Israel’s justice ministry ‘cautiously optimistic’ court will decide against issuing warrants, Haaretz reports. This live blog is closed
Julian Borger is the Guardian’s world affairs editor
The mass protests in Tel Aviv over the past two nights, and the smaller ones every Saturday night for the past few months, have been almost entirely about a deal with Hamas so that Israeli hostages are freed and come home.
Continue reading...Shona Robison, Scottish finance secretary, says current financial situation facing Scottish government is ‘not sustainable’
Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, is launching his campaign for the Tory leadership. There is a live feed here.
Tugendhat started by saying that he did not actually want the job, because he does not want to be leader of the opposition. He wants to be prime minister, he said.
Politics is not a game, and we all know the cost when government isn’t sober and serious. We saw it in the lives lost in Afghanistan and then in that wasted chaos of that withdrawal. We saw it during Covid, not just in the lost years of education that cost so many or the opportunities missed, or even in the grief for lost loved ones or those left to cope alone, but through the disrespect.
That’s why I’m standing before you today, because this country can change. We must change, and Britain deserves better, and we need a different government.
Continue reading...Israeli PM says move will embolden a genocidal Hamas as British government faces growing backlash
Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned the UK government’s decision to suspend some arms export licences to Israel, describing it as a shameful decision that would embolden a genocidal Hamas.
The Israeli prime minister said his country was at war to also protect British hostages and vowed the UK measures would not prevent it from winning the conflict in Gaza.
Continue reading...Comments follow criticism from Joe Biden and protests against his handling of war and efforts to free hostages
Benjamin Netanyahu has defied protests at home and criticism from Joe Biden by vowing that Israel would not relinquish control over a strategic corridor along the Gaza-Egyptian border.
In a combative press conference, the Israeli prime minister presented control of the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt as a primary war aim, entrenching a position that has emerged as a key obstacle to a ceasefire deal.
Continue reading...Foreign Office says review found ‘clear risk’ UK arms may be used in violation of humanitarian law
The UK has broken with the Biden administration on a significant part of their tightly coordinated policy towards Israel by announcing it is suspending some arms export licences to Israel because of a “clear risk” they may be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.
The Foreign Office said a two-month internal review had raised concerns about the way Israel had conducted itself in the conflict in Gaza and that the decision specifically related to concerns around the treatment of Palestinian detainees and the supply of aid to Gaza.
Continue reading...PM says he will not take lectures from previous government as Kemi Badenoch launches Tory leadership campaign
Kemi Badenoch is speaking now. She says she wants to talk about the future.
She was born in the UK, but “grew up under socialism”, she says (referring to her childhood in Nigeria).
Labour have no ideas. At best, they are announcing things we have already done, and at their worst, they are clueless, irresponsible and dishonest.
They are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public about the state of Britain’s finances, placing political donors into civil service jobs, pretending that they have no plans to cut pensioner benefits before the election and then doing exactly that to cover the cost of pay rises for the unions with no promise of reform, But their model of spend, spend, spend is broken, and they don’t know what to do, and this will only lead to even more cynicism in politics.
Continue reading...Schools, offices and airport had closed after trade union said general strike was needed to ‘shake those who need to be shaken’ over inaction
Israel’s first nationwide general strike since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, which was convened in support of a deal to free hostages held in Gaza, has ended after eight hours with a court order for workers to go back to their jobs.
The strike was organised amid widespread public anger at the government’s handling of the war in Gaza after the discovery of the bodies of six hostages at the weekend.
Continue reading...Tens of thousands take to streets as anger rises at Netanyahu government after deaths of six hostages
Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Sunday night and a general strike was called amid an eruption of public outrage over the government’s handling of the war in Gaza after the deaths of six hostages being held deep underground by Hamas.
The discovery of the hostages’ bodies in Gaza over the weekend threatened to bring deep divisions over the war to breaking point. An estimated 100,000 protested in Tel Aviv, while others demonstrated in Jerusalem as pressure on the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to reach a ceasefire deal to bring the remaining hostages home reached a new peak.
Continue reading...Families queue at vaccination centres on first day of complex campaign to inoculate children against emerging threat
A complex, large-scale vaccination campaign to inoculate children against the newly emerged threat of polio in the Gaza Strip has begun successfully despite ongoing fighting in the territory, according to UN officials and local health authorities.
Infectious conditions such as dysentery, pneumonia and severe skin diseases are affecting more than 150,000 people in Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, amid a dire humanitarian crisis and unsanitary conditions caused by Israel’s campaign to annihilate Hamas in the wake of 7 October.
Continue reading...Discovery of six bodies may trigger renewed protests as anger grows over prime minister’s handling of the crisis
Overnight, the rumours spread: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had found bodies in Gaza. Everyone in Israel knew the corpses were likely to be hostages seized on 7 October. The grim details – how many, their identities, and how and when they died – slowly emerged during the early hours of Sunday, to mounting sorrow and fury across the country.
The bodies of six people kidnapped alive by Hamas – Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Master Sgt Ori Danino – were found in a Rafah tunnel 20 metres underground, a kilometre away from where another hostage, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found in relatively decent health last week. Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American citizen, appeared in a Hamas video in April. It was clear from the footage that his left hand had been amputated.
Continue reading...Mass protests follow call for general strike by head of Israeli labour union after six hostages held by Hamas were recovered overnight
The Associated Press has put together a profile of the six hostages whose bodies were discovered by the Israeli military in Gaza.
Here’s a look at their lives:
Continue reading...IDF says Hamas killed captives shortly before bodies found, as families’ group accuses Netanyahu of ‘abandoning’ abductees
Israel has confirmed the deaths of six more hostages taken in the 7 October attack by Hamas, saying they were killed by their captors shortly before their bodies were found on Saturday in a tunnel complex under Gaza.
“According to our initial estimation, they were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short time before we reached them,” a military spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, told reporters in an early-morning briefing.
Continue reading...Israel accused of using a 10-year-old girl as a human shield as it carried out its devastating attack on the occupied Palestinian territory
When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.
They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”
Continue reading...Anera says four men who died in Gaza were locals who asked to serve as escort for convoy, but IDF describes them as ‘armed assailants’
Continue reading...The family watched the rare 3,500-year-old jar, believed used for wine or oil, being restored at the Hecht Museum
Smashing a rare museum artefact dating back thousands of years would probably earn you a lifetime ban at the very least.
But a four-year-old who accidentally toppled a jar from the bronze age, leaving it broken into pieces, was welcomed back to the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel, a week after the unfortunate incident.
Continue reading...Anera says four men who died were Gazans offering to protect convoy, but IDF describes them as ‘armed assailants’ who hijacked car
An aid agency whose convoy was hit by an Israeli airstrike on Thursday has said that the four men killed were local community members who had asked to serve as an escort for the convoy.
The four men were the only casualties from the strike, which hit the lead vehicle in which they were travelling. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) described them as “armed assailants” who had hijacked the convoy.
Continue reading...Opinion differs only over whether leadership is merely incompetent or actively working with Netanyahu
Israel said it has killed three militants including a senior Hamas official in an airstrike on a car outside Jenin on the third day of extensive military operations across the West Bank.
The campaign, according to Israeli leaders, is designed to pre-empt attacks on Israelis after a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv this month, the first for eight years.
Continue reading...Wassem Hazem, commander in Jenin, killed in car Israel says container weapons and cash
There is more coming to us on reports from the Israeli military of the death of local Hamas commander in Jenin, Wassem Hazem (see 9.48am post) and two Hamas gunmen.
Hamas has not yet commented on the incident.
In the village of Zababdeh, just outside Jenin, a burnt-out car riddled with bullet holes stood against a wall where the driver crashed the vehicle after being pursued by an Israeli special forces unit, residents said.
Villager Saif Ghannam, 25, said one of the two other men who escaped from the vehicle was killed just outside his house by a small drone strike that shattered the windows, while a second man was killed a short distance away.
Continue reading...Three-day humanitarian pauses in several areas planned to allow inoculation of more than 640,000 children
The World Health Organization has said it delivered 1.2m doses of polio vaccine to Gaza, with 400,000 more to follow, as part of an emergency campaign after the first case of the childhood disease in the war-hit coastal strip in quarter of a century.
The vaccinations, due to begin this weekend, will be accompanied by three-day pauses in the fighting in several areas of the territory to allow the inoculation of more than 640,000 children.
Continue reading...IDF claims ‘armed assailants’ tried to hijack vehicle leading convoy of medical supplies, but aid organiser says those killed were transport company staff
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have said they carried out an airstrike on a humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza aimed at “armed assailants” trying to hijack it but the charity that organised the aid said people killed in the strike were employees of the transport company it was working with.
The convoy, organised by the US-based NGO Anera, was carrying medical supplies and fuel to an Emirati-run hospital in Rafah on Thursday evening at the time of the attack. Its route had been coordinated in advance with the IDF, under a deconfliction process intended to prevent aid vehicles being bombed.
Continue reading...