Israel-Gaza war live: Deadly weekend of strikes draws condemnation with fate of senior Hamas commander unclear
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and the wider crisis in the Middle East.
Israeli bombing across Gaza over the weekend drew strong condemnation, with Egypt’s foreign ministry saying that Saturday’ strike on Khan Younis, which killed 90 people according to the territory’s emergency services, could not be “accepted under any justification whatsoever”.
That strike – which also left hundreds injured – was targeting Hamas military chief, Mohammed Deif, the mastermind of the 7 October attack. There was no confirmation about the fate of Deif, but on Saturday a senior Hamas official denied that Deif had been killed and the group said Israeli claims were aimed at justifying the attack.
On Sunday, at least 31 Palestinians were killed and more than 50 other people injured in fresh Israeli bombings across the Gaza Strip, according to rescuers and health officials.
Responding to the weekend’s violence, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan said Israel does not intend to end the war and commits “new massacres each time there is a positive atmosphere” towards peace.
The government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday denounced Israeli strikes on southern Gaza, urging the world not to “remain silent in the face of this endless massacre”.
O governo de Israel segue sabotando o processo de paz e o cessar-fogo no Oriente Médio. O mais recente bombardeio promovido na Faixa de Gaza vitimando centenas de inocentes é inadmissível. Agora com mais de 90 vítimas fatais e quase 300 feridos em tendas que abrigavam crianças,…
— Lula (@LulaOficial) July 14, 2024
Here is a summary of the day’s other main events:
The civil defence agency in Gaza said that 15 people were killed in a strike on a school sheltering war displaced on Sunday. If confirmed, the strike on the UN-run Abu Araban site in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp would be the fifth on a school turned shelter in eight days. The Abu Araban school was housing “thousands of displaced people,” civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, condemned Israel’s Saturday strike in Khan Younis, writing on social media that the “claim that people in Gaza can move to ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones is false”. Scott Anderson, director of Unrwa affairs in the Gaza Strip, said that on a visit to Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital, where many of the casualties were taken, he had “witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen” in the war.
Israeli police shot dead a driver who ran down four soldiers at a bus stop near a military base on Sunday, a police and army spokesperson said. Police called it a “suspected terrorist attack” and said the driver, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, had been “neutralised” during the incident. A military statement said one officer and a soldier were “severely injured” in the incident and two others also hurt.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said on Monday it had received a report of an incident 70 nautical miles southwest of Yemen’s Hodeidah.
The agency said authorities were investigating the incident but didn’t provide any details.