More than 70 Palestinians killed in Gaza since dawn

Medical sources on the ground have told Al Jazeera that at least 73 people have been killed in Gaza since dawn today, including 33 aid seekers. Our colleagues collected information on some of the overnight attacks:

US contractors reveal reckless practices in Gaza aid operations

An investigation by The Associated Press news agency has found that US contractors guarding aid distribution hubs for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) use bullets, stun grenades and pepper spray against Palestinians seeking food, even if there is no threat.

The report quotes two US contractors saying that they came forward due to what they perceived as dangerous and irresponsible practices. “Security staff hired were often unqualified, unvetted, heavily armed and seemed to have an open license to do whatever they wished,” read the report.

According to one of the contractors, the Israeli army is leveraging the distribution system to access information.

Both sources said that cameras monitor distributions at each site and that American analysts and Israeli soldiers sit in a control room where the footage is screened in real time. One contractor said some cameras are equipped with facial recognition software.

Last week, a separate investigation by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper collected testimonies of Israeli soldiers who revealed that the army ordered them to shoot deliberately at unarmed people in Gaza while waiting for humanitarian aid.


GHF has ‘nothing to do with alleviating starvation in Gaza’

Mads Gilbert, an emergency medicine doctor who has spent extensive time working in Gaza, says the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) distribution centres are “part of the Israeli occupation forces’ and the Israeli government plan to ethnically cleanse and to fulfil their goal of genocide in Gaza”.

He told Al Jazeera that the food parcels the GHF delivers “are grossly inadequate”.

“There is no dairy or eggs in the parcels – neither in physical form nor powdered form; there is no infant formula, which is desperately needed by the newborn and the children,” he added.

Gilbert also pointed out that the food “needs cooking and there are almost no cooking facilities available in Gaza”.

“The distribution organisation is aimed at using food as bait to attract starving people, to terrorise them and to kill them. The shooting of people in food lines is a war crime,” he concluded.

Let UN distribute Gaza aid: UNRWA

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in a post on X has called for investigations into the killing and injury of Palestinians trying to access food through the current US- and Israeli- backed food distribution mechanism in Gaza.

While the previous United Nations-led distribution network operated about 400 sites across the Strip, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, guarded by armed private security contractors working for a US company, has set up only four “mega-sites”, three in the south and one in central Gaza – none in the north, where conditions are most severe.

In its post, UNRWA called for the UN to “do the work” in distributing aid.

Turkiye condemns West Bank annexation calls by Israeli politicians

The Turkish Foreign Ministry has rejected “in the strongest terms” statements by Israeli politicians and ministers calling for the annexation of the occupied West Bank.

“These irresponsible calls for annexation, coming notably during a period when ceasefire initiatives are ongoing, disregard the principles for a solution that the international community has taken for many years,” the ministry said.

The statement comes as 14 cabinet ministers from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party urged the premier to immediately annex the occupied West Bank.

In a letter addressed to Netanyahu and shared by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on X, the signatories demanded the government “apply sovereignty over Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) before the end of the Knesset (parliament) summer session”, which is set to end on July 27.

Israel occupied the Palestinian territory in the 1967 war, but it never formally annexed it – a goal long sought by far-right ministers. Yet, after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas and the ensuing war on Gaza, Israeli authorities have been redrawing the map of the Palestinian territory.

High school students among 30 arrested by Israeli forces in West Bank: Monitor

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) says that Israeli forces arrested seven high school students in the occupied West Bank at dawn, hours before they were scheduled to take their exams this morning.

It added that about 30 Palestinians were arrested this morning.

The monitor explained that the arrests were concentrated in the village of Deir Istiya in the north of the occupied West Bank. It added that based on data from the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 67 students have been prevented from taking their exams this year due to their arrest by Israeli authorities.


39 children among 660 arrested by Israel in West Bank last month alone

Israeli forces arrested 660 Palestinians over the past month, including 25 women and 39 children, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Media Office (ASRA).

The organisation said those arrests add to 18,000 made from October 7, 2023, to the end of May this year. During that period, 570 women and girls and about 1,400 minors were arrested, it added.

“The occupation escalated arrests after June 13, coinciding with the aggression against Iran, carrying out mass raids and converting homes into interrogation centres,” the ASRA statement published on Telegram said.

“The occupation arrested more than (300) Palestinians from the West Bank within six days on the pretext of entering Jerusalem without a permit, and arrested (32) Jerusalemites on charges of providing assistance,” it added.

Palestinian families ordered to vacate homes in occupied West Bank: Report

Israeli authorities have ordered 22 Palestinian families to vacate their homes in the village of Sur Baher, south of occupied East Jerusalem, by July 7, according to the Wafa news agency.

According to the Jerusalem Governorate cited in the report, the eviction orders target families residing near the Har Homa settlement, which is built on Palestinian land.

Quoting a resident, the Palestinian news agency said that about 180 Palestinians would be affected by the orders.

Israeli army kills Palestinian near West Bank refugee camp

The Palestinian Ministry of Health is reporting that a Palestinian was killed in Israeli military gunfire near the Nour Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem in the north of the occupied West Bank.

Palestinian news agency Wafa named the person killed as 61-year-old Walid Hassan Saad Bdeir.

At least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023. That figure includes at least 202 children and 21 women.

More than 9,210 others have been injured across the area in a wave of heightened Israeli military and settler violence.

UN expert urges countries to cut trade, financial ties with Israel

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian Territories, has called on countries to impose a full arms embargo as well as cut off trade and financial ties with Israel, which she alleged is waging a “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.

“Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history,” Albanese said in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council.

The UN expert was presenting her latest report, which named more than 60 companies she accuses of being involved in supporting Israeli illegal settlements and military actions in Gaza.

“What I expose is not a list, it is a system, and that is to be addressed,” she told the council. “We must reverse the tide,” she added, calling for states to impose a full arms embargo, suspend all trade agreements and ensure companies face legal consequences for their involvement in violations of international law.

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva earlier this week said Albanese’s latest report was “legally groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of her office”. Its delegate was not present in the room in line with a new policy to disengage with the council, which Israel says has an anti-Semitic bias.

‘For some, genocide is profitable’: UN’s Francesca Albanese

“There have been people and organisations that have profited from the violence, the killing, the maiming, the destruction in Gaza and other parts of the occupied Palestinian territory,” the UN’s special rapporteur told reporters in Geneva.

“In the past 20 months … the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange soared by 213 percent, amassing over $220bn in market gains, including [a] $76.8bn [gain] in the past month alone; so clearly, for some genocide is profitable,” Albanese stated.

She said her latest report “exposes a system, something that is so structural and so widespread and so systemic that there is no possibility to fix it”, adding that if the corporate sector had observed due diligence, it “would have disengaged completely and totally from its entanglement with the Israeli economy”.

She added that if Palestine were a “crime scene”, it would have “the fingerprints of all of us through what we purchase … the banks where we put our money, the investments we make”.

Tech giants ‘making very clear’ products can be used for military purposes

We’ve spoken to Samer Abdelnour, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh Business School, about UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s report on corporate complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

Abdelnour noted that the report alludes to “how companies, especially in Big Tech, are using and utilising the experience of the genocide in Gaza to enter into new markets”.

“That’s a massive market providing states and weapons companies with AI and cloud-computing services,” Abdelnour told Al Jazeera, explaining that companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are producing “dual-use” technologies.

“Big Tech companies have shown that they’re willing and in fact already utilising their technology for the development of specifically autonomous weapons systems, or what’s known in the international community as killer robots,” he said.

“By participating in the genocide, companies like Google – also Amazon and Microsoft – are making very clear that they’re willing to pivot their technologies … for military purposes.”

In her report, Albanese said Microsoft, Alphabet – Google’s parent company – and Amazon have granted Israel “virtually government-wide access to their cloud and AI technologies”, enhancing its data processing and surveillance capacities.

Firms ‘central to Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial regime’: Rights group

Palestinian human rights group Al Haq has welcomed the report from Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur, on corporate complicity in Israeli abuses against Palestinians.

“Corporations continue to service Israel’s settlement enterprise, surveillance regime, and war economy,” the group said in a statement.

Al Haq noted that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the UN’s court – found in July of last year that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful.

“Nearly a year later, and over 21 months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, states have yet to act in accordance with these findings,” the group said. “What persists is a system of impunity, sustained not only by military force, but by a global economy that profits from Palestinian dispossession.”

Evidence points to Israel’s continued use of starvation to inflict genocide: Amnesty

Amnesty International has accused Israel of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, citing it as part of a broader policy of genocide.

“While the eyes of the world were diverted to the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Israel’s genocide has continued unabated in Gaza, including through the infliction of conditions of life that have created a deadly mix of hunger and disease pushing the population past breaking point,” said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s chief, in a statement.

The human rights organisation documented severe malnutrition among children, with 66 deaths since October 2023 and thousands more hospitalised.

It also accused Israeli authorities of weaponising aid by imposing an “unlawful blockade on the entry of aid and commercial supplies” into Gaza, as hundreds of aid trucks remain stuck outside the Palestinian enclave, waiting for an Israeli permit to enter.

Israeli forces use drugs to recruit collaborators in the Gaza Strip: Hamas

A Hamas security official has told our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic that the Israeli forces are working to create and prolong issues that will lead to the emergence of criminal gangs, as it directs them to destabilise security in the Palestinian enclave.

The official also said the group had prevented an attempt by Israel to smuggle spying equipment and modern phones to collaborators in the Gaza Strip so they could carry out missions.

The official stated that drugs are often used to “ensnare young people, bring them down, and assign them to security and espionage missions” and that agents had been smuggling large quantities of drugs from intelligence officers assigned to the aid teams that have access to the aid distribution points.

Israeli intelligence officers use the aid distribution points as a recruiting ground, the Hamas official said.

Gaza: Was oxycodone found in flour bags distributed by US-Israeli aid centres?

It is being widely reported that oxycodone pills were found in flour bags distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Gaza. We tell you what we know about these allegations in this edition of Truth or Fake.

Gaza death toll rises

At least 118 Palestinians have been killed and 581 others injured in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

That includes 12 people killed and 49 injured at the US- and Israeli-backed aid centres, it added, raising the total number of aid seekers killed to 652. More than 4,537 others have been injured since the new mechanism came into force on May 27, the ministry said.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 57,130 Palestinians and injured 135,173 others since October 7, 2023, the statement published on Telegram said.


_{People walk over debris at Mustafa Hafez School, sheltering Palestinians displaced by the war, following an overnight Israeli attack in Gaza City}

Palestine Action says four people charged over military base protest

The campaign group says that four people have been charged with entering a prohibited place and criminal damage after its activists broke into a UK military base last month and sprayed red paint on two planes in protest at the UK’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

In a post on X, it says the state stated that the protest had a “terrorist connection” as it called people to mobilise outside the Westminster Magistrates Court in solidarity with those charged.

PA, the UK news agency, says that the four have been remanded in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

Parliament voted 385-26 in favour of the measure against the group on Wednesday, proscribing the campaign group as a “terrorist” organisation.

Critics decried the chilling effect of the ban, which puts Palestine Action on a par with armed groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) in the UK, making it a criminal offence to support or be part of the protest group.

The SECRET Israel PLOT to BAN Palestine Action

“This is the story of how Israel was able to get a protest group based in another country proscribed as a Terrorist organisation”

Israel’s push to crush Hamas militarily ‘proven impossible’

Dan Perry, an Israeli affairs analyst, says the latest ceasefire proposal that Washington has said Israel agreed to does not appear to include a guarantee of an end to the war on Gaza.

“My assessment is that Israel will insist on a full Hamas disarmament, and also that Israel will come under pressure to allow the [Palestinian Authority] to be the umbrella brand under which Gaza is governed, presumably with the help of Arab countries,” Perry told Al Jazeera.

“Neither of those things have been agreed to, respectively, by Hamas or Israel.”

Hamas has said it is studying the new proposal for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza, but insisted it is seeking an agreement that would bring an end to the war.

Meanwhile, Perry said that, in Israel, there is strong opposition to prolonging the war.

“It’s been 21 months and Israel’s idea that it can completely crush Hamas militarily without also killing the hostages in the process. That has proven impossible, or at least extremely difficult, as many people predicted,” he said.