implement a displacement plan," Haniyeh said. 

"I tell you that the enemy, despite the destruction and massacres, has failed to achieve any of the goals of the war."

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Tuesday that "there is nothing more atrocious and preposterous" than the lawsuit filed in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocidal actions against Palestinians in the Gaza war.

Speaking to visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Herzog censured South Africa for bringing the case, which is due to begin hearings on Thursday, and thanked Washington for its support of Israel.

Reporting by Reuters.

The Israeli government has appointed Aharon Barak, the former head of its Supreme Court, to the panel of judges that will hear South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza at an International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing later this week. 

Barak’s appointment to the ICJ panel was personally approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a report on Israel's Channel 12.

The 87-year-old jurist was born in Lithuania and is a survivor of the Holocaust. His parents moved to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1947, a year before the creation of the state of Israel. 

He went on to embark on a distinguished academic and legal career, and served as Israel’s attorney general between 1975 and 1978, after which he began a three-decade tenure as a judge in Israel’s Supreme Court. In the last 11 of those years, he served as its president.

Barak has built up a reputation of being a liberal judge and a champion of democracy, particularly since his retirement. 

But researchers and commentators have called into question Barak's liberal and democratic credentials, citing his decades-long approach to cases involving abuses against Palestinians.

"For many, many years, and particularly since the massive demonstrations against the judicial coup alone, Barak has become the symbol of liberal democracy in Israel," Orly Noy, chair of Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told Middle East Eye. 

"Now Israel is sending that symbol of the so-called democratic Israel to whitewash its crimes against Palestinians in Gaza."

Read more: Aharon Barak: Israel's judge at the ICJ who 'legitimised occupation'

Three main hospitals in Khan Younis and the central Gaza Strip are at risk of closure as the intensifying Israeli offensive in those areas is worsening the situation, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha).

"As casualties rise, the ability to treat them continues to be in jeopardy, with three hospitals in the Middle Area and Khan Younis– Al Aqsa, Nasser, and Gaza European – at risk of closure," Ocha said on Tuesday. 

Meanwhile, in the northern Gaza Strip, UN teams continue to be denied access to the besieged area, preventing urgent supplies from reaching hundreds of thousands of people in need. 

Ocha said at least five missions to Al Awda Hospital in Jabalia and Central Drug Store in Gaza City have been blocked since 26 December, leaving "five hospitals in northern Gaza without access to life-saving medical supplies and equipment".

An Israeli drone strike in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday wounded nine people, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has said. 

The strike hit a home in Tulkarm camp hours after Israeli forces shot and killed three young men during a military raid in the city. 

The Israeli military released Tuesday morning the names of four soldiers who recently died in Gaza, bringing the number of troops killed in the besieged strip since the ground invasion started to 180. 

Three were killed in the southern Gaza Strip, according to the military, and one was killed in central areas. 

At least 580 members of Israel's security forces have been killed by Palestinians since 7 October. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due to meet Israeli leaders on Tuesday in his quest to prevent the Gaza conflict from growing into a regional conflagration, as the Israeli military said its fight against Hamas would continue all year.

Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv late on Monday to brief Israeli officials on his two days of talks with Arab leaders on ending the war.

He also said he would press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government "on the absolute imperative to do more to protect civilians and to do more to make sure that humanitarian assistance is getting into the hands of those who need it".

Reporting by Reuters.

Good evening Middle East Eye readers,

Several countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America have signed up to a global day of action that will see marches take place on Saturday demanding Israel end its bloody offensive on the besieged Gaza Strip. 

Famine, drought and epidemics form a "triangle of death" in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra warned on Monday.

In other developments:

• Separate Israeli air strikes killed the family members of two Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
• Israeli forces fatally shot three Palestinians in Tulkarm, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he will do “everything to restore security in the north".
• According to Medical Aid for Palestinians, around 71,000 cases of diarrhoea have been recorded in children in Gaza. 
• Israeli NGO B’Tselem said on Monday that Israel is starving Gaza, and that around 2.2 million people are surviving in Gaza “on almost nothing, routinely going without meals”. 
• Hundreds of pro-Palestine protestors on Monday blocked the entrances to three major bridges and a tunnel in New York City to demand a ceasefire in the war on Gaza.

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