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

The European Union's foreign policy chief met a political official of Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Beirut on Saturday, as part of a push to avoid Lebanon being dragged into the Israel-Hamas war.

Josep Borrell held talks with the head of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, Mohammad Raad, Lebanese media reported. 

An EU source confirmed the meeting, which came hours after the group's militants fired a barrage of rockets at an Israeli military base in response to the killing of a senior Hamas figure in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut on Tuesday.

The EU is "engaging in diplomatic dialogue with all relevant political representatives who have influence on the situation on the ground or have a stake in it", the source said.

Bereaved Palestinians on Saturday reburied bodies exhumed from a cemetery in Gaza City, where the Israeli army has been leading a ground offensive against Hamas militants since late October, an AFP video showed.

The footage from the cemetery in al-Tuffah neighbourhood showed bodies wrapped in bags and laid out on mounds of soil.

Other bodies were strewn around smashed-up graves, as a dozen menworked with shovels to rebury them, the video showed.

Hamas on Saturday accused the Israeli military of "destroying 1,100 graves" at the cemetery and "stealing 150 bodies of recently buried martyrs".

The Israeli army said they were checking the claims without elaborating further.

"We were surprised to see the bodies exhumed" on Saturday morning, said a local man surnamed Aliwa, who was among the people reburying the bodies. He declined to give his first name.

He accused the Israeli army of "running over bodies" with a "bulldozer". Imprinted in the soil near the graves were what looked like track marks.

"We are currently retrieving the corpses present in the cemetery," he said, adding that only a "small number" of bodies had been identified.

“The only way is the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said, adding that the prospect of a state would offer a “horizon of hope” to the Palestinians.

Borrell added: “It is imperative to avoid regional escalation in the Middle East. It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” AFP reported.

“I am sending this message to Israel, too: nobody will win from a regional conflict,” he said, adding: “I think that the war can be prevented, has to be avoided and diplomacy can prevail.”

Since 7 October, Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah has exchanged frequent cross-border fire with Israeli forces. On Tuesday, a strike in a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut killed Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri.

Israel has not claimed responsibility while a US official told AFP that Israel was behind the strike.

Borrell said he would also visit Saudi Arabia on Sunday to discuss steps to secure peace across the region.

France's foreign minister said on Saturday that she had told her Iranian counterpart that the risk of a Middle East regional conflagration had never been greater and that Tehran and its proxies needed to end their destabilising activities.

"Iran and its associates must immediately stop their destabilising actions," Catherine Colonna said on social media X (formerly Twitter) after speaking with Hossein Amirabdollahian.

"No one would gain from escalation."

Translation: "I called Iranian Minister A Abdollahian and gave him a very clear message: the risk of regional conflagration has never been so significant; #Iran and its associates must immediately stop their destabilising actions. No one would gain from escalation."

Amirabdollahian said the only way to quell conflict was to resolve the root causes, Iran's state media reported, according to Reuters.

Seven Palestinians including women and children were killed and dozens were wounded in an Israeli air strike on Saturday on a house in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip belonging to the al-Nabris family, Palestinian health officials said.

The United States is working with its allies to see what can be done to protect civilians in Gaza as Israel's military campaign continues, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Saturday.

Blinken, on a week-long tour of the region, also told reporters in Greece that he wanted to make sure countries in the region were using existing relationships to ensure the conflict did not escalate.

Pro-Palestinian protesters blocked roads outside the British parliament in London on Saturday, demanding an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict and clashing with police who prevented them from marching across Westminster Bridge.

Videos posted on social media showed police blocking protesters' access to the bridge and a Reuters reporter said there had been several small scuffles. Unable to fully access the bridge, where they had planned to unfurl banners, protesters instead occupied the surrounding roads.

Police said they had imposed a legal order limiting the location of the protests and that by 3pm GMT people had begun to disperse.

The photographs below show daily life in Gaza City on Saturday, after the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts of the city. 

Credit: Mohammed al-Hajjar/Middle East Eye 

Several Palestinian civilians have been killed and wounded during Israeli air strikes targeting residential areas in Gaza's Khan Younis and Beit Lahia, Wafa news agency reported on Saturday. 

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that there was intense shelling of the PRCS-run al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis. 

"Shrapnel from the shelling scatters on the building, accompanied by heavy gunfire from drones," it said on social media platform X. 

PRCS added later that a displaced Palestinian was wounded in the chest after being shot by a sniper bullet outside the hospital. 

Lebanese group Jama'a Islamiya said in a statement on Saturday that it fired two volleys of rockets at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.

The attack came after Hezbollah said it had fired at least 62 rockets towards Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul. 

The meeting came at the beginning of a week-long trip by Blinken aimed at calming tensions across the Middle East, which have spiked since 7 October.

Earlier, Blinken and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met to discuss the situation in Gaza, as well as Turkey's process to ratify Sweden's membership of Nato, Ankara's foreign ministry said in a statement.

The Biden administration's most senior diplomat's tour will include Arab states, Israel and the occupied West Bank, during which he will say that Washington does not want a regional escalation of the conflict.

A US official told Reuters that Washington wants countries in the region, including Turkey, to play a part in reconstruction, governance and potentially security in the besieged Gaza Strip after the war.

Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has written in a column for Middle East Eye of her shock over the lack of official condemnation of Israel's killing civilians in Gaza. 

She writes: "Today, as Israel's war on Gaza continues, we have seen a very concerning targeting of women and children, thousands of whom have been killed in air strikes. This strategy aims to break, subjugate and even destroy the population or group to which they belong. 

"Within this abhorrent reality, we have heard the perpetrators justify their violence. Israel's blatant incitement of hatred and violence against Palestinians, including women and children, has stood out in its degree of dehumanisation. Members of the Israeli government and society have made it clear that they consider women and children part of 'the enemy' that should be destroyed.

"Disturbingly, there seems to be absolute impunity for crimes committed against civilians. Perhaps that should not come as a surprise. We have seen the consequences clearly in recent days in both Sudan and Palestine, where the international justice system has failed to hold perpetrators accountable."

You can read Alsalem's full column by clicking on the link below. 

Opinion: Israel's killing of women and children bodes ill for the world

A Palestinian was wounded after being shot by Israeli forces during an early morning raid in the town of Balaa, east of the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm, according to the Wafa news agency. 

In the nearby town of Anabta, also in Tulkarm, at least three Palestinians were wounded after confrontations broke out between Israeli troops and residents. 

In the north of Tulkarm, two women were detained by Israeli forces after their homes were reportedly ransacked. 

Elsewhere, two Palestinian men were shot and wounded during an Israeli operation in the town of Qatana in occupied East Jerusalem. The men were transferred to hospital and said to be in a stable condition, Wafa reported.

Several other Palestinians in Jerusalem were detained after Israeli forces raided multiple homes. 

At least 122 Palestinians were killed and 256 others wounded by Israeli bombardment over the past 24 hours in Gaza, the Palestinian health ministry said on Saturday.

That brings the total death toll in Gaza since 7 October to 22,722 Palestinians, with 58,166 others wounded.

In his latest opinion piece for Middle East Eye, columnist Peter Oborne argues that a recent much-criticised interview of a Palestinian politician highlights structural bias in western media. 

He writes: "No one can deny, however, that the reporters in Gaza are heroes of our trade, risking their own and their families' lives in conditions of immense hardship to tell the truth about conditions inside Gaza. To sum up: this is journalism at its most awesome, bravest, sacrificial and, above all, necessary.

"This week, however, we saw an example of journalism at its worst. Julia Hartley-Brewer, a presenter on London-based TalkTV, launched a rant against Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, accusing him of misogyny ('not used to a woman talking') in a set of remarks that left her open to claims of racial stereotyping.

"Barghouti handled the situation with calm and courtesy, refusing to become flustered or driven off course. One would expect no less from an internationally respected Palestinian politician who has survived time in Israeli police detention and has dealt with far more dangerous and formidable opponents than Hartley-Brewer."

You can read the full column below. 

Opinion: The voices that really matter are the journalists on the ground