Israel’s war on Gaza updates: Biden says US will air drop aid to enclave

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

To read more about the mounting global condemnation of the killing of Gaza aid seekers, read here.

To learn about the challenges of Israeli conscientious objectors to the war, read here.

And you can always find our latest news about the conflict here.

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

• US President Biden announced the US will start airdropping aid into Gaza in the “coming days”. The US is also working on a possible “maritime corridor”, his administration said.
• Israeli strikes killed and injured dozens of Palestinians from the north to the south, said Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum from Rafah. Casualties were reported in Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir el-Balah and Beit Hanoon.
• The death toll of aid seekers who were fired on by Israeli forces in Gaza City on Thursday has reached 115, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
• Palestinian health officials and a UN team that visited al-Shifa Hospital said many Gaza City attack victims they observed had gunshot wounds, challenging the Israeli military narrative that most casualties were caused by a stampede.
• Hamas said seven Israeli captives were killed by recent Israeli bombardment.
• An Israeli military general warned that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank could stage protests during Ramadan.

A number of dead and injured have arrived at Deir el-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after the Israeli bombing of two houses and a mosque.

Video footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows at least three dead bodies, including children.

Several ambulances arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night carrying the bodies of those killed, as well as injured people needing treatment.

Simon Moutquin, a member of the Belgian parliament and one of the signatories to the letter, told Al Jazeera that his own country had to act to stop Israel.

“As a signatory country of the Convention Against Genocide, [Belgium has] a legal and moral obligation to act and prevent the risk of genocide, so I think this letter … is a good first step, but we need to go further,” Moutquin said.

Speaking about European divisions on Gaza, Moutquin said that Europe risked its credibility to speak on Russia’s actions in Ukraine if it remained silent on Gaza.

“We need to really speak about international law,” he said. “We are so hypocritical in Europe to speak about international law when we speak about Ukraine and Russia, [but] if we don’t have the same [views] when we speak about the Palestinians, we will not have any credit in the future to speak about [it].”

There is a renewed push to force ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the Israeli military.

Israel has called on its reserves to wage its ground war on Gaza. But its ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has an exemption to military service going back decades.

Now, the defence minister says they need to join the fight. But can a national consensus be reached on such a divisive issue? And can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government survive the fallout from such a policy change?

Watch the full episode below:

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said the body and other aid groups have managed to reach al-Shifa Hospital to supply it with aid for the first time in more than a month.

The teams delivered 19,000 litres (about 5,000 gallons) of fuel to the north Gaza facility, as well as “lifesaving medical supplies for 150 patients and treatment for 50 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition”, Tedros said in a post on X.

However, he noted that the facility’s capacity remains “very limited” due to scarce “supplies, fuel, water, and food” and that it was relying on volunteers to treat more than 240 patients.

“The level of destruction around the hospital is beyond words,” he said.

He feared being called a “mishtamet”. A draft dodger. Someone who shrinks from their responsibility.

But at age 17, Jewish social worker Asaf Calderon made a fateful decision: not to participate in the mandatory military service required of nearly all Israeli citizens.

Instead, he pursued and was granted a medical exemption for mental health reasons. Still, his choice came with a cost.

A soft-spoken man with round glasses and a tender smile, Calderon, 34, noticed that, afterwards, his friends started to seem distant. Members of his family fell out of contact.

He realised his decision had left him a pariah in Israel, even among his loved ones. He eventually moved away to New York City.

“It doesn’t matter why you do it,” Calderon said of becoming a conscientious objector, someone who refuses to participate in military service on ethical or moral grounds. “You are going to get ostracised in a way.”

Read more here.

The US president’s team is carefully organising his public appearances so as to minimise “disruptions from pro-Palestinian protests”, reports NBC News.

This includes keeping his public events smaller, not disclosing their exact location ahead of time, and staying away from college campuses, the US outlet said, citing a Biden ally and a source “familiar with his planning”.

The measures come after Biden was interrupted more than a dozen times by pro-Palestinian protesters while speaking at a campaign rally in January.

Protesters at the January 23 event shouted phrases such as “ceasefire now”, “let Gaza women live”, and “genocide Joe”.

The latest round of Israeli strikes this evening have caused dozens of casualties, reports the Palestinian Wafa news agency. They include:

• One child killed and others injured from Israeli bombardment on the Yibna refugee camp in Rafah, southern Gaza.
• Numerous killed and injured from Israeli bombardment on a home in Beit Hanoon, northern Gaza.
• One man killed by Israeli drone fire in the village of Maghraqa in central Gaza.
• Several injured by Israeli artillery fire in eastern Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

The comments were made by Josep Borrell as he announced continued European Union funding for the UNRWA.

In a statement released today, the European Commission announced that it would give 50 million euros ($54.2m) to UNRWA next week, part of the 150 million euros ($162.5m) it plans to give in 2024.

“By continuing to fund it, the EU acknowledges UNRWA as an irreplaceable actor,” Borrell said in a social media post, before adding that Israel should provide evidence to back the allegations it has made about links between UNRWA and Hamas.

Several countries, including the US, suspended funding to UNRWA, the primary UN agency providing relief to Palestinians in Gaza, after Israel alleged ties between the agency and Hamas. The UN says that Israel has yet to present any evidence to support its claims.

In a post on X, Israel’s military said its fighter jets struck several Hezbollah military sites in the Lebanese town of Ramyeh near the border “a short time ago”.

The strikes killed at least one Hezbollah member, said the military’s post, which also shared purported footage of the attack.

Mohammed Salha, the acting director of al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, has confirmed that the vast majority of the Gaza City food aid attack victims brought to his health facility showed injuries from gunfire.

Of the 176 wounded who were brought to al-Awda Hospital, 142 had gunshot wounds, while the other 34 showed injuries from a stampede, Salha told the Associated Press.

He said he could not provide information on the cause of death of the victims who were killed because their bodies were transported to other facilities.

Earlier, a UN team who visited al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza also confirmed that many victims had been injured by gunfire.

An all-hands meeting held by the US media network became an opportunity for several staff members, including star presenter Christine Amanpour, to criticise its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, with many reflecting external criticism that the network has been biased towards Israel.

A recording obtained by The Intercept revealed Amanpour speaking of her “real distress” with CNN’s editorial process when it comes to coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, before she added that the network should have sent more experienced reporters to the region to cover the war.

Other staffers went further in their criticism, with one journalist who worked from Lebanon last year saying that she found CNN “platforming people over and over again, that are either calling for my death, or using very dehumanising language against me … and people that look like me”.

“I want to ask as well, what have you done, and what are you doing to address the hate speech that fills our air and informed our coverage, especially in the first few months of the war,” the journalist added, according to The Intercept.

CNN Editor-in-Chief Mark Thompson defended the network’s coverage in the meeting, saying that he was generally satisfied with it, and adding that it had been difficult to cover the Palestinian side because of a lack of access to Gaza.

The progressive US senator said Washington had a responsibility to compel Israel to allow more aid in.

“The United States, which has helped fund the Israeli military for years, cannot sit back and allow hundreds of thousands of innocent children to starve to death,” Sanders said in a statement.

“As a result of Israeli bombing and restrictions on humanitarian aid, the people of Gaza are facing an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. Whether Netanyahu’s right-wing government likes it or not, the United States must immediately begin to airdrop food, water, and other lifesaving supplies into Gaza,” Sanders added, before Biden made his own announcement that the US would be conducting humanitarian aid air drops.

During a visit to al-Shifa Hospital, a team from the United Nations was able to confirm that many people being treated there who were victims of Thursday’s attack near Gaza City “had gunshot wounds”, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN secretary-general.

Speaking to the press at the UN headquarters in New York, Dujarric said the UN team observed “a large number of gunshot wounds” at the health facility, where many of Thursday’s wounded were taken.

While an Israeli military official conceded that troops “opened fire” at some Palestinians who moved in a way that “endangered” the troops, the Israeli army has blamed the aid-seekers’ deaths on trampling, crowding, and “Gaza truck drivers”.

Witnesses of the attack told Al Jazeera they were hit by direct Israeli artillery shelling, drone missiles and gunshots.

More US announcements on aid into Gaza, this time from White House spokesperson John Kirby.

He said Washington would redouble its efforts to establish a maritime corridor to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and would “continue to push Israel to facilitate more trucks going in and more routes being opened”.

Kirby said Cyprus could potentially be used as part of the maritime corridor and added that Thursday’s attack by Israel on Palestinians waiting for food aid in Gaza City underscored the need to continue to find alternative routes for getting aid into Gaza.

Israel – and by extension the US – have come under intense global criticism for Thursday’s attack, which has put the spotlight on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, with food and water scarce.

Samantha Power, head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has shared footage of a visit she made to a Palestinian youth center in the occupied West Bank that has been shuttered due to frequent attacks from Israeli settlers.

“Repeated attacks by extremist Israeli settlers have forced its doors to close and sent shock waves of fear through the community, Power wrote on X. “This violence is intolerable and must stop.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Biden said the US’s humanitarian aid drops into Gaza will begin in the “coming days”.

He also said the US was continuing to work towards a ceasefire that would allow even more aid to flow into the enclave. However, he previously acknowledged that the killing of at least 115 aid seekers in northern Gaza on Thursday – after Israeli forces opened fire in the area – could complicate these efforts.

The current amount of aid getting into Gaza, Biden said, is not enough to meet people’s needs, and he wants to see “hundreds” more aid trucks get in.

Yousri Alghoul, a Palestinian author who witnessed the mass shooting of aid seekers by Israeli forces, says people facing hunger in northern Gaza often head to the Nabulsi area in southwest Gaza City, where assistance trucks occasionally arrive during the absence of UNRWA and other humanitarian agencies.

He said Israeli forces target Palestinians there daily, but the scale of the violence early on Thursday was unprecedented as Israeli soldiers methodically opened fire at people with the aim to kill.

Alghoul told Al Jazeera in a voice note that Israeli snipers shot hundreds of victims in their upper bodies – in the chest and the head.

“It was a massacre, which is incredible. We were waiting just to get food,” he said. “We don’t have food. There’s starvation here in north Gaza. Even the food of animals, we don’t find it. We’re just eating plants.”

The stark decline in water has pushed many Gaza residents, particularly in the north, to the point of severe dehydration.

In recent days, at least six Palestinian children have died from either dehydration, starvation or poisoning, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.