Gaza live: Israeli attack hits Unrwa centre
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It was in November last year when Grammy award-winning pop star Dua Lipa and other celebrities were named in a viral Israeli drill rap threatening them with violence for speaking up for Palestinians amid Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
Seven months later, Lipa says she is willing to face backlash over her opposition to the war for the “greater good”.
“When I speak about things that are political, I double-, triple-check myself to be: ‘OK, this is about something that is way bigger than me, and it’s necessary – and that’s the only reason I’m posting it.’ That is my only solace in doing that,” she said in an interview with the Radio Times on Tuesday.
“It’s always going to be met with a backlash and other people’s opinions, so it’s a big decision. I balance it out, because ultimately I feel it’s for the greater good, so I’m willing to [take that hit],” the 2024 Glastonbury Festival headliner said.
Most recently, Lipa made headlines when she joined tens of millions of people in sharing a viral AI image calling for attention to the Rafah massacre, where the Israeli army attacked a tent camp housing displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza, killing least 45 people and injuring dozens of others, mostly women and children.
Read more: Dua Lipa says she is willing to risk backlash for criticising Israel
In his latest column for Middle East Eye, Joseph Massad argues that western countries are willing to destroy academic freedom and human rights as part of its "commitment to Israel".
He writes: "No academic expert could deny that Zionism was always a European settler-colonial movement allied with the imperialist countries or that Zionism had always espoused racist views of the Palestinians and cooperated with other settler colonies extending from South Africa to French Algeria and beyond.
And no scholar today could earnestly question that the Israeli state is an institutionally racist and Jewish supremacist state - enshrined in law - or deny the history of Zionist terrorism in the region, let alone the turmoil and violence Israel has visited on the entire Middle East since its establishment in 1948.
The problem, however, is that the media seems oblivious to this massive corpus of academic knowledge. So are academics in the professional schools of business, engineering, law and medicine, or even in the natural sciences or some of the social sciences who obtain their information from the mainstream western media."
You can read the full column below.
Opinion: Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites
Jerusalem’s deputy mayor has urged municipality workers to deny waste collections and lawn mowing services to the French consulate for Palestinians, in the latest instance of simmering tensions between France and Israel.
On Tuesday, far-right deputy mayor Aryeh King posted a letter on X which he had sent to the Jerusalem municipality’s sanitation department.
"In view of the treacherous and anti-Israel conduct of Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron, the president of France who passed resolutions in his government whose purpose is to harm the state of Israel and Israeli industry, I ask you to order the employees… to immediately stop the service of removing the garbage from the French Consulate building," the letter stated.
The consulate is situated on Paul Emile Botta Street, in the Yemin Moshe neighbourhood just outside occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City.
"I would like you to make sure that the municipal workers who clean Paul Emile Botta Street refrain from… collecting waste, as well as trimming the grass on the pavement in front of the consulate."
It came days after French authorities banned Israeli defence companies from exhibiting at Eurosatory, the world’s largest defence and security exhibition, in Paris. The ban has since been overturned.
Read more: Jerusalem waste collection at centre of latest spat between France and Israel
Hezbollah has published a nine and a half minute video of what it said was footage gathered from its surveillance aircraft of locations in Israel, including of ports in the coastal city of Haifa.
Haifa is 27 kilometres from the border with Lebanon.
In November, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the group would be sending surveillance drones over Haifa.
Hezbollah has sent both surveillance and attack drones into Israel since war broke out eight months ago, in parallel with the conflict in Gaza.
You can view the surveillance footage, which has not been independently verified by Middle East Eye, below.
#شاهد الفيديو كاملاً...9 دقائق ونصف من الأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة يعرضها #حزب_الله تحت عنوان: هذا ما رجع به الهدهد✌#الميادين #الإعلام_الحربي pic.twitter.com/Ptsc68ObHw
— قناة الميادين (@AlMayadeenNews) June 18, 2024
Israel's war on Gaza has created unprecedented soil, water and air pollution, destroyed sanitation systems and left tons of debris from explosive devices, according to a UN report on the environmental impact of the war published on Tuesday.
The conflict has reversed limited progress in improving Gaza's water desalination and wastewater treatment facilities, restoring the Wadi Gaza coastal wetland, and investments in solar power installations, according to a preliminary assessment by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reported by Reuters.
The report found that explosive weapons had generated 39 million tons of debris, with each square metre in Gaza littered with over 107kg of debris.
"All of this is deeply harming people's health, food security and Gaza's resilience," said Inger Andersen, UNEP's executive director.
UNEP assessed the environmental damage following a request by the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority in December.
The report found that water, sanitation, and hygiene systems were effectively defunct, with Gaza's five wastewater treatment plants shut down.
Before the war, Israel's 17-year siege on Gaza had already posed serious environmental and health challenges related to the availability of clean water.
More than 92 percent of water in the enclave has been deemed unfit for human consumption.
The Gaza Strip had one of the highest densities of rooftop solar panels in the world, with an estimated 12,400 rooftop solar systems recorded in 2023. But Israel's war has destroyed most of the solar infrastructure.
Destroyed solar panels can result in metal contaminants leaking into the soil, according to Reuters.
The Israeli army and intelligence services had detailed knowledge of Hamas’s plan to attack Israel and take captives weeks before the 7 October attack, a newly surfaced document reveals.
A report by Israel’s Kan News says the report, titled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training”, was compiled by the Israeli army’s Gaza Division, distributed on 19 September 2023, and was known to top intelligence officials.
The document went through Hamas’s intentions and described in detail the series of exercises conducted by the Palestinian group’s elite units.
Kan says the exercises included simulated raids on military posts and kibbutzim, the kidnapping of soldiers and civilians, as well as how to keep the captives once they had entered the Gaza Strip.
The document even reportedly included “the number of civilians and soldiers that Hamas planned to kidnap”.
Read more: Israeli army knew of Hamas's plans on 7 October, report finds
Gaza's government said in a statement that 3,500 children are at risk of dying due to malnourishment as a result of Israel's war and siege on the Palestinian enclave.
The government warns that aid is drying up due to the closure of border crossings and called on the international community and "all countries of the free world to condemn this crime, which … violates international law".
Hezbollah announced on Tuesday that it targeted an Israeli tank with a drone, the first announcement since the Lebanese movement halted its attacks on Israel for two days.
No clear reason was given as to why the group paused its attacks during the first two days of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.
US presidential envoy Amos Hochstein is currently in Beirut in a bid to avoid further escalations between Hezbollah and Israel.
Hochstein said the current situation is "serious".
"We have seen an escalation over the last few weeks, and what President Biden wants to do is avoid a further escalation to a greater war," he said.
Hochstein urged Hamas to accept the US-backed ceasefire proposal, which he says "also provides an opportunity to end the conflict across the Blue Line," referring to the demarcation line dividing Lebanon from Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.
Gaza's health ministry said that 25 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on the enclave in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 37,372 people killed since the start of the war on Gaza on 7 October.
Since the Israeli onslaught on neighbouring Gaza in October, Egyptian soldier Mohamed Omar* has felt helpless.
Omar, 23, has served as a patrolling officer in Egypt's North Sinai, along the border with Gaza's Rafah, over the past year. The region is part of a demilitarised zone according to security pacts between Egypt and Israel, and only soldiers with light weapons are allowed to be deployed there.
“It is painful to know that you can help, but you are shackled and cannot help rescue your people from being slaughtered,” he told Middle East Eye while on leave in Port Said, a destination for soldiers to rest before heading off to their units in North Sinai.
“We've been watching and hearing how intense the Israeli bombing in Rafah is, and we see dozens of Palestinian families passing by the borders.”
READ MORE: ‘My blood will go in vain’: Egyptian soldiers say their country has failed Gaza
A senior doctor from Gaza died while under Shin Bet investigation in November, six days after Israeli forces arrested him from the Palestinian enclave, Haaretz reports.
Dr Iyad Rantisi, 53, was the head of a women's hospital, part of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza.
He was arrested on 11 November and declared dead six days later at Shikma Prison, a Shin Bet interrogation facility.
Haaretz says that following Rantisi's death, "Ashkelon Magistrate's Court issued a six-month gag order prohibiting publication of all details of the case, including the existence of the gag order." The order expired in May.
Dr Husam Abu Safia, the manager of the Kamal Adwan hospital, said that Rantisi was arrested at a military checkpoint as he was trying to cross from the north to the south of Gaza following the Israeli army's evacuation orders.
The Shin Bet said they arrested him over suspicion of involvement in hiding hostages.
Rantisi is the second known case of a Gaza physician dying in Israeli prisons, following Dr Adnan al-Bursh, a surgeon who led the orthopaedic department at Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital, who died on 19 April in Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank.
No authorities have yet provided any information on the circumstances related to Rantisi's death.
Israel's National Unity chairman Benny Gantz and opposition leader Yair Lapid have slammed Likud MK Nissim Vaturi following his comments comparing Israeli anti-government protesters to Hamas.
Gantz called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "remove him from his position" as deputy speaker of the Knesset, which Lapid echoed.
"The demonstrators are IDF soldiers and officers, they are the Israeli economy, they are teachers and doctors, they are Zionism in its embodiment," Lapid said.
"Nissim Vaturi, on the other hand, is a man full of hatred whose inflammatory words are used by Israel’s enemies in a lawsuit in The Hague. Likud should have fired him this morning from the position of deputy speaker of the Knesset," he added, saying "they won’t do it, because this government has decided to dismantle the State of Israel. Vaturi is just the symptom."
Israel's Channel 12 reported that the Israeli government informed US presidential envoy Amos Hochstein that the army's operations in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip are nearing completion.
Hochstein has now landed in Lebanon in an attempt to stave off any potential escalations between Israel and Hezbollah.
US presidential envoy Amos Hochstein landed in Beirut following his trip to Israel, in another bid to avoid wider conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
during Hochstein's time in Israel, National Unity chairman Benny Gantz told him "time is running out" to reach any sort of diplomatic solution with Hezbollah.
Likud MK Nissim Vaturi has suggested in a radio interview that Israeli anti-government protesters are a branch of Hamas.
"There are a few branches of Hamas — the fighting branch of wicked terrorists who murder children, and the branch of the protests," he told Israel's Kol Brama radio station.
Israeli police clashed with protesters demanding new elections on Monday.
