The Palestinian Civil Defence Agency has said that at least 10 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli attack on Jabalia, adding that the majority of those killed are children, Al Jazeera reports.
The strike targeted a house in Jabalia in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
The head of the UN refugee agency for Palestinians says Sweden’s move “comes at the worst time” for the refugees, Al Jazeera reports.
Philippe Lazzarini said on X: “Defunding UNRWA now will undermine decades of Sweden’s investment in human development including by denying access to education for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys across the region.”
“For the people of Gaza, this decision will double their suffering endured over the past 14 months since the horrendous Hamas attack on 7 October and the ongoing war,” he added.
More than 14 months of Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 45,206 Palestinians and among them are at least 644 athletes, including 359 football players, according to the Palestinian Football Association, Al Jazeera reports.
At least 91 of them were children, the federation said.
Senior Israeli military officers have presented army chief Herzi Halevi with the initial findings of an internal investigation into the buildup to the Hamas attack on October 7 last year, Al Jazeera reports according to Israeli media.
The Times of Israel newspaper said the probe looked into the functioning of the army’s top echelons on the night between October 6-7. Each senior officer presented their findings that will be cross-examined.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly planning to skip next month’s events in Poland marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, fearing potential arrest, Middle East Eye reports according to Polish news outlet Rzeczpospolita.
Rzeczpospolita adds that Israeli officials have not reached out to their Polish counterparts regarding Netanyahu’s attendance.
Warsaw believes the absence is tied to its commitment to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu “for crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed since October 7, 2023.
The report says Israeli President Isaac Herzog also does not plan to attend the event.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, has called for “political courage to defend and reinforce the multilateral system and the international rules-based order”, Al Jazeera reports.
In an article he wrote for The Guardian, he said the international community will have to choose between a world “where we have reneged on our commitment to provide a political answer to the question of Palestine”.
He called it “a dystopian world, where Israel, as the occupying power, is solely responsible for the population in the occupied Palestinian territory”.
Lazzarini stressed that in the other direction “lies a world where the guardrails of the rules-based order hold firm and the Palestinian question is resolved by political means”.
“This is the path currently being pursued by the global alliance for the implementation of the two-state solution,” the UNRWA chief added.
Lazzarini also stressed that Israel continued to claim that UNRWA is “infiltrated by Hamas, even though all allegations for which evidence has been offered have been thoroughly investigated”.
Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian residents said, and a video showed “Revenge”, “Death to Arabs” and other slogans had been spray-painted in Hebrew on the building’s facade, Reuters reports.
Black burn marks were visible at the entrance to the Muslim holy site in the northern West Bank village of Marda. The fire was put out before it could spread much further.
Israeli police said they were collecting testimonies and evidence at the scene.
Nasfat al-Khufash, head of the Marda village council, said: “On Friday, Marda awoke to a systematic terror attack by a group of settlers who set fire to Bir al-Walideen mosque.”
“These attacks by settler groups are continuous and systematic,” he said.
The Israeli police and Shin Bet security services said in a joint statement: “We see this incident as extremely serious and will act resolutely to bring the perpetrators to justice for rigorous trial.”
Israeli settlers have stormed a village in the occupied West Bank, burning down a mosque and vandalising it, Al Jazeera reports.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has condemned the attack in Marda, north of Salfit, and called on the United Nations to “activate the international protection system”.
The Gaza health ministry has said that at least 45,206 people have been killed during more than 14 months of conflict between Israel and Hamas, AFP reports.
The toll includes 77 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry, which said 107,512 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the onslaught began on October 7, 2023.
An Israeli government minister criticised Pope Francis for suggesting the international community should study whether Israel’s military offensive in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people, Reuters reports.
In an open letter published by Italian newspaper Il Foglio, Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli said the pope’s remarks — made in excerpts from a forthcoming book that were published last month — amounted to a “trivialisation” of the term genocide.
“As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialisation of the term ‘genocide’ — a trivialisation that comes dangerously close to Holocaust denial,” Chikli wrote.
Chikli, who ended the letter by calling Francis “a dear friend of the Jewish people,” asked the pope “to clarify your position regarding the new accusation of genocide against the Jewish state”.
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, has hailed the Nordic country’s decision to stop funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, claiming UNRWA “has lost its legitimacy to exist”, Al Jazeera reports.
“It has been relatively calm here in the central areas during the past hour. But the escalation continues to take place in the north of the Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports from Deir el-Balah, Gaza.
“We got reports coming from the town of Jabalia al-Balad confirming that Israeli quadcopter drones have been shooting civilians there.
“We saw earlier different videos emerging from the Israeli side showing how those quadcopter drones are equipped with grenades and even explosives that could be dropped on the rooftops of buildings, which can, in turn cause significant destruction in a residential building,” he said.
Earlier today, the Israeli military levelled to the ground residential buildings in the Sabra neighbourhood, killing at least four civilians.
Military operations are also still ongoing in the north, in particular in the town of Beit Lahiya with military confrontations there and in Jabalia between Palestinian groups and Israeli forces continuing to escalate, he added.
Al Jazeera Arabic, quoting Gaza’s civil defence, reports that four people have been killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike that targeted a house.
The attack took place in the Sabra neighbourhood in the south of Gaza City, the rescue agency said.
“It looks like the aid system has been weaponised, and as a result of this, what we can provide to people is only a fraction of what they truly need,” said Georgios Petropoulos, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) sub-office in Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.
Speaking during a virtual news conference, the UN official said Israeli authorities “seem unwilling” to open checkpoints, hampering the delivery of vital supplies.
He also noted that convoys trying to cross into southern Gaza are often looted in areas that are under the control of the Israeli army.
The result is that aid workers have to make “horrible” choices each day.
“Should I let people die of starvation or the cold? Do we bring in more food to ease hunger or more plastic sheets for shelter?” said Petropoulos. “Famine is very likely already here.”
The Israeli army has violated a ceasefire agreement with Lebanon six times on its 23rd day, Anadolu reports.
Since the ceasefire was declared on Nov 27, the total number of Israeli violations has risen to 259, with 31 people killed and 37 injured during the incidents.
According to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), Israeli forces demolished homes in the southern Lebanese town of Kafr Kila, causing tremors felt throughout the area.
An Israeli military drone was observed flying over the city of Tyre, while the town of Alma al-Shaab near the border was targeted by Israeli forces, it said.
Homes in the Tayr Harfa area were also bombed, and Israeli military bulldozers demolished houses in the town of Naqoura.
Sweden will no longer fund the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and plans instead to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Nordic country’s aid minister Benjamin Dousa told Swedish TV4, according to Reuters.
Sweden’s decision to end funding for UNRWA was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channelling aid to the Palestinians via the agency more difficult, Dousa said.
Sweden plans to increase its overall humanitarian assistance to Gaza next year, he added.
“There are several other organisations in Gaza, I have just been there and met several of them,” the minister said, naming the UN World Food Programme as one potential recipient.
“It looks like the aid system has been weaponised, and as a result of this, what we can provide to people is only a fraction of what they truly need,” said Georgios Petropoulos, the head of the UN humanitarian agency OCHA in Gaza, according to Al Jazeera.
Speaking during a virtual news conference, the UN official said Israeli authorities “seem unwilling” to open checkpoints, hampering the delivery of vital supplies.
He also noted that convoys trying to cross into southern Gaza are often looted in areas that are under the control of the Israeli army. The result is that aid workers have to make “horrible” choices each day.
“Should I let people die of starvation or the cold? Do we bring in more food to ease hunger or more plastic sheets for shelter?” he said adding, “Famine is very likely already here.”
Six Palestinians were killed and several others were injured following Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City and Rafah in the northern and southern Gaza Strip respectively, Wafareports.
According to Wafa’s correspondent, three people were killed when Israeli warplanes targeted a vehicle in the Al-Jenena neighborhood, east of Rafah.
Meantime, another three individuals were killed, and several others were injured, when an Israeli airstrike hit a house across from the Sultan Bakery in the Al-Sabra neighborhood, south of Gaza City.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), has described as “a new welcome milestone” the UN General Assembly’s vote to seek the opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding Israel’s legal obligations to facilitate aid to Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.
The vote yesterday proved that the majority of UN members “stand in solidarity” with Palestinian refugees and “question the legality of the Israeli Parliament bills aimed at dismantling UNRWA”, Lazzarini wrote on X.
Israel’s moves to ban UNRWA would deprive Palestinians of “lifesaving assistance” as well as the right to education for hundreds of thousands“ of Palestinian children currently living in the “rubble of Gaza”, he said.
Lazzarini also noted that in July, the ICJ had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory was illegal. “Respect for international law must be upheld with no exceptions,” he said.
David Des Roches, a professor at the National Defence University in Washington, DC, has said Israel’s military strategy in Gaza remains uncertain as the execution of the operation “blends into a political strategy”, Al Jazeera reports.
The military goal is to prevent Hamas or any other organisation from being able to launch an attack from Gaza on Israel again and, at the same time, try to avoid Israel assuming the “burden” of being the occupying power in the Palestinian territory, Des Roches was quoted as saying.
“What that means is they have to find a way to make Hamas or any successor organisation incapable of coalescing into a military outfit, while at the same time somehow getting a Palestinian entity to govern this area and keep it quiet,” he said.
Des Roches also said that Israeli military operations to “root out Hamas fighters from the civilian population […] causes an immense amount of damage that fewer and fewer people regard as appropriate or proportionate or legal”, Al Jazeera added.
Mourners carry the bodies of Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike, in Gaza City on Dec 19, 2024. — Reuters
Lisa Grande, the Biden administration’s Middle East aid envoy, is said to have made demands around Israel’s humanitarian approach in Gaza in a heated phone call with Ghassan Alian, the chief of the Israeli military body responsible for Palestinian civil affairs (COGAT), Al Jazeera quotes Israel’s Channel 12 as saying.
Grande reportedly demanded during the call that Israel publicly declare it is not following a policy of deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza.
She also demanded Israel cancel all evacuation orders issued for civilians and allow evacuated Palestinians to return home, as well as present a comprehensive plan for reducing harm to civilian infrastructure, the report said.
Channel 12, citing unnamed US officials, reports the call was heated but remained constructive, despite Alian reportedly being “stunned” by the demands.
