Israel-Palestine war: First week ends with over 2,500 Palestinians, 1,400 Israelis killed
Live Updates
Several Palestinians have been killed after an Israeli air strike targeted a home in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, according to several Palestinian news sources.
The exact number of killed is unclear at the moment.
Another Israeli air strike has killed two Palestinians in southern Gaza.
After Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a statement stating that it has verified footage showing Israel use white phosphorus in Gaza this week, Amnesty International has released its own report.
The investigation from the rights group Amnesty shows that Israeli forces positioned artillery shells near the border with Gaza. These artillery shells were "labelled D528, the US Department of Defense Identification Code (DODIC) for white phosphorus-based rounds".
White phosphorous is an incendiary chemical that ignites when in contact with air and can cause severe burns in people or structures it comes into contact with.
“White phosphorous is unlawfully indiscriminate when airburst in populated urban areas, where it can burn down houses and cause egregious harm to civilians,” HRW has said.
US defence secretary has said that there will be no conditions placed on American military aid to Israel.
You can read the full Amnesty report by clicking here.
Thousands of Jewish New Yorkers protested outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s home in Brooklyn on Friday evening, demanding the lawmaker take action for an immediate ceasefire.
The protest took place as Schumer prepared to travel with a delegation of lawmakers to Israel.
The New York Police Department arrested 100 of these protesters, including New York City Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, as well as "rabbis, and descendants of Holocaust survivors", according to Mamdani's office.
Other mass protests took place in major US cities on Friday, including in Washington where a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups demonstrated in front of the Washington Post office, projecting onto the office building's facade that the newspaper is "complicit in genocide".
On Thursday, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated in Washington outside a fundraiser for the Israeli government-aligned Jewish National Fund, an organisation founded more than a century ago to buy and develop land in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine for Jewish settlers.
A squadron of American F-15 fighter jets has arrived in the Middle East, the US Central Command has said, as Washington continues to enhance its military posture in the region.
The US has already dispatched a carrier strike group to the region since Saturday, as Israel has gone on a devastating bombing campaign and launched a full siege on Gaza.
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin travelled to Israel on Friday, where he said during a news conference that "America's support for Israel's security is ironclad".
Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are estimated to have fled south after Israel warned Palestinians on Friday to leave the area within 24 hours before an expected ground offensive, UN humanitarian office (OCHA) said.
OCHA added that prior to the evacuation order, more than 400,000 Palestinians had been internally displaced due to the hostilities.
Al Jazeera has issued a statement of condemnation against Israel, after an Israeli missile fired at one of its news crews and killed a Reuters journalist while wounding two others.
"Israel has once again attempted to silence the media by targeting journalists," the news network said in a statement.
"We demand that the perpetrators behind this heinous crime are held accountable and brought to justice."
A New York City council member visibly carried a gun on her waistband as she opposed a pro-Palestine rally outside Brooklyn College on Thursday.
After a photo of her carrying the gun went viral on Twitter, council member Inna Vernikov was arrested Friday morning and charged with criminal possession of a firearm.
To read the full story, click below.
Pro-Israel council member brings gun to New York Palestine solidarity protest
Israeli forces have begun storming several cities in the occupied West Bank, including Nablus, Silwad, and Jericho, according to several Palestinian and Arabic-language media outlets.
Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians, including at least one child, in the occupied West Bank on Friday.
After Israel sent a warning for Palestinians in Gaza on Friday to evacuate within 24 hours, many have questioned the legality of the order.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) into making a rare public statement saying: "Instructions issued by the Israeli authorities for the population of Gaza City to immediately leave their homes, coupled with the complete siege explicitly denying them food, water, and electricity, are not compatible with international humanitarian law.”
And human rights lawyer Gissou Nia told MEE that the evacuation order may amount to forced displacement, "which is a violation of international humanitarian law".
To read the full story, click below.
Why Israel's call to evacuate northern Gaza violates international law
The Israeli army has said that it has bombed a Hezbollah target in southern Lebanon, after it claimed that it intercepted the "infiltration of unidentified aerial objects into Israel".
Earlier on Friday, an Israeli air strike in the south of Lebanon killed a Reuters journalist and injured several others.
The Russian ambassador to the UN has decried what he said was western double standards and hypocrisy, after Moscow drafted a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire between Israel and armed Palestinian groups in Gaza.
“Our former western partners are not hestitating to apply blatant double standards,” Vasily Nebenzya said on Friday.
He said that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, previously said “attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes”.
“The head of the European Commission openly declares that the EU stands with Israel while turning a blind eye to the Israeli air force attacks on civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”
US broadcaster MSNBC has removed three Muslim news anchors from their scheduled slots since the attacks in Israel last Saturday amid accusations the network was too sympathetic to Palestinians.
According to a report from Semafor, MSNBC did not air an episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show on Thursday, reversed a plan for Ayman Mohyeldin to fill in on another show, and plans to have another anchor fill in this weekend for Ali Velshi, a third Muslim-American host "who on Sunday interviewed a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority".
MSNBC denied the idea that the hosts were being sidelined, and said the three were continuing to appear on network programming to provide analysis. Middle East Eye reached out to MSNBC for comment.
The report comes after Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, came onto a MSNBC show on Monday and accused the network of being sympathetic to Hamas.
“I must say, I love this show, and I love this network, but I’ve got to ask, who’s writing the scripts? Hamas?” he asked.
As day seven ends of the ongoing violence between Israel and Palestine, here is our latest update, summing up events.
In Gaza, more than 1,900 have been killed in Israeli air strikes, including 614 children and 370 women. An additional 7,696 have been wounded, including 2,000 children and 1,400 women.
Israel gave a warning at midnight local time on Friday, telling the more than one million Palestinians living north of Wadi Gaza that they have 24 hours to evacuate to the south of the enclave. That time is now up.
Here are the other key updates from the past several hours:
-
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, 50 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and troops. They include at least six children and one woman. An additional 600 have been wounded.
-
Middle East Eye has lost contact with its Gaza-based reporters, Maha Hussaini and Mohammed al-Hajjar.
-
A Reuters journalist, Issam Abdullah, was killed in an Israeli attack in southern Lebanon which also injured a number of other journalists. BBC Arabic journalists were dragged out of their car at gunpoint in Tel Aviv.
-
Gaza hospital Al Awda has until 6am to evacuate it patients after a warning from Israel.
-
Scores have been killed in air strikes in Gaza while evacuating from the north to the south following Israel's order to evacuate.
-
UN chief says evacuating people in Gaza during a siege is ‘extremely dangerous’, while World Health Organisation and International Committee of the Red Cross all denounce Israel's call to evacuate Gaza.
Middle East Eye is going to continue providing you with up-to-date information around the clock. Be sure to check out our coverage elsewhere as well, including on Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Middle East Eye lost contact with its Gaza-based journalists Maha Hussaini and Mohammed al-Hajjar on Friday after the Israeli military told more than one million Palestinians they had just 24 hours to relocate to the southern part of the besieged enclave.
The last contact MEE had with Maha Hussaini, who won the 2020 Martin Adler Prize for journalism and was a finalist this month in the local reporter category at the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism, was at 03:40 GMT.
On Thursday, Hussaini published what she feared could be her "last video", and said she had lost contact with at least nine fellow journalists, some of whom had either been covering events on the ground or were at their homes at the time of an Israeli air strike.
"Everything and everyone can be targeted in Gaza," she said.
"Internet services have been disrupted after Israel targeted and bombed the two main telecommunication companies in the Gaza Strip.
The last communication MEE had with Hajjar was at 13:00 GMT, when the father of two said some 70 members of his extended family were trying to leave Gaza City.
With only two cars between them, Hajjar said he was unsure whether they would be able to do so.
