There have been confrontations between Palestinian fighters and Israeli forces in the town of Tammun, about 5km (3 miles) south of Tubas city in the occupied West Bank. Other armed confrontations took place this morning in Turmus Aya village, north of Ramallah, after Palestinian fighters targeted a nearby Israeli military base.

Israeli forces raided the villages of Khirbet Abu Falah, Kafr Malek and Turmus Aya in search of the shooters. Israeli forces also raided Palestinian homes in Qalqilya city and arrested several people.

One of the homes that was stormed had been raided 14 times in the last few days.

Other raids took place across the occupied West Bank. During these raids, the Israeli forces arrested 25 Palestinians, including two women and a journalist.

_{A vehicle is driven on a street, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on May 22}

More than a dozen Israelis stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third-holiest site, on Wednesday morning. In a video published on Telegram by a local media network and verified by Al Jazeera, Israeli police officers are seen walking beside the individuals who entered the compound.

The storming of the compound is a regular occurrence even though entering any part of it is forbidden for Jews due to the sacred nature of the site, according to Jewish law. Israeli authorities have also repeatedly barred Palestinians from entering the site for Friday prayers since October 7, forcing many to pray on the streets near the Old City.

In previous years, Israeli forces have also attacked Palestinian worshippers inside the mosque.

The health worker, Sari Muhammad Hafez Qashou, is an anaesthesia technician employed by Martyr Dr Thabet Thabet Governmental Hospital in Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank, reports the Wafa news agency.

He was arrested while riding in an ambulance on the way back from Nablus, after transporting a patient to a local hospital, according to Wafa.

Since October 7, Israeli forces have regularly obstructed health services in the West Bank, including blocking the path of ambulances nearly 300 times, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Students arrested as Israeli forces storm school near Nablus

Contagious skin diseases are rapidly spreading among Palestinians in Israeli jails, with dozens of cases seen recently by lawyers and released detainees, reports the Palestinian Prisoners Society.

The most prevalent of the diseases is scabies, it says, a highly contagious infestation caused by small ticks. Its spread is worsened by poor hygiene conditions, overcrowding and limited water in Israel’s jails, according to the group, specifically the facilities in Israel’s Negev desert and Megiddo.

The group claims Israel is leaving infected prisoners without treatment and even transferring them to other areas of the prison where the disease can spread, acts that it says amount to “medical crimes”.

Munitions made in the US were deployed by Israel during their deadly attack on a tented camp in Rafah which killed 45 displaced Palestinians, CNN reports, citing analysis of footage from the scene.

The Israeli military claims that it bombed a compound housing Hamas fighters, causing an explosion that triggered a fire that rapidly spread to nearby tents. The encampment in the Tal as-Sultan area of Rafah was razed, killing at least 45 people and injuring some 200 more.

CNN based its findings on footage taken at the scene of Sunday’s strike, saying that the geolocated video showed the tail of a “US-made GBU-39 small diameter bomb” – a finding verified by four explosive weapons experts.

CNN added that serial numbers seen on the remnants of the munitions matched a California-based manufacturer of GBU-39 parts.

Omar Ashour, a professor of security and military studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, says Israel’s military likely avoided naming the exact bomb used to attack Rafah’s tent encampment – now reported to be a US-made GBU-39 – so as not to “embarrass” the administration of US President Biden.

While they are “precision-guided”, GBU-39 bombs are “not always accurate”, hitting their target just 80 to 90 percent of the time, Ashour told Al Jazeera.

They have the potential to miss “by a significant margin”, causing extensive civilian casualties in densely populated areas like Rafah, he said.

“It’s very telling that this is allowed to continue while knowing that there will be significant death among innocent people”, said Ashour.

The Washington Post is reporting that another US official has resigned, citing disagreements over a recent State Department report that claimed Israel was not impeding humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

The Post, quoting two sources with knowledge of the matter, identified the official as Stacey Gilbert, who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

The report that Gilbert is said to have objected to was published earlier this month and stated the US does not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance”.

The findings contravene assessments by the UN and aid groups.

US senator labels Israel’s attack on Rafah ‘horrific’

Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren has said Israel’s attack on Rafah that killed 45 displaced Palestinian civilians in a tented camp was “horrific”.

“Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go,” she wrote on X.

A community note beneath the tweet, however, highlighted that Warren voted in favour of supplying “Israel with $3.8 billion of weapons”, while she also voted to pause US funding for the UN organisation for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific. Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go.

Netanyahu’s assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 27, 2024

The AFP news agency is reporting clashes between police and protesters outside the Israeli embassy in Mexico’s capital, after some people in the crowd threw stones and tried to take down barriers blocking their path to the diplomatic mission.

Police used tear gas and threw back some of the stones hurled at them by protesters as they sought to disperse the crowds, AFP reported.



An estimated 200 people attended the protest at the embassy in Mexico City’s Lomas de Chapultepec neighbourhood, rallying against the Israeli attack on Sunday night that killed 45 displaced Palestinians in Rafah, it added.

California academic workers strike in support of pro-Palestinian protests

Israel’s military is attempting to divide Gaza into small, disconnected pockets, weakening it in much the same way it has the occupied West Bank, says Omar Ashour, professor of security and military studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

It will do this by creating three separate corridors in the enclave, he told Al Jazeera:

• the Netzarim Corridor, which splits Gaza into north and south
• a separate east-west division
• a 1km (0.6 mile) buffer zone along the Israeli border

Israel’s military, Ashour predicts, will then use these zones as bases from which to launch regular raids into Gaza, in a strategy that avoids full-on military occupation but continues to cause high civilian casualties.

“I think they [Israel’s military] will be based there for the long term and do these heavy raids, similar to the one you’re seeing in Jabalia right now,” Ashour told Al Jazeera. “They go there, undermine the capabilities of whatever they see as a threat, with a lot of civilian casualties because of the population density, and they will keep repeating that.”

Israel is unlikely to forgo this strategy unless the United States withholds extensive weaponry or delivers “serious condemnation”, Ashour said, adding that both scenarios are unlikely.

Displaced families trapped in central Rafah as artillery fire rages

Three Israeli soldiers killed in southern Gaza

Palestinian NGOs and professional unions are holding a news conference in Ramallah on the situation in Gaza. A video recorded by Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network (PNGO) in Deir el-Balah, is currently being shown.

“What is required now is to declare Gaza Strip as a famine-stricken zone”, he says. He explains that sewage water has overflowed between tents, leaving people without any water supply.

The situation, he says, is getting more dire by the minute and is made worse by the “ruthless, merciless bombardment by the Israeli warplanes”.

‘It is Israel’s goal to starve the population’ in Gaza: NGO director

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, says that he expects fighting in Gaza to continue throughout 2024 at least.

He also told Israel’s public broadcaster Kan that the Israeli military was in control of 75 percent of the Philadelphi Corridor, a buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt.

Eisenkot: Gaza military operations will continue for years

Israel must do more to protect innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and more must be done to ensure humanitarian aid gets into the enclave and can be safely distributed, says Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN.

“The continued pattern of significant civilian harm resulting from incidents like Sunday’s air strikes undermines Israel’s strategic goals in Gaza,” Wood told the UN Security Council.

An Israeli air attack on a tent encampment north of Rafah on Sunday night killed at least 45 Palestinians, many of them women and children, in an enormous inferno.

Images of fragments of weaponry believed to be used in this attack obtained by Al Jazeera’s Sanad Verification Agency show a GBU-39/B small-diameter bomb made by US manufacturer Boeing.

The US has repeatedly said it does not support an Israeli military operation in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip but has not imposed consequences on Israel as this very operation continues to kill civilians.


Blinken lies again

The top United States diplomat was speaking during a trip to Moldova when he was asked the question.

“I can’t tell you, as we meet here this evening, what weapons were used or how they were used,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in response. “All of that needs to be the product of a deliberate, but also fast, investigation, and we’ll await the results.”

The reporter asking the question had noted that a State Department report released earlier this month said it was “reasonable to assess” that the weapons Washington provided to Israel have been used in violation of international humanitarian law in Gaza. The report did not call for weapons transfers to be halted.

Blinken then repeated the information that Israel has released about the strike, but added he could not “vouch” for it.

“I think we also see that even limited, focused, targeted attacks designed to deal with terrorists who killed innocent civilians that are plotting to kill more, even those kinds of operations can have terrible, horrific, unintended consequences,” he said.

The New York Times is reporting that the weapons used in Israel’s attack on a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah that killed dozens of people were made in the United States.

The US newspaper said “munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39”, which is “a bomb designed and manufactured” in the US.

The bomb was identified thanks to elements found in the debris, including its “tail actuation system, which controls the fins that guide the GBU-39 to a target”, the Times said, as well as its “unique bolt pattern and slot where the folding finds are stowed”.

The fragments were also marked by a series of numbers beginning with “81873”, which the newspaper said is “the unique identifier code” assigned by the US government to a Colorado-based firm that supplies parts for bombs, including the GBU-39.

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, rejects the argument repeatedly put forward by the US government that Israel’s attacks in Rafah do not amount to a large-scale offensive.

“There’s a total, full-blown offensive by Israel in an area where hundreds of thousands of civilians are finding shelter. The United States is supporting that war. They call it limited, but that’s just an Orwellian concept,” Bishara said.

He added that the US has provided Israel with weapons and ammunition since the war began in early October and appears poised to continue. “So in a sense, the United States continues to be complicit, directly, militarily, in the war on Gaza.”

I would go further than saying the US is merely complicit, they are the main driving force keeping the war going by supplying 70% of the weapons with no (real) strings attached. While also providing diplomatic cover, disinformation, excuses, signing criticism of Israel into law as anti-semetic, keeping in law that Palestinian statehood triggers sanctions on the UN, continued defunding of UNWRA on false allegations, cracking down on anti-war protests.

US senator promises to ‘hold ICC to account’

‘Let’s beat Hamas,’ US’s Nikki Haley tells Netanyahu

Naftali Bennett, a right-wing Israeli politician and former prime minister, says Israel will be able to block “weapons and ammunition” from reaching Hamas in Gaza.

As we reported earlier, Israel’s military says it has taken “operational control” of the key corridor between Gaza and Egypt, according to Israeli media.

Israeli forces had seized portions of the Palestinian side of the corridor earlier this month, sparking outrage from Egyptian officials, who said Israel was violating the terms of the two countries’ 1979 peace treaty. Israel’s control of the corridor, Bennett said, “has profound strategic implications”.

Big news.
The IDF has secured the “Philadelphi Corridor” which separates Egypt from the Gaza Strip.

This means that we can block the influx of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai into Hamas’ hands.

Israel will continue to let in food and medical supplies, but no more…

— Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט (@naftalibennett) May 29, 2024

Herzi Halevi toured the “Rafah area”, according to the Israeli military, as the ground offensive in the southernmost city continues.

He told Israeli troops they’re continuing the operation despite appeals to stop from the US and other key allies, for several reasons. Hamas fighters in Rafah are the “last division left with full capabilities” in Gaza, said Halevi.

He told soldiers they’re “making progress” in the city, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been ordered to evacuate to “humanitarian zones”.

Syrian Arab New Agency (SANA) said Israel attacks targeted a site in the country’s central region and a residential building in the Mediterranean coastal city of Baniyas.

One girl was killed in Baniyas and 10 others were injured, according to SANA. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group, also reported the death.

It said Israel had attacked Syrian territory at least 42 times since the beginning of the year.