Israel’s war on Gaza updates: Hamas says Rafah assault would end talks

This live page is now closed. Follow along with our ongoing coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza here.

To learn more about how Israel may be breaching the January ruling of the International Court of Justice, watch this.

And you can always read more about the conflict here.

We will be closing the live blog soon. Here’s a review of the day’s main events.

• “Any attack by the occupation army on the city of Rafah would torpedo the exchange negotiations,” a Hamas leader told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity.
• United States President Joe Biden said an Israeli assault on Rafah should not go ahead without a “credible” plan to protect civilians in the city.
• The chief of UNRWA says the agency is facing growing administrative hurdles from Israel – with a shipment amounting to a month’s supply of food held in Israel’s Ashdod Port.
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is in Doha for talks on securing a ceasefire in Gaza.
• Gaza’s Health Ministry says 112 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours, taking the death toll since October 7 to at least 28,176.

Israeli soldiers have stormed the town of Hajjah in the occupied West Bank and removed Palestinian flags, according to images posted online by local media outlets and verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit Sanad.

Raids by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank have intensified since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7.

More than 6,900 Palestinians have been arrested since the fighting began.

The Democratic-led Senate voted 67-27 to send the bill to the Republican-led House of Representatives, where it may face more opposition.

The legislation includes $61bn for Ukraine, $14bn for Israel and $4.83bn to support US allies in the Asia Pacific, including Taiwan against China.

The bill would also see $9.15bn in funding for humanitarian assistance to civilians in conflict zones across the globe, including Ukraine and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Republican speaker of the House has indicated that he will seek to split the aid provisions into separate measures, despite a standalone aid bill for Israel failing in the House after opposition from Democrats and some Republicans.

It takes a special kind of narcissism for a world leader to declare himself a 50-year-long adherent to a white supremacist ideology that excuses apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide, and then to turn to the greatness of the US and all its “possibilities” as if the US has only been sprinkling pixie dust around the world and not intervening with brutal military and economic power over the past 130 years.

But the US president is not alone in his self-delusion. At the Conservative Friends of Israel gathering in London last month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak showed unwavering support for Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. “There is a horrific irony in Israel, of all countries being accused of genocide,” Sunak said, labelling South Africa’s case against Israel “completely unjustified”.

The “horrific irony” is that Israel, as a Western ally, cannot be accused of genocide because it is one of “the good guys”. The “bad guys” can only be non-Western (really, non-white) nations, such as South Africa.

You can read more of this opinion piece here.

Iraq and the US have held talks to set a timetable for a gradual phase-out of US-led coalition forces in Iraq, an Iraqi military spokesman has said.

Talks began in January but less than 24 hours later, three US service members were killed in an attack in Jordan that the United States said was carried out by armed groups in Syria and Iraq.

The US conducted a wave of retaliatory air strikes, killing more than a dozen people.

Attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria have increased since the onset of the Israeli war on Gaza, which has been militarily backed by Washington.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society has urged the international community to ensure the protection of its staff and workplaces in light of the the recent deaths of two of its paramedics.

The bodies of Ahmad al-Madhoun and Yusuf Zeino were found on Saturday, 12 days after they were dispatched to rescue six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was also found dead a few metres away.

“According to international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, the direct targeting and deliberate killing of PRCS crews and volunteers is considered a war crime,” the group said in a statement on X.

“[T]he contracting parties that signed the Geneva Conventions and are obligated to enforce respect for international humanitarian law must take the necessary measures to suppress, rebuke and punish the perpetrators.”

The report, released by WestBankJewishPopulationStats.com, based on Israeli government population statistics, found the settler population jumped to 517,407 as of December 31, from 502,991 a year earlier.

The settler population has grown by more than 15 percent in the last five years, the report said. Last year, it passed the half-million mark, a significant threshold.

This year’s report predicted “accelerated growth” in the coming years, claiming the current war persuaded many Israelis who were formerly opposed to illegal settlement-building on occupied land to change positions.

“Serious cracks have indeed developed in the wall of opposition to Jewish settlement of the West Bank,” it said.

Since the war began in Gaza in October, almost 7,000 Palestinians have been arrested and more than 390 killed in the occupied West Bank, many of them by settlers who have increased attacks on Palestinians.

Israel’s escalation in Gaza has led to hundreds of casualties, more devastation and forced displacement, says Francesca Albanese, the United Nations rapporteur on Palestine.

“Israel is obligated to adhere to the court’s order and states must act decisively to prevent further atrocities,” she says.

Israel was given until February 23 to report to the International Court of Justice on steps it has taken to comply with six orders the court issued, including ending incitement to genocide and improving the supply of humanitarian aid.

Basri Saleh, deputy minister of Gaza’s Ministry of Education, says that this encompasses seven universities and 12 colleges throughout the besieged coastal enclave.

“All higher education institutions in the Gaza Strip were damaged, either completely or partially,” he told Al Jazeera.

“This has affected more than 88,000 thousand students enrolled in higher education institutions throughout the Gaza Strip,” Saleh added.

Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative says the fact that the United States president did not call for an immediate ceasefire represents a regression in US policy vis-a-vis the war on Gaza.

“What I expected to hear from Biden [is something] we will never hear. His comments about the imminent Israeli attack on Rafah should have been accompanied by the United States supporting a ceasefire,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Rafah is the only area that is not destroyed completely in Gaza. Israel never gave up on its plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population into Egypt. That’s what the US president should have opposed. But he doesn’t. The US is a participant in this attack,” Barghouti said.

The World Health Organization’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says reports of Israel’s looming offensive in Rafah are “extremely worrying”.

“Proceeding with the plans could have gravely devastating consequences for the 1.4 million people who have nowhere else left to go, an who have almost no place left to seek health care,” he posted on X.

Moreover, the WHO chief said hospitals in Rafah in the Gaza Strip were “overwhelmed and overflowing”.

“In the rest of the Strip, a majority of hospitals are either minimally or non-functional,” he added.

According to Aref Daraghmeh, an expert on settlement affairs and Israeli violations in the Jordan Valley, there was a surge in the number of checkpoints in the Jordan Valley after the war on Gaza began.

The most infamous of the checkpoints are “Hamra” and “Tayasir”, which separate the Jordan Valley from the northern occupied West Bank, where residents “are exposed to daily humiliation by soldiers who act according to their whim”, Daraghmeh told Al Jazeera.

“These policies have become a real danger to the citizens of the Jordan Valley. Every day, there are scenes of children, women, and the elderly at these two checkpoints waiting in vehicles in long queues to pass, adding to the miserable and harsh conditions already facing them.”

According to Daraghmeh, Palestinians are often forced to spend three to four hours waiting to pass through these military checkpoints, while their vehicles are inspected or they are subject to humiliation and even detention.

“The aim is to force residents to leave the area so the Jordan Valley can be annexed to Israel,” he said.

According to Israeli NGO Ir Amim, in four months alone, 17 settlement plans for more than 8,400 housing units were advanced in occupied East Jerusalem.

Four of them, the organisation says, are for entirely new settlements within or beside Palestinian neighbourhoods.

“While Palestinians are consistently deprived basic rights to housing and property in East Jerusalem, the state continues its robust investment in the settlement enterprise to entrench Israeli control over more territory and predetermine the end game of the conflict,” Ir Amim says.