Israel’s war on Gaza updates: ‘Extreme hunger’ in Gaza as Ramadan begins

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To learn more about Israel’s starvation strategy in Gaza as Ramadan begins, watch this video.

And you can find more news, features and videos on the conflict here.

We will be closing this live page soon. Here are some of the main developments from today:

• Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh blamed Israel for the lack of a truce agreement before Ramadan and said Palestinians want a ceasefire.
• Benjamin Netanyahu fired back at Joe Biden’s comments, saying most Israelis back him, and again opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state.
• The US military conducted more airdrops over Gaza as Washington’s temporary pier plan continues to raise questions about effectiveness and logistics.
• Israel wants to clear up space in its prisons to be prepared for the arrest of “thousands” more Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
• An Israeli survey said three-quarters of Jewish Israelis support an attack on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where more than 1.5 million people are displaced and in crisis.
• The Israeli military and Hezbollah continue to launch offensives and counteroffensives against each other in border fighting.

The armed Lebanese group says it was behind 12 attacks on Israeli positions today, using missiles and dozens of rockets, and achieving some direct hits.

Hezbollah said it targeted the Ramya site that it had targeted before as well, hit a gathering of Israeli soldiers in Birkat Risha, and launched Katyusha rockets at the Meron settlement.

It also claimed an attack at “spy equipment” at a radar site in Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, and a launch on the Maale Golan military barracks.

This is how our TV colleagues from Al Jazeera Arabic are commemorating the thousands of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military since the start of the war.

Translation: They are moons, not numbers. Their names adorn the Al Jazeera studio on the first night of Ramadan.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza says exhausted medical personnel in the northern Strip continue to work around the clock but are under immense physical pressure as there is nothing to eat.

More than 2,000 medical personnel working in northern Gaza will begin their Ramadan without having anything to eat for suhoor or iftar, it said.

“We call on international and relief institutions to provide ready-made meals to enable medical teams to carry out their work.”

The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says as Israel continues to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, the enclave’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate.

The main causes are bombing, starvation, dehydration, malnutrition and lack of access to medical care.

The organisation said in a statement on Sunday that its team on the ground in Gaza “is recording nearly daily deaths among the elderly due to Israel’s systematic and pervasive crimes of starvation and treatment deprivation in the Gaza Strip, especially in Gaza City and the Strip’s northern regions”.

“The majority of these cases do not reach hospitals, which are only partially operational in northern Gaza because of the difficulty of access given the ongoing Israeli military attacks. Consequently, after dying at home, the elderly are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries.”

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry says a months-long genocide in the Gaza Strip should be sufficient to show that the goals pursued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be “confronted and overthrown”.

It said in a statement that Netanyahu’s latest rejection of the Palestinian Authority as the future governing body of Gaza earlier today was “an extension of his anti-peace policy that he has worked for decades to implement”.

The ministry noted that, as Netanyahu has said time and time again after the start of the war on Gaza, he firmly opposes the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and wishes to create a “state of division”.

Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) office says that 225 trucks carrying humanitarian aid were “inspected and transferred to Gaza today”.

It said 134 of the trucks carried food, with the rest carrying water, medical supplies and shelter equipment.

“There is no limit to the amount of aid that can enter Gaza,” the organisation continues to claim despite condemnations by the UN and allies that Israel is not letting enough aid in.

COGAT had said earlier that 120 aid trucks were coordinated to northern Gaza over the last week, where Israel has blocked most aid since the start of its war on Gaza.

A recent report by the humanitarian group Refugees International says that Israel has generated “famine-like conditions” in the Gaza Strip “while obstructing and undermining the humanitarian response”.

In addition, the Gaza Health Ministry has been reporting deaths from starvation in northern Gaza, the number of which stands at 25 after an infant and a young woman succumbed to malnutrition earlier today.

A survey conducted by Israel’s Jewish People’s Policy Institute found that a vast majority of Israeli Jews believe that the US president strongly supported Israel at the beginning of its war on Gaza in October but that his support has decreased since then.

The pollster noted that even among those Israeli Jews who do not “trust” the leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu – nearly 70 percent of those polled – there is still very low support for the US’s policy proposals regarding the way the war is conducted and also its support for a two-state solution after the war ends.

The UK-based Palestine Action group of protesters has sprayed the London headquarters of the Leonardo company for manufacturing weapons used by Israel.

“Leonardo supply the Israeli military with Apache fighter jets and parts for their F-35 stealth bombers,” the group said.

Palestine Action had on Friday sprayed and slashed a historical painting of Arthur Balfour, the British lord who as foreign minister signed the 1917 declaration of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The occupied West Bank city has named a street after the US airman who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest against the war in Gaza, UK newspaper The Guardian reports.

The Guardian quotes the mayor of Jericho, Abdul Karim Sidr, as saying that 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell, who died on February 25, “sacrificed everything” for Palestinians.

“We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. There were no social, economic or political ties between us. What we share is a love for freedom and a desire to stand against these attacks [on Gaza],” the mayor said as he unveiled the street sign with a small crowd.

The Israeli military has released aerial footage of what it says is an attack on a Hezbollah rocket launch site.

It said its fighter jets destroyed a launcher in southern Lebanon’s Rachaya Al Foukhar, from which Hezbollah had sent a rocket volley earlier today into Israel’s Mount Hermon area.

The Israeli military further reported an attack on a launcher in Kounine, which had been used to fire toward the Mount Meron area, sounding sirens but reportedly not inflicting any casualties.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Ramadan in the Gaza Strip this year is “unlike the holy month in previous years or anywhere else in the world”, especially in light of the destruction of all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip, including dozens of mosques.

Ramadan, it says in a statement, has arrived as “Palestinians have been suffering from the lack and scarcity of food and drinkable water for more than five consecutive months”.

Hezbollah has released a video that shows a guided anti-tank missile achieving a direct hit against an Israeli armoured personnel carrier.

The armed Lebanese group released the video on its Telegram channel. Like some of its previous videos, the clip appears to show the successful use of what looks to be an anti-tank guided missile of the Iranian-made family of Almas munitions.

A camera installed on the missile shows how it strikes a Namer armoured carrier, considered among some of the best in the world in its class of vehicles.

Photographer Chris Mowgli, who goes by @modern_Mowgli on Instagram, has uploaded footage of a giant sign calling for an end to US foreign aid for Israel.

According to the photographer, the action was taken by an anonymous group of activists.

The banner was visible to “thousands” of residents of the California city, as well as many taking off from San Francisco’s airport, the post claims.

The administration of US President Joe Biden has so far twice bypassed Congress to urgently send bombs and other munitions to Israel amid the war that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, mostly children and women, and left tens of thousands more injured or missing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his defence, national security and finance ministers to open up space in Israeli prisons in preparation for the arrests of “thousands” more Palestinians this year.

The office of the prime minister said in a statement that the military and internal security agency Shin Bet have assessed that many more “terrorists” will be arrested in Gaza and Israel will run out of prison space if it doesn’t do something now.

Approximately 4,000 Palestinians have already been arrested since the October start of the war – mostly in Gaza – it said, prompting this “urgent” need for preparations.

Israel holds thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention without judicial due process, and the United Nations and others have documented numerous instances of torture in Israeli prisons.

A delegation led by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz to New York City will include “dozens” of family members of captives held in Gaza with a mission to get the United Nations to declare Hamas a “terrorist” organisation.

The delegation is departing for the US today, and will take part in Monday’s session of the UN Security Council that is being held at the request of the US, UK and France to discuss a UN review on sexual violence on October 7. The delegation met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before leaving Israel.

“The hostages’ families will stand beside me in order to remind the UN secretary-general and the entire world: The people of Israel will not tolerate what happened and will not relent until the UN declares Hamas a terrorist organisation,” Katz said.

A Hamas security official has made these comments to Al Jazeera Arabic:

• We will strike anyone who tampers with the internal front in the Gaza Strip with an iron hand, and we will not allow new rules to be imposed.
• Accepting communication with the [Israeli] occupation … to work in the Gaza Strip is a national betrayal that we will not allow.
• The occupation’s attempt to create bodies to manage Gaza is a failed conspiracy that will not be achieved.
• All attempts to destabilise our security and stability in the Gaza Strip will fail, and we will not allow that.
• Resistance is the only guarantee for us as a people, a nurturing environment, a family, and for all who live in this country.

Israeli forces prevented a large number of Palestinian worshipers from entering the compound in occupied East Jerusalem for tarawih prayers on the eve of Ramadan, local media reports.

In a video verified by Al Jazeera, Israeli forces can be seen shoving a young man as he tries to enter the compound.

Palestinian journalist Omar al-Dirawi has uploaded video to his Instagram account showing children in a Deir el-Balah medical facility in the central Gaza Strip banging pots and waving small fireworks to ring in the beginning of the Muslim holy month.

The children, displaced from their homes due to Israeli bombardment, are currently sheltering inside the hospital.