Here’s how things stand on Friday, March 1, 2024:
Fighting and humanitarian crisis
- On Thursday, Israeli troops fired on a crowd of Palestinians racing to pull food off an aid convoy in Gaza City. At least 112 people were killed in the chaos.
- Initially, the Israeli army blamed crowding and trampling for the deaths, while an Israeli military official later said the troops “opened fire at the crowd” after some Palestinians began heading towards Israeli forces in a way that “endangered” them.
- Hamas decried the attack as an “unprecedented war crime”. The PA office described the incident as an “ugly massacre”.
- Israeli military claims that it has killed more than 13,000 Palestinian fighters in Gaza since the start of its ground invasion likely still leaves Palestinian armed groups with a sizeable force as Hamas alone had 40,000 fighters before the latest war began in October, war monitors said.
Regional tensions and diplomacy
- Thursday’s shooting was quickly condemned by Arab countries, and United States President Joe Biden expressed concern it would add to the difficulty of negotiating a ceasefire in the nearly five-month conflict.
- Meanwhile, Austria’s foreign minister urged Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group against escalating the conflict along the volatile Israel-Lebanon border and expressed hope for a pause in the fighting in Gaza.
- Yemen also condemned Israel’s killing of more than 100 Palestinian civilians waiting for food aid near Gaza City, saying the ongoing “massacres” amount to “war crimes and the collective punishment of innocent people”.
- Elsewhere, veteran left-wing British politician George Galloway has won a by-election in England’s northwestern town of Rochdale after running on a pro-Palestine, anti-Israel platform.
- In Russia, representatives of a dozen Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, are meeting for “inter-Palestinian” talks to discuss the formation of a unified government.
- In the US, a statement from Biden has urged House Republicans to pass a foreign aid bill in order to “help ensure that Israel can defend itself against Hamas and other threats”.
Violence in the occupied West Bank
- Israeli forces have stormed the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank and arrested two men allegedly connected to a deadly attack on Israeli settlers in the Eli settlement.
- Elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers attacked the homes of Palestinians with stones on the outskirts of the town of Jalud, southeast of Nablus.
