Within the past half-hour, a loud explosion has occurred that appears to be caused by multiple air strikes.

Witnesses in the area who rushed to the [Al-Aqsa Martyrs] Hospital, trying to take shelter here, say it happened at the southeastern part of Deir el-Balah. That’s the southeastern part of Salah al-Din road. This is part of an extension of relentless air attacks overnight.

Since the beginning of the operations from the early hours of yesterday evening until now, 78 people have been reported killed. The majority are women, children and elderly who were transferred to the hospital. The morgue of the hospital is packed with bodies.

The Israeli military continues to pound across the central area with occupying ground forces pushing deeper into Bureij refugee camp. Due to the multiple ongoing air strikes, it’s creating a sense of chaos and mayhem as people are being herded from one place to another so many times right now.

Deir el-Balah is now becoming really crowded, running out of space and infrastructure, adding more pressure on this health facility. The coming hours are going to be quite difficult.

One doctor told us some of the injuries are very alien to them, and they don’t have the medical capacity to intervene and to save lives other than running basic first aid for those injuries.

At least 70 people have been killed and more than 300 wounded in the past 24 hours, showed the count as they were brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza. They were predominantly women and children.

“The odor of blood in the hospital’s emergency room this morning was unbearable. There are people lying everywhere, on the floor, outside … bodies were being brought in plastic bags. The situation is overwhelming,” said Karin Huster from Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF).

“With the insane escalation of violence in various locations of the Gaza Strip over the last 48 hours and while the Rafah crossing point has remained closed for a month, the health system has been stretched to the point of collapse,” Huster said. “The situation is apocalyptic.”

The daily Israeli newspaper has said that journalist Nir Hasson was attacked by a group of young Israelis taking part in Jerusalem’s Flag Parade.

According to Haaretz, several assailants knocked Hasson to the ground and kicked him, until Border Police officers intervened.

Every year, the parade attracts thousands of national-religious Jews, many of them young men, who aggressively march with Israeli flags through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and engage in acts of provocation, violence, and destruction of Palestinian property with little police intervention.

Sapir Sluzker Amran, an activist and human rights lawyer, says the Israeli right-wing has been holding the Flag March for years and “it’s always provocative”, but this year “there’s a direct intention to set fire.”

She told Al Jazeera that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the rest of the right-wing ministers are trying to do all they can to stop the captives deal and the ceasefire recently promoted by Biden.

“They’re using this parade and they’re using the route going through Damascus Gate, inside the Old City confronting and using violence against Palestinians to escalate the situation so that we have an excuse to continue the war,” she said.

“Even though it’s not part of the route of the parade, they’re going to insist on going to Al-Aqsa to pray there,” Amran added.

“According to the leading rabbis, it is forbidden for Jews right now to go pray in Al-Aqsa and they’re still doing it because they can and because they consider themselves as the landlords as they say, so they came to prove a lesson to the Palestinians today.”

‘Death to Arabs’: Israelis march through Palestinian part of Jerusalem

Palestinian Authority spokesmperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh says the Israeli march through the Old City “constitutes not only a violation of all international laws that consider East Jerusalem as an integral part of Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, but also a blatant provocation to Arab, Muslim and Christian sentiments”.

In a statement, Abu Rudeineh said the march is another Israeli step to alter the history of Jerusalem and change its Palestinian-Arab character, which he called a “futile attempt”.

Abu Rudeina called for the US administration, which he said supports and protects Israel, to “intervene immediately to halt the genocidal war on Gaza and the ongoing attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem”.

‘People are literally on the floor of the hospital’

_{Children at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza after Israeli bombardment}

200 Jewish Americans lobby lawmakers to stop arming Israel

Israel’s government primarily targeted Black lawmakers and progressives with this content in order to sway public opinion on the war in Gaza, Haaretz newspaper reports, citing an investigation by the Fake Reporter organisation.

The daily said the operation, orchestrated by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry and run by a political campaigning firm, involved fake accounts and sites that spread pro-Israel and Islamophobic content, as well as disinformation about anti-Semitism on US campuses.

Haaretz first reported about the existence of the operation in March but Fake Reporter published more details. Fake Reporter’s Executive Director Achiya Schatz told Haaretz that “running the foreign influence campaign against American lawmakers is amateurish, irresponsible and anti-democratic”.

Palestinians at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University marked this year’s World Environment Day by restoring soils and planting flowers.

“Palestine faces significant environmental challenges caused by colonisation, overexploitation, habitat destruction, pollution and invasive species,” the institute said in a statement.

“We are the generation that can make peace with land,” the statement added. “Our Land. Our Future.”

The UN estimates that a third of Gaza’s agricultural land was damaged between October 2023 and February 2024, while Israel controls freshwater sources in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Israeli judge quits ICJ panel, citing personal reasons

US hoping to ‘re-anchor’ Gaza pier repaired by end of week

Our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic report that Israeli gunboats have bombed the coast of the southernmost Gaza city with a number of shells.

A local activist in Gaza published footage on social media of a young girl rushing her infant brother to Al-Aqsa Hospital following the bombardment of their home in the Maghazi camp.

In the video, verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit Sanad, the girl can be heard shouting, “My father, my father”.

The administration at the Al-Aqsa Hospital says one of the two generators at the the central Gaza facility is now out of service.

“Al-Aqsa Hospital currently has more than 700 wounded and sick people, and serves more than one million people and displaced people in the central governorate,” it said in a press release, posted by the Gaza Ministry of Health.

“We condemn the attempts of the Israeli occupation to subjugate the hospital and put it out of service in a crime against humanity and against international law … This comes within the framework of the crime of genocide against civilians, children and women.”

The hospital urged the international community and regional countries to “save the sick, wounded, and children of Gaza from certain death”.

An Israeli air strike on a school housing thousands of displaced Palestinians in the Bureij refugee camp has killed “dozens” of people and injured many more, the Wafa news agency reports.

The strike is said to have hit the al-Sardi boys school, near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to Wafa. There are at least 29 confirmed casualties so far, according to preliminary estimates being reported in local media, with women and children among the dead.

Air attacks took place on the Bureij refugee camp and more residential buildings have been targeted and destroyed.

The people who are inside are residents who have been trying to leave their homes since yesterday, since the surge in attacks started and the invasion of the eastern part of the central area of Gaza began.

At least five more people arrived at the hospital in two separate ambulance vehicles, including one child – as we have seen here in the courtyard of the hospital. That brings the total number of people who’ve been killed in the past 24 hours to 102.

We were told by paramedics in the ambulance vehicle that there are still more people at the targeted site.

A spokesperson for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon spoke to Al Jazeera about the situation on the Israel-Lebanon border.

Here is a summary of his comments:

• The situation on the border between Lebanon and Israel raises concerns.
• There is a possibility that tension will expand further in the border area.
• We have communication channels with the Lebanese authorities and the Israeli army to avoid any widespread conflict.
• The expansion of the conflict would be a disaster not only for Lebanon but for the entire region.
• We hope the international community will play a broader role than in the past to reach a solution to the current situation.
  
  
  

Prime Minister Netanyahu says Israel is “prepared for a very intense operation” along its border with Lebanon, where Israeli troops have exchanged near daily fire with Hezbollah fighters for almost eight months.

“One way or another, we will restore security to the north,” Netanyahu said during a visit to the border area.

Israeli Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi said on Tuesday that the army is ready to move to an offensive in the north. The hostilities have been the worst between Israel and Hezbollah since they went to war in 2006, and tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have been forced to leave their homes.


It's more like a certainty that this will escalate without intervention.