The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has confirmed the arrests of 94 people participating in demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza at the University of Southern California.

LAPD Captain Kelly Muniz said 93 people were arrested on trespass violations, while one other arrest was for assault with a deadly weapon, though she did not provide details.

Police said there were no reports of injuries during the tense standoff earlier between police and pro-Palestinian and antiwar student protesters at the university’s campus.

Seireth Jawaid wanted the opportunity to support her older sister and attend student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza at the University of Southern California (USC).

Jawaid’s sister attended USC in the early 2000s and was moved that current students at her alma mater are demonstrating against the war.

But as the sisters attempted to join the protests, they were blocked from getting in – alarmed by the number of security personnel they saw, including dozens of police cars, two fire trucks, and security guards only allowing entry to those who carried student IDs.

Some of the police appeared to be armed with riot gear, Jawaid said.

“What these students are doing is so courageous and brave and I am so proud of them. They are risking their careers and their education to tell their universities to stop investing in Israel and Israeli companies,” she told Al Jazeera.

Jawaid said the images from Gaza “since October have been the worst crimes of humanity”, and while no longer a student herself, she said supporting college antiwar protests is important.

“Change starts on college campuses, from protesting the South African apartheid government to protesting the Vietnam War. Those movements are still remembered today and all the protests at college campuses around the country this past week will be written down in history.”

Police in the United States have arrested dozens of protesters at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California as student-led demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza intensify.

After visiting Jewish students at Columbia University in New York, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested calling in the National Guard to put down the protests.

An air strike targeted a family home in the area of Fukhari, east of Khan Younis, report our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic. The extent of casualties remains unclear. Meanwhile, more Israeli air raids took place in the western part of Rafah, following earlier reports of overnight strikes on a home in the southernmost city of Gaza that killed at least five.

Israeli airpower pounds Gaza as ground forces poised for Rafah invasion: Monitors

‘The tragedy keeps unfolding’: Attack drones kill 2 in Rafah

Two children among those killed in Rafah strike

Palestinians killed, wounded from artillery fire in Nuseirat

Two of the largest US weapons manufacturers – Lockheed Martin and RTX – are in for a major boost in sales as the US demands more pricey military equipment to send to Ukraine and Israel.

On Wednesday, Biden signed a law that designates $17bn in new military aid to Israel and $61bn to Ukraine.

That means the US will need to buy and restock military equipment, including missiles and drones produced by RTX and interceptors that arm the Patriot missile defence system produced by Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet told investors this week that the new demand will “provide a strong underpinning for future growth” in the upcoming years.

Not one Jordanian, British, French or American warplane was deployed in defence of the 50 Palestinian women killed every day for the past 200 days by Israel. But they all scrambled to protect Israel from Iranian drones and missiles.

Now the world has shifted its focus to Iran. Israel has been made into the victim again. No one speaks about the right to self-defence of Palestinian civilians living through genocide and crimes against humanity.

“Fire and forget” in Gaza appears to be a global policy.

Bezalel Smotrich says Israel should subvert the Palestinian Authority (PA) and hold back its funding if the UN formally recognises Palestinian statehood or the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials.

In a letter to Netanyahu, Smotrich said the best way to deal with such international moves would be to cut ties with the PA to “bring about its immediate fall”. He also said his ministry would withhold funding to the PA, whose tax funds Israel largely controls.

“Unilateral measures will be met with unilateral measures,” Smotrich said in the letter.

Police in Israel moved in to break up protests outside the prime minister’s residence after a new video was released of a captive in Gaza.

Many families say not enough has been done to get a deal to free the Israelis held since October 7.

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, warns the war in Gaza has pushed Lebanon to “the brink of imploding”.

“It simply cannot continue like this,” said Egeland, following a visit to the country. “People fleeing southern villages in search of a safe place end up in overcrowded shelters. Their livelihoods have been destroyed, but we have insufficient funding to help them.”

More than 90,000 people have been forced to abandon their houses in southern Lebanon since October 7. There have been nearly daily attacks by Hezbollah and the Israeli army.

On Tuesday, the Iran-backed group said it struck Acre, marking its deepest attack into Israeli territory since the conflict began.

Hamas has reiterated its demand that Israel end the Gaza war as part of any deal to release captives held there, the Reuters news agency reports. Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters that US pressure on Hamas “has no value”.

Eighteen countries, including the US, appear to be trying to step up pressure on Hamas in these ongoing attempts at negotiation. These countries issued a joint statement calling on Hamas to immediately release all captives being held in Gaza.

There’s no mention whatsoever of any concomitant release of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel by the Israeli government, but this is stepping up pressure on Hamas, it would appear, as these negotiations grind forward.

The statement says as well that the release of the captives would allow for a greater influx of humanitarian aid into Gaza. This is regarded as utterly essential, but looming behind all of this is ongoing concern about an Israeli operation in the south.

This would create massive issues within Gaza and would certainly derail any possibility of ongoing negotiations.

A lack of resources and continuous air strikes in Gaza will hinder efforts to investigate human rights abuses, says Donatella Rovera, a senior adviser with Amnesty International.

“The expertise, the skills, the resources – such as the ability to carry out DNA tests – none of that is available [in Gaza], and to make matters worse, there is the constant bombardment,” Rovera told Al Jazeera.

“Where there is evidence of a crime committed yesterday, it may be destroyed by a bombardment committed today,” she said.

Furthermore, Rovera noted, human rights investigators have not been allowed inside Gaza for years. “Something can be done immediately. That is for the Israeli authorities to allow independent investigators in immediately. If they have nothing to hide, they should have no reason in preventing them getting into Gaza,” she added.

A Jewish-American professor at Columbia University defended student protesters calling for the end of Israel’s war on Gaza and divestment from companies that provide it with war-related products.

“I do not feel that this project is anti-Semitic in any way. I do feel that the students are highly critical of Israeli politics,” said Susan Bernofsky. “And I do not feel threatened as a Jewish faculty member in any way by what’s happening on this campus – except by the arrest of many of our students.”

On a visit to the campus, US House Speaker Mike Johnson called on Columbia’s president to resign “if she cannot bring order to this chaos”.

“If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard,” said Johnson, who was repeatedly heckled.

A Columbia spokesman said rumours that the university threatened to bring in the National Guard were unfounded. “Our focus is to restore order and if we can get there through dialogue we will,” said Ben Chang.

Palestinian civil defence officials are holding a press conference in Gaza’s southern district of Rafah regarding the discovery of mass graves around Gaza’s Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals.

Yamen Abu Sulaiman, the head of the civil defence department in Khan Younis, where Nasser Hospital is located, said three separate mass graves have been found at the facility – one behind the morgue, one in front of the morgue, and one near the dialysis building.

Bodies were “stacked together” in the mass graves and showed indications of field executions having taken place, said Abu Sulaiman.

Most of 392 bodies found in mass graves unidentified: Gaza civil defence

Watching the investigation into mass graves takes us to a whole new nightmarish level. Even the unravelling genocide over the past six months on our TV screen does not measure. This is a new level of criminality that I thought the Israelis were too smart to get involved with.

Israel might be able to resist this politically and legally, but this is going to enter history.

The ugliness and the tragedy of the scenes and the mindset behind it – done by the Israelis against the hospital, against the refugee camp – is something that we have never seen before and that is something that is going to stay with us for a while.

• There are three mass graves at the grounds of Nasser Hospital, together holding at least 392 bodies that were “stacked together”.
• The majority of the bodies cannot be identified, either because they are too badly decomposed or mutilated, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence.
• Some bodies show signs of being executed or tortured. Up to 20 bodies may have been buried alive, say civil defence officials.
• Children and hospital patients were among those buried in the graves, with some of them found still with hospital tubes used in operating or recovery rooms.
  
  

Gaza civil defence ready to cooperate with independent investigation of mass graves

In central Gaza, four people were killed in Israeli tank shelling and their bodies were brought to a local hospital. Family members told The Associated Press news agency they were killed as they tried to move to northern Gaza, where Israel’s military is preventing people from returning to their homes.

Earlier, Palestinian hospital officials said Israeli air strikes on the southern city of Rafah killed at least five people.

The bodies of 43 people killed in Israeli strikes have been brought to local hospitals over the past 24 hours. Hospitals also received 64 wounded people, Gaza’s Health Ministry says.

Medics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) have responded to the scene of an attack near central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp, where we previously reported Israeli bombardment.

The PRCS responders recovered the body of one person killed in the attacks and transported another wounded person to receive treatment, the organisation said.

Israeli forces killed a Belgian aid worker and his seven-year-old son in an attack in Rafah, southern Gaza, Minister of Development Cooperation and Urban Policy Caroline Gennez says.

“It is with great sadness that I was informed that last night one of our staff was killed by an Israeli bombardment,” Gennez wrote on X.

“Abdallah Nabhan and his 7-year-old son Jamal were killed in an attack on Rafah,” she added.

At least seven people were killed by the strike on a building that housed about 25 people, including displaced Palestinians from other parts of the Gaza Strip.

Foreign Minster Hadja Lahbib has summoned Israel’s ambassador after an employee with the Belgian development agency Enabel and his son were killed in an Israeli strike on southern Gaza. “Bombing civilian areas and populations is contrary to international law. I will summon the Israeli ambassador to condemn this unacceptable act and demand an explanation,” Lahbib said on X.

The Palestinian ambassador to Cairo, Diab Allouh, told the AFP news agency that the Palestinians had crossed the frontier without specifying how.

The Rafah border crossing is the sole entry and exit point to Gaza not directly under the control of Israeli forces.

Cairo has communicated that it does not want Palestinians to be displaced from Gaza into Egypt by Israel, comparing such a scenario to the 1948 Nakba.

It has also fortified a buffer zone with concrete walls on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing.

Israeli army waiting for green light to go into Rafah

UN World Food Programme (WFP) Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau says that the north of Gaza is heading towards a famine, and the organisation has not seen evidence of a “paradigm shift that is needed to avert a famine“.

“We need more volume, predictability, and a sustained effort to get more diverse assistance into the north [of the Gaza Strip],” he said.

He also expressed the WFP’s “grave concern” over the prospect of an Israeli military operation in Rafah.

The organisation is looking at how a maritime corridor can meaningfully contribute to overall aid assistance, Skau said, but added that there is no substitute for aid delivery by land, and that is where the focus should remain.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) says there is a lack of sufficient clean water and waste disposal in Rafah. In a post on X, it said that hot temperatures in conjunction with these shortages have “sparked new fears of disease outbreaks”.

As temperatures soar in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Civil Defence has warned that conditions are ripe for “the expansion of the spread of epidemics and diseases among [displaced Palestinians], especially among children and pregnant women”.

“Drink plenty of water, try to ventilate the place, keep children away from the sun’s rays, especially at peak heat times, and be sure to wipe their bodies with cold water constantly”, spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said in a statement on Telegram, speaking to the thousands of displaced Palestinians currently sheltering in tents.