People waiting for aid among dozens reported killed by Israeli forces in Gaza – Middle East crisis live | Israel-Gaza war

Kiran Stacey is a political correspondent based in Westminster.

Nearly 60 Labour MPs have demanded the UK immediately recognises Palestine as a state, after Israel’s defence minister announced plans to force all residents of Gaza into a camp on the ruins of Rafah.

The MPs, who include centrist and leftwing backbenchers, sent a letter to David Lammy on Thursday warning they believed Gaza was being ethnically cleansed.

They are urging the foreign secretary to take immediate steps to prevent the Israeli government from carrying out its Rafah plan, and to go further and recognise Palestinian statehood immediately.

The letter was sent just after the French president, Emmanuel Macron, made a similar plea at a joint press conference with Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister.

The MPs wrote:

It is with great urgency and concern that we are writing to you regarding the Israeli defence minister’s announcement on Monday of his plans to forcibly transfer all Palestinian civilians in Gaza to a camp in the ruined city of Rafah without allowing them to leave.

The defence minister’s plans have been described by a leading Israeli human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard, as ‘an operational plan for crimes against humanity. It’s about population transfer to the southern tip of Gaza in preparation for deportation outside the strip.

Though an accurate description, we believe there is a clearer one. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

You can read more of Kiran Stacey’s article on the letter here: Nearly 60 Labour MPs call for UK to immediately recognise Palestinian state

The family of a Palestinian American man who was beaten to death by settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have demanded for an investigation to be launched, Reuters reports.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said in a statement that US citizen Sayafollah Musallet, who was in his early 20s, died after being severely beaten in the incident on Friday evening in Sinjil, north of Ramallah.

A second man, Hussein Al-Shalabi, 23, also died after being shot in the chest.

Musallet’s family, from Tampa in Florida, said in a statement that medics tried to reach him for three hours before his brother managed to carry him to an ambulance, but that he died before reaching the hospital.

The family statement said:

This is an unimaginable nightmare and injustice that no family should ever have to face. We demand the U.S. State Department lead an immediate investigation and hold the Israeli settlers who killed Saif accountable for their crimes.

A US state department spokesperson said on Friday it was aware of the incident, but that the department had no further comment “out of respect for the privacy of the family and loved ones” of the reported victim.

The Israeli military said Israel was probing the incident in the town of Sinjil. It said confrontations between Palestinians and settlers broke out after Palestinians threw rocks at Israelis, lightly injuring them.

The military said forces were dispatched to the scene and used non-lethal weapons to disperse the crowds.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 30 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the south of the war-ravaged territory, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Gaza civil defence official Mohammed al-Mughayyir said that 10 people were shot by Israeli forces on Friday while waiting for supplies in the Al-Shakoush area northwest of Rafah, where there have been repeated reports of deadly fire on aid seekers.

The latest deaths came as the UN said nearly 800 people had been killed trying to access food in Gaza since late May, when Israel began easing a more than two-month blockade on deliveries.

UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said most of the deaths occurred near facilities operated by the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)

“We’ve recorded now 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the GHF sites,” from the time the group’s operations began in late May until 7 July, Shamdasani said on Friday.

An officially private effort, GHF operations have been marred by chaotic scenes and frequent reports of Israeli forces firing on people waiting to collect rations.

UN agencies and major aid groups have refused to cooperate with the foundation over concerns it was designed to cater to Israeli military objectives and violates basic humanitarian principles.

Responding to the UN’s figures, Israel’s military said it had worked to minimise “possible friction between the population and the (army) as much as possible”.

It said:

Following incidents in which harm to civilians who arrived at distribution facilities was reported, thorough examinations were conducted… and instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned.

GHF called the UN report “false and misleading”, claiming that “most deadly attacks on aid sites have been linked to UN convoys”.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 30 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the south of the war-ravaged territory.

The latest deaths came as the United Nations said nearly 800 people had been killed trying to access food in Gaza since late May, when Israel began easing a more than two-month blockade on deliveries.

UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said most of the deaths occurred near facilities operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), backed by the US and Israel.

“We’ve recorded now 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the GHF sites,” from the time the group’s operations began in late May until 7 July, Shamdasani said on Friday.

Israel began easing a more than two-month total blockade of aid in late May. Since then, the GHF has effectively sidelined the territory’s vast UN-led aid delivery network.

Asked about the UN figures, the military said it had worked to minimise “possible friction” between aid seekers and soldiers, and that it conducted “thorough examinations” of incidents in which “harm to civilians who arrived at distribution facilities was reported”.

“Instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned,” it added in a statement.

GHF called the UN report “false and misleading”, claiming that “most deadly attacks on aid sites have been linked to UN convoys”.

Friday’s reported violence came as negotiators from Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas were locked in indirect talks in Qatar to try to agree on a temporary ceasefire in the more than 21-month conflict.

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday he hoped a deal for a 60-day pause in the war could be struck in the coming days, and that he would then be ready to negotiate a more permanent end to hostilities.

Hamas has said the free flow of aid is a main sticking point in the talks, with Gaza’s more than 2 million residents facing a dire humanitarian crisis of hunger and disease amid the grinding conflict.

In other developments:

• Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian American man to death in the occupied West Bank on Friday, the Palestinian health ministry confirmed. A spokesperson for the ministry, Annas Abu El Ezz, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Saif al-Din Kamil Abdul Karim Musalat “died after being severely beaten all over his body by settlers in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah, this afternoon”. The US state department said it was aware of the reported death.

• Israeli officials have signaled they want the UN to remain the key avenue for humanitarian deliveries in Gaza, the deputy head of the World Food Programme said on Friday, noting the work of the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid group was not discussed. “They wanted the U.N. to continue to be the main track for delivery, especially should there be a cease fire, and they asked us to be ready to scale up,” Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the UN food agency, told reporters on Friday after visiting Gaza and Israel last week.

• Francesca Albanese, the top UN expert on Palestinian rights said on Friday that the US decision to place her under sanctions could have a “chilling effect” on people who engage with her and restrict her movements, but that she planned to continue her work. Albanese warned that the US decision could set a “dangerous” precedent for human rights defenders worldwide. “There are no red lines anymore … It is scary,” she told Reuters via video link from Bosnia, where she was attending events for the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide.

• Doctors Without Borders warned on Friday that its teams on the ground in Gaza were witnessing surging levels of acute malnutrition in the besieged and war-ravaged Palestinian territory. The medical charity said levels of acute malnutrition had reached an “all-time high” at two of its facilities in the Gaza Strip. It said it now had more than 700 pregnant and breastfeeding women and nearly 500 children with severe and moderate malnutrition currently enrolled in ambulatory therapeutic feeding centres in both clinics.

• Thirty Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) militants burned their weapons at the mouth of a cave in northern Iraq on Friday, marking a symbolic but significant step toward ending a decades-long insurgency against Turkey. Footage from the ceremony showed the fighters, half of them women, queuing to place AK-47 assault rifles, bandoliers and other guns into a large grey cauldron.

• An Iranian attack on an airbase in Qatar that’s key to the U.S. military hit a geodesic dome housing equipment used by the Americans for secure communications, satellite images analysed Friday by the Associated Press (AP) show. Hours after the publication of the AP report, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell acknowledged that an Iranian ballistic missile had hit the dome.

• A UN conference hosted by France and Saudi Arabia to work towards a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians has been rescheduled for July 28-29, diplomats said on Friday, after it was postponed last month when Israel launched a military attack on Iran.

• An Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon on Friday killed one person, the Lebanese health ministry reported, with Israel saying it had targeted a man accused of helping smuggle weapons from Iran. The attack was the latest in Lebanon despite a months-long ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah there.

• Palestinians were mourning for 14 people, including nine children, killed when an Israeli strike hit a group of women and children waiting for aid in Deir al-Balah on Thursday. The children’s deaths drew outrage from humanitarian groups even as Israel allowed the first delivery of fuel to Gaza in more than four months, though still less than a day’s supply, according to the UN.