In the four-minute audio message where the spokesman of the armed wing of Hamas in Gaza announced the ambush of Israeli soldiers, he also commented on intense ongoing fighting across the enclave and the discovery of several Israeli captives’ bodies. Here is some of what he said:

• The Israeli government continues its blind and absurd policy of revenge and destruction and moves from failure to failure – the latest chapter being failed military operations in Jabalia and Rafah.
• Palestinian forces have carried out dozens of attacks against Israeli forces in more than two weeks of Israel’s ground invasions of Rafah and Beit Hanoon.
• Israeli forces are digging up the remains of captives in Gaza for Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal machinations.
• Israel is trying to portray the discovery of the remains of its captives as a military and moral achievement.

Israeli military says it attacked Hezbollah operatives

US military reports floating pier operational despite incident

U.S. Central Command personnel continue to team up with USAID and the UN to deliver aid to the people of Gaza via a temporary pier affixed to the beach.

Aid delivered by CENTCOM personnel from the sea to the beach transfer point:

• 1005 metric tons (2,214,543 pounds) total as… pic.twitter.com/wxjfife9Ps

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) May 25, 2024

Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, says he’s not surprised that Israel has ignored the world court’s order to immediately cease its assault on Rafah city.

“Israel for decades has considered itself above international law. But what’s changing now is its impunity is gone. Not only the ICJ but also the ICC are intervening. This is a new situation, but Israel is not listening,” Barghouti told Al Jazeera.

Israel killed at least 46 people, mostly children and women, on Saturday, he noted, adding, “so Netanyahu is proceeding”.

“The main country that can restrain Israel and stop it immediately is the United States of America. I believe now is the time to impose sanctions on Israel. It’s either support international law or support Israel,” said Barghouti.

Always twisting words to weasel a way out.

ICJ order on Rafah does not rule out entire offensive, Israeli officials say

Craig Mokhiber, a former top UN human rights official, has questioned the US plan to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza through a temporary pier after the US said four vessels supporting the pier were washed away in the high seas on Saturday.

Mokhiber, who resigned from the UN last year, described the pier as a “fig leaf to cover US complicity in genocide and in the destruction of UNRWA” in a post on X. He said the pier had “failed to have any meaningful impact” while “Israel continues to block aid at all crossing points”.

The US Army has said the pier remained operational and is still working to deliver humanitarian assistance, after the incident.

On Friday, the UN said it had received the equivalent of 97 trucks of humanitarian supplies through the floating dock since it came into operation on May 17.

UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Friday that aid delivery through the pier had “stabilised” after a “rocky start” but “what we want to see, as we’ve been saying, is massive aid coming in through land routes”.

Sam Rose, the director of planning at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, says the ICJ ruling ordering Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah has not changed much for Palestinians in Gaza.

“We’ve not seen any immediate changes on the ground in terms of impacts on the lives of Palestinians. What we have seen is a commitment for goods and for fuel to start flowing from Egypt tomorrow,” he told Al Jazeera from Rafah.

Rose was referring to an Egyptian commitment to send UN-provided humanitarian aid to Gaza via the Karem Abu Salem (known as Kerem Shalom to Israelis) crossing, located at the borders of Egypt, Israel and Gaza. Cairo said the move was temporary until legal mechanisms were in place to reopen the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza from the Palestinian side. Israel closed that crossing in early May.

“We see this as a positive development. This is something we’ve been calling for, for a long time. But until we are able to get those supplies in […] only then will we be able to resume distribution of flour and food commodities to the population that remains in Rafah and other parts of Gaza,” Rose said.

“We have – at UNRWA alone – thousands of trucks of aid, either inside Egypt or in Ashdod [port] in Israel. So the aid is there… on the boundaries, while the population in Gaza gets closer to famine.”

Four humanitarian aid trucks from Egypt have entered Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing, according to the Egyptian broadcaster Al-Qahera.

The crossing is located at the intersection of Israel, Gaza and Egypt. The trucks were carrying fuel, according to the television network.

Khaled Zayed, the head of the Egyptian Red Crescent Society in North Sinai, told Reuters that 200 aid trucks are expected to enter Gaza via the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing today.

Located at the borders of Egypt, Israel and Gaza, Karem Abu Salem is one of the two crossings into southern Gaza. The other one is the Rafah crossing, located between Egypt and Gaza, which has been closed since Israeli forces seized control of it on May 6.

Egypt on Friday agreed to allow UN-provided humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza temporarily through Karem Abu Salem until legal mechanisms are in place to reopen the Rafah border crossing from the Palestinian side.

Although the Rafah crossing has remained closed, some trucks have been entering Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem crossing. The exact number of trucks is not known since the UN says it has been unable to maintain a presence at either crossing to monitor them since May 7.

The UN has said 143 UN humanitarian trucks crossed through the Karem Abu Salem crossing between May 6 to 25, significantly less than the 146 trucks that entered Gaza per day on average through Karem Abu Salem in April.

The ICJ on Friday ruled that Israel must allow the UN and other relevant bodies, “unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip” to “investigate allegations of genocide”. But Palestinian lawyer Mohammad Dahleh told Al Jazeera’s Inside Story that Israel has denied access to similar inquiries in the past.

“Several UN inquiry commissions were supposed to come to the Palestinian Territories in the past, based on the resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, and other committees,” Dahleh said.

“Israel in the past hasn’t been cooperative and this time, I don’t think it’s going to be any different,” he added.

Dahleh noted that Israel continues to control who can and can’t enter the Gaza Strip, noting that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Israel and the occupied West Bank in December last year but did not visit the Gaza Strip.

“Gaza has been under Israeli full control from the sea from the air and from the [land] borders,” Dahleh said. “No one can enter Gaza without an Israeli permit or Israeli consent.”

Israel’s war cabinet member Benny Gantz has submitted a proposal to the Israeli cabinet secretary to establish a commission of inquiry into October 7 and the war on Gaza, according to various Israeli media outlets.

Last week, Gantz threatened to quit Israel’s coalition government if Netanyahu didn’t come up with a plan for Gaza’s post-war governance within three weeks.

A leading figure in the opposition before joining the war cabinet, Gantz is currently viewed as Netanyahu’s main political rival in Israel.

Mohamad Elmasry, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, citing a report in Politico, says “70 percent of Hamas’s fighting force remains intact on fighting in Gaza” and that Hamas has been able to recruit thousands of new members.

The report, he said, also indicated Hamas’s extensive tunnel network under the Gaza Strip remains largely intact.

Elmasry said there had also been reports that Hamas has been able to repurpose unexploded Israeli bombs, so the Palestinian group no longer has a weapons supply issue.

“I think Israel is clearly getting all it can handle on the battlefield right now,” he concluded.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid says on X that Prime Minister Netanyahu and “his entourage” are people whose “only interest is political survival and wreaking havoc in the State of Israel”.

Lapid has been vocal in his criticism of the embattled Israeli leader and his government.

Earlier this month, he said the Netanyahu administration had “lost control”. “Relations with the US are collapsing; the middle class is collapsing,” he said at the time.

“Soldiers are being killed every day in Gaza, and they fight among themselves on television. The cabinet is disassembled and non-functional. Ministers protest in front of cabinet meetings.”

General Yair Golan, former Israeli deputy chief of staff has told Radio Israel that “there will be no deal [between Israel and Hamas] without the cessation of fighting” in Gaza.

“Let’s be real with ourselves, and we will not listen to the poison machine coming out of Jerusalem,” the retired general was quoted as saying.

Pakistani women, students protest for free Palestine in Karachi

Women held mock bodies symbolising Palestinians killed in Gaza at a demonstration opposing Israel’s war on the Palestinian enclave, in Karachi, Pakistan on Saturday.

The protest came as Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed the ICJ’s most recent ruling ‘ordering Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah in conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention’ 

The demonstrators marched towards the US consulate in Karachi, calling for a free Palestine and decrying US support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Thousands of antiwar activists gather in Michigan for Palestine conference

The leader of the Australian Greens, Adam Bandt, says his party will call a vote on Palestinian statehood in Australia’s Parliament next week, after a similar move announced by Ireland, Spain and Norway last week.

“Labor says today they support recognition of Palestine,” Bandt said in a post on X, referring to Australia’s Labor party-led government. “Let’s see how Labor votes.”

Bandt announced the plan after Australia’s Assistant Foreign Minister, Tim Watts, a member of the Australian Labor Party, said “anyone who is serious about peace knows that requires a two-state solution, a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel” in comments reported by the Guardian Australia.

Israeli forces have launched a new raid on the city of Jenin and its refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, days after another operation there which killed 12 people, including four children.

Israeli troops accompanied by a military bulldozer stormed the city at dawn today, according to the Wafa news agency, while Israeli snipers mounted the roofs of several residential buildings.

The bulldozer destroyed infrastructure on as-Sikka Street, the agency said. Al Jazeera Arabic, meanwhile, reported clashes in the city with Palestinian fighters targeting Israeli military vehicles with homemade explosive devices.

Known as a symbol of resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, about 14,000 Palestinians live in the Jenin refugee camp, many of them directly descended from the 750,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

On October 19, Sarah Mahamid watched helplessly from a window as Israeli security forces shot her younger brother. Taha, 15, had been playing with a friend outside their house in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem. The 19-year-old screamed as her brother fell to the ground.

Their father, Ibrahim, ran out of the front door to get his son, but a sniper shot him too. “I remember hearing my father shout that Taha might be alive… but I knew that Taha was martyred. I knew he was dead,” Sarah told Al Jazeera.

Taha was killed instantly. Ibrahim fought for his life for five months in intensive care until he also died. Footage seen by Al Jazeera shows Taha and Ibrahim were both unarmed and posed no threat.

Nearly 1,500 Palestinians have been unlawfully killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in the past 16 years – 98 percent of them civilians, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Each of them, like Taha and Ibrahim, has a story and loved ones who mourn them.

The frequency of the killings has spiked in recent years with Israel killing 509 Palestinians in 2023. That is more than double the number recorded by OCHA in any previous year.

Israeli forces have arrested several Palestinians in raids across the occupied West Bank tonight, including in Nablus, Bethlehem, Jenin and Yatta, south of Hebron, our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are reporting.

Israeli forces also raided the town of Husan in Bethlehem and the village of Madama, south of Nablus, Al Jazeera Arabic correspondents added.

At least 8,680 Palestinians have been detained in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, according to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.

There are 9,300 political prisoners held in Israeli prisons and 3,424 administrative detainees (held without charge or trial), according to estimates from the Ramallah-based Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

An Israeli attack on a residential building in the Rafah Governorate has killed 6 including a child and wounded many others, according to the Wafa news agency. The attack hit the home of the Qishta family in the Khirbet al-Adas area, north of the city of Rafah, the agency said.

The latest death came after Israeli forces killed at least 51 Palestinians in attacks across Gaza, including six in a separate assault on Khirbet al-Adas earlier on Saturday.

The agency said the Israelis used a missile, which hit the home of the Qishta family.

The director of the Kuwait Specialty Hospital in Rafah is warning the medical facility will run out of fuel in less than 24 hours.

“We are sounding the alarm and urging the World Health Organization to live up to its responsibilities and provide the hospital with the necessary fuel to power the generators. We have an amount of fuel that is enough only for 24 hours,” Shuaib al-Hams told Al Jazeera.

“The Palestinian people must not be left alone to face their fate. This hospital is still operating and has never been evacuated. We will continue our efforts for the sake of the patients and we are now trying to establish a field hospital as soon as possible.”

Palestinians flee Jabalia amid ‘extremely harsh conditions’

Israeli drones have attacked the town of Naqoura near the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), according to the official National News agency. Artillery fire from the Israeli army hit areas on the outskirts of the towns of Chihine and Majdal Zoun in the Tyre region in southern Lebanon, the agency said.

Israeli artillery also bombed the areas of Wadi Hamul and Wadi Hassan in southern Lebanon, it added.

Israeli air raid hits motorcycle in southern Lebanon: Report

More than 70 international organisations are calling on all authorities and international institutions to officially declare a famine in Gaza, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said in a statement.

Food security levels have significantly declined due to the Israeli army’s ground operation in Rafah which began on May 7, the organisation said.

“The entire population in the Gaza Strip, including the governorates of Deir al-Balah, Khan Yunis, and Rafah, are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half of them in … the disaster/famine stage,” the statement said.

Due to fuel shortage, only one-eighth of water distributed: MSF