Middle East crisis live: 26 reported dead and more than 100 wounded after Israeli attacks on Gaza aid centres
Gaza’s civil defence agency said that Israeli fire killed 10 aid seekers on Friday, as a hospital director in the south warned of an influx of patients with acute malnutrition. Civil defence spokesperson Mahmud Bassal said that Israeli fire killed nine people “near the US aid centre in the Al-Shakoush area, northwest of Rafah city in southern Gaza” on Friday.
Two of the most senior Christian leaders in Jerusalem made a rare visit to war-torn Gaza on Friday, a day after Israeli fire killed three at the Palestinian territory’s only Catholic church, provoking international condemnation. The Roman Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, and his Greek Orthodox counterpart, Theophilos III, greeted local Christians and toured the Holy Family Church in Gaza City.
At least 718 people have been killed in Syria’s Sweida province, a war monitor said Saturday in an updated toll for nearly a week of violence in the heartland of the Druze minority. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted 146 Druze fighters and 245 civilians among the dead since Sunday, 165 of whom “were summarily executed by personnel of the defence and interior ministries”.
Armed tribes supported by Syria’s Islamist-led government clashed with Druze fighters in the community’s Sweida heartland on Friday, a day after the army withdrew under Israeli bombardment and diplomatic pressure. The UN called for an end to the “bloodshed” and demanded an “independent” investigation of the violence.
The US said early on Saturday that it had negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Syria’s government as new clashes erupted in Syria’s Druze heartland following violence that prompted massive Israeli strikes. Tom Barrack, the US pointman on Syria, said in the early hours of Saturday in the Middle East that Sharaa and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “have agreed to a ceasefire” negotiated by the US.
Dr Omar Obeid, who heads the Sweida division at Syria’s Order of Physicians, said Sweida’s only government hospital has received “more than 400 bodies since Monday morning”, including women, children and the elderly. He said: “It’s not a hospital any more, it’s a mass grave,”
Syria’s government misread how Israel would respond to its troops deploying to the country’s south this week, encouraged by US messaging that Syria should be governed as a centralized state, eight sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Israel carried out strikes on Syrian troops and on Damascus on Wednesday in an escalation that took the Islamist-led leadership by surprise, the sources said, after government forces were accused of killing scores of people in the Druze city of Sweida.
Syria’s presidency on Friday pledged to send forces to halt the clashes between Bedouin tribal factions and Druze fighters in Sweida, in the south of the country, and urged “restraint”. In a statement, the presidency urged “all parties to exercise restraint and prioritise reason”, adding: “The relevant authorities are working on dispatching a specialised force to break up the clashes and resolve the conflict on the ground.”
Nearly 80,000 people have been displaced by sectarian violence in southern Syria that began last week, the UN’s migration agency said on Friday. In a statement, the International Organization for Migration said “79,339 people have been displaced since 13 July, including 20,019 on 17 July”, adding that water, electricity and telecomms services in Sweida had “collapsed” and fuel shortages had crippled transportation and emergency logistics.
Israel has agreed to allow limited access by Syrian forces into the Sweida area of southern Syria for the next two days, an Israeli official said on Friday, after days of bloodshed in the predominantly Druze area that has killed over 300 people. The Syrian presidency said late on Friday that authorities would deploy a force in the south dedicated to ending the clashes, in coordination with political and security measures to restore stability and prevent the return of violence.
Israel has declined to renew the visa for Jonathan Whittall, the senior U.N. aid official for the occupied Palestinian territories, a U.N. spokesperson said on Friday, adding there were intensifying threats of reduced access to suffering civilians. Eri Kaneko, spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said visas for U.N. staff were recently renewed for shorter periods than usual and access requests to Gaza were denied for multiple agencies. Kaneko said permits for Palestinian staff to enter East Jerusalem were also withheld.
Yemen’s Houthi militant group said late on Friday it had attacked Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv with a ballistic missile, while the Israeli military said the projectile was intercepted after air raid sirens were triggered in several parts of the country. Most of the dozens of missiles and drones the Houthis have launched at Israel have been intercepted or fallen short. Israel has carried out a series of retaliatory strikes.
Iraq said on Friday that drones which hit several military radar systems last month were launched from within the country but manufactured abroad, without identifying the perpetrators. On June 24, the Iraqi government said that several small suicide drones targeted multiple Iraqi military sites and bases, including the radar systems at Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, and Imam Ali Base in Dhi Qar Province in southern Iraq.