Israel-Gaza war live: ceasefire ‘close to the goalline’, says US | Israel-Gaza war
Israel-Hamas ceasefire close to the goalline, US secretary of state says
As we mentioned in the opening summary, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said that a long-sought ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was within sight.
Speaking at the Aspen security forum in Colorado on Friday, he said:
I believe we’re inside the 10-yard line and driving toward the goalline in getting an agreement that would produce a ceasefire, get the hostages home and put us on a better track to trying to build lasting peace and stability.
There remains some issues that need to be resolved, that need to be negotiated. We’re in the midst of doing exactly that.
The US has been working with Qatar and Egypt to try to arrange a ceasefire in order to free hostages held since the 7 October Hamas attacks, and get more humanitarian aid into the enclave devastated by Israeli airstrikes.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to travel to Washington next week and address a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. He is expected to meet Joe Biden if the US president has recovered from Covid-19 by then, the White House has said.
Netanyahu has reportedly said Israel needed control of the Palestinian side of Gaza’s border with Egypt to stop weapons reaching. It is a condition that conflicts with Hamas’s position that Israel must withdraw from all Gaza territory after a ceasefire.
He has also said that Israel must also be allowed to keep on fighting until its war aims of destroying Hamas and bringing home all hostages are achieved.
Key events
Death toll in Gaza reaches 38,919, says health ministry
At least 38,919 Palestinian people have been killed and 89,622 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
The ministry has said thousands of other dead people are most likely lost in the rubble of the enclave.
Odaisseh had last been bombed four days ago. Israeli missiles would strike it again in the evening. But on this searing July morning, the small Lebanese village on the frontier with Israel was deathly quiet as three armoured cars with UN markings crept along its narrow main road.
“From here to the end of Odaisseh, we are not going to see people in the streets,” said Lt Col José Irisarri, a Spanish officer serving in a battalion of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. “Only ambulances and paramedics.”
For months, Israel and the militant group Hezbollah have been exchanging fire over the “blue line” that demarcates Israeli-held territory from Lebanon. Fears are growing it could boil over into full-blown war. In Odaisseh, and other areas to which the Guardian gained access last week with a UN peacekeeping patrol, it appears that war has already arrived.
Long stretches of Odaisseh and a neighbouring village, Kafr Kila, have been reduced to jagged seas of concrete rubble, strewn with rebar, electrical cables and upturned furniture. A yellow Hezbollah flag was tangled in the wreckage of one Kafr Kila home. Shocks of bright-pink bougainvillea protruded from the ruins of others.
The few buildings along Odaisseh’s main road to be spared a direct hit still carry scars of the village’s repeated poundings by heavy bombs, their windows shattered and metal garage doors left writhing and twisted.
The extent of the damage in these villages since October has been rarely glimpsed, at least by the media. Surveillance cameras mounted across the Israeli frontier watch anything that moves. Still, someone has returned in the past week to mount red and black flags in some of the debris, in defiant commemoration of the Shi’a Muslim religious festival Ashura.
You can read the full story by Michael Safiand Kafr Kila here:
At least two people have been killed and a number of others injured in an Israeli bombing that targeted a house in the Zarqa areaof northern Gaza City, Al Jazeera Arabic reports. Journalists from Al Jazeera Arabic also described intense Israeli bombardment on the ad-Dawa area, north of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. These claims have not yet been independently verified by the Guardian.
Here are some of the latest images of Gaza coming out of the newswires:
Firefighters try to put out a fire that broke out after Israeli attacks in Gaza City on 19 July 2024. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesSmoke rises from a destroyed building after an Israeli airstrike in the Al-Zawaida neighbourhood in the central Gaza Strip. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPAThe aftermath of an attack by the Israeli army on a Palestinian family's house in the Nusairat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) has said that a vessel sustained minor damage after it was targeted in two attacks that occurred about 64 nautical miles northwest of Mokha, a city in Yemen. It said that no crew members were harmed.
Although no one has claimed immediate responsibility for the attack, the Houthi militia, which controls the most populous parts of Yemen and is aligned with Iran, has attacked ships off its coast for months, saying it is acting in solidarity with Palestinians over Israel’s war in Gaza.
Jordan’s foreign minister has welcomed the International Court of Justice’s decision that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories and its settlement policy is unlawful.
“It is a clear ruling on the side of Palestinians people’s right to justice, freedom & statehood,” Ayman Safadi in a post on X. “The end of occupation is the only path to peace that will guarantee the rights and security of all.”
We welcome the ICJ ruling on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It is a clear ruling on the side of Palestinians people’s right to justice, freedom & statehood. The end of occupation is the only path to peace that will guarantee the rights and security of all.
In a historic, albeit non-binding, opinion, the ICJ found multiple breaches of international law by Israel including activities that amounted to apartheid. You can read more about the ruling in this story here.
Along with Egypt, Jordan is one of few countries in the Middle East with established diplomatic ties with Israel. But it has been highly critical of the Israeli army’s conduct, publicly accusing it of trying to remove Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel-Hamas ceasefire close to the goalline, US secretary of state says
As we mentioned in the opening summary, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said that a long-sought ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was within sight.
Speaking at the Aspen security forum in Colorado on Friday, he said:
I believe we’re inside the 10-yard line and driving toward the goalline in getting an agreement that would produce a ceasefire, get the hostages home and put us on a better track to trying to build lasting peace and stability.
There remains some issues that need to be resolved, that need to be negotiated. We’re in the midst of doing exactly that.
The US has been working with Qatar and Egypt to try to arrange a ceasefire in order to free hostages held since the 7 October Hamas attacks, and get more humanitarian aid into the enclave devastated by Israeli airstrikes.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to travel to Washington next week and address a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. He is expected to meet Joe Biden if the US president has recovered from Covid-19 by then, the White House has said.
Netanyahu has reportedly said Israel needed control of the Palestinian side of Gaza’s border with Egypt to stop weapons reaching. It is a condition that conflicts with Hamas’s position that Israel must withdraw from all Gaza territory after a ceasefire.
He has also said that Israel must also be allowed to keep on fighting until its war aims of destroying Hamas and bringing home all hostages are achieved.
Opening summary
We are restarting our live coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis.
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has welcomed the international court of justice’s (ICJ’s) landmark ruling that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories violates international law, calling the decision “historic” and saying Israel must be compelled to implement it.
The Palestinian foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, called it a “watershed moment”.
It came after the UN court on Friday ordered Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories “as rapidly as possible” and make full reparations for its “internationally wrongful acts” in a sweeping and damning advisory opinion that says the occupation violates international law.
The ICJ panel of judges, with president Nawaf Salam centre, during the delivery of the ruling. Photograph: Lina Selg/EPA
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, would shortly transmit the advisory opinion to the 193-member world body and “it is for the general assembly to decide how to proceed in the matter”, UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said.
The ICJ’s opinion said Israel should pay reparations to Palestinians for damages caused by the occupation. It also found that the UN security council, the general assembly and all states had an obligation not to recognise the occupation as legal and not to give aid or support toward maintaining it. The court’s findings are not binding but carry weight under international law.
Israel’s foreign ministry rejected the court’s opinion as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided, and repeated its stance that a political settlement in the region could only be reached by negotiations. “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
The court’s opinion also angered West Bank settlers as well as politicians such as the far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, Reuters reported. The ICJ opinion was “contrary to the Bible, morality and international law”, said Israel Gantz, head of the Binyamin Regional Council, one of the largest settler councils.
In other news:
Hamas demanded “immediate action” against the Israeli occupation after the ICJ ruling. In a statement the Palestinian militant group welcomed the decision, saying it puts “the international system before the imperative of immediate action to end the occupation”.
Israel threatened reprisals after a drone claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels killed a civilian in a Tel Aviv apartment building near a US embassy branch office. The pre-dawn attack drew condemnation from António Guterres and an appeal for “maximum restraint” to avoid “further escalation in the region”. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant vowed revenge on Friday, posting on X: “The security system will settle the score with all who try to harm the state of Israel, or sends terrorism against it, in a decisive and surprising manner.” Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said Israel believed the drone used was Iranian-made and upgraded so it could reach Tel Aviv from Yemen, at least 1,800km (1,100 miles) away.
Police at the site of the explosion in Tel Aviv on Friday. Photograph: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
Len Blavatnik, the second-richest man in Britain, is facing a series of protests in the UK after his Israeli television channel was accused of cancelling programmes to please Benjamin Netanyahu.
The UK announced it would resume funding to the UN Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa. Britain’s foreign minister, David Lammy, told parliament he was reassured that the agency had taken steps to “ensure it meets the highest standards of neutrality” and that the UK would provide £21m ($27m) to the agency.
The US secretary of state Antony Blinken said a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel that will release Israeli hostages in Gaza are “inside the 10-yard line”. “But we know that anything in the last 10 yards are the hardest,” Blinken said on Friday. International mediators, including the US, are pushing Israel and Hamas toward an internationally backed phased deal that would halt the fighting and free about 120 hostages in Gaza.
The UN human rights office (OHCHR) warned that “anarchy” was spreading in Gaza, with rampant looting, unlawful killings and shootings as the population faced an acute humanitarian crisis. Ajith Sunghay, head of OHCHR for Gaza and the West Bank, described unlawful killings and looting in the absence of law enforcement as linked to “Israel’s dismantling of local capacity to maintain public order and safety in Gaza”.
An Israeli airstrike killed a woman who was nine months pregnant in Gaza, but her baby survived after the mother’s body was rushed to a hospital delivery room, medical officials said. Ola al-Kurd, 25, was among seven people killed in an Israeli strike that hit the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, the Associated Press reports.
Dozens of people were killed in Israeli attacks on residential buildings across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Saturday morning, according to reports.
