Israel’s war on Gaza updates: 600k displaced from Gaza since May 6 – UN

Thank you for joining us for real-time updates on everything related to Israel’s war on Gaza.

Read more about Israel’s continued military push into northern Gaza here.

And for more news, analysis and opinion on the conflict, click here.

We will be closing this live page soon. Here’s a recap of the latest events:

• Israeli forces attacked a group of people who had gathered at an internet access point in Gaza City, killing at least four and wounding dozens more.
• The UN said at least 600,000 people, or a quarter of Gaza’s population, have been displaced from Rafah since May 6, when Israeli forces began a ground invasion in the southern city.
• Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has come out in opposition to Israel’s control over Gaza after the war, urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rule out such a possibility and to consider Palestinian alternatives to Hamas immediately.
• Netanyahu responded to Gallant’s call saying he was not “prepared to exchange Hamastan for Fatahstan”. The Israeli leader has previously said that talking about the “day after” war was a moot point because the conflict would not end until the complete defeat of Hamas.
• Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it launched a swarm of drones at an Israeli military base, west of the city of Tiberias. The attack came as Israeli jets bombed the hillside in Kasrat al-Arush between the towns of Armati and Jabal al-Rayhan in southern Lebanon.

South Africa will ask the top UN court to order a halt to the Rafah offensive as part of its case in The Hague accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The hearings at the International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, come after South Africa last week asked for additional emergency measures to protect Rafah, a southern Gaza city where more than 1.5 million Palestinians had been sheltering.

On Thursday, South Africa will present its latest intervention-seeking emergency measures starting at 3pm (13:00 GMT). Israel, which has denounced South Africa’s claim that it is violating the 1949 Genocide Convention as baseless, will respond on Friday.

Distressing images show the immediate aftermath of an Israeli attack on an internet access point in Gaza City. At least four people are confirmed to have been killed and dozens of others were critically wounded.

Washington, DC – “It’s wrong,” US President Joe Biden said last week of the ongoing Israeli offensive against the southern Gaza city of Rafah, pledging to stop supplying offensive weapons if the assault proceeds.

One week later, however, Israeli forces have seized the Rafah border crossing and pushed into the city, where more than 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering.

Still, US media reported Biden plans to advance a $1bn arms transfer to Israel, including tank shells.

Read the full story here.

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah shares how he won the fight to share his account of Israel’s brutality in its war on Gaza as Palestinians mark Nakba Day.

Abu-Sittah treated patients at hospitals throughout Gaza shortly after the war had started on October 7. Last month, he was blocked from entering much of Europe to share what he had seen.

He has now won a legal battle challenging that travel ban.

With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the fighting in Gaza and the death toll soaring, some suggest the situation today is worse than the “catastrophe” of 1948.

“Our Nakba … is the worst ever. It is much harder than the Nakba of 1948,” said Mohammed al-Farra, whose family fled their home in Khan Younis for the coastal area of al-Mawasi.

At least 600,000 have fled southern Rafah since Israel intensified its military operations this month. About 1.7 million have had to leave their homes and shelters since the war began in October.

The death toll, meanwhile, has surpassed 35,000, mostly women and children.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says it is filing a legal complaint challenging Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s “unlawful executive order targeting student advocates for Palestine”.

“The order targets student advocates for Palestine and directs universities to punish students and organizations that are critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” CAIR said in a statement.

Pro-Palestine demonstrators wearing masks pitched tents and placed fake bloody corpses outside the home of a University of Michigan board member, raising tension with the school.

Sarah Hubbard, chair of the university’s governing board, said the 6am demonstration at her home in Okemos involved 30 people.

“They approached my home and taped a letter to my front door and proceeded to erect the tents. A variety of other things were left in the front yard,” Hubbard said. “They started chanting with their bullhorn and pounding on a drum in my otherwise quiet neighbourhood.”

She and her husband stayed inside. The protesters left 45 minutes later when police arrived. No arrests were made.

Bisan Owda has met with three survivors from the Nakba who shared firsthand accounts of their struggles in 1948 and today.

They spoke about their life before the establishment of Israel and how they’ve now been displaced twice in their lifetimes.

About 15,000 Palestinians were killed during the Nakba in 1948. Since October 7, Israel has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and 1.7 million people have been displaced — more than double the number of Palestinians displaced in 1948.

The Biden administration is working to get a group of American doctors out of Gaza after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing.

The Palestinian American Medical Association, a US-based non-profit, said its team of 19 healthcare professionals, including 10 Americans, had been denied exit from Gaza after a two-week mission providing medical services at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, a city near Rafah in southern Gaza.

Israel seized and closed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt on May 7, disrupting a vital route for people and aid into and out of the besieged coastal enclave.

“We’re tracking this matter closely and working to get the impacted American citizens out of Gaza,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

Jean-Pierre said the United States is engaging directly with Israel on the matter.

The Biden administration has been warning Israel against a major military ground operation in Rafah, but Jean-Pierre said efforts to get the doctors out are continuing regardless of what happens there. “We need to get them out. We want to get them out and it has nothing to do with anything else.”

Greek police have clashed with protesters during a pro-Palestinian march to the Israeli embassy in Athens.

More than 2,500 people marched through the streets of Greece’s capital to the embassy carrying Palestinian flags and chanting, “Free Palestine!”

A group of protesters broke off from the march, which was largely peaceful, and hurled stones at police who had formed a security cordon outside the embassy. Police fired tear gas to disperse them. Three people were detained during the brief clashes, a police official said.

Earlier this month, violence broke out during a pro-Palestinian rally in central Athens, a day after the Israeli military launched a ground assault on Rafah in the Gaza Strip.

This is the deepest attack into Israeli territory since the Lebanese group and Israel began exchanging fire in parallel with the war on Gaza.

Hezbollah said it was targeting part of a surveillance system used by the Israeli air force, and that the swarm of attack drones “hit its limited targets accurately and accomplished what it wanted in this limited operation”.

The attack came a day after an Israeli attack killed a Hezbollah field commander, Hussein Mekki, in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah said on Wednesday that its drone attack was in response to “assassinations” carried out by Israel, but did not specify that it was in retaliation for Mekki’s killing.

Palestinian journalist Alamuddin Sadiq has posted video to his Instagram account showing an Israeli army bomb hitting a home in Rafah, where Israel has begun a ground offensive and has been ramping up air attacks.

This video has been verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit.

Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, has blamed Israel for the current deadlock, saying their amendments on the Gaza ceasefire proposal introduced by mediators Qatar and Egypt led the negotiation into deadlock.

He rejected any post-war settlement in Gaza that excludes the group, adding that Hamas is sticking to its demands that a ceasefire agreement should end the war in the besieged coastal enclave.

Haniyeh also said Israel is putting the captives in harm’s way by continuing the war on Gaza.

“The enemy’s insistence on moving forward with the Rafah invasion puts the entire negotiation in jeopardy,” he added.

Yair Lapid has said that as long as the Netanyahu government is in power, Israel will not be able to win the war in Gaza.

His comments came after Defence Minister Yoav Gallant rejected the possibility of Israeli civil or military governance of post-war Gaza.

“The government has lost control,” Lapid wrote in a post on X. “Soldiers are being killed every day in Gaza and they fight among themselves on television. The cabinet is disassembled and non-functional. Ministers protest in front of cabinet meetings.”

“One cabinet sends humanitarian aid convoys and the other burns them,” he added. “Relations with the US are collapsing, the middle class is collapsing, they have lost the north”.

“We can’t go on like this. We will not win with this government.”

A US Interior Department staffer has become the first Jewish political appointee to publicly resign in protest of the country’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Lily Greenberg Call is a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Department of the Interior. She accuses President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict.

She is at least the fifth mid- or senior-level administration staffer to make public their resignation in protest of the Biden administration’s military and diplomatic support of the now seven-month-long Israeli war.

In her resignation letter delivered Wednesday, she said she “can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration”.

“I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous,” Call said of the war overall and US support for it. “Not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, [but also] for Americans, for [Biden’s] election prospects.”

Farhan Haq, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, gave the figures during his office’s daily news briefing.

“As of today, some 600,000 people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, have been displaced from Rafah since the 6th of May as the Israeli ground operation there continues,” he said.

Additionally, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has issued a flash update on the displacement of Palestinians from the southern Gaza city.

“On 14 and 15 May, the Israeli military issued two new evacuation orders for all or part of 19 neighbourhoods in northern Gaza, bringing to five the number of orders issued since 6 May in Rafah and northern Gaza”, the update said.

Of the nearly 600,000 displaced since May 6, UN figures say, approximately 150,000 of that number have fled Rafah in the past 48 hours.

The Israeli army continues to move ground troops into Rafah, despite warnings from the US and others among its closest allies.

Pro-Palestine protesters in Beirut marched to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, Reuters reports.

The demonstration began outside the American University of Beirut and reached its final destination outside the British Embassy in the city.

This year’s commemoration has been dominated by the plight of around two million Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are living in temporary shelters after being displaced from their homes by the Israeli war.

The seven-month-long war, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians and displaced most of the population, has drawn fears among many of a second Nakba in which they would be forced from the besieged coastal enclave altogether.