The German government says it is providing 45 million euros ($48m) to the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied West Bank.

“With this sum, we support health and education services as well as cash-for-work programs for Palestinian refugees,” the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development said in a post on X.

This video from the al-Haq rights group, based in the occupied West Bank, shows how Abu al-Saeed al-Sousi, the owner of the oldest felafel shop in Gaza, is running his business amid widespread starvation there.

“There is no electricity, no gas, and we still manage to work,” he said, adding that he is selling his felafels much cheaper than usual to help people out even as prices are skyrocketing as local markets have shut down in Gaza.

“This is a struggle to survive. We are struggling to maintain our existence. We were hit in 2021, and the shop was gone, and hopefully, if God wills it, we will come back and rebuild again.”

#Gaza testimonies: The Oldest Falafel Shop in the Gaza Strip:
“This is a struggle to survive...We are here, we are struggling to maintain our existence. We were hit in 2021 and the shop was gone, and hopefully, if God wills it, we will come back and rebuild again.” #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/z5oQVwfrsZ

— Al-Haq الحق (@alhaq_org) March 25, 2024

Red Crescent: Gaza’s al-Amal Hospital out of service after Israeli siege

Today, the Palestine Red Crescent teams, in coordination with the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs and the International Committee of the Red Cross, evacuated the PRCS’s staff at #AlAmalHospital in Khan Yunis, totaling 27, in addition to 6 patients and one…

— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) March 25, 2024

The Israeli military has bombed a house in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza, killing at least 15 people and injuring more, our Al Jazeera Arabic colleagues report. The building was housing displaced Palestinians and among the dead are at least four children.

UK joins the bandwagon, air drops half a truck load

UK military makes first airdrop of food supplies into Gaza

_{Humanitarian aid being airdropped over Gaza from an RAF A400M aircraft [Handout taken and released by the UK’s Ministry of Defence on March 25, 2024}


Earlier drops missed, the one up there also looks like it's aiming for the ocean...

Palestinians forced to swim to retrieve aid dropped into sea off Gaza

Swimming while starving, I hope everyone got back on land.

They did not :( Twelve people have drowned, and six have been killed in stampedes while trying to recover airdropped aid, according to Gaza’s media office.

Air drops are nothing but PR stunts, don't even care where it lands.

Israeli settlers attack Palestinian town, man shot in Balata camp

UN rejects US claim Gaza ceasefire resolution is ‘non-binding’

Test of US stance on Gaza will come from decision on arms sales to Israel

At least seven Palestinians have drowned after they swam into the Mediterranean Sea trying to get aid that was airdropped there, the AFP news agency reports, citing Gaza’s Health Ministry. At least five other people are missing in the waters off Gaza, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported.

They were among hundreds of people who swam into the sea near as-Sudaniya northwest of Gaza City after parcels of aid were airdropped there.

“Why can’t those who deliver aid deliver it through the crossings?“ Muhammad Sobeih, one Gaza resident who went into the sea to get aid, told Al Jazeera. “The crossings are safer and easier.”

Earlier this month, at least five Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza when an airdropped aid package fell on them after its parachute failed to open, fuelling more criticism of the aid delivery method.

Twelve people are confirmed to have drowned when they swam into the Mediterranean Sea to get aid parcels airdropped near Gaza’s northern coast, said the Gaza government’s media office.

Six more were killed in “stampedes” that broke out when aid was dropped elsewhere in northern Gaza, where extreme hunger is pervasive, it added.

The media office said such aid airdrops were “abusive” and “futile” in light of the famine-like conditions in northern Gaza, and called for the opening of land crossings which can bring in far more aid more safely and efficiently.

A UN humanitarian office spokesperson has called for Israel to revoke a decision barring food deliveries to northern Gaza from the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), saying people there were facing a “cruel death by famine”.

“The decision must be revoked,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke told a UN briefing. “You cannot claim to adhere to these international provisions of law when you block UNRWA food convoys.”

UNRWA’s head said on Sunday that Israel had informed the UN that it will no longer approve its food convoys to north Gaza.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, has issued a damning report on Israel’s war on Gaza, saying there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is committing genocide in the Palestinian enclave.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Albanese said evidence – gathered from organisations on the ground, investigative reports and consultations with affected people – suggested that Israel has committed at least three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.
• These are “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
• On the first point, Albanese noted that Israel has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. A further 12,000 are reported missing, presumed dead under the rubble.
• More than 70 percent of the recorded deaths have been women and children and Israel has failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent – adult males – were active Hamas fighters, she said.
• Israel’s heightened blockade of Gaza is also resulting in deaths by starvation, including that of 10 children daily.
• On the second point, Albanese noted that Israeli forces have wounded more than 70,000 Palestinians and detained thousands of Palestinian men and boys, subjecting them to torture and mistreatment.
• On the third point, Albanese said Israel has destroyed or severely damaged most of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure, including hospitals and agricultural land.

UN expert says Israel using concepts such as ‘human shields’ as legal cover for genocide

In less than 6 months, Israel has destroyed Gaza: UN expert

The Israeli mission in Geneva has rejected the UN expert’s accusation of genocide, labelling the allegations as “outrageous” and an “obscene inversion of reality”, according to the AFP news agency. The mission also described the report as “simply an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine the very establishment of the Jewish State”.

The failure of the US to veto the recently passed UN Security Council resolution on Gaza makes it more difficult to free the Israeli captives held in the enclave, according to the country’s foreign minister.

Hamas is taking advantage of the lack of veto by Washington to avoid paying the price for a ceasefire, Israel Katz said in remarks quoted by Israel’s army radio.

The binding resolution, adopted on Monday, “demands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire” and the “immediate and unconditional release” of captives.

The US abstained from voting and let the resolution to be adopted. It had vetoed three previous resolutions that called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

The New York Times says it has seen video footage that undercuts the accounts of an Israeli military paramedic who claimed two teenage girls killed during Hamas’s attacks on October 7 were sexually assaulted.

The medic provided key testimony to The Times’s controversial December article, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponised Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. At the time, he was quoted as saying that he had discovered the bodies of two partially-clothed teenage girls in a home in Kibbutz Be’eri that bore signs of sexual violence.

The girls were among three alleged victims of sexual assault for whom The Times reported specific biographical information. The Times now says it has seen footage taken by an Israeli soldier who was in Be’eri on October 7 that “shows the bodies of three female victims, fully clothed and with no apparent signs of sexual violence, at a home where many residents had believed the assaults occurred”.

It says it contacted the paramedic again but he declined to say whether he still stood by his account, telling The Times that “he would like to put the attacks behind him”.

The Times’s report in December drew widespread criticism, with many journalists – including from within the paper’s audio division – arguing that key anecdotes in the article were unsubstantiated.

The family of the third person for whom The Times reported biographical information in the December expose have also contested the paper’s claims after the article’s publication.

Staff at Australia’s national broadcaster warned that its coverage of the war in Gaza relied too much on Israeli sources and used language that “favoured the Israeli narrative over objective reporting”, according to internal communications.

An undated three-page summary of an editorial meeting, which Al Jazeera obtained via a freedom of information request with the ABC, sheds new light on bias claims that convulsed the outlet.

According to the document, staff detailed concerns that coverage displayed pro-Israel bias, such as by accepting “Israeli facts and figures with no ifs or buts” while questioning Palestinian viewpoints and avoiding the word “Palestine” itself.

At least seven armed Palestinian groups are battling Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip and Israel has carried out “multi-week operations” to “re-clear” areas in the north of the territory where Palestinian fighters are based, war monitors report.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP), two US-based military think tanks, said Israeli forces are also conducting a “second round of clearing operations” in the west of Khan Younis in the south of Gaza.

The focus of the Israeli “re-clearing” operation is Khan Younis’s al-Amal neighbourhood, the ISW and CTP said in their latest battlefield report.

On Sunday, Palestinian fighters in Gaza fired eight rockets at southern Israel’s Ashdod, the first reported attack on the city since mid-January, as well as rockets fired at Israel’s Beeri region. On Monday, rockets were fired at Sderot city, the latest ISW/CTP report states.

NEW | Shin Bet announced that the IDF seized a “significant amount of advanced arms from Iran” that Iran had smuggled into the West Bank to support Palestinian militia attacks targeting Israel. Read the update from CTP and @TheStudyofWar: https://t.co/JU4Tzy6O4d pic.twitter.com/4J1A4kyPla

— Critical Threats (@criticalthreats) March 26, 2024

No let-up in Israeli attacks despite UNSC resolution

_{Palestinian mourners react next to the bodies of relatives killed in an Israeli strike at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, March 25, 2024}

Homes targeted near al-Shifa

Israeli jets strike more than 60 targets across Gaza: Army

Death toll from Rafah attack rises to 18

Undeterred by UN resolution, Israel keeps pounding Gaza

Israeli military in defiance of UN resolution

Footage published by our Al Jazeera Arabic colleagues shows hundreds of Palestinians marching in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarem in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza and its military operations in the occupied West Bank.

مسيرة تجوب شوارع مدينة طولكرم بالضفة الغربية دعمًا لغزة وتنديدًا بجرائم الاحتلال الإسرائيلي#فيديو #حرب_غزة pic.twitter.com/6ulBaCqGo1

— الجزيرة فلسطين (@AJA_Palestine) March 26, 2024

Israeli forces storm Nablus

Israeli forces arrest 30 Palestinians in occupied West Bank

By Maram Humaid, Abdelhakim Abu Riash, and Alia Chughtai

Throughout Gaza, many families are surviving with hardly anything to eat, making do with carefully portioned canned and cartoned food if they can find it.

The extreme lack of food is causing half of Gaza’s population — 1.1 million people — to suffer from “catastrophic hunger,” the highest indicator of famine, according to a UN-backed report published last week.

For three days, Al Jazeera followed three families in Gaza to document how they are coping with hardly any food during this crisis.


_{A family in Gaza shares their only meal of the day outside of a makeshift tent}

Maysoon al-Nabahin squeezes out the last bit of cartoned cheese onto a freshly baked piece of bread, knowing it will be the only thing her family of eight will eat that day. Umm Muhammed, as she's known, fled from a school in Bureij where she, together with her husband and six children, were sheltering after Israeli forces destroyed their home in east Bureij in central Gaza.

The 45-year-old now lives in the crowd of tents around Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah further south. She’s a petite woman, her face etched with worry, looking older than her years.

In the centre of their plastic makeshift tent is a small fire where Umm Muhammed is making flatbread on a woodfire saj oven. She’s surrounded by a few neatly arranged backpacks containing the belongings her family managed to bring, as well as a pile of blankets, now cleared away to make space for their daytime living.

Also living under an overflowing plastic sheet-covered tent in Deir el-Balah are the 15 members of the al-Masry family. There is no food in the al-Masry tent. “We’ve been here almost a month. Since then, we have not eaten properly, and my children need food.

They scream in hunger and cry themselves to sleep”, 45-year-old Salwa al-Masry tells Al Jazeera, quivering.

Salwa, who also goes by Umm Mohammed, suffers from asthma and her husband has a cardiac condition. Her young children plead for food, and she has nothing to give them. “My young son tells me: 'Mommy, I am hungry, I want to eat.’ I am patient with him and tell him: 'Sit down, I will get it for you.'" But, she says, that is usually a lie as there is nothing she can do to help alleviate his hunger.

Umm Mohammed says she has been to every aid centre but all the warehouses have been cleaned out so she returns empty-handed. She has lost considerable weight since she, her husband, eight daughters and five sons fled their home in Beit Hanoon in northern Gaza to Gaza City, then to Nuseirat and finally to this tent in Deir el-Balah.

Sanaa "Umm Hassan" Abu Issa and her family of 11 have also been displaced multiple times.

In December, they fled their home in east Bureij in central Gaza after the Israeli army told them they had to evacuate. On foot, they fled to a school in Bureij camp where they were also told to evacuate. In search of safety, the family, along with many others, were forced to make the trek south to Deir el-Balah where they were joined by Umm Hassan’s pregnant daughter and her husband who fled their home in Shujayea, one of the largest neighbourhoods in Gaza City.

Umm Hassan had a small convenience store as part of a social affairs project in front of her house, which has since been destroyed. The shop part of the house still stands, she tells Al Jazeera ruefully. “Only part of the shop remains, because it is legitimate money, thank God,” she says, laughing.

They now live in a small tent, with plastic sheet walls. The hard earth is covered with bits of faded fabric to make a place to sit. In one corner of the tent is a pile of worn-out blankets and a few bags that the family managed to bring from their home. In another corner is a makeshift kitchen with a table, a hotplate, two pots, a few pantry items and bits and pieces of utensils.

No normal-sized babies

"Doctors are reporting that they no longer see normal-sized babies," UNFPA official Dominic Allen told journalists after visiting hospitals still providing maternity services in the north of Gaza, where the need is especially great.

"What they do see though, tragically, is more stillborn births... and more neonatal deaths, caused in part by malnutrition, dehydration and complications," Allen added.

The numbers of complicated deliveries are roughly twice what they were before the war with Israel began - with mothers stressed, fearful, underfed and exhausted - and caregivers often lacking necessary supplies.