At least 15 killed in Israeli attack on central Gaza refugee camps | Gaza News

Dozens wounded in attacks on Bureij, Maghazi as only remaining working hospital in area ‘overflowing’ with patients, health official says.

At least 15 people have been killed in Israeli ground and air attacks on the Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps in central Gaza, a Palestinian health official has said.

“More than 15 martyrs and dozens of injuries reached the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the last several hours,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health told reporters from outside the hospital grounds in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.

If the “aggression” on the areas in central Gaza does not come to a halt, the number of those killed is expected to quickly rise, he said.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital is the only medical facility currently offering services to more than one million people in the area, the spokesperson said.

The facility does not have the capacity for more patients, he warned, adding that the hospital is already “overflowing with wounded people”, many of whom are being treated on the floor.

An attack on another house in the neighbouring Maghazi refugee camp killed two people, according to officials at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Earlier, the Israeli military said in a statement jets were hitting Hamas targets in central Gaza while ground forces were operating “in a focused manner with guidance from intelligence” in the al-Bureij area.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said medical staff at the hospital are overwhelmed by casualties pouring in.

“Doctors are running everywhere, searching for remaining medical supplies including antiseptics and anaesthetics to perform urgent operations to save lives,” Mahmoud said.

“We can still hear explosions of ongoing attacks and heavy machine-gun fire in the eastern area of central Gaza – including the densely populated Maghazi and Bureij camps,” he added.

“We’re learning from victims’ relatives there are still entire families trapped inside bombed homes in those camps.”

Ceasefire proposal faltering?

Israeli forces waged an offensive earlier this year for several weeks in Bureij and several other nearby refugee camps in central Gaza.

Troops pulled out of the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza last Friday after weeks of fighting caused widespread destruction to the already ravaged area. First responders have recovered the bodies of 360 people, mostly women and children, a spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence said.

The Israeli air raids and ground offensives across the Gaza Strip come as international mediators wait for Israel and Hamas to respond to a new ceasefire and captive exchange proposal.

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said on Tuesday the group will not accept a deal with Israel that does not clearly lay out a permanent ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

“The Israeli response talks about opening the door for negotiations on everything with no end or timeline … this confirms that Israel only wants one phase, where it takes its prisoners then resumes its aggression and war against our people,” Hamdan said.

“As long as there is no clear stance of readiness by the Zionist occupation for a permanent ceasefire and full withdrawal from Gaza … we cannot agree to a deal that does not ensure and does not guarantee a permanent ceasefire, full withdrawal and a subsequent prisoner exchange,” he added.

Announcing the plan last week, US President Joe Biden said the three-phase plan was proposed by Israel, however, Israeli leaders have since appeared to distance themselves from the proposal and pledged to keep fighting Hamas until the group is destroyed.

Israeli bombardments and ground operations in Gaza have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry.

Israel is expanding its offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and has largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and other supplies to Palestinians who are facing widespread hunger.

More than 1 million Palestinians have fled Rafah, mostly into tent camps that have arisen across central and southern Gaza.

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There is a measure of desperation in Biden’s ceasefire plan | Israel-Palestine conflict

On Friday, US President Joe Biden outlined a ceasefire proposal for the war in Gaza. The plan is comprised of three stages in which Israel and Hamas would negotiate an exchange of captives, an eventual permanent cessation of hostilities and rebuilding of homes and public facilities.

He called on Israel and Hamas to immediately accept the deal, and quickly move towards a full resolution of the conflict. He now seeks an immediate long-term ceasefire, and links his name and reputation to achieving it.

What are we to make of this? For starters, Biden described the proposal as an Israeli offer to Hamas, but it may well be an American initiative crediting Israel, or even a refurbished Hamas proposal from months ago dressed in American clothing to make it palatable to warmongers.

The plan is intriguing because it includes all the key drivers of the conflict, and also of its resolution: end of fighting, release of all detainees, eviction of Israel from Gaza, removal of the underlying motivation for Hamas to attack Israel, and reconstruction of the strip.

Hamas almost immediately responded that it viewed the proposal positively. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government responded with its usual combination of bravado and ambiguity – saying it would stop its attacks and leave Gaza only after a total victory over Hamas, even if the captives are freed. Yet Biden said that Hamas’s military power has been diminished to the point where it could not repeat its October 7 assault, suggesting that Israel has achieved its goal and can now leave Gaza.

Why have both Biden and Netanyahu, the brothers-in-genocide, who until recently scoffed at longer-term ceasefire proposals, suddenly changed their minds? I have no doubt it is their common desperation. Their reputations have been dragged through the mud, and their political incumbency is threatened. Desperation is a mighty driver of political innovation.

Biden fears losing the November election, while Netanyahu fears being thrown into jail for corruption by an Israeli court or for overseeing a genocide by the International Criminal Court.

Biden will try to claim credit for spurring peace-making. But it is impossible to reconcile any peace-making efforts with his eight months of nonstop funding, arming, and diplomatically shielding the Israeli genocide in Gaza – openly, gleefully, proudly, and at every opportunity. He revealed his true nature, and it earned him the nickname, “Genocide Joe”.

Netanyahu is caught in the grip of irreconcilable pressures of his own making, intended to keep him in power and out of the reach of the courts. Biden’s proposal is totally incompatible with the war-making frenzy of the extreme right-wing Israelis in his government. Like all politicians, but especially genocidal apartheid practitioners, he has made contradictory pledges to different audiences whom he needs to remain in power. Biden’s proposal has given him a soft exit from his dilemma.

Whatever dance Biden and Netanyahu may be performing for the cameras, the pull of moving forward with a plan to “end this war and for the day after to begin” – as the US president put it – will quickly run into serious obstacles on the path to a permanent peace. Ending the Israel-Palestine conflict involves many players who must negotiate along multiple axes, involving forces in several countries – all driven by unpredictable motives and contradictory needs.

The tensions between the following main players have to be resolved: the US and Israeli governments; Biden and Netanyahu; Netanyahu and several far-right Jewish ultranationalists in his government; the Israeli government and Israeli citizens who reject its ideology from well before October 7; the Israeli government and many Israeli citizens who support the demands of captives’ families to end the war and free them; Biden and a large swath of his Democratic Party base who demand that he reverse his support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, or they will not vote for him in November; Biden and the many Democrats and Republicans who want to continue the Israeli genocide; the US leadership, and most of the world’s people and governments who support equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis and oppose the US-backed genocide; the Israeli government and Hamas whose respective core goals are nearly, but not fully, met in the Biden proposal; and the US government and Hamas who now negotiate indirectly, but remain antagonistic on most issues related to Palestine-Israel and US hegemony in the region.

If the first of the plan’s three stages happens, hard negotiations will then have to tackle the toughest issues, like what form of Palestinian governance ultimately takes charge in Gaza, what security guarantees regional and global powers give Israelis and Palestinians, and how they permanently resolve the most contentious underlying issues – like ending Palestinian refugeehood, containing Zionist settler-colonialism, and peacefully coexisting as separate sovereignties in one land or adjacent states.

On the issue of Palestinian governance, Biden made an intriguing point in his Friday speech when he said that “at this point, Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7th”, meaning Israel has achieved a key goal of seriously degrading Hamas and it could now stop the war and leave Gaza.

Israel may or may not agree, but the US president may be laying the groundwork for engaging a different Hamas in a post-war era, as he did with the Taliban and his predecessors did with the Viet Cong after decades of fighting them as “terrorists”. When wars end, amazing things happen.

Hamas, or an entity that mirrors its nationalistic and militant determination to exercise self-determination in Palestine, will have to be part of the new governance system in Palestine, alongside the other Palestinian factions that agree to live peacefully alongside Israel. But that will happen only if – and this is the biggest if in this entire equation – Israel and its American backers explicitly, openly, and sincerely agree to full freedom and self-determination for Palestinians, and peaceful coexistence of equally sovereign Israelis and Palestinians in historical Palestine.

Now that would be a really bold move for lasting peace – if an American president one day decides to walk down that path, powered by sincerity, which is hard to discern in the current offering.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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War on Gaza, the view from Israel | Politics News

As the war on Gaza closes in on eight months of violence, support in Israel for the campaign is waning.

Columns in The Jerusalem Post speak of compassion fatigue while on the fringes of Gaza, reservists tell American journalists of the toll the relentless violence has taken.

None of this concern, or compassion fatigue, extends to the more than 36,000 Palestinians killed so far.

“I believe the Israeli public’s support for the war might be flagging,” Shai Parnes said by phone from Jerusalem, “but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking.”

War fatigue for a people divided

Parnes, spokesperson for the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which documents human rights abuses in Palestine, spoke over a shaky connection about a consistent ache in Israeli society over the absence of the captives taken to Gaza on October 7, the economic cost of the war and the toll on reservists who have interrupted their jobs or studies several times to wage war on a besieged enclave that is mostly rubble now.

The total military and civilian costs of the war to Israel is projected to be 253 billion shekels ($67bn) between the years 2023 and 2025, Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron warned at a conference at the end of May.

Among the reservists, who have been denied any end date to the conflict, support for the war remains, even if the exhaustion of lives subject to endless interruptions is beginning to show.

“I really want to know what the end will be,” Lia Golan, 24, a reserve tank instructor and student at Tel Aviv University told The Washington Post this week. “And no one has told us what that point is.”

Golan described the emotional toll of the unknown fate of the Israeli captives, soldiers being killed and Israeli citizens left homeless. At no point did she mention the Palestinians killed and displaced.

If the military doesn’t rule over Gaza, “everything will come back again and again”, 38-year-old Yechezkal Garmiza, a reserve soldier in the Givati Brigade told the Post.

“We need to finish the job,” he said – a reflection of the broad, if carefully curated, consensus that holds across Israeli media.

Israeli soldiers during operations in Gaza on May 31, 2024 [Handout: Israeli military via AFP]

In Tel Aviv, the urgency of the protests calling for the return of the captives is growing.

This week, tens of thousands of people pressed into Democracy Square and other locations around the country to demand the release of the captives and the dismissal of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

However, calls for the captives’ return and criticism of the government is not the same as a demand to halt the war. Public support for the conflict is strong, if starkly divided along political lines, polling carried out by the Pew Research Center from March to April has shown.

The roots behind much of that division was recently highlighted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which spotlighted in two stories the strict controls imposed by the Israeli censor over what information Israeli citizens are, and are not, allowed access to.

Any information deemed “sensitive”, including everything from the reasons behind the continued detention of Palestinians caught up in Israeli police dragnets to the campaign of intimidation against a former prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), are withheld by law from the Israeli public.

Wounded Palestinians at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah after Israeli attacks on a Palestinian vehicle on June 4, 2024 [Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency]

In recent weeks, a request by the current prosecutor of the ICC for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, have been dismissed by most Israeli politicians and media as “new anti-Semitism”, according to Parnes.

Likewise, the decisions by Ireland, Norway and Spain to recognise Palestine can be dismissed as a rejection of Israel rather than its actions.

Aside from official protestations that Israel is being singled out, it has not swayed public opinion notably in favour of the war.

“If you asked me what the mood was two weeks ago before all these things happened, my answer would be the same: Support for the war might be slacking … not on humanitarian grounds but for direct, personal reasons,” Parnes said.

More recent initiatives, such as a peace plan announced by United States President Joe Biden after Parnes was interviewed – framed as an Israeli proposal – have also served to divide and undermine public enthusiasm for a war that appears to many to have no end.

Israel launched its war on Gaza on October 7 after a Hamas-led incursion into its territory killed 1,139 people and took more than 200 captive.

Since then, Israeli attacks on the small strip of land have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, wounded more than 81,000 and destroyed any sense of normalcy among a battered and traumatised population.

“The government of Israel is leading its country to commit crimes of magnitudes that are difficult to [comprehend] and even continues to abandon its hostages,” Parnes said.

Last week, Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told Kan public radio he was expecting seven more months of war if Israel were to destroy Hamas and the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in Gaza.

“Most Israelis want to see the hostages back and do not support endless military operations in Gaza,” Eyal Lurie-Pardes of the Middle East Institute told Al Jazeera last week.

Politicians divided

Within Israel, seemingly irreconcilable views over the fate of the captives and the future of Gaza divide politicians as much as they do the public, pushing an end to the fighting beyond reach.

The gulf between those two sides broadened further on Friday when Biden made his announcement of the peace proposal he claimed came from Israel.

Rather than unify, the proposal has divided.

Far-right cabinet members Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have threatened to rebel over any suggestion of halting the fighting.

Netanyahu rival and supposed centrist Benny Gantz has spoken warmly of the deal and previously threatened to quit the three-man war cabinet, on which he sits with Netanyahu and Gallant, if no plan for Gaza beyond the conflict is agreed.

“In mid-May, Gantz threatened to quit the cabinet by June 8 if no plan is forthcoming,” Lurie-Pardes said. “However, that date is approaching, and we’re still waiting.”

While the current peace proposal may be grounds for postponing that threat, any plan on Gaza’s future is unlikely to satisfy either Gantz and his supporters or the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir camp, who are open in their ambitions to colonise the enclave.

In the short term, opposition leader Yair Lapid has promised to support Netanyahu in parliament on the peace plan, but it is not open-ended support for the prime minister as Lapid has also signalled an intent to form an alternative government.

Last week, Lapid met with politicians Avigdor Lieberman and Gideon Sa’ar to plan a rival government, one they urged Gantz to join.

All this manoeuvring and division will have little to no impact for those dying in Gaza, the International Crisis Group’s Mairav Zonszein said.

“There’s no political will to halt the fighting. Lieberman and Sa’ar are both extreme right-wingers. They’re unlikely to halt the war.

“Gantz is unlikely to offer a real alternative to the current approach aside from operating in a way that is more acceptable to the US,” she said.

“Public confidence in Israel’s war aims may be lessening, but people are still struggling to see an alternative to the fighting,”

War without end?

“At first sight, Israel’s war aims – to destroy Hamas both as a military and governmental force and to return the hostages – were straightforward,” Lurie-Pardes said.

However, he continued, those aims are not likely to happen without a political solution for a Gaza administration, and Netanyahu cannot offer that without risking his coalition, which relies on the far right.

Netanyahu is also suspected by many analysts of extending the war for his own personal ends, namely to stay in office as he is on trial on corruption charges.

“All Netanyahu needs to do,” Lurie-Pardes said, “is to maintain his coalition for the next two months of the Knesset summer session. If he manages to do so, we’re not really looking at elections before March 2025 because of the different requirements of election laws in Israel.”

For those trapped in Gaza, March is a long way away, if they survive.

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UN rights chief condemns ‘unprecedented bloodshed’ in occupied West Bank | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Israeli forces kill, injure and arrest many Palestinians every day during numerous raids in the occupied territory.

The United Nations has renewed its call for an end to violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Volker Turk said in a statement released on Tuesday that in addition to the death toll in the Gaza Strip, “the people of the occupied West Bank are also being subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed”. The UN human rights chief’s words came as the Israeli military and settlers carried out new attacks in the territory.

“Pervasive impunity for such crimes has been commonplace for far too long in the occupied West Bank,” he said, adding that this has created an environment for more “unlawful killings” by Israeli forces.

According to Turk, Israeli forces shot dead 16-year-old Ahmed Ashraf Hamidat on June 1 and critically wounded 17-year-old Mohammed Musa al-Bitar, who died a day later, near the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp in Jericho.

They were shot in the back at a distance of about 70 metres while running away after throwing stones or Molotov cocktails at a military post in the occupied Palestinian territory, he said.

The war in Gaza has seen a wave of violence and arrests unleashed in the West Bank. At least 505 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since the October 7 attacks on Israel, according to data confirmed by the UN. Data shows that 24 Israelis have been killed.

A tally by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society records the arrests of 9,025 people in the same period, including 300 women and 635 children. Many of those who have been released have reported being tortured and abused during their detention.

Renewed violence

As Turk’s statement was released, reports of renewed violence and arrests in the West Bank were being filed.

Al Jazeera reporters on the ground confirmed that Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian men from Tulkarem on Tuesday, with the army claiming they were about to carry out an armed attack.

Three more Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid on Nablus.

The Wafa news agency reported early on Tuesday afternoon that 22 Palestinians, including former detainees, had been arrested since dawn.

The arrests, which were accompanied by raids and threats against families of the detained, were carried out in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Salfit, Tubas, Jericho and East Jerusalem.

For a second consecutive day, Israeli forces have also imposed a blockade on Jericho.

Meanwhile, in Ein Samiya, east of Ramallah, Israeli settlers stole 120 sheep belonging to a Palestinian citizen in the latest attack on farmers, according to a Wafa report citing a security source.

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Fires burn in northern Israel after Hezbollah rocket attacks | Hezbollah

NewsFeed

Forests in northern Israel have been engulfed by wildfires started by Hezbollah rockets from south Lebanon.

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Biden sees Hamas as ‘only obstacle’ to Gaza deal, White House says | Gaza News

US President Joe Biden has told Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani that Hamas is the only obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire deal with Israel, and urged him to press the group to accept it.

Biden “affirmed that Hamas is now the only obstacle to a complete ceasefire” and “confirmed Israel’s readiness to move forward” with the terms he set out last week, the White House said in a readout of a call between the two leaders on Monday.

The Qatari Amiri Diwan confirmed that Sheikh Tamim received a call from the US president “to discuss efforts towards reaching a permanent Gaza ceasefire”, it said in a statement.

It added that the two leaders discussed “developments in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories”.

Qatar has played a key role in mediating indirect negations between Hamas and Israel, along with Egypt and the United States.

The ceasefire proposal includes a three-phase plan, with an exchange of Israeli captives for Palestinian prisoners, the evacuation of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the rebuilding of the devastated enclave.

The proposal excludes Hamas from remaining in power, something that the group has repeatedly rejected.

The G7 bloc of developed countries on Monday said it stood behind the proposal and called on Hamas to accept it.

“We, the Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), fully endorse” the truce plan “that would lead to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, a significant and sustained increase in humanitarian assistance for distribution throughout Gaza, and an enduring end to the crisis, with Israel’s security interests and Gazan civilian safety assured,” read the statement.

“We call on Hamas to accept this deal, that Israel is ready to move forward with, and we urge countries with influence over Hamas to help ensure that it does so,” it continued.

The G7 countries are the US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan has welcomed the truce plan but told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the group has yet to receive any written documents.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 36,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials, causing widespread destruction and displacing 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million-strong population.

Gaza’s Government Media Office said on Monday that more than 3,500 children under the age of five are at risk of dying due to shortages of food, nutritional supplements and vaccinations, as Israel continued to severely restrict the entry of much-needed aid from entering Gaza.

Six-week ceasefire plan

The latest US-proposed deal begins with a six-week complete ceasefire that would see Israeli forces withdraw from all populated areas of Gaza, where famine has already taken hold in parts of the north.

Although Israel’s war cabinet has convened to discuss the proposal, it remains unclear whether they are on board.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the plan as “partial”, a government spokesman said earlier on Monday.

“The outline that President Biden presented is partial,” government spokesman David Mencer quoted Netanyahu as saying, adding in a press briefing that “the war will be stopped for the purpose of returning the hostages” after which discussions will follow on how to achieve Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas.

Netanyahu, in a separate statement issued by his office, said that “claims that we have agreed to a ceasefire without our conditions being met are incorrect”.

Family members of Israeli captives held in Gaza have called on the Israeli government to accept the plan and urged Netanyahu to publicly support the proposal. They have been protesting for months against the government, and repeatedly called on it to accept previous deals that were indirectly negotiated.

Israel’s military on Monday confirmed the deaths of four more hostages held in Gaza, naming them as Haim Perry, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper and Nadav Popplewell.

Military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “We assess that the four of them were killed while together in the area of Khan Younis during our operation there against Hamas.”

Earlier this month, Hamas approved a proposal for a ceasefire put forward by mediators Qatar and Egypt, but Israel again said the proposal falls short of its demands.

Israel is coming under growing international pressure to stop its assault and is becoming increasingly isolated.

An International Court of Justice order for it to stop its offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah has not stopped Israel from continuing to launch attacks on the overcrowded area, where it is also expanding a ground operation.

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Iran parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announces presidential bid | News

Ghalibaf is among presidential hopefuls seeking approval to run for the June 28 snap elections.

The conservative speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has registered his candidacy for the snap presidential election on June 28.

At the end of the five-day registration period on Monday evening, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told reporters that a total of 80 applications have been submitted.

The presidential hopefuls now have to wait until June 11 to see if their candidacy is approved by the Guardian Council – a conservative-dominated, 12-member body of jurists who are either appointed or approved by Iran’s supreme leader and vet all candidates for public office.

Candidates cleared by the vetting body will have two weeks to campaign, present their manifestos, and participate in televised debates before the election.

The upcoming vote, initially slated for 2025, was brought forward following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi on May 19.

Raisi and seven members of his entourage, including foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, were killed when their helicopter came down on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern Iran.

Economic problems

Ghalibaf ran for president previously in 2005 and 2013, and in 2017 withdrew from the race in favour of Raisi who finished second to Hassan Rouhani, giving the moderate leader a second term.

After formally registering his candidacy, Ghalibaf vowed to improve the economy if elected.

“If I don’t run for election, the work that we have started in the last few years to solve the economic problem of the people … will not be completed,” he said.

He added that he “would never have entered the field of competition” if he did not believe that Iran’s economic and social problems could be solved.

Ghalibaf, 62, is a former commander of the air force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, part of Iran’s military.

He was re-elected parliament speaker on May 28 following a legislative election in March.

An Iran-Iraq war veteran, Ghalibaf was mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017 and before that was chief of the Iranian police forces.

Candidate registration opened on Thursday and closed on Monday.

Other prominent figures including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, moderate ex-parliament speaker Ali Larijani and ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili have also registered their bids.

With Ghalibaf filing his nomination, experts believe Jalili’s chances of making it to the finish line have become bleak.

Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani is also likely to withdraw in favour of Ghalibaf.

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‘No one will hold Israel accountable’ as it targets medics in south Lebanon | Benjamin Netanyahu News

Most evenings in al-Habbariyeh, a small town in southern Lebanon’s verdant hills, the young volunteers of the Lebanese Emergency and Relief Corps centre liked to get together to play cards or share an argileh (hookah).

On March 26, a clear, brisk night, Abdullah Sharif Atwi, Abdulrahman al-Shaar, Ahmad al-Shaar, Baraa Abu Qais, Hussein al-Shaar, Muhammad al-Farouq Atwi and Muhammad Ragheed Hammoud were in the second-floor hangout.

The Israeli drones hovered overhead, they had been going all day and now their sound was fading almost into the background.

The group was in high spirits, taking videos of themselves and joking about.

About half an hour after midnight, just into March 27, Israel hit the centre with an air strike, levelling the two-storey building.

“People from the village ran down to see what happened,” Ali Noureddine, a journalist and activist from al-Habbariyeh, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a small village,” he said. “We’re all one family.”

The seven young men had been killed and four others badly injured.

Most of the 18-to-25-year-olds had been students.

Hunted health workers

Israel killed a total of 17 people in three different towns just that day, 10 of them medical workers.

The attack made March 27 the deadliest day for medical workers in south Lebanon.

An attack on a cafe in Ras al-Naqoura killed a medical worker from Amal’s Al-Risala Scouts and three others, including one Amal member.

The third attack that day was in Tayr Harfa which killed two paramedics from Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Association along with four Hezbollah fighters.

The Israeli army spokesperson said the al-Habbariyeh attack successfully targeted a “significant terrorist” in al-Jamaa al-Islamiya.

“They didn’t say who the ‘terrorist’ was,” Mahyaddine Qarhani, director of the Lebanese Emergency and Relief Corps’ Ambulance Association, told Al Jazeera.

Investigations by human rights organisations found no evidence of military activity or fighters on-site.

Human Rights Watch called for the al-Habbariyeh attack to be investigated as a war crime as leading rights groups currently investigate other Israeli attacks on medical workers.

Hezbollah and Israel have been trading attacks across the border since October 8, the day after Israel launched its war on Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on Israel in which 1,139 people were killed and about 240 others taken captive.

More than 92,600 people have been displaced from southern Lebanon by the relentless Israeli attacks, according to the International Organization for Migration.

The people still in the south are vulnerable, like the elderly and lower-income people who rely on the medical services the Lebanese Emergency and Relief Corps provides.

Flares fired from northern Israel over the southern Lebanese village of Aita al-Shaab, on October 28, 2023 [Fadel Senna/AFP]

Like many services in the country, Lebanon’s healthcare is mostly privatised as the Ministry of Public Health relies on private groups and NGOs to fill the gaps.

The medical situation in Lebanon was already deeply affected by a five-year-old economic crisis, with 80 percent of the population below the poverty line.

Now, the south is also contending with war and with its few medical workers and facilities being targeted by Israel.

Data on the attacks on south Lebanon are hard to find, with locals saying many incidents go unreported.

Al Jazeera collected data from monitoring groups indicating at least 18 Israeli attacks on medical personnel and facilities, resulting in the deaths of 20 health workers.

They include members of Lebanon’s civil defence and health workers for the medical branches of Hezbollah, the Amal Movement and al-Jamaa al-Islamiya.

Each group has an armed wing engaging with the Israeli military but their healthcare workers are protected by international humanitarian law.

This protection as medical workers lapses only if they participate in military activities.

There has been no evidence that this was the case in any of the attacks on medical workers, multiple sources, including representatives of leading human rights and monitoring agencies, told Al Jazeera.

None of the attacks showed “evidence of any association with the armed wing of these groups”, Ameneh Mehvar, a Middle East specialist at ACLED, told Al Jazeera.

Possible war crimes

The attacks on medical workers in southern Lebanon have gone largely unreported, although they are contributing to significantly degrading the quality of life for the people left there.

Medical personnel cannot be targeted “even if they’re close to military targets”, Shane Darcy, a professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera.

“Even if there is a Hezbollah [fighter] present, the principle of proportionality means [Israel’s military] has to weigh the impact on civilian proportionality,” a source at a renowned human rights organisation told Al Jazeera, speaking on background.

There is no exact formula for proportionality, Darcy said, but targeting or killing civilians deliberately is a crime.

“There’s a lot of danger [for medical workers],” Dr Wahida Ghalayni, who works at the Ministry of Public Health, told Al Jazeera. “These are direct attacks [on them].”

The pattern of Israel’s lack of accountability and continued attacks leave Lebanon’s medical workers feeling Israel is directly targeting them.

A day before the al-Habbariyeh attack, on March 26, an Israeli air raid hit Tayr Harfa’s civil defence centre, injuring four health workers.

Israeli soldiers simulating an invasion of Lebanon in May 2024 [Handout via Israeli military]

Then two Hezbollah paramedics “were killed in a second strike on the same location during the same day”, according to data collected by ACLED.

“This is nothing new,” Rabieh Issa, civil defence commissioner for Al-Risala Scouts, told Al Jazeera.

“We don’t normally deploy until 15 minutes after the first hit because they hit again and again. So, for our own security, we wait a bit.”

But it is not only warplanes that the hunted medical personnel need to look out for.

On March 21, Israeli warplanes struck Yarine during fighting with Hezbollah, according to ACLED.

Israel said they were targeting Hezbollah’s military infrastructure but that does not explain why ambulances that rushed in after the attack came under “heavy machinegun fire” from the Israelis.

And there are many more incidents.

On March 4, a medical centre in the Al-Ouwayni neighbourhood of Odaisseh was hit by an Israeli air raid, killing three Hezbollah-affiliated health workers. On February 22, four people from Lebanon’s civil defence were killed in air attacks on Blida. On January 11, two medics were killed in the southern town of Hanin when Israeli jets struck the Islamic Health Society building.

Israel claims it is attacking “Hezbollah cells”. But in many of its attacks on medical workers or facilities, no fighters were killed.

In April, media outlet +972mag reported on Lavender, an artificial intelligence (AI)-supported system Israel uses to select targets for assassination and calculate “acceptable civilian loss” for each killing.

For a low-level Hamas operative, the Israeli army determined that 15-20 civilian deaths are permissible, while “the army on several occasions authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.

“I’d find it hard for any international humanitarian lawyer to say that’s an acceptable application of proportionality,” Darcy said. “Those are possible war crimes.”

Gaps in the south

Back in al-Habbariyeh, the Israeli attack has left a big hole in the community.

“We’re a small village … all grieving,” Noureddine, who used to visit friends at the centre, said.

“Israel hits whoever they want. I don’t know if tomorrow someone else will die or not.”

But the decimated team has also left a big gap in the community’s medical care.

The Emergency and Relief Corps suspended operations in al-Habbariyeh after the attack, fearing that moving operations would simply attract attacks on civilians in other neighbourhoods.

“We can’t work in that area anymore,” he said. “Nobody knows why they hit the centre but it’s completely destroyed.”

The outskirts of al-Habbariyeh have been hit as recently as a month ago.

“Israel is still hitting us and if we make a new centre they’ll come and bomb it again,” Noureddine said. “They’re hitting civilians and we don’t have people whose lives we can simply sacrifice.”

“The Americans give Israelis weapons and hit us with them and no one will hold them accountable or will even look at what they’re doing,” Noureddine said.

“No one is held accountable for Israel’s attacks.”

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Maldives bans Israeli passport holders over war on Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict News

The Indian Ocean archipelago’s ban comes in solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza facing unrelenting attacks and mass hunger.

The Maldives government will ban Israelis from the Indian Ocean archipelago known for white sand beaches and luxury resorts as public anger in the predominantly Muslim nation rises over the war in Gaza.

President Mohamed Muizzu has “resolved to impose a ban on Israeli passports”, a spokesman for his office said in a statement, without giving details of when the new law would take effect.

Muizzu also announced a national fundraising campaign called “Maldivians in Solidarity with Palestine”. Nearly 11,000 Israelis visited the Maldives last year, which was 0.6 percent of total tourist arrivals.

Official data also shows the number of Israelis visiting the Maldives dropped to 528 in the first four months of this year, down 88 percent compared to the corresponding period last year.

Opposition parties and government allies in the Maldives have been putting pressure on Muizzu to ban Israelis as a sign of protest against the Gaza war. At least 36,439 Palestinians have been killed and 82,627 wounded in the conflict since October 7.

‘We’re good’

The Maldives lifted a previous ban on Israeli tourists in the early 1990s and moved to restore relations in 2010. However, normalisation attempts were scuttled following the toppling of President Mohamed Nasheed in February 2012.

In response to the ban, an Israel foreign ministry spokesman urged citizens currently in the Maldives to depart. “For Israeli citizens staying in the country, it is recommended to consider leaving, since if they fall into distress for any reason, it will be difficult for us to help.”

Israeli passport holders have also not been allowed to enter Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen.

In a post on X in March, the State of Israel said: “We’re good,” in response to a post about these countries’ entry bans, which had been in place prior to the onset of the ongoing war in Gaza.



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‘We will not accept the rule of Hamas in Gaza at any stage’: Israel | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Israel won’t accept Hamas’s rule of Gaza and is examining alternatives, its defence minister said, a further indication it’s brushing aside a ceasefire proposal announced by US President Joe Biden as Palestinian fighters continue to resist the invasion.

“While we conduct our important military actions, the defence establishment is simultaneously assessing a governing alternative to Hamas,” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a statement on Sunday.

“We will isolate areas, remove Hamas operatives from these areas, and introduce forces that will enable an alternative government to form – an alternative that threatens Hamas,” Gallant added.

“On one hand, military action and on the other the ability to change the government. [This] will lead to the achievement of two of the goals of this war: the dismantling of the Hamas government and its military power, and the return of the hostages. We will not accept the rule of Hamas in Gaza at any stage in any process aimed at ending the war.”

Pressure is mounting on Israel’s government after Biden announced the proposal on Friday, saying it was an “Israeli” truce deal and urging Hamas to accept it. The group that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007 reacted “positively” to the US president’s statements.

Israel’s war cabinet meets later on Sunday.

Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have vowed to quit the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government if the ceasefire proposal is accepted.

“The deal … means the end of the war and the abandonment of the goal to destroy Hamas. This is a reckless deal that constitutes a victory for terrorism and a security threat to the state of Israel,” said Ben-Gvir.

Ophir Falk, Israel’s senior foreign policy adviser, said Biden’s plan is a “deal we agreed to – it’s not a good deal, but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them”.

‘Every expectation Israel would say yes’

Yossi Beilin, a former cabinet minister and peace negotiator, said even if the far-right members quit the government it can still survive if the parties of opposition leader Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz replace them.

“The right-wing government is causing us huge problems. It was a political decision by Netanyahu, who just three years earlier rejected joining them. But since he needed them to have a majority and again become prime minister, he agreed to something he never should have agreed to,” Beilin told Al Jazeera.

“If this deal is eventually connected to a larger regional deal, according to the Arab [Peace] Initiative of 2002 and the readiness of the Saudis, this will be his most important legacy. Otherwise, his legacy will be very disappointing.”

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said if Hamas agrees to Biden’s ceasefire proposal to end the war, the United States expects Israel to also accept the plan.

“This was an Israeli proposal. We have every expectation that if Hamas agrees to the proposal – as was transmitted to them, an Israeli proposal – then Israel would say ‘yes’,” Kirby said in an interview on the ABC News programme This Week.

More than 100,000 Israeli demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday demanding that the Netanyahu-led coalition sign on to the truce proposal.

‘Catastrophic’ hunger spreads in Gaza

Pressure is mounting on Israel and Egypt to reopen land crossings that connect to Gaza to allow desperately needed aid deliveries. Hundreds of aid trucks have been stuck in Egypt with food supplies rotting for weeks after Israel took control of the crucial Rafah crossing last month.

“The closure of the nine possible potential crossings is a catastrophe,” Ahmed Bayram, spokesman for aid group the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Al Jazeera.

“We hear on a daily basis from our teams that children are sleeping on the sands because there are no tents left, they are drinking unsafe water all day long, and they are eating very, very little.”

Even before Israel took control of the Rafah crossing, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza was far below the total needed. The United Nations says at least 500 to 600 trucks are required daily to feed hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of starvation.

Officials from Egypt, the US, and Israel met in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the worsening humanitarian situation on the ground.

Al-Qahera News, which is linked to Egyptian intelligence, quoted a senior official as saying, “The Egyptian security delegation affirmed Israel’s full responsibility for humanitarian aid not entering the Gaza Strip … Egypt adhered to its firm position on the need for Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing to resume its operation.”

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