Hamas representative gives news conference
Here are some of the key points Osama Hamdan, an official for the group in Beirut, Lebanon made:
- This is a declared war of starvation against 700,000 Palestinians.
- The whole world is watching every day as our children and our women are screaming and suffering in the north [of the Gaza Strip].
- Our people are waiting for the International community and the United Nations, with all its agencies, to take concrete steps immediately to bring aid into the Strip.
- The explosion is coming in response to any restrictions on Muslims entering Al-Aqsa Mosque during the month of Ramadan. We call on the people of our Palestinian people in the occupied territories, Jerusalem and the West Bank, to reject this criminal decision, and to escalate the confrontation of the occupation everywhere, and to mobilize and march and band together in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.
- The occupation’s positions and responses to the mediators are negative and pose many obstacles to reaching an agreement. Netanyahu is procrastinating and evading and aims to disrupt reaching an agreement. He does not care about the release of prisoners held by the resistance, but rather it is a card he uses to achieve his goals.
Fighting rages in Gaza City neighbourhood
Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, has hit an Israeli Merkva tank with mortar shells in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, the group said in a statement. In another part of the area, Qassam fighters targeted a group of Israeli soldiers inside a house with an anti-personnel missile, leading to an unspecified number of deaths and injuries.
UNRWA no longer functioning in northern Gaza
A spokesperson for the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA has said that the organisation is no longer able to provide assistance in northern Gaza, where it only has “a few staff”, and that civil order has collapsed amid Israel’s ongoing assault and severe restrictions on food access.
UNRWA says it is struggling to offer assistance to millions of Palestinians in Gaza and throughout the region after several key donor countries froze funding for the humanitarian group following Israeli allegations that a dozen of its employees took part in the October 7 attacks. Israel has not provided evidence for those claims nearly one month after first putting them forward.
“I believe we have some weeks, five or six, less than that. After that, we will not be able to continue providing services, not only in Gaza, but also in places like Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank and East Jerusalem,” UNRWA spokesperson Adnan Abu Hasna told Al Jazeera.
