[IMPORTANT] Hamas launches foot assault against settlements.

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Eyewitnesses describe scenes of destruction as they return to the area surrounding Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital after the Israel Defense Forces withdrew troops at the conclusion of a two-week raid on terror groups using the medical complex as a command center.

Last week, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Hamas was “destroying Shifa Hospital,” as the military operated against the terror group at the medical center, the largest in the Gaza Strip.

Mohammed Mahdi, who was among those who returned, describes a scene of “total destruction.”

He says several buildings have been burned down and that he saw a number of bodies.

Another resident, Yahia Abu Auf, says army bulldozers plowed over a makeshift cemetery inside the hospital compound.

“The situation is indescribable,” he says. “The occupation destroyed all sense of life here.”

Last week, Hagari said Hamas was firing at troops from inside the Shifa Emergency Room and Maternity Ward and throwing explosive devices from the Shifa Burn Ward.

“Terrorists hiding around the hospital fired mortars at our forces, causing extensive damage to the hospital buildings,” Hagari said.

International law stipulates that while a medical facility is a protected site in conflict, it loses that status if it is used for military activity.

Thousands of demonstrators packed streets outside the Knesset in Jerusalem on Sunday evening in a mass protest demanding the government resign, marking the first day in what is slated to be a four-day event.

The organizers of the protest called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government to step down, for Israel to hold early elections, and for the country’s leaders to agree to a hostage deal that will bring about the release of the 130 captives held in Gaza since Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack on the country.

The gathering outside the Knesset was spearheaded by a coalition of anti-government protest movements, including the Kaplan Force and Brothers in Arms, who plan to hold four days of protests and gatherings in Jerusalem this week.

The rally was the largest protest held since October 7, with the war putting a stop to months-long demonstrations against the government and its efforts at the time to overhaul the judiciary. Organizers claimed more than 100,000 people had taken part, while media outlets reported turnout in the tens of thousands.

Many attendees at the rally in Jerusalem expressed disbelief that Netanyahu was still in power, and that the country hasn’t held elections yet, six months after the Hamas terror onslaught, the worst single attack on the country in its history.

terms
“It is beyond belief that this country, which was so successful… is being led down [this] path by one man and his henchmen,” said one demonstrator.

“We need elections,” another participant said. “The government doesn’t have the public’s faith. And [now] they want to pass a law allowing one in five people to avoid army service,” he added, referring to potential legislation of IDF service exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox community.

After the main protest died down, some participants moved to block the nearby Begin highway, including lighting a number of fires on the road, and were physically removed by police officers, while others clashed with police while attempting to block the entrance to Jerusalem next to the Chords Bridge. At least one protester was arrested, police said.

During the clashes, police deployed foul-smelling skunk water on protesters, Hebrew media reported.

The gathering of protest movements is planning four days of rallies and activities throughout Jerusalem this week, including a tent city set up near the Knesset. On Monday, events are scheduled with former IDF chief and ex-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and Labor activist Yaya Fink, ahead of an evening rally with comments from ex-MK and former deputy IDF chief Yair Golan, as well as family members of those killed on October 7 and the grandson of hostage Chaim Peri. On Tuesday, former prime minister Ehud Barak is slated to address the rally, as is Merav Svirsky, whose parents were murdered on October 7 and whose brother Itay Svirsky was taken hostage and killed in Gaza.

As night fell Sunday, protesters set up more than 100 tents outside the Knesset to sleep at the scene.

The line of tents reached nearly between the Knesset and the Foreign Ministry, several blocks away. Next to the individual sleeping tents were larger logistics tents set up by the various protest movements involved in the demonstration, as well as two life-size mock-ups of tanks brought by veterans of the Yom Kippur War.

Addressing the demonstrators on Sunday, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid proclaimed that all that matters to Netanyahu is staying in office, accusing the prime minister of focusing more on keeping his coalition partners happy than helping citizens impacted by the war.

“The lights have been on in his office for a week,” Lapid sayid as Netanyahu works “to make sure that the ultra-Orthodox can continue to evade conscription despite the war.”

“The IDF is begging for more soldiers [but] they don’t care,” said Lapid, referencing the crisis engulfing the coalition over the issue of Haredi enlistment in the military.

“If a hundredth, a thousandth, a fraction of this organizational efficiency had been devoted to the hostages, or the evacuees, or the management of the war, or the economy, our situation would be completely different, [but] there is only one thing that is important to Netanyahu — to stay in office,” Lapid added.

“This week, they are taking the Knesset into recess in the middle of the war,” he said. “The reservists don’t get a break. The hostages don’t get a break. It doesn’t interest them. Everyone who sits in this government today, the responsibility is on them. Every minister who doesn’t resign, every Knesset member who doesn’t vote against the government, who doesn’t help us send them home, it’s on them. This stain will stick to them for the rest of their life.”

The opposition leader alleged those affected by the war were “transparent” to the government.

“We can’t live like this. We can’t go on like this. We don’t have to either. We can live differently, we can continue otherwise. As long as we are a democracy, there is a tool that changes reality. It’s called elections.”

In response, the gathered crowd screamed back: “Elections now! Elections now!”

“We can’t live like this. We can’t go on like this. We don’t have to either. We can live differently, we can continue otherwise. As long as we are a democracy, there is a tool that changes reality. It’s called elections.”

In response, the gathered crowd screamed back: “Elections now! Elections now!”

Last week, the Knesset House Committee voted to approve a six-week break despite vociferous objections by parties in both the opposition and coalition. The recess is slated to run from April 7 to May 19.

“Every three days a hostage dies. They are leaving for 42 days. That means that 14 hostages will die,” Radman said. It was not clear what those figures were based on.

Radman told The Times of Israel that the prime minister “can’t listen because he’s in the middle of [ensuring] his [political] survival [and the preservation] of his leadership, but I hope that the people in the coalition will hear us and will understand that the only way Israel will recover from this disaster is by elections.”

Asked by reporters at a press conference Sunday evening as the protest began about the possibility of an election, Netanyahu argued such a move would paralyze the country — “in the midst of the war, the moment before victory” — for up to eight months.

“It would paralyze negotiations for freeing our hostages and would bring an end to the war before the goals are completely achieved,” he said. “And the first who would welcome this is Hamas, and that tells you everything.”

Earlier Sunday, before the main protest began, a group of Brothers in Arms activists staged a demonstration in the Haredi neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, demanding that the ultra-Orthodox share the burden of military service.

“I believe, I believe, I believe in enlisting in the military!” some of the protesters sang into megaphones, to the tune of a popular religious song, as air horns blared.

Channel 12 news reported that water and eggs were thrown at the protesters from nearby buildings. Some clashes emerged between locals in the neighborhood and demonstrators.

A picture showed an Israeli flag being burnt as ultra-Orthodox men stood around it.

Police issued a statement saying the protesters in Mea Shearim “illegally blocked a road, disturbed the peace and created a provocation and clashes with locals,” some of whom threw objects at the protesters.

Two people were arrested at the site of the demonstration, police said, without specifying if they were protesters or counter-protesters, adding that one was arrested for shoving a police motorcycle to the ground and the other for burning the flag of the State of Israel.

Thousands of demonstrators packed streets outside the Knesset in Jerusalem on Sunday evening in a mass protest demanding the government resign, marking the first day in what is slated to be a four-day event.

The organizers of the protest called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government to step down, for Israel to hold early elections, and for the country’s leaders to agree to a hostage deal that will bring about the release of the 130 captives held in Gaza since Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack on the country.

The gathering outside the Knesset was spearheaded by a coalition of anti-government protest movements, including the Kaplan Force and Brothers in Arms, who plan to hold four days of protests and gatherings in Jerusalem this week.

The rally was the largest protest held since October 7, with the war putting a stop to months-long demonstrations against the government and its efforts at the time to overhaul the judiciary. Organizers claimed more than 100,000 people had taken part, while media outlets reported turnout in the tens of thousands.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is recovering from a “successful” hernia surgery on Monday, according to the Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem.

The surgery went “as expected and successfully,” and the prime minister was “awake and talking to his family,” Alon Pikarsky, the hospital’s director of general surgery, said in a video statement Monday morning

Netanyahu, 74, was placed under full anesthesia and his duties were filled by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice Yariv Levi, his office said in an initial statement Sunday.

“In consultation with his doctors, it was decided that tonight, at the end of the agenda, the Prime Minister will arrive at the hospital for hernia surgery,” the prime minister’s office wrote.

The hernia was discovered during a routine checkup the night before, according to his office.
In a press conference before the surgery on Sunday, Netanyahu indicated he was optimistic about the surgery and vowed to return to work “very soon,” according to a translation from MSNBC.

In July of last year, Netanyahu underwent surgery to install an emergency pacemaker and doctors confirmed he had a chronic heart condition.

A drone, apparently launched from Iraq, struck a building in a naval base in Israel’s southernmost city of Eilat early Monday morning, the Israel Defense Forces said.

The IDF said it had identified a “suspicious aerial target” that entered Israeli airspace “from the east” and then impacted “in the Eilat Bay area.”

Slight damage was caused to a building in Eilat Bay, and there were no injuries the IDF said.

The IDF later confirmed that the building hit was a hangar at the Eilat naval base. It did not say if any attempt had been made to intercept the aircraft but said the incident was under investigation.

The reference to the projectile’s origin being to the east appeared to confirm a claim by the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, a coalition of Iran-backed paramilitary groups, that it had fired on Israel.

The Iran-backed militia said it had struck a “vital target” in Israel “with appropriate weapons,” without elaborating further.

Toxic Patriotism.

Or more accurately, toxic Iranian-influence.

Sounds like Hamas (who are talking in the name of Palestinians) care more in scoring stupid stances rather than doing anything to stop the genocide.

Iran accused Israel Monday of carrying out an airstrike on a building next to Iran’s embassy in Damascus that killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the top Iranian commander in Syria.

The strike in the Damascus-area municipality of Mezzeh hit a building adjacent to the Iranian embassy, footage showed.

Though Israel has not commented on the strike, The New York Times cited four unnamed Israeli officials as confirming the country was behind the attack.

A Reuters report said a building in the embassy compound was “flattened,” in what it said was “a startling apparent escalation of conflict in the Middle East that would pit Israel against Iran and its allies.” Iran’s SSN news website said the targeted building was Iran’s consulate and ambassador’s residence.

The IRGC in a statement carried by Iranian media announced the deaths of seven members, including its senior-most official in Syria, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy Mohammad Haj Rahimi.

Zahedi was a top commander in IRGC’s Quds Force, a US-designated terrorist organization.

He was reportedly responsible for the unit’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. Israel’s Army Radio said Zahedi oversaw all Iranian terrorist operations against Israel from Syria, Lebanon “and the Palestinian sphere.”

His death was the most significant killing of an IRGC leader since the US assassinated Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January, 2020.

Reuters quoted Iran’s ambassador in Syria warning that Iran’s response to the strike would be harsh.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, meanwhile, said in a call with his Syrian counterpart that Tehran holds Israel responsible for the consequences of the attack, Iran’s state media reported.

The strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus is “a breach of all international conventions,” Amirabdollahian added.

Footage from the scene showed that the targeted building had been destroyed in the strike. Next to the rubble, an Iranian flag was seen flying over the Iranian embassy.

Syria’s state-run SANA broadcaster claimed air defense systems had engaged the alleged Israeli attack, downing some of the missiles.

While Israel does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed terror groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country over the last decade. The Israeli military says it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Hezbollah. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense systems.

Faced with ongoing attacks by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group and Shiite militias throughout the Middle East in the wake of Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre, which sparked the war in Gaza, Israel has escalated its strikes on Iran-linked terror targets in Syria, killing numerous IRGC operatives, as well as members of Hezbollah and other Iranian proxy groups.

The Israeli parliament has approved a law giving the government the power to ban broadcasts of TV channels including Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned network.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would "act immediately" to close the network's local office.

The US expressed concern over the move.

With foreign journalists banned from entering Gaza, Al Jazeera staff based in the strip have been some of the only reporters able to cover the war on the ground.

The Knesset, Israel's parliament, approved the bill allowing foreign networks considered a threat to national security to be "temporarily" banned.

The ban would be in place for a period of 45 days at a time, which could be renewed. The law would stay in force until July or until the end of significant fighting in Gaza.

"Al Jazeera will no longer be broadcast from Israel," Mr Netanyahu wrote on Twitter/X, calling the network a "terrorist channel".

For years, Israeli officials have accused the network of anti-Israeli bias. But their criticisms of the broadcaster have intensified since the Hamas attacks of 7 October. Authorities claim it has close links with Hamas, which Al Jazeera vehemently denies.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said: "Netanyahu could not find any justifications to offer the world for his ongoing attacks on Al Jazeera and press freedom except to present new lies and inflammatory slanders against the Network and the rights of its employees.

"Al Jazeera holds the Israeli Prime Minister responsible for the safety of its staff and Network premises around the world, following his incitement and this false accusation in a disgraceful manner."

The channel has accused Israel of deliberately targeting its staff. Journalists including Hamza Al-Dahdouh, the son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh, have been killed by Israeli strikes. Israel denies targeting journalists.

Qatar, where Al Jazeera is headquartered, is mediating talks between Israel and Hamas over the now almost six-month long conflict. Previous negotiations mediated by Qatar led to a temporary ceasefire and the release of 105 Israeli hostages.

It is not clear, though, if the move by Israel will affect the ceasefire talks.

Israel has previously banned a smaller Lebanese channel, Al Mayadeen, from operating in the country.

"If it is true, a move like this is concerning," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said when asked about the proposed ban.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday his country’s forces had “unintentionally hit innocent people” in the Gaza Strip in the past day, after an airstrike killed seven aid workers with the disaster relief charity World Central Kitchen.

The U.S.-based nonprofit, founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, said it was immediately pausing its operations in the region and Cyprus said that ships carrying aid were turning back after the incident — a major setback for efforts to get food into Gaza by sea for a population that has been pushed to the brink of starvation by the Israel-Hamas war.

Andrés said he was “heartbroken and grieving” for his colleagues who were killed.

“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing,” Andrés wrote on X. “It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon.”

Speaking hours later as he departed the hospital, where he had undergone a hernia operation, Netanyahu said that “Unfortunately, in the last day there was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip.”

“It happens in war, we check it to the end, we are in contact with the governments, and we will do everything so that this thing does not happen again,” Netanyahu added.

His comments came as Israel faced a wave of indignation from humanitarian organizations and foreign leaders about the deadly strike.

The negotiating team made up of officials from the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF will return on Tuesday afternoon from Cairo, "at the conclusion of an additional intensive round of negotiations," the Prime Minister's Office announced on Tuesday afternoon.

The bureau's announcement stated that: "In the framework of the talks, under useful Egyptian mediation, the mediators formulated an updated proposal for Hamas. Israel expects the mediators to take vigorous action regarding Hamas to advance the negotiations toward a deal.

Every Israeli woman who is being held captive by Hamas in Gaza is being sexually abused, freed hostage Mia Regev said during an emergency debate in the Knesset's Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality on the situation of the women hostages.

Regev, who was freed during the hostage deal between Israel and Hamas in November, said that it was "unbelievable" that the Knesset was planning on going on recess on April 8 for over five weeks.

Every day, there is an emergency and every minute counts. What will the women do there? What will the rest of the captives do there?" Regev said.

Yaffa Ohad, the aunt of the captive Noa Argamani, said that recent reports of both Amit Soussana, who described to the New York Times how her captor sexually attacked her at gunpoint, and of a Hamas captive who described in an interrogation how he raped an Israeli woman in a Kibbutz on October 7, have broken the families' spirit. Ohad warned that time was running out, not just for the captives but for their families in Israel.

“Do you want there to be 100,000 Itzik Saidyans?" Ohad said, referring to the released soldier who self-immolated in 2021 after years of struggling to receive the care he sought for PTSD.

Yarden Gonen, sister of hostage Romi Gonen, and Shai Dickman, cousin of hostage Carmel Gat, detailed horrific accounts of eyewitnesses from October 7 that included rape, genital mutilation, and torture.

“Why are you letting my sister remain there? What did she do wrong? Why do I need to be here and beg?" Gonen said. "Why do I not see ministers echoing this throughout the world? I've had enough," Gonen said.

The session was deeply emotional, and many of the people at the session broke into tears and sobs while they and others were speaking.

Sharon Cunio, who was released from captivity in November along with her three-year-old twins, and whose husband is still in captivity, said, "As a woman who was there, the terror is never ending and is indescribable. It is the never-ending terror that you will be hurt, that there is no one to save you, and that you are at the mercy of Hamas."

’Please do not forget the men'
Cunio said that along with the terrible experiences of women, she needed the men, including her husband David, to return as well. "My husband is my strength, and I have no strength left," she said.

"Please do not forget the men," she said while sobbing. "You must reach a deal for everyone, even if in stages," she said.

Politicians from the opposition attacked the government for not sending any representatives to the discussion. "In a normal world, the Minister for Women's Affairs would be here or would gather all of the ministers to hear the testimonies. This is a weak government," Yesh Atid MK Merav Ben-Ari said. Religious Zionist Party Michal Woldiger responded, "Then you are surprised that they do not come," to which committee chairman MK Pnina Tamano-Shata (National Unity) said, "Do not threaten me, they must be here."

The sexual abuse against female hostages has been one of the main arguments for a hostage release and ceasefire deal. Former hostage Amit Soussana came forward last week and was the first woman to come on record and reveal that she herself had been sexually abused while being held hostage.

Later on Tuesday, other hostage families handcuffed themselves to each other during a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee session, in which The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel presented a report on sexual abuses of Israelis on October 7 and its aftermath in Gaza.
In a written statement, the families called the move "a call on members of Knesset not to head to recess, not to continue on routinely and join the struggle to free the hostages, and replace the prime minister who is a barrier to a deal."

"If the hostages have no freedom, neither will elected officials," the families said

The airstrike on a World Central Kitchen convoy in the Gaza Strip on Monday killing seven team members has prompted a slew of questions about the Israeli military practices in the war.

While Israeli officials have acknowledged the bombings — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country’s forces had “unintentionally hit innocent people” — they have released few details about the incident.

“It happens in war, we check it to the end, we are in contact with the governments, and we will do everything so that this thing does not happen again,” he said.

In an effort to better understand what exactly happened, NBC News has geolocated the three damaged aid vehicles abandoned along a 1.55-mile stretch of coastal highway in Gaza, using images posted by international photo agencies and cross-referencing them with satellite imagery.

In a statement, WCK said that the convoy that was hit was made up of three vehicles, two of which were armored and one of which had a softback. They were traveling south along Al-Rashid Road near WCK’s headquarters in Deir al-Balah, a Palestinian city in the central Gaza Strip. The coastal road was earmarked as an accessible road for humanitarian aid by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in March.

The northernmost vehicle, which lies just south of the Port of Deir al-Balah, appears to have suffered fire damage. The hood, trunk and doors are open and there are visible burn marks on the ground. A photo shows fire damage inside the vehicle, with charred World Central Kitchen stickers strewn on the floor and across the seats.

The second vehicle, roughly half a mile farther south along Al-Rashid Road, bears a large entry hole next to large WCK branding plastered on the roof. A number 1 is stickered on the windshield, along with another sticker bearing the logo of the aid agency. Orange, high-visibility vests could be seen inside the vehicle. Metal from the roof is pushed inward, jutting down toward the back seats. Blood is matted into the white paintwork and dark upholstery.

In contrast to the first two vehicles, which were relatively close to each other, a third vehicle was photographed over a mile south of them. This vehicle, smaller than the first two, was the only one off the road, on a patch of land near some homes and tents. Leaning into a ditch, it is missing its roof and windshield and appears to have suffered more damage than the first two. Panels are crumpled or missing, with what appear to be blood and dirt staining the metal frame of the vehicle and the interior seating. The hood is covered with small World Central Kitchen stickers.

The U.S.-based nonprofit group, founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, was leaving a warehouse where the team had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid that the charity had brought to Gaza by sea earlier in the day. The charity said last week that it has served 42 million meals over 175 days in Gaza.

“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing,” Andrés wrote on X. “It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon.”

Those killed included international aid workers — a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, and team members from Britain, Australia and Poland — and a Palestinian driver. The charity did not release their identities.

The U.S. has called on Israel to conduct a swift investigation into the airstrike.

When Mai Kamal Zaqout learned she was pregnant in December, she and her husband, Ahmad, felt something they hadn’t experienced in many weeks in Gaza: happiness — a glimmer of optimism amid the war’s devastation and despair.

Zaqout, 22, said Ahmad placed his hand on her belly and told her: “This is it. She is our last hope.”

But within months, that hope was shattered.

Ahmad, 29, was killed in an airstrike.

Then Zaqout fled south to Rafah, where more than a million people have sought refuge, in hopes of giving birth to her daughter in safety.

But Zaqout fell ill, weak from a lack of food and clean drinking water. Already grieving, she received another devastating blow seven months into her pregnancy: Her baby no longer had a heartbeat.

“I didn’t understand. I started crying and screaming,” she told an NBC News crew on the ground late last month. “All of the hospital gathered,” she said, asking, “‘What’s wrong with her? Why is she crying?’”

“I started saying, ‘Check again. Make sure,’” she said.

Her baby was stillborn in March.

Doctors in Gaza and humanitarian groups told NBC News that Zaqout is one of a growing number of women who have lost pregnancies or had complications, another dire consequence of the war.

“The doctors told me malnutrition had a big role in this,” Zaqout said. “I was not able to eat properly. I didn’t take vitamins. There was nothing available. … The water was polluted. I was feeling it.”

Zaqout said she visited the Emirati Hospital in Rafah during her pregnancy. Dr. Haider Abu Sneima, the hospital’s director, told NBC News last month that various factors were affecting maternal health there.

The little food that is available lacks “proteins, vitamins or vegetables, and if you find them, prices are out of the imaginary,” he said. "A pregnant woman or her family can’t obtain them."

On top of that, Abu Sneima added, the psychological pressures of the war have “a very negative effect on the mother and her baby.”

In recent weeks, he said, there appeared to be a rise in babies being born premature and generally “small in size.”

“We don’t see big children like we used to give birth to in the past. We don’t see these children anymore,” he said.

Dominic Allen, the designated representative for Palestinian territories with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said that when he visited Gaza last month, doctors at the Emirati Hospital similarly told him that they were no longer seeing “normal-sized” babies.

They reported “more complications around births caused, they’re telling us, by malnutrition and dehydration and from stress,” Allen said. “What they are seeing is an increased number of stillborn babies and neonatal deaths.”

NBC News could not independently verify those reported trends, and no data was available to confirm them. The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to a request for comment.

The World Health Organization has repeatedly said that malnourishment is rising in Gaza.

“Different doctors particularly in the maternity hospitals are reporting that they’re seeing a big rise in children born [with] low birth weight and just not surviving the neonatal period because they are born too small,” WHO spokeswoman Dr. Margaret Harris said Tuesday at a briefing.

The reports come amid mounting concerns about looming famine in Gaza. Already, Palestinian health authorities reported that at least 27 people, including children, have died from severe malnutrition in the enclave. Israel faces growing pressure from the international community to expedite the delivery of aid into Gaza, which it has been accused of restricting.

Israeli authorities have denied hindering the flow of aid into Gaza and have instead blamed humanitarian groups for the issue.

According to the UNFPA, around 155,000 pregnant women and new mothers in Gaza are “struggling to survive.”

“They are suffering from hunger and the diseases that stalk it, amid life-threatening shortages of food, water and medical care,” the agency wrote on its website.

“For the 5,500 women who will give birth in the coming month, accessing adequate health care is an unimaginable challenge. Only three maternity hospitals remain in the Gaza Strip, and they are overwhelmed with patients,” it said, adding: “Doctors and midwives — desperate for medicines and supplies — are struggling to provide adequate care to newborns.”

Dr. Angela Bianco, director of maternal fetal medicine and a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said she wasn’t surprised by the Rafah doctors’ reports, though limited data makes it difficult to draw conclusions.

“When you look at the world’s medical literature and you look at the impact of stress on pregnancy outcomes, there is data that definitely supports that there’s an increased rate of adverse pregnancy outcomes and specifically stillbirth and preterm birth in the face of maternal stress — specifically more so extreme stress.”

Speaking with NBC News in Gaza on March 23, UNICEF’s global spokesperson, James Elder, said a cease-fire is necessary to address the spiraling humanitarian crisis in the enclave.

“People are exhausted, the coping mechanisms have been smashed,” he said. “The health system is teetering on collapse, and now we have imminent famine.”

Zaqout does not know exactly why her baby was stillborn, but she said she believes it was a consequence of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

After the delivery, she said, “I kept on saying goodbye.”

“I told her, ‘Go to your father, a bird in paradise. I will wait for you and be patient, and we’ll back to what we were,’” she said. “We were a family on Earth. We will be in the afterlife.

Israel’s military says it has killed around 9,000 militants in Gaza since October 7 — and adamantly denies targeting civilians.

But new reporting published Sunday by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz casts serious doubt on the IDF’s estimate and details how the U.S.-armed military has established combat zones that have become death traps for ordinary Gazans.

The boundaries of such “kill zones” are not clearly marked, making it almost impossible for Palestinian civilians to know whether they are entering one. An Israeli reserve officer told Haaretz that “as soon as people enter” a kill zone, “orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed.”

“To a large extent, the tragedy in which three hostages were killed by the IDF is such a story,” the newspaper reported, “since in fleeing from their captors the three entered a kill zone in the middle of the Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City.”

Significant discretion is given to Israeli commanders to decide whether to open fire on people near a kill zone. Unnamed Israeli soldiers told Haaretz that “there are commanders who will shoot at a building with a suspect in it even if there are civilians in the vicinity, while other commanders will act differently.”

“For our commanders, if we identified someone in our area of operation who was not part of our forces, we were told to shoot to kill,” said one soldier. “We were explicitly told that even if a suspect runs into a building with people in it, we should fire at the building and kill the terrorist, even if other people are hurt.”

One Israeli commander described to Haaretz “incidents in which civilians tried to reach areas they thought the army had left, possibly in the hope of finding food left behind.”

“When they went to such places, they were shot, perceived as people who could harm our forces,” the commander said.

The new reporting points to a recent example documented by Al Jazeera in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it attacked “a terrorist” who was allegedly behind a rocket attack on southern Israel.

“Ostensibly, this was another statistic in the roster of dead Hamas militants,” Haaretz reported. “However, over a week ago, other documentation of the incident surfaced on Al Jazeera. It showed four men, not one, walking together on a wide path, in civilian clothing. There is no one nearby, only the ruins of houses where people once lived. This apocalyptic silence in the Khan Younis area was shattered by a loud explosion. Two of the men were killed instantly. Two others were wounded and tried to continue walking. Perhaps they thought they had been saved, but seconds later, a bomb was dropped on one of them. You can then see the other one falling to his knees and then, a boom, fire, and smoke.”

A senior IDF officer told the Israeli newspaper that the individuals who unwittingly entered a kill zone “were unarmed” and “didn’t endanger our forces in the area in which they were walking.” It was also not clear they were involved in the rocket attack.

“It’s quite possible that Palestinians who never held a gun in their lives were elevated to the rank of ‘terrorist’ posthumously, at least by the IDF,” Haaretz noted. As one officer who served in Gaza told the newspaper, “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”

Last week, Al Jazeerapublished video footage showing Israeli forces gunning down two unarmed Palestinians in northern Gaza, one of whom was waving a piece of white fabric. They are believed to have entered an Israeli “kill zone.”

“One reason why the Israeli government, media, the Biden administration, et al. have been trying to undermine the credibility of Gazan casualty figures is to deflect from the fact that the IDF’s own figures are almost certainly BS,” foreign policy analyst Derek Davison wrote Sunday in response to the Haaretz story.

Brianna Rosen, a senior fellow at Just Security, argued that the “kind of indiscriminate killing” detailed in Haaretz’s reporting “is illegal and falls far short of any gold standard for civilian harm.”

Israel risks being left without any partners to provide and deliver humanitarian assistance to Gaza after the deadly erroneous IDF strikes on a convoy belonging to the World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid group in central Gaza, a United States official told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.

An Israeli air strike killed seven people working for WCK in Gaza on Monday.

The strike saw WCK halt its operations and several other agencies and countries said they were pausing aid efforts, raising fears that there would be no one to supply aid to large parts of Gaza that are increasingly facing hunger and starvation.

US and Israeli officials expressed concern that such a situation could force Israel to shift its war goals in Gaza. The US and other allies have made it increasingly clear to Israel that continued support for the war on Hamas depends on Israel allowing and facilitating aid to Gaza’s civilian population.

“People aren’t exactly lining up to do this work, and they just took out one of the few groups that has volunteered,” the US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

They don’t want UNRWA involved? Fine. But they have to be… sure that the rest of the humanitarian workers are protected,” the official said, referring to the UN agency for Palestinians, which Israel has sought to sideline after accusing some of its staff of participating in the October 7 attack and many more of having ties to Hamas.

“If [WCK] doesn’t come back, and other groups follow suit, the onus is going to fall on Israel to provide aid to the Palestinians,” the US official continued, citing international law.

“To not have proper de-confliction mechanisms put in place six months into the war is inexcusable,” the official said.

“The IDF is talking about improving communications between the Southern Command and COGAT,” they said, referring to the military unit that coordinates activities with the Palestinians.

“How is this mechanism only being put in place now?” the official continued, warning that the strike could have implications on continued fighting in Gaza as well as negotiations to free the hostages in return for at least a temporary ceasefire.

The US also publicly expressed its anger.

The White House said it was “outraged” by the strike and that US President Joe Biden called the charity aid group’s founder to share his condolences.

“We were outraged to learn of an IDF strike that killed a number of civilian humanitarian workers yesterday from the World Central Kitchen,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters during a briefing in Washington.

Biden told WCK founder Jose Andres that he will make clear to Israel that aid workers must be protected, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told the same briefing.

The strike on the WCK convoy killed citizens of Australia, Britain and Poland, as well as Palestinians and a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.

Speaking to Channel 12, a senior Israeli official echoed the fears that the incident could be a turning point in the war.

Channel 12 reported that Israeli officials fear the WCK deaths and disruptions to aid deliveries will exacerbate famine concerns. Other aid agencies may also stop their operations, which would leave Israel forced to choose between taking over food distribution — effectively making it a military governor of Gaza — or ending the war.

A senior political source told Channel 12 that there are concerns the incident could deeply impact the war, racking up the pressure on Israel to end the conflict before it has achieved its stated goals of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages.

Those fears appeared to quickly be coming to pass with groups suspending aid and boats full of desperately needed food sailing away from Gaza.

The United Arab Emirates was pausing humanitarian aid efforts through the Gaza maritime corridor pending a full investigation of the deadly strike on aid workers and assurances from Israel that in future they will be protected, a senior Emirati official told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.

As the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas continues to disrupt essential aid via land causing a humanitarian crisis, the UAE has been the main financier for aid through a maritime corridor to Gaza, often in missions organized by WCK.
Cypriot officials said that ships waiting to unload more supplies had instead sailed away and were heading back to Cyprus.

WCK staff had just finished offloading 100 tons of food aid from a barge that sailed from Cyprus when their vehicle convoy was attacked overnight Monday in the Israeli airstrike.

The barge was part of a four-vessel flotilla that set sail from Larnaca, Cyprus on March 30. Another vessel still loaded with 240 tons of food, the Jennifer, was heading back to Cyprus on Tuesday with the empty barge, a salvage boat and a tugboat after WCK suspended operations.

“They only managed to offload the barge,” a Cypriot official told Reuters. “One-third [of the aid cargo] was delivered, and two-thirds is coming back.”

Monday’s attack was a serious setback in attempts to expedite aid into Gaza, where international agencies say many are on the verge of famine as a result of the fighting.

Israel has faced intense international pressure to ensure more aid gets into the Strip, especially hard-to-reach areas of northern Gaza, amid repeated warnings that the population faces starvation and famine. There have already been previous deadly incidents during aid deliveries with desperate Palestinians dying in stampedes, being hit by falling packages air-dropped by military planes from a variety of countries, drowning as they try to retrieve aid that fell in the sea, or being caught in gunfire from Israeli troops.

Israel has said aid on trucks waiting to enter Gaza from Egypt is backed up due to poor coordination by United Nations and aid agency officials. It also accuses Hamas of looting aid deliveries for its own purposes and denying supplies to the civilian population.

In addition, the deaths of the aid workers are bound to raise more hurdles for Israel as it seeks to press ahead with a promised offensive in Rafah, a southern Gaza city that is the last Hamas stronghold not yet overrun by the IDF, the official said. The city and its surroundings have absorbed hundreds of thousands of Gazans who fled the fighting in other areas of Gaza, and the US is insisting that Israel implement a reasonable evacuation plan for the 1.4 million people in the area before it launches the operation.

Already another aid group said it is freezing its activities.

Anera, a Washington-based aid group that has been operating in the Palestinian territories for decades, said that in the wake of the strike it was taking the “unprecedented” step of pausing its own operations in Gaza, where it had been helping to provide around 150,000 meals daily.

“The escalating risks associated with aid delivery leave us with no choice,” it said in a statement.

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi issued an apology after midnight on Wednesday for a deadly Israeli strike on an aid convoy in Gaza, adding that it was a result of a “misidentification,” which was being investigated and learned from.

The stoic video statement from the military leader came as new details emerged from the Monday night incident, which reportedly saw three cars from a World Central Kitchen convoy targeted one after another by drone-fired missiles, leaving seven humanitarian workers dead.

The strike was far from the first against aid workers in the Strip since the outbreak of a war waged by Israel against a Hamas terror group that is deeply embedded within the civilian population.

But the latest incident appeared on track to force a major shift in the war — similar to the one sparked by a mass casualty incident involving another aid convoy, which desperate Palestinians swarmed in northern Gaza on February 29. The dozens killed in the ensuing gunfire and stampede led to furious international reactions and an announcement by US President Joe Biden that he was done waiting for Israel to facilitate the delivery of more aid and was instead establishing a new maritime corridor to flood the Strip with food.

As anger bubbled, Halevi issued his own statement in which he hailed WCK — which froze its operations in Gaza following the strike — ostensibly recognizing that the IDF desperately needs such aid organizations in order to prevent the humanitarian crisis from deteriorating into full-fledged famine.

Halevi highlighted WCK’s work in Israel since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, which has included serving nearly two million meals to evacuated residents from the south and the north.

The aid organization has become a favorite of the IDF, which has sought to sideline UNRWA from the humanitarian effort over concerns about its ties to Hamas. “The IDF works together closely with the World Central Kitchen and greatly appreciates the important work that they do,” Halevi said.

The IDF chief of staff noted that the army had already completed its preliminary probe into the strike and that the findings were shared with him.

“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification, at night, during a war, in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” Halevi clarified, adding that there was no “intention of harming WCK aid workers.”

‘Every commander makes his own rules’
Meanwhile, on Tuesday evening, the Haaretz daily spoke to unnamed military sources who revealed that the cause of the strike was undisciplined, rouge commanders, not a lack of coordination between the IDF and the WCK.

A source in the intelligence branch told Haaretz that the IDF’s Southern Command “knows exactly what the cause of the attack was: in Gaza, everyone does as they please.”

Army regulations require final approvals from division commanders or those above them before strikes can be carried out on sensitive targets such as aid convoys.

But in Gaza, “every commander makes his own rules” and his own interpretation of the rules of engagement, the source told Haaretz, which said it wasn’t clear whether the strikes on the convoy ever received final approval.

The intelligence source noted the IDF decision to establish a new coordination hub between COGAT — which facilitates aid delivery for Israel — and Southern Command but insisted that this wouldn’t solve the problem, as similar centers already exist.

“It has no connection to coordination… You can set up another 20 administrations or war rooms, but if someone doesn’t decide to put an end to the conduct of some of the troops inside Gaza, we’ll see more incidents like this,” the source told Haaretz.

Dr Fozia Alvi was making her rounds of the intensive care unit on her final day at the battered European public hospital in southern Gaza when she stopped next to two young arrivals with facial injuries and breathing tubes in their windpipes.

“I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old,” she said.

The Canadian doctor’s heart sank. These were not the first children treated by Alvi who she was told were targeted by Israeli soldiers, and she knew the damage a single high-calibre bullet could do to a fragile young body.

“They were not able to talk, paraplegic. They were literally lying down as vegetables on those beds. They were not the only ones. I saw even small children with direct sniper shot wounds to the head as well as in the chest. They were not combatants, they were small children,” said Alvi.

Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Tens of thousands more young people have suffered severe injuries, including amputations.

Nine doctors gave the Guardian accounts of working in Gaza hospitals this year, all but one of them foreign volunteers. Their common assessment was that most of the dead and wounded children they treated were hit by shrapnel or burned during Israel’s extensive bombardment of residential neighbourhoods, in some cases wiping out entire families. Others were killed or injured by collapsing buildings with still more missing under the rubble.

But doctors also reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.

Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops.

Other doctors said they did not know the circumstances of the shootings but that they were deeply troubled by the number of children who were severely wounded or killed by single gunshots, sometimes by high-calibre bullets causing extensive damage to young bodies.

In mid-February, a group of UN experts accused the Israeli military of targeting Palestinian civilians who are evidently not combatants, including children, as they sought shelter.

“We are shocked by reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the group said.

The Guardian shared descriptions and images of gunshot wounds suffered by eight children with military experts and forensic pathologists. They said it was difficult to conclusively determine the circumstances of the shootings based on the descriptions and photos alone, although in some of the cases they were able to identify ammunition used by the Israeli military.

Eyewitness accounts and video recordings appear to back up claims that Israeli soldiers have fired on civilians, including children, outside of combat with Hamas or other armed groups. In some cases, witnesses describe coming under fire while waving white flags. Haaretz reported on Saturday that Israel routinely fires on civilians in areas its military has declared a “combat zone”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deploy snipers – or sharpshooters, as the military calls them – during combat operations, often as part of elite units. They are trained to “target and eliminate particularly difficult terrorist threats”, according to the military’s own definition.

Israeli and foreign human rights groups have documented a long history of snipers firing on unarmed Palestinians, including children, in Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinians in Gaza also report a terrifying new development in the latest Gaza war – armed drones able to hover over streets and pick off individuals. Called quadcopters, some of these drones are used as remote-control snipers that Palestinians say have been used to shoot civilians.

The IDF said it “completely rejects” allegations that its snipers deliberately fire on civilians. It said it cannot address individual shootings “without coordinates of the incidents”.

“The IDF only targets terrorists and military targets. In stark contrast to Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians, including men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm,” it said.

Doctors say otherwise.

Dr Vanita Gupta, an intensive care doctor at a New York City hospital, volunteered at Gaza’s European hospital in January. One morning, three badly wounded children arrived in quick succession. Their families told Gupta that the children had been together in the street when they came under fire and that there had been no other shooting in the area. She said no wounded adults were brought in to the hospital at the same time and from the same place.

“One child, I could see there was a shot to the head. They were doing CPR on this five- or six-year-old girl who obviously died,” said Gupta.

“There was another little girl about the same age. I saw a bullet entry wound on her head. Her father was there, crying and asking me, ‘Can you save her? She’s my only child.’”

Gupta said that a third young child also had a shot to the head and was sent for a CT scan.

“The neurosurgeon looked and said, ‘There’s no hope.’ You could see the bullet had gone through the head. I don’t know how old he was, but young,” she said.

Family members told Gupta that the Israeli army had withdrawn from the area about four kilometres from the hospital.

“They said people started returning to their homes because the army was gone. But the snipers stayed on. The families said they opened fire at the children,” she said.

Doctors who worked at the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza said what appeared to be targeted Israeli fire killed more than two dozen people, including children, as they entered or left the hospital in the first weeks of this year.

Among the casualties was 14-year-old Ruwa Qdeih. Doctors say she was shot dead outside the hospital in Khan Younis as she went to collect water. They said there was no fighting in the area at the time and that she was killed by a single shot and then men who went to recover her body were also shot at.

In Gaza City, three-year-old Emad Abu al-Qura was shot outside his home as he went to buy fruit with his cousin, Hadeel, a 20-year-old medical student, who was also killed. The family said they were targeted by an Israeli sniper.

A video of the pair lying together in the street shows Emad still alive after he is first hit and trying to lift his head. More shots hit the ground close by including one that strikes a plank next to Emad. The boy’s mother said he was then hit again and this time killed.

Hadeel’s father, Haroon, saw the shooting.

“The targeting of civilians is very clear. It is a deliberate direct targeting aimed at killing civilians without reason, without there being any events, without there being any resistance. They deliberately killed Hadeel and Emad,” he told Al Jazeera.

Other young victims include 14-year-old Nahedh Barbakh, who was hit by sniper fire alongside his 20-year-old brother, Ramez, as they followed Israeli military orders to evacuate an area west of Khan Younis in late January, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

According to a witness interviewed by Euro-Med Monitor, Nahedh was carrying a white flag to lead the way for his family, but after walking just a few steps from the house he was hit in the leg by a bullet. As the teenager attempted to turn back home he was shot in the back and head, the witness said.

Ramez was shot through the heart when he tried to rescue his brother.

The family decided it was too dangerous to recover the bodies and eventually fled the area, leaving the brothers still lying in the street. A last photograph shows Ramez stretched across Nahedh’s body with the white flag tangled between them.

Witnesses said the shots came from the rooftop of a nearby building taken over by Israeli soldiers.

"A new threat"
In December, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said that 13-year-old Amir Odeh was killed by an Israeli drone at its headquarters in the Al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis. The family told Euro-Med Monitor he was shot through a window as he played with his cousins on the eighth floor of building where they had sought shelter from the fighting. The killing was especially notable because the single shot to the chest came from a type of drone not seen in combat in Gaza before – a quadcopter, fitted with a gun, camera and speaker. Unlike some other drones, quadcopters are able to hover over their targets.

Dr Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago doctor who volunteered in Nasser hospital’s emergency room, said quadcopters sometimes appeared in swarms, giving orders to Palestinians to clear an area.

“We heard an incredible amount of stories from people recovering from injuries from these quadcopters firing bullets from the sky,” he said.

Ahmad said that on one occasion a drone shot one of the hospital’s doctors in the head, although he survived.

Dr Ahmed Moghrabi described on Instagram “hundreds” of quadcopters descending on the Nasser hospital in the third week of February and ordering people to evacuate the compound before killing a number of them. On another occasion, he filmed quadcopters giving instructions to Palestinians to leave the area.

Although the Israeli military has previously deployed quadcopters for intelligence gathering, this appears to be the first time that versions of the drone able to fire guns have been used against the Palestinians.

Prof Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon and who was recently elected rector of the University of Glasgow, told Mondoweiss, a leftwing Israel-Palestine news site, that working at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City “we were getting a lot of people shot by these quadcopters, these drones that have sniper guns attached to them”.

Abu-Sittah, who has operated on Palestinians wounded by Israeli sharpshooters during visits to Gaza in earlier years, described the quadcopters as firing “single high-velocity” shots.

“We have received over 20 chest and neck gunshot wounds fired from Israeli Quadcopter drones. This is a low flying sniper drone,” he wrote on X.

Quadcopter killings documented by Euro-Med Monitor include two children shot dead on 21 January when drones opened fire at al-Aqsa University near Khan Younis, where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. The following month, a drone shot dead Elyas Abu Jama, a 17-year-old whose family said had mental and physical disabilities, outside his tent in a Rafah displaced persons camp. Euro-Med Monitor said that on the same day, a quadcopter killed 16-year-old Mahmoud al-Assar and his 21-year-old sister, Asmaa.

Thaer Ahmad spent three weeks at the Nasser hospital in January as a volunteer with the medical charity MedGlobal. Normally he works at a trauma centre on Chicago’s south side, where he regularly deals with gunshot wounds.

“I did more trauma procedures on paediatric patients in the three weeks that I was at Nasser than I did in the 10 years that I’ve been practising in the US,” he said.

The doctor said he treated five children he believes were shot by snipers because the placing of the bullets suggested they were not hit randomly but targeted.

“They were mostly shot in the thorax, the chest area, some in the abdomen. There was one boy shot in the face. As a result he had a shattered jaw. There were two children who had been shot in the chest, young, under the age of 10, who did not survive. Two others, one shot in the abdomen, did survive. They were still recovering in the hospital when I left,” he said.

Ahmad noted the children were often shot by “one large-calibre bullet” which could produce devastating wounds.

Dr Irfan Galaria, a surgeon based in Virginia, slept on the operating room floor of the European hospital between shifts as a volunteer in January. He too saw children badly wounded by high-calibre bullets.

Galaria said that a 14-year-old boy arrived at the hospital who had been shot once through the back. When surgeons operated they found a bullet in the boy’s stomach.

“He was very lucky because it missed a lot of the vital organs but it was just sitting in his abdomen,” he said.

The surgeon took a photo of the bullet, which former IDF soldiers who spoke with the Guardian identified as a powerful .50 calibre round typically fired from a machine gun mounted on an armoured vehicle, although it has also been used in sniper rifles. They said that vehicle-mounted guns often have advanced sighting systems that allow them to target shots but that large numbers of .50 rounds could be fired without precision targeting, making it difficult to establish whether the child was targeted.

Other bullets recovered from young Palestinians include 5.56mm rounds that are standard issue for all IDF infantry rifles but also used by marksmen attached to all infantry units.

Gupta provided the Guardian with CT scans of children with head wounds. These included one of an eight-year-old girl that a pathologist described as showing a “gunshot wound to the head entering right side with bullet in brain (medial right temporal lobe)”.

Although doctors were shocked at the number of child victims, they said they believed the shootings were part of a broader pattern of targeting Palestinian civilians, including elderly people.

“The vast majority of people we saw were not combatants,” said Ahmad. “There was an elderly woman who was on the back of a donkey cart when she was shot. The bullet lodged in her spine and she was paralysed from the waist down and also her lung collapsed. She was somewhere between 60 and 70 years old.”

"Sniper wounds were common"
Dr Osaid Alser helped organise a group of doctors outside Gaza to give long-distance guidance to the only Palestinian general surgeon remaining at Nasser hospital, who only had limited experience.

“Sniper wounds were common, and quadcopter gunshots as well,” said Alser, who grew up in Gaza City and now lives in Texas.

Doctors said that apparent sniper shots also account for numerous amputations and long-term disabilities, made all the worse in children because a bullet often causes more damage to small bodies.

Alser argued that it was often possible to distinguish sniper shots.

“When it’s a sniper, usually it’s a bigger bullet, which causes significantly more damage and has more shock-wave energy as compared to a smaller rifle or a pistol. If it’s a sniper, it may cause amputation of the limb because it will cause damage to the vascular structure – nerves, bone, soft tissue, everything,” he said.

“Another pattern is injury to the spinal cord when people are shot in the middle of the abdomen or in the middle of the back. Spinal cord injury is not necessarily fatal, unless it’s the neck, but it can be disabling.”

Alser said that one of his elderly relatives, a pioneer of dentistry in Gaza, was among the apparent victims of a sniper.

Dr Mohammed Al Madhoun went missing after seeking medical treatment for a chronic condition at a charity hospital west of Gaza City in December. The 73-year-old’s body was found near the hospital a week later alongside that of his great-nephew. They had both been shot.

“The pattern of injury, and the amount of damage from the bullet, was significant, and that’s mainly caused by a sniper,” said Alser, who reviewed CT scans of the injury. “He was obviously old. You wouldn’t expect a 73-year-old to be a target, right?”

The doctor said the cases he reviewed remotely included other elderly people, among them a woman in her 70s.

“She was shot by a sniper and she had a massive head bleed. That is non-survivable. She died a day or two after,” he said.

In October, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world”. The Israeli military claims to be guided by a “purity of arms” doctrine that precludes soldiers from harming “uninvolved civilians”.

But Israeli and international human rights groups have long said that the military’s failure to enforce its own standards – and its willingness to cover up breaches – has contributed to a climate of impunity for soldiers who target civilians.

The groups say it is extremely difficult at this stage to quantify the scale of such shootings in Gaza, not least because their own staff are often displaced and under attack. But Miranda Cleland of Defense for Children International Palestine said that over the years there had been a “clear pattern of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian children with deadly force in situations where the children posed no threat to soldiers”.

“In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in the head, chest or abdomen, all areas from which a child will quickly bleed out if they aren’t killed instantly. Many of these children are shot by Israeli forces from great distances, sometimes upwards of 500ft, which is something only a trained military sniper would be capable of,” she said.

An Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, collected testimonies from IDF soldiers in earlier conflicts who said they shot Palestinian civilians merely because they were where they were not supposed to be even though it was evident they were not combatants.

IDF snipers boasted about shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters, including young people, in the knees during nearly two years of demonstrations at the Gaza border fence from the spring of 2018.

One former Israeli army sniper, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian that the IDF’s open-fire regulations were so broad that a soldier has extensive leeway to shoot at anyone once an area is declared a combat zone.

“The problem is the regulations that enable soldiers who just want to shoot Palestinians. In my experience, most soldiers who pull a trigger only want to kill those who should be killed but there are those who regard all the Arabs as the enemy and find any reason to shoot or no reason at all,” he said, adding that a system of impunity protects such soldiers.

“Even if they are outside the regulations, the system will protect them. The army will cover up. The other soldiers in the unit will not object or they will celebrate another dead Arab. There’s no accountability so even the loosest regulations have no real meaning.”

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has described the IDF’s open-fire regulations as “no more than a semblance of legality” in part because they are “repeatedly violated”.

“Other than a handful of cases, usually involving low-ranking soldiers, no one has been put on trial for harming Palestinians,” the group said.

In one of the most notorious cases of soldiers shooting young children in the occupied territories, an army captain fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, in 2004 after she crossed into a security zone even though she posed no immediate threat and his own soldiers told him she was “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. The captain was cleared of wrongdoing by a military court.

The Israeli military also has a long history of covering up the killing of children.

After 11-year-old Khalil al-Mughrabi was shot dead as he played football in Rafah in 2001, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem wrote to the IDF demanding an inquiry.

Months later, the judge advocate general’s office told B’Tselem that Khalil was shot by soldiers who acted with “restraint and control” to disperse a riot in the area. However, the IDF made the mistake of attaching a copy of its secret internal investigation, which said the riot had been much earlier in the day and that soldiers who opened fire on the child were guilty of a “serious deviation from obligatory norms of behaviour”.

The chief military prosecutor, Col Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B’Tselem to cover up the crime.

More recently, the IDF was accused of lying to cover up the shooting of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, almost certainly by an Israeli sniper. The military at first blamed the Palestinians and then falsely claimed that Abu Akleh was caught in crossfire during a gun battle. Her employer, Al Jazeera, presented video evidence that there was no firefight and that at least one Israeli soldier was targeting the journalist.

Alvi, the Canadian physician, left Gaza in the third week of February as Israeli forces were threatening a ground assault against Rafah. Alvi founded the US-based charity Humanity Auxilium, which has worked with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, displaced Syrians and earthquake survivors in Turkey.

“This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”

Israel and Hamas will continue to battle for many years, war-cabinet minister and National Unity MK Benny Gantz said in an address to the Israeli public on Wednesday evening.
Speaking on recent efforts made to reach a hostage and ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip, Gantz publicly apologized to the families of the 134 remaining hostages over the Israeli government's inability to reach a deal.

"If there is an opportunity to bring the hostages home, we will not miss it," Gantz said. "We will not take part in a government that is not doing everything it can to release the captives.
"It shames me when I hear comments from elected officials disgracing the families. Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] must publicly support the hostages' families and make sure all coalition members treat them with dignity

Gantz continued, saying that Israel's top security priority was to change the reality on the northern front against the Lebanese terror organization Hezbollah.

Gantz also said that Israel has a chance to create a regional security pact to defend itself against Hamas and "those who try to harm us, headed by Iran.

Gantz also claimed a peace deal with Saudi Arabia was "within reach."

"A normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, which would include the establishment of an international directorate for the Gaza Strip headed by Arab states, is within reach."

Israel war cabinet member Benny Gantz called for national elections in September on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government faces pressure at home and abroad over the war in Gaza.

"We must agree on a date for elections in September, towards a year to the war if you will," Gantz said in a televised briefing. "Setting such a date will allow us to continue the military effort while signaling to the citizens of Israel that we will soon renew their trust in us."

The third day of a four-day anti-government demonstration in Jerusalem descended into chaos on Tuesday night when marchers attempting to bypass police barricades split into multiple directions in order to reach the private residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The march began with a series of speeches outside the Knesset given by family members of the hostages, anti-government activists and former prime minister Ehud Barak — a vocal critic of Netanyahu.

Though the procession from the Knesset began as a unified mass of people led by relatives of the hostages and veteran activists who rose to prominence last year amid Israel’s since-paused judicial overhaul, it fragmented when its thousands of marchers flooded the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s wealthy Rehavia neighborhood where the Netanyahus live.

After encountering barricades, a handful of protesters with megaphones ran to the front of the march and successfully directed a large contingent of the crowd to take a detour to Netanyahu’s home on Azza Street, catching law enforcement off-guard.

Organizers urged participants to run as quickly as they could to evade crowd control measures. Israel Police called this stage of the march an “unbridled riot.”

Upon reaching Azza Street, Ayala Metzger, daughter-in-law of Hamas-held hostage Yoram Metzger, sat down with several people inside a playground across the street from Netanyahu’s home, but was quickly dragged to the side by police after authorities apparently demanded that protesters clear the area.

Police arrested five demonstrators throughout the night and opened an investigation into the throwing of a burning torch at a mounted officer.

Another police officer was admitted to the hospital for an injury sustained by a protester who threw a crowd control fence at him.

A group of police were also filmed severely beating a demonstrator carrying a drum in the middle of the street.

Outside Netanyahu’s home, one demonstrator lay down underneath a police water cannon for an extended period, stopping it in its tracks and preventing law enforcement from deploying it against protesters. Police sprayed him with foul-smelling skunk liquid and then pulled him out from under the vehicle to take him into custody.

In response to the protests outside Netanyahu’s residence, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — who holds authority over the police — accused the Shin Bet of ignoring threats to the prime minister.

Among the hundreds protesting outside Netanyahu’s home was also Einav Zangauker, the mother of Hamas-held hostage Matan Zangauker and one of the main speakers outside the Knesset.

Earlier that evening, Zangauker decried Netanyahu as “Pharaoh who inflicts on us the plague of the firstborn.”

“As long as my Matan has no day or night, neither will you,” she said in a speech directed at Netanyahu, whom she once backed at the ballot box until becoming disillusioned by the aftermath of October 7 when Hamas slaughtered some 1,200 Israelis and took 253 hostage.

“You failed on October 7 in every possible way… you are an obstacle to a hostage deal,” she declared, accusing Netanyahu of smearing her and other relatives of the hostages.

You call us traitors when it is you who is a traitor — a traitor to your people, your voters and the State of Israel,” she said. Netanyahu has not called any of the hostage families traitors but some of his most fervent supporters have.

Chaos erupted in the Knesset visitors’ gallery Wednesday as activists and relatives of hostages in Gaza splattered yellow paint on viewing windows above the plenum to protest a lack of government action to free their loved ones after 180 days of captivity.

Security personnel immediately confronted the protesters, pushed them away from the windows and escorted them out of the gallery. In the Knesset plenum below, where legislators were voting on a climate-related bill, a number of opposition lawmakers raised their hands in solidarity with the protesters.

Some of the approximately 20 protesters threw paint at the balcony’s floor-to-ceiling windows, while others raised hands covered in paint and smeared them on the glass.

The protesters used bright yellow paint, a color that has been adopted to symbolize the plight of the captives, usually in the form of yellow ribbons.

Addressing the plenum following the incident, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid expressed sympathy for the families while attempting to lower the temperature.

Our hearts are with you, the families of the protesters. We will fight with you,” he said, while stressing the obligation of “protesters to follow the law, and of police to maintain the safety of the demonstrators.”

From the article -
"The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity."

With a warning for some particularly harrowing detail and images.

‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza