Funerals and Islamic Jihad battle songs: Gaza after the ceasefire

Many areas are still without water and electricity following three days of Israeli airstrikes

In Shujaiya, a neighbourhood of Gaza City already scarred by several rounds of war, men passed around coffee and dates under the shade of a colourful mourning tent while Palestinian Islamic Jihad battle songs blared from sound systems.

About a dozen men carrying AK-47s, their faces shielded by black balaclavas, lined the entrance to the tent, and the militant group’s black and yellow flag flew overhead.

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Israel bombs Gaza Strip for second day in ‘pre-emptive operation’

Health authorities in Palestinian enclave report 15 dead in Israeli attacks targeting Islamic Jihad

Residents of the Gaza Strip were bracing for the possibility of a new round of war on Saturday after two days of “pre-emptive” Israeli airstrikes against a Palestinian militant group.

Israeli warplanes hit several sites in the blockaded territory on Friday, part of a surprise operation named “Breaking Dawn” that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said thwarted alleged planned rocket attacks by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

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Israel strikes Gaza amid tensions following arrest of Palestinian militant

Palestinian officials say at least 10 dead after Israel said it was preparing to ‘remove the threat from this region’

Israeli warplanes struck numerous sites in the Gaza Strip on Friday in what Israel said was a preemptive strike against Palestinian factions allegedly planning rocket strikes at targets in Israel.

Palestinian health officials reported that at least 10 people died and 55 were wounded in an initial barrage which killed the commander of Islamic Jihad, Tayseer Jabari, in the north of Gaza. Among the fatalities was an eight-year-old girl.

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Hamas releases video of Israeli citizen held captive since 2015

Hisham al-Sayed seen lying in bed wearing a mask, with what appears to be an oxygen canister next to him

Gaza’s Hamas rulers have released a video of a captive Israeli citizen held incommunicado since 2015, showing the man lying in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask.

It was the first image of Hisham al-Sayed to be released since he wandered across the frontier from southern Israel into Gaza. Its release came a day after Hamas said the condition of one of the Israelis it was holding captive had deteriorated.

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Impact of Israeli strike in Gaza akin to chemical weapons, NGO report finds

Shells fired at agrochemical warehouse created toxic plume that has left residents with health problems

An Israeli airstrike on an agrochemical warehouse during last year’s war in Gaza amounted to the “indirect deploying of chemical weapons”, according to a report analysing the attack and its impact.

Incendiary artillery shells fired by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) hit the large Khudair Pharmaceutical and Agricultural Tools warehouse in the north of the Gaza Strip on 15 May last year, setting fire to hundreds of tonnes of pesticides, fertilisers, plastics and nylons. The strike created a toxic plume, which engulfed an area of 5.7 sq km and has left local residents struggling with health issues, including two reports of miscarriages, and indications of environmental damage.

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Clashes in Jerusalem as Israeli nationalists march through Muslim Quarter

Israeli media estimated around 25,000 people took part in contentious annual flag march through Muslim parts of Ohld City

Thousands of Israeli religious nationalists have paraded through Muslim parts of the Old City of Jerusalem, putting the city on edge after violence during the same event last year helped spark an 11-day-war between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in the Gaza Strip.

The annual flag march, in which Israelis enter the highly symbolic Damascus Gate and walk through the Muslim Quarter to the Western Wall waving the national flag, takes place around sunset on what Israel calls Jerusalem Day, the celebration of the capture and annexation of East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, a move that is not internationally recognised.

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‘My only hobby is crying’: the boy who lost his family to an Israeli airstrike

Omar Abu al-Ouf’s father, mother, brother and sister were all killed in the attack on their apartment building last May

Omar Abu al-Ouf is revising for his final school exams, hoping to do well enough to pursue his dream of becoming an engineer, but it’s difficult for the 17-year-old to focus. His mind constantly drifts to his family, all of whom died last year when an Israeli airstrike destroyed their apartment building in a middle-class neighbourhood of Gaza city.

“It’s like he goes somewhere else,” said his grandmother, Manar, in the living room of the boy’s uncle’s house, where he now lives. “His whole family is gone, for nothing.”

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Israel under pressure to conclude flawed case against aid worker

Latest court order raises hopes of verdict in trial of World Vision’s Mohammed El Halabi

Pressure is mounting on Israel to conclude the trial of a Gazan aid worker accused of funnelling relief money to Hamas in a six-year-old case widely derided by the international community as “not worthy of a democratic state”.

Mohammed El Halabi, the head of the US-based charity World Vision’s Gaza office, was detained in 2016 after being accused by Israel’s Shin Bet security service of transferring $7.2m (£5.4m) a year to the Palestinian militant group in control of the Gaza Strip.

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Hamas gunman kills one and injures four in Jerusalem’s Old City

South African immigrant Eliyahu Kay, 26, killed in attack before militant shot dead by Israeli police

A Hamas militant opened fire in Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday, killing one and wounding four others before Israeli police fatally shot him.

It was not immediately clear whether Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, had ordered the attack or whether one of its members had acted alone.

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Israeli aircraft strike Hamas sites in Gaza as hostilities escalate

Cross-border gunfire earlier on Saturday seriously injured an Israeli soldier and wounded 41 Palestinians

Israeli aircraft struck Hamas sites in Gaza late on Saturday, the military said, in an escalation of hostilities after earlier cross-border gunfire seriously injured an Israeli soldier and wounded 41 Palestinians, including two critically.

The injuries came during a Gaza protest organised by the enclave’s Islamist rulers, Hamas, and other factions in support of Jerusalem, where Palestinian clashes with Israeli police helped spark an 11-day Israel-Hamas conflict in May.

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‘I can’t give up on my leg’: the Gaza protesters resisting amputation at all costs

Despite chronic pain and deadly infections, Palestinians wounded in protests three years ago still hope to recover without surgery

Sitting on his hospital bed, with external fixators screwed into his right leg, Mohammed al-Mughari has been in pain and on medication since he was shot in the leg more than three years ago.

He lives with a chronic bone infection – from bacteria now resistant to most antibiotics. Doctors, including in Jordan and Egypt where he sought treatment previously, have all recommended that an amputation could end his long-term suffering, but he has steadfastly refused.

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Israel hits Gaza with airstrikes after more incendiary balloon launches

Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Israeli-blockaded Gaza, said the strikes hit training sites

Israel hit Islamist militant sites in Gaza with airstrikes on Friday in retaliation for incendiary balloon launches from the Palestinian enclave, in the latest unrest since a ceasefire ended May’s conflict.

Security sources with Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Israeli-blockaded Gaza, said the strikes hit training sites. There were no injuries reported.

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Biden accused of U-turn over Egypt’s human rights abuses

Critics say US president’s realpolitik ignores Sisi regime’s ‘hostage-taking tactics’ against dissidents

“It’s a hostage negotiation and it has been all along,” said Sherif Mansour, describing the arrest of his cousin Reda Abdel-Rahman by Egyptian security forces last August as an attempt to intimidate Mansour into silence.

Abdel-Rahman has been imprisoned without trial for nine months. Mansour, an outspoken human rights advocate in Washington with the Committee to Protect Journalists, has since learned that he and his father are listed on the same charge sheet, all accused of joining a terrorist group and spreading “false news”.

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US to reopen Palestinian diplomatic mission in Jerusalem

Secretary of state Antony Blinken also announces aid to help rebuild Gaza as he begins Middle East trip

The US will reopen a mission in Jerusalem to manage diplomatic relations with Palestinians, which had been downgraded by the Trump administration, the US secretary of state has said.

On a trip to the Middle East designed to shore up last week’s ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, Antony Blinken also announced the Biden administration would ask Congress for $75m (£53m) in aid for Palestinians, including $5.5m in immediate aid for rebuilding Gaza. He had earlier pledged at a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the US would not allow Hamas to benefit from those funds.

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From the river to the sea, Jews and Arabs must forge a shared future | Kenan Malik

Each side in this bitter conflict needs to recognise the other’s fears and aspirations

‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” runs a Palestinian slogan. Originally a call for a secular state in historic Palestine between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, it soon became a sectarian slogan, deeply inflected by antisemitism. In the hands of Hamas, it is a call for the driving out of all Jews from the region; at best, a demand for ethnic cleansing, at worst for genocide.

The founding charter of Likud, Israel’s leading centre-right party, and the party of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, echoes the same words but from the opposite perspective: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. It has continually blocked any workable two-state solution.

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We don’t recognise our own city: Israeli barrage redraws the map of Gaza

A ceasefire is finally in force, but traumatised families have little hope as they recall collapsing buildings and deaths of loved ones

As they emerge from hiding, people living in Gaza City have had to adapt their memories. So deformed is this small place on the coast that a mental map of its roads and landmarks from two weeks ago is largely useless today. Shortcuts to avoid traffic may no longer work, as craters dot back streets and rubble blocks roads. Locally famous high-rises no longer exist.

Eleven days of bombardment have buckled the city. Air attacks shook the ground so violently that some bomb sites appear as if buildings have been pulled into the earth rather than hit from above.

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Palestinians return to devastated homes as UN calls for Gaza dialogue

World leaders welcome ceasefire but Hamas and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu remain belligerent

Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza have begun returning to their homes to inspect the devastation from 11 days of Israeli airstrikes in its war with Hamas.

Gaza City, on the Mediterranean coast, had been warped by the intense attacks, with gaping holes in the skyline from where high-rise buildings had collapsed, their remains sprawling into the street. Cars mounted pavements to avoid craters.

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Gaza: Israel security cabinet ‘to vote on unilateral ceasefire’ – reports

US White House says it believes Israel is in a position to wind down operations

Israel’s security cabinet has met amid reports that the government was considering halting its bombardment of Gaza, as international pressure to end the bloodshed gathered momentum.

The country’s public broadcaster, Kan, reported that the cabinet, headed by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would vote on a proposed “unilateral ceasefire” to go into effect within 24 hours. Israeli officials did not immediately confirm the report.

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Biden expresses support for Israel-Gaza ceasefire as pressure on US rises

Israel carries out fresh wave of pre-dawn airstrikes US president stops short of demanding halt to hostilities

Joe Biden has issued a statement for the first time expressing support for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza’s militant rulers, Hamas, after a phone conversation with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

However, the US president stopped short of calling for an immediate halt to the eight days of Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket barrages that have killed more than 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinian.

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Gaza suffers deadliest airstrikes yet as Israel targets Hamas leader – video report

At least 33 Palestinians have been killed and 50 injured in the deadliest airstrikes since the start of fighting between Israel and Hamas six days ago. Israel targeted the home of the Hamas leader Yehya al-Sinwar over the weekend and destroyed the building that housed the offices of Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press. At least 181 people in Gaza and 10 in Israel have been killed so far

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