Gaza live: Gaza death toll rises to 35,80

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday he was unsure that Israel was ready to make compromises to reach a deal to normalise relations with Saudi Arabia.

Blinken said the Biden administration was uncertain whether Israel would agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for normalisation with Saudi Arabia. Israel has publicly and consistently rejected a two-state solution to its conflict with Palestine.

"I can't tell you whether Israel - whether it's the prime minister or the country as a whole - is prepared to do in this moment what would be necessary to actually realise normalisation,” Blinken told a Senate committee.

"Because that requires an end to [the war in] Gaza and that requires a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.”

Israeli soldiers attacked an ambulance as it was heading to treat people injured in an Israeli ground raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank. 

Arabic media outlets said the Israeli soldiers fired at the ambulance, citing the Palestinian Red Crescent.

At least seven Palestinians were killed during Israel’s raid on Jenin, including a doctor and a teacher, Palestinian news Agency Wafa reported.  At least 18 Palestinians have been injured.

The UN’s human rights office in Palestine condemned the raid.

Israel has also launched a raid on the city of Dura south of Hebron, according to Arabic media reports. 

“For 76 years, Israel literally had a licence to kill. Until Monday,” Middle East Eye’s Editor in Chief, David Hearst writes, reacting to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision to request arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

Hearst notes that prosecutor Karim Khan based his application on a report by a panel of international law experts, who focused on Israel’s policy of famine and siege in Gaza, but if the application succeeds it could pave the way for the UCC to investigate other allegations of war crimes against Israel going back to 2015.

“Whichever way you look at it, this is a watershed moment. It punctures Israel’s immunity and deeply embarrasses its backers. It exposes, as never before, the colonial nature of the stance that international justice applies only to others,” Hearst writes.

READ MORE: The ICC has suspended Israel's licence to kill

Israeli soldiers and police have been tipping off Israeli settlers on the location of aid trucks travelling to the Gaza Strip so they can attack them and set up roadblocks, a spokesperson for one of the groups told The Guardian.

“When a policeman or soldier’s mission is supposed to protect Israelis and instead he is sent to protect humanitarian aid convoys - knowing it will end up in the hands of Hamas - we cannot blame them or civilians who notice the trucks passing by their towns for providing intel to groups trying to block that aid,” Rachel Touitou, a spokesperson for the far-right Israeli group Tzav 9, said.

“Yes, some of our intel comes from individual members of Israeli forces.”

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Tuesday that a number of countries could provide security to Gaza “on an interim basis” at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Blinken was responding to a question about whether Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would be able or willing to provide security to the Gaza Strip.

Middle East Eye previously reported that the US had been reaching out to Gulf states to send peacekeeping forces to Gaza.

The Arab League called for UN peacekeepers in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem at a summit in Bahrain. The US says it is against a UN role.

Read more: Bahrain signals willingness to join Arab multinational force in Gaza

The US Department of Defence said on Tuesday that new routes are being used to move aid in Gaza that had arrived from a US-built pier.

Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder said aid was now moving from assembly areas to warehouses in Gaza.

"As we work out processes and procedures, alternative routes for the safe movement of that cargo have been established. And aid is now being taken from those assembly areas to warehouses for further distribution throughout Gaza,” he said.

The comments come after the UN said it had not received aid from the US-built pier in southern Gaza for two days.

Israel is returning the Associated Press’s (AP) broadcasting equipment after seizing it on Tuesday.

Israeli Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi said he ordered the ministry to return the equipment “until a different decision is made by the Ministry of Defense”.

The US said earlier it was engaging directly with Israel to ask that it reverse its decision to confiscate the AP camera equipment, a White House spokesperson said on Tuesday. 

Norway’s foreign minister said that the Nordic country would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him.

“If he or one of the Hamas leaders who are also indicted should appear in Norway, then we are obliged by international law to do so. The same applies to all countries in Europe with the exception of Turkey,” Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said in an interview on Norweigan TV.

Forty-four European countries are members of the ICC. Turkey is not a member of the court.

Strikes on Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza damaged an intensive care unit and administrative facilities, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.

Ghebreyesus said northern Gaza’s largest partially functioning hospital was “reportedly hit four times” on Tuesday by Israel after several weeks of “intense hostilities” in the vicinity of the hospital.

The hospital has been dealing with an influx of injured patients as a result of the Israeli strikes.

Efforts are underway to evacuate 20 health staff and 13 patients from damaged sites, he added.

The UN has halted all food distribution to Gaza's southern city of Rafah, a spokesperson said on Tuesday. 

The UN said it had halted operations due to a lack of supplies and security concerns.

The UN added that it hasn’t received supplies for two days from a US-built pier in Gaza.

Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Programme, warned that “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse”.

She said if food and other supplies don’t begin entering Gaza “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread”.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has slammed Israel's decision to shut down an Associated Press live video feed of Gaza, describing the move as "outrageous censorship". 

"After banning Al Jazeera, Israel goes after AP. RSF denounces the seizure of a news agency's camera and the shut down of a live feed showing a view of Gaza... this is outrageous censorship," RSF said on X.

US officials have asked Israel to reverse its decision to confiscate equipment from the Associated Press, according to Walla news.

Meanwhile, Ynet news site reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not consulted ahead of the move by the communications ministry to seize the broadcasting equipment.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken denied that the Biden administration withheld intelligence from Israel regarding senior Hamas officials.

Blinken was responding to questions from US Senator Ted Cruz about reports that the administration was withholding intelligence on the whereabouts of senior Hamas officials.

“If we had the locations of course we’d provide them,” Blinken said.

“We have offered them [Israel] nothing, not to invade Rafah,” Blinken said.

Middle East Eye reported that the Biden administration is roughly one month behind tracking the location of Hamas’s Gaza Chief Yayha Sinwar.

Read more: US focused on hunting down Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, in bid to end Gaza war

The Foreign Press Association said it is "alarmed" by Israel’s confiscation of the Associated Press’s broadcasting equipment in southern Israel.

“Israel’s move today is a slippery slope,” the association said in a statement. “Israel could block other international news agencies from providing live footage of Gaza.”

The Association, which represents international media working in Israel and Palestine, said Israel’s conduct had already been “dismal”.

“It could also allow Israel to block media coverage of virtually any news event on vague security grounds".

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said that the number of Palestinians residing in its Khan Younis's facilities has surged 36 percent amid Israel’s offensive on Rafah.

Unrwa said over 810,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s offensive on Rafah.