Closing summary
In Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, the municipality issued an urgent statement saying it was no longer able to provide 700,000 people in the area with drinking water after running out of fuel.
Unrwa’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a post on X on Monday that the agency’s headquarters in Gaza was “flattened” after being “turned into a battlefield” during heavy fighting. “Another episode in the blatant disregard of international humanitarian law,” he wrote.
In the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the main focus of Israel’s offensive since May, residents reported renewed fighting on Monday. The military also reportedly intensified aerial and tank shelling in central Gaza in the al-Bureij and al-Maghazi historic refugee camps.
At least 38,664 Palestinian people have been killed and 89,097 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement. An estimated 80 Palestinians were killed and 216 injured in the past 24 hours alone, the ministry said.
David Lammy called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza during his first visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories as the UK’s foreign secretary.
Gaza’s health ministry updated the death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a school in central Gaza on Sunday, saying it had increased from 15 to 22. The Abu Araban school was run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, and housed “thousands of displaced people”, civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
We are closing this blog now, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Middle East coverage here.
Deir Al-Balah municipality says it can no longer provide 700,000 people in area with drinking water
In Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, where Israel hasn’t yet invaded and hundreds of thousands of people have taken refuge, the municipality issued an urgent statement saying it was no longer able to provide 700,000 people in the area with drinking water after running out of fuel.
The statement said:
We urge citizens to preserve what is left in their private tankers and we stress the need to maintain the spirit of cooperation and sharing.
Aid agencies have warned that the lack of clean water and flows of untreated sewage pose a serious threat to health for Palestinians in Gaza.
When Israel cut off fuel to Gaza after 7 October, the resulting power cuts meant wastewater could not be pumped to treatment plants, leading to 100,000 cubic metres of sewage a day spewing into the sea, according to the UN Environment Programme.
A BBC Verify investigation found in May that hundreds of water and sanitation facilities in the devastated enclave had been damaged or destroyed since October.
Updated
Israeli airstrikes have targeted the town of Marwahin in southern Lebanon, Al Jazeera reports. Hezbollah reportedly announced afterwards it bombed Israeli spy equipment with guided missiles. These claims have not yet been verified by the Guardian.
Almost daily exchanges of fire have occurred along Lebanon’s frontier with northern Israel since the October 7 Hamas attacks last year, in which about 1,200 people in southern Israel were killed.
The situation to the north worsened significantly in May after an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Hezbollah military commander in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah retaliated by firing hundreds of rockets and explosive drones into northern Israel.
Israeli officials have threatened a military offensive in Lebanon if no deal is negotiated to push Hezbollah away from the border.
Updated
Here are the latest images coming out of Gaza from the newswires:
Unrwa head says agency's headquarters in Gaza was 'turned into a battlefield'
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Philippe Lazzarini, said the agency’s headquarters in Gaza was “flattened” after being “turned into a battlefield” during heavy fighting.
Lazzarini said:
The headquarters in Gaza turned into a battlefield and now flattened. Another episode in the blatant disregard of international humanitarian law. United Nations facilities must be protected at all times. They must never be used for military or fighting purposes. Shocking.
Shocking.@UNRWA headquarters in #Gaza, turned into a battlefield & now flattened 👇
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) July 15, 2024
Another episode in the blatant disregard of international humanitarian law.
United Nations facilities must be protected at all times. They must never be used for military or fighting… pic.twitter.com/XVOm5UjJeM
Unrwa provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, with the agency acting as the backbone of aid operations in Gaza since October.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long-called for Unrwa to be dismantled, accusing it of anti-Israeli incitement, and Israel’s parliament is currently considering designating Unrwa as a terrorist organisation. Unrwa has denied both claims.
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said Israeli forces have arrested 15 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including a woman and former prisoners, Al Jazeera reports. Since October, it has said thousands of Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces there.
Human rights groups and international organisations have alleged widespread abuse of inmates detained by Israel in raids in the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians want as the core of a future independent state along with Gaza.
Gaza’s health ministry has updated the death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a school in central Gaza on Sunday, saying it had increased from 15 to 22.
The Abu Araban school was run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, and housed “thousands of displaced people”, civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told Agence France-Presse (AFP). It was the fifth Israeli strike on a school being used to shelter displaced Palestinians in eight days.
Sunday’s airstrikes added to what was already one of the deadliest weeks of Israeli aerial attacks on Gaza since the war broke out nine months ago.
After a night spent shaking in fear as the roof rattled from explosions, and a long walk along a crowded road, Diana Mahmoud arrived at the hospital where she gave birth to her son, Yaman.
Mahmoud, 22, discovered she was pregnant a week after the outbreak of the war in Gaza and, like other mothers who became pregnant about that time, spent her entire pregnancy fearing for her own safety as well as that of her child. Miscarriages are three times more likely than before the war, according to a February report by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health.
“It was not a day or two – no, it was nine months. Every day we lived through it we died a million times because of the bombing and destruction,” says Mahmoud.
The UN estimates around 5,522 women will give birth in the next month in Gaza. As well as anxiety about safety, the women face practical struggles that come with repeated displacement and a constant search for food and medicine. According to the UN, 95% of pregnant women do not have enough to eat.
The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system meant that Mahmoud received no antenatal care during her pregnancy and was discharged by the overburdened hospital immediately after Yaman’s birth.
“The situation in the hospitals is so bad, every moment some place or house near you is being targeted so it’s difficult for the hospitals to care for pregnant women. The total focus is on the wounded,” says Mahmoud.
You can read the full story here:
Updated
We have more on the UK foreign secretary David Lammy’s first Middle East trip since the Labour party’s landslide general election victory at the beginning of the month (see more details in post at 08.48).
Labour came in for heavy criticism for comments made by the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, who said earlier in the war that Israel had the right to withhold power and water from civilians in Gaza. That anger was compounded when the party refused to back a Scottish National party motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in the region – even though Labour passed its own similar motion soon afterwards.
Lammy has now reaffirmed his call for a ceasefire in the war during a second day of talks with Israeli leaders on Monday, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Lammy had already called for a halt to hostilities in a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday.
He also met Palestinian Authority prime minister Mohammed Mustafa with whom he pressed the case for reform to the authority, officials said.
“I hope ... that we see a ceasefire soon and we bring an alleviation to the suffering and the intolerable loss of life that we’re now seeing also in Gaza,” Lammy said during a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday.
Lammy said that Hamas must release the hostages seized in its October 7 attacks. He said he was “very conscious of the pain and anguish that many hostage families are experiencing and the nation is experiencing”.
Herzog said the more than 100 hostages still in Gaza - “in terrible circumstances in real danger for their lives” - were the key issue for Israel, AFP reports.
“We are working tirelessly to get them out. I sincerely hope that there will be a hostage deal soon, it is a very important step,” Herzog said.
Updated
Renewed fighting reported in Rafah as Israel intensifies shelling in central Gaza
In the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the main focus of Israel’s offensive since May, residents reported renewed fighting on Monday.
Israeli forces in western and central parts of the city blew up several homes, they told the Reuters news agency.
Medical officials said they recovered 10 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in eastern areas of the city, some of which had already begun to decompose.
The military also reportedly intensified aerial and tank shelling in central Gaza in the al-Bureij and al-Maghazi historic refugee camps. Health officials said five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Maghazi camp.
Updated
Death toll in Gaza reaches 38,664, says health ministry
At least 38,664 Palestinian people have been killed and 89,097 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday.
An estimated 80 Palestinians were killed and 216 injured in the past 24 hours alone, the ministry said.
The ministry has said thousands of other dead people are most likely lost in the rubble of the enclave.
Updated
Two Palestinians have been injured in shelling near a power station north of the Nuseirat refugee camp, with warplanes and drones continuing to bombard the central Gaza Strip overnight, Al Jazeera reports.
On Sunday, Israeli forces continued with aerial and ground shelling of several areas across the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million people, according to Reuters.
A strike on a UN-run school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, one of Gaza’s eight longstanding refugee camps, killed 15 Palestinians and injured dozens more, health officials said.
Updated
We have some more information on the UK maritime agency’s alert of a vessel reporting being attacked off Hodeidah, a city in Yemen (see opening summary).
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said earlier today it had received a report of a merchant vessel being attacked by three small craft 70 nautical miles southwest of the city.
An unmanned small craft collided with the vessel twice and two manned small craft fired at it, according to UKMTO. The vessel and crew were reported safe, and it was proceeding to the next port of call after it conducted “self protection measures”, UKMTO said.
UKMTO WARNING
— United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) (@UK_MTO) July 15, 2024
INCIDENT 099 - ATTACK - UPDATE 001https://t.co/fX3hWupi7g#MaritimeSecurity #MarSec pic.twitter.com/Ldv2NuAe3X
Since November, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group has been launching drone and missile strikes in shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The group says these actions are in solidarity with Palestinians affected by Israel’s war on Gaza.
Updated
A fleet of more than one hundred lorries would take 15 years to clear Gaza of almost 40m tonnes of rubble in an operation costing between $500m (£394m) and $600m, a UN assessment has found.
The conclusions will underline the immense challenge of rebuilding the Palestinian territory after months of a grinding Israeli offensive that has led to massive destruction of homes and infrastructure.
According to the assessment, which was published last month by the UN Environment Programme, 137,297 buildings had been damaged in Gaza, more than half of the total. Of these, just over a quarter were destroyed, about a 10th severely damaged and a third moderately damaged.
Massive landfill sites covering between 250 and 500 hectares (618 to 1,235 acres) would be necessary to dump the rubble, depending on how much could be recycled, the assessment found.
You can read the full story by the Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, here:
Israeli soldiers demolished a gas station in the town of Hizma, north of Jerusalem, Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reports.
Eyewitnesses said that Al-Salam gas station was destroyed by Israeli military bulldozers. While this was happening, confrontations broke out with Israeli forces, who reportedly fired “poison gas bombs”, stun grenades, and live bullets towards citizens and their homes. These claims have not been independently verified by the Guardian.
Updated
David Lammy is to call for an immediate ceasefire during talks with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on his first visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as the UK’s foreign secretary. Lammy will also raise the issue of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank when he meets Netanyahu. He is to meet the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, as well. You can read more about the diplomatic visit here.
The UK foreign secretary yesterday met with the secretary of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Hussein Al-Sheikh, in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the central West Bank.
According to Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, Sheikh urged Lammy to help to work to stop the Israeli aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, to allow more aid to people in Gaza and to recognise the state of Palestine. The UK government has stopped short of saying the UK will unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state.
Updated
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and the wider crisis in the Middle East.
Israeli bombing across Gaza over the weekend drew strong condemnation, with Egypt’s foreign ministry saying that Saturday’ strike on Khan Younis, which killed 90 people according to the territory’s emergency services, could not be “accepted under any justification whatsoever”.
That strike – which also left hundreds injured – was targeting Hamas military chief, Mohammed Deif, the mastermind of the 7 October attack. There was no confirmation about the fate of Deif, but on Saturday a senior Hamas official denied that Deif had been killed and the group said Israeli claims were aimed at justifying the attack.
On Sunday, at least 31 Palestinians were killed and more than 50 other people injured in fresh Israeli bombings across the Gaza Strip, according to rescuers and health officials.
Responding to the weekend’s violence, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan said Israel does not intend to end the war and commits “new massacres each time there is a positive atmosphere” towards peace.
The government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday denounced Israeli strikes on southern Gaza, urging the world not to “remain silent in the face of this endless massacre”.
O governo de Israel segue sabotando o processo de paz e o cessar-fogo no Oriente Médio. O mais recente bombardeio promovido na Faixa de Gaza vitimando centenas de inocentes é inadmissível. Agora com mais de 90 vítimas fatais e quase 300 feridos em tendas que abrigavam crianças,…
— Lula (@LulaOficial) July 14, 2024
Here is a summary of the day’s other main events:
The civil defence agency in Gaza said that 15 people were killed in a strike on a school sheltering war displaced on Sunday. If confirmed, the strike on the UN-run Abu Araban site in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp would be the fifth on a school turned shelter in eight days. The Abu Araban school was housing “thousands of displaced people,” civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, condemned Israel’s Saturday strike in Khan Younis, writing on social media that the “claim that people in Gaza can move to ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones is false”. Scott Anderson, director of Unrwa affairs in the Gaza Strip, said that on a visit to Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital, where many of the casualties were taken, he had “witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen” in the war.
Israeli police shot dead a driver who ran down four soldiers at a bus stop near a military base on Sunday, a police and army spokesperson said. Police called it a “suspected terrorist attack” and said the driver, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, had been “neutralised” during the incident. A military statement said one officer and a soldier were “severely injured” in the incident and two others also hurt.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said on Monday it had received a report of an incident 70 nautical miles southwest of Yemen’s Hodeidah. The agency said authorities were investigating the incident but didn’t provide any details.
Updated
