Middle East crisis live: second shipment of Gaza aid sets sail from Cyprus | Israel

Lorenzo Tondo

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing one of the most serious threats yet to his coalition government after the country’s supreme court ordered an end to government subsidies from Monday for many ultra-Orthodox men who do not serve in the army.

The ruling follows a series of delays by the government in presenting a proposal to the court aimed at enhancing the military enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men, who have historically been exempt from conscription.

The court has previously ruled the current system discriminatory and given the government until Monday to present a new plan, and until 30 June to pass it. Netanyahu, whose government includes parties supportive of and opposed to ultra-Orthodox enlistment, on Thursday asked the court for a 30-day extension to find a compromise.

Israel has mandatory army service, but for decades made an exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews, also known as Haredi, who are allowed to continue full-time Torah study and live on government stipends.

You can read the full story by Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem here:

Airdrops of humanitarian aid are leading to fatal fights in Gaza as the desperate and hungry battle to reach parachuted food and essentials, amid fears that little of the much-needed assistance is reaching those most threatened by a looming famine.

Eyewitness accounts, images and interviews with aid workers in Gaza suggest the high-profile airdrop operations are of limited help, and have contributed to growing anarchy there.

Yousef Abu Rabee, a strawberry farmer in northern Gaza before the conflict, said he had given up trying to reach aid drops to provide for his family after being shot at by unidentified armed men during a recent chaotic struggle around one parachuted pallet of assistance.

“Since then, I have stopped going as it is not worth all this risk, as a person is vulnerable to injury and death at any moment,” Rabee, 25, said.

Others have reported deaths by stabbing, as well as in stampedes. Twelve people drowned trying to get to aid dropped by plane off a Gaza beach last week, Palestinian health authorities have said. Earlier last month, five were killed near the coastal refugee camp known as al-Shati, one of the most devastated parts of Gaza, after a parachute failed to deploy properly and aid fell on a group of waiting men, teenagers and younger children.

You can read the full report by Jason Burke in Jerusalem and Malek A Tantesh in Gaza here:

About 9,000 patients in the Gaza Strip require evacuation for emergency care, with the war-torn Palestinian territory down to just 10 barely functioning hospitals, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday.

“With only 10 hospitals minimally functional across the whole of Gaza, thousands of patients continue to be deprived of health care,” the WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X.

Before the war, Gaza had 36 hospitals, according to the WHO.

“Around 9,000 patients urgently need to be evacuated abroad for lifesaving health services, including treatment for cancer, injuries from bombardments, kidney dialysis and other chronic conditions,” he said.

That is up from 8,000 in the WHO’s previous assessment at the beginning of March, reports AFP.

Tedros said that “so far, over 3,400 patients have been referred abroad through Rafah, including 2,198 wounded and 1,215 ill. But many more need to be evacuated. We urge Israel to speed up approvals for evacuations, so that critical patients can be treated. Every moment matters.”

Before the war, 50 to 100 patients a day were transferred to East Jerusalem or the West Bank, half of them for cancer treatment.

Peter Beaumont

Famine is already probably present in at least some areas of northern Gaza, while other areas are in danger of falling into conditions of starvation, the US state department said on Friday a day after the world’s top court ordered Israel to admit food aid into the territory.

“While we can say with confidence that famine is a significant risk in the south and centre but not present, in the north, it is both a risk and quite possibly is present in at least some areas,” a state department official told Reuters.

The US comments add to a growing and powerful consensus that Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian coastal territory has triggered a famine.

The number of trucks distributing aid in south and central Gaza had nearly reached 200 a day, an increase on a month ago, but more were needed, the state department official said.

“You need to address the full nutrition needs of the population of Gaza of all ages. That means more than just that minimal survival level feeding,” the official said, adding that malnutrition, and infant and young-child mortality was a significant, growing problem.

“It has to be addressed by additional assistance coming and the right kind of assistance coming in,” he said.

You can read the full piece by Peter Beaumont here:

A second shipment of aid carrying almost 400 tons of food for Gaza left Cyprus’s Larnaca port on Saturday, a Reuters witness said.

A cargo vessel already anchored outside the port carrying aid was joined by a salvage vessel and a platform also carrying aid and which had previously been moored in port, the witness said. The salvage vessel will be towing the aid.

It will be the second dispatch of aid via Cyprus, where Cypriot authorities have established, in cooperation with Israel, a maritime corridor to facilitiate pre-screened cargoes arriving directly to Gaza.

Jason Burke

Aid workers in Gaza – as well as eyewitness accounts and images – are suggesting that the airdrops of humanitarian aid are of limited help, and have contributed to growing anarchy there.

Some of the airdrops are leading to fatal fights, with some reporting deaths by stabbing, as well as in stampede. Last week, 12 people drowned trying to get to aid dropped by plane off a Gaza beach, and last month, five were killed near the coastal refugee camp known as al-Shati after a parachute failed to deploy properly and aid fell on a group of waiting men, teenagers and younger children.

Read more here:

The death toll from the presumed Israeli airstrikes in Syria near the Aleppo International Airport has risen to 52, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday.

Of those killed, 38 members of Syrian government forces, seven fighters of the pro-Iranian Lebanese Hezbollah movement and seven Iran-allied militia fighters.

Friday’s strikes had been targeting a missile depot belonging to Hezbollah in northern Syria, said the Observatory, which has been documenting violence in Syria since the civil war erupted there in 2011. So far this year, there have been 28 attacks that killed 114.

In an incident under review by the Israeli military, Israeli forces shot dead a 13-year-old Palestinian boy during a raid in the occupied West Bank, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting.

Confrontations with Israeli forces broke our during a pre-dawn military raid on the town of Qabatiya, south of Jenin city, with the Israeli military saying that a number of Palestinian gunmen had shot at its troops, the Wafa report said. The Israeli military said a number of Palestinian gunmen had shot at its troops, who returned fire.

“The circumstances of the incident are under review,” the Israeli military said in a statement to Reuters.

Fawaz Hammad, director of Al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, confirmed the teen’s death, Wafa said.

Violence in the West Bank had already been on the rise before the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began in October, and it has since escalated with frequent Israeli raids and Palestinian street attacks.

Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards have been targeting the broadcaster Iran International, a spokesperson for the channel said after a leading journalist was stabbed in London.

The Persian-language news television channel that employed Pouria Zeraati, who was attacked outside his London home, had received an increased level of threats beforehand, Adam Baillie told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Saturday.

Iran International has been under “heavy threat for the last 18 months”, Baillie said. “Families [in Iran] have been taken in for questioning. The scale of that has increased dramatically over the last few months and the scale of questioning has been more aggressive: ‘Tell your relatives to stop working for this channel.’”

On Friday, a group of men reportedly attacked Zeraati, a presenter for the channel, as he left his home in Wimbledon. Metropolitan police officers responding to a call to the address said they found a man in his 30s who had sustained an injury to his leg. Zeraati was taken to a hospital, where he is in stable condition, Baillie said. No arrests were made.

You can read the full story by Vivian Ho here:

Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati condemned on Saturday the ‘targeting’ of UN forces in southern Lebanon that injured three UN observers and a translator.

Reuters have published an update on the number of injured UN observers in south Lebanon on Saturday.

Previously, it was reported that four UN observers had been injured (see 10:34 GMT), but Reuters say it was actually three UN observers and a translator who were injured today when a shell exploded near them as they were carrying out a foot patrol in south Lebanon.

The UN peacekeeping mission said it was still investigating the origin of the blast. Unifil said in a statement the targeting of peacekeepers is “unacceptable”.

Two security sources had earlier told Reuters the observers were injured in an Israeli strike but the Israeli military have denied involvement in the incident.

“Contrary to the reports, the IDF did not strike a Unifil vehicle in the area of Rmeish this morning,” the military said in a statement.

The security sources told Reuters the incident occurred outside the border town of Rmeish. One of the security sources said the car carried three UN technical observers and one Lebanese translator.

The mayor of Rmeish, Milad Alam, told Reuters that he had spoken with the translator and confirmed his condition was stable.

“From Rmeish, we heard a blast and then saw a Unifil car zipping by. The foreign observers were taken to hospitals in Tyre and Beirut by helicopter and car,” Milad said, without providing details on their condition.

Israel has been trading fire with the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon for nearly six months in parallel with the war in Gaza.

Israel’s shelling of Lebanon has killed nearly 270 Hezbollah fighters, but has also killed about 50 civilians – including children, medics and journalists – and hit both Unifil and the Lebanese army.

The UN technical observer mission, which is unarmed and known as Untso, monitors the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel. Unifil is an armed peacekeeping mission.

The latest figures from the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said 82 Palestinians were killed and 98 injured in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours.

According to the statement, at least 32,705 Palestinians have been killed and 75,190 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October.

The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.