IsraelPalestine

Israeli soldiers bound Mohamed Yousef’s hands behind his back as they dragged him to a military camp near the occupied West Bank’s Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian villages in Hebron governorate, in late June.

With him were his mother, his wife and two sisters, arrested on their land for confronting armed Israeli settlers.

Settlers often graze their animals on Palestinian land to assert control, signal unrestricted access and lay the groundwork for establishing illegal outposts, cutting Palestinians off from their farms and livestock.

Yousef knew this, so he went out to defend his farm when he saw the armed settlers.

But as is often the case, it was Mohamed, a Palestinian, who was punished. At the military camp, he was left with his family in the scorching sun for hours.

While Mohamed and his family were released the next day, they fear they will not have the means to defend themselves for much longer.

“The police, the [Israeli] army and settlers often attack us all at once. What are we supposed to do?” Yousef said.

The Israeli military did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the incident.

Useful pretext

Things might be about to get worse for Yousef and his family, who, along with about 1,200 other Palestinians, could soon be expelled from their lands.

On June 17, during the zenith of Israel’s war on Iran, the Israeli government submitted a letter, a copy of which has been seen by Al Jazeera, to the Israeli High Court of Justice that included a request by the army to demolish at least 12 villages in Masafer Yatta and expel the inhabitants.

The Israeli army argued that it has to demolish the villages to convert the area into a military “firing” or training zone, according to Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups.

However, a 2015 study by Kerem Novat, an Israeli civil society organisation, found that such justifications are a ruse to seize Palestinian land. From the time Israel occupied swaths of the West Bank in the 1967 war, it has converted about one-third of the West Bank into a “closed military zone”, according to the study.

And yet, military drills have never been carried out in 80 percent of these zones after Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes.

The study concluded that the military confiscates Palestinian land as a strategy to “reduce the Palestinian population’s ability to use the land and to transfer as much of it as possible to Israeli settlers”.

Yousef fears his village could suffer a similar fate following the state’s petition to the High Court.

“I have no idea what’s going to happen to us,” Mohamed told Al Jazeera. “Even if we are forced to leave, then where are we supposed to go? Where will we live?”

Rigged system

Many fear the Israeli High Court will side with the army and evict all Palestinians from “Firing Zone 918”, a battle that has been ongoing for decades.

Israeli courts have played a central role in rubber-stamping Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank, described as apartheid by many, by approving the demolition of entire Palestinian communities, according to Amnesty International.

The communities currently at risk were first handed an eviction notice and expelled in 1999, and told that their villages had been declared a military training zone, which the army dubbed “Firing Zone 918”.

The army claimed that the herding communities living in this “zone” were not “permanent residents”, despite the communities saying they lived there long before the state of Israel was formed by ethnically cleansing Palestinians in 1948, an event known as the Nakba.

With little recourse other than navigating an unfriendly Israeli legal system to resist their dispossession, the communities and human rights lawyers representing them initiated a legal battle to stop the evictions in Israeli district courts and the High Court.

In 2000, a judge ordered the army to allow the communities to return to their villages until a final ruling was issued.

Human rights lawyers have since filed countless petitions and appeals to delay and hinder the army’s attempt to expel the villagers.

“The [Israelis]…have been trying to expel us for decades,” said 63-year-old Nidal Younis, the head of the Masafer Yatta Council.

Then, in May 2022, the High Court ordered the expulsion of eight Masafer Yatta villages. The court ruled that the inhabitants were not “permanent residents”, ignoring evidence that the defence provided.

“We brought [the court] artefacts, photo analyses and ancient tools, used by the families for decades, that were representative of permanent residence,” said Netta Amar-Shiff, one of the lawyers representing the villagers.

“But the court dismissed all the evidence we brought as irrelevant.”

Expediting demolitions

Amar-Shiff and her colleagues filed another case in early 2023 to argue that military drills must, at the very least, not result in the demolition of Palestinian villages or the expulsion of inhabitants in the area.

The legal battle, and others, is now being upended by the Israeli army and government’s request to evict and demolish all the villages in the desired military zone, said Amar-Shiff.

In an attempt to fast-track that request, the Civil Planning Bureau, an Israeli military body responsible for building permits, issued a decree on June 18 to reject all pending Palestinian building requests in “Firing Zone 918”. The United Nations and Israeli human rights groups have been notified of the new decree, although it has not been published on any government website.

Across Israel and the occupied West Bank, Palestinians and Israelis need to obtain building permits from Israeli authorities to build and live in any structure.

According to the Israeli human rights group Bimkom, Palestinians in Area C, the largest of three zones in the occupied West Bank that were created out of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, are practically always denied permits, while permits for Israeli settlers are almost always approved.

Palestinians in Masafer Yatta still submitted many building requests, hoping the administrative process would delay the demolition of their homes.

However, the Central Planning Bureau’s recent decree, issued to align with the army’s prior announcement, supersedes all these pending requests and paves the way for an outright rejection of all of them, facilitating more ethnic cleansing, according to activists, lawyers and human rights groups.

Once the decree is published, lawyers representing Palestinians from “Firing Zone 918” will have to go to the High Court for a final and definitive ruling, which is expected within a few months.

“There are many judges in the High Court who will either dismiss this case on its face or not order the army to stop demolitions until they rule,” Amar-Shiff told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, settlers and Israeli troops are escalating attacks against Palestinians living in the area.

Sami Hourani, a researcher from Masafer Yatta for Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organisation, said the Israeli army has confiscated dozens of cars since declaring its intent to ethnically cleanse the villages.

He added that the army is arresting solidarity activists trying to visit the area, as well as helping settlers to attack and expel Palestinians.

“We are in an isolation stage now,” Hourani told Al Jazeera, adding that the villages in Masafer Yatta are under siege and cut off from the outside world.

“We are expecting the army to carry out massive demolitions at any moment.”

Two of Gaza’s largest hospitals have issued desperate pleas for help, warning that fuel shortages caused by Israel’s siege could soon turn the medical centres into “silent graveyards”.

The warnings from al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza City and Nasser Hospital in southern Khan Younis came on Wednesday, as Israeli forces continued to bombard the Palestinian enclave, killing at least 74 people.

Muhammad Abu Salmiyah, the director of al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest facility, told reporters that the lives of more than 100 premature babies and some 350 dialysis patients were at risk.

“Oxygen stations will stop working. A hospital without oxygen is no longer a hospital. The lab and blood banks will shut down, and the blood units in the refrigerators will spoil,” Salmiyah said.

“The hospital will cease to be a place of healing and will become a graveyard for those inside,” he said.

Abu Salmiyah went on to accuse Israel of “trickle-feeding” fuel to Gaza’s hospitals, and said that al-Shifa’s dialysis department had already been shut down to conserve power for the intensive care unit and operating rooms, which cannot be without electricity for even a few minutes.

‘Final hours’

In Khan Younis, the Nasser Medical Complex said it, too, has entered “the crucial and final hours” due to the fuel shortages.

“With the fuel counter nearing zero, doctors have entered the battle to save lives in a race against time, death, and darkness,” the hospital said in a statement. “Medical teams fight to the last breath. They have only their conscience and hope in those who hear the call – save Nasser Medical Complex before it turns into a silent graveyard for patients who could have been saved.”

Mohammed Sakr, a spokesman for the hospital, told the Reuters news agency that the facility needs 4,500 litres (1,189 gallons) of fuel per day to function, but it now has only 3,000 litres (790 gallons) – enough to last 24 hours.

Sakr said doctors are performing surgeries without electricity or air conditioning, and the sweat from staff is dripping into patients’ wounds, risking infection.

A video from Nasser Hospital, posted on social media, shows doctors sweating profusely as they perform a surgery.

“Everything is turned off here. The air conditioning is turned off. No fans,” a doctor says in the video as he demonstrates conditions in the ward. “All the staff are exhausted, they are complaining [about the] high temperature.”

Israel’s relentless bombardment has decimated Gaza’s healthcare system in the 21 months since it launched its assault on the Palestinian enclave in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.

Since then, there have been more than 600 recorded attacks on health facilities in Gaza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). As of May this year, only 19 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain partially operational, with 94 percent of all hospitals damaged or destroyed.

Israeli forces have also killed more than 1,500 health workers in Gaza, and detained 185, according to official figures.

The WHO, meanwhile, has described Gaza’s health sector as being “on its knees”, with shortages of fuel, medical supplies and frequent arrivals of mass casualties from Israeli attacks.

Suffocating siege

Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that “hundreds” of people could die in the territory if fuel supplies are not brought in urgently.

This includes “dozens” of premature babies who could die within the next two days, he said. Dialysis and intensive care patients would also lose their lives, he said, adding that the injuries of the wounded were worsening amid deteriorating conditions, while diseases like meningitis were spreading.

UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who recently returned from Gaza, said, “You can have the best hospital staff on the planet”, but if they are denied medicine and fuel, operating a health facility “becomes an impossibility”.

Israel has imposed a suffocating siege on Gaza since early March.

Over the past weeks, it has allowed some food into Gaza to be distributed through a United States-backed group at sites where hundreds of aid seekers have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

But fuel has not entered the territory in more than four months.

“What little fuel remains is already being used to power the most essential operations – such as intensive care units and water desalination – but those supplies are running out fast, and there are virtually no additional accessible stocks left,” the UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA) said on Tuesday.

“Hospitals are rationing. Ambulances are stalling. Water systems are on the brink. The deaths this is likely causing could soon increase sharply unless the Israeli authorities allow new fuel in – urgently, regularly and in sufficient quantities.”

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 57,575 people and wounded 136,879, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023 attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.

A top US Department of State official waived nine mandatory counterterrorism and anti-fraud safeguards to rush a $30m award last month to a controversial Gaza aid group backed by the Trump administration and Israel, the Reuters news agency reported, citing an internal memorandum.

Jeremy Lewin, a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) associate, signed off on the award despite an assessment in the memorandum that the GHF funding plan failed to meet required “minimum technical or budgetary standards”.

The June 24 action memorandum to Lewin was sent by Kenneth Jackson, also a former DOGE operative who serves as an acting deputy US Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator. The pair has overseen the agency’s dismantling and the merger of its functions into the State Department.

Lewin also overrode 58 objections that USAID staff experts wanted GHF to resolve in its application before the funds were approved, the Reuters news agency reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

Lewin, who runs the State Department’s foreign aid programme, cleared the funds only five days after GHF filed its proposal on June 19, according to the June 24 “action memorandum” bearing his signature.

“Strong Admin support for this one,” Lewin wrote to USAID leaders in a June 25 email, Reuters reported, that urged disbursement of the funds by the agency “ASAP”.

Lewin and Jackson have not issued comments on the matter.

The documents underline the priority the Trump administration has given GHF despite the group’s lack of experience and the killing of hundreds of Palestinians near its Gaza aid distribution hubs.

GHF, which closely coordinates with the Israeli military, has acknowledged reports of violence, but claims they occurred beyond its operations area.

Lewin noted in the email that he had discussed the funds with aides to Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s negotiator on Gaza, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office.

He acknowledged that authorising the funds would be controversial, writing, “I’m taking the bullet on this one.”

‘Inhumane and deadly’

There was no comment from the White House.

Reuters said Witkoff and Rubio did not reply to a question about whether they were aware of and supported the decision to waive the safeguards.

The State Department told Reuters that the $30m was approved under a legal provision allowing USAID to expedite awards in response to “emergency situations” to “meet humanitarian needs as expeditiously as possible”.

“The GHF award remains subject to rigorous oversight, including of GHF’s operations and finances,” the statement said. “As part of the award, GHF was subject to new control and reporting requirements”.

A GHF spokesperson told Reuters, “Our model is specifically designed to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. Every dollar we receive is safeguarded to ensure all resources — which will eventually include American taxpayer funds — reach the people of Gaza.” The spokesperson added that such requests for clarification from the US government about fund applications were routine.

Speaking about the nine conditions that were waived, the spokesperson said, “We are addressing each question as per regulations and normal procedure and will continue to do so as required.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry has said at least 743 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,891 others injured while seeking assistance at GHF aid sites.

The GHF, which began operating in the bombarded Palestinian enclave in late May, has drawn widespread criticism amid multiple reports that its contractors, as well as Israeli forces, have opened fire on aid seekers.

Leading humanitarian and human rights groups have demanded the immediate closure of the GHF, which they accused of “forcing two million people into overcrowded, militarised zones where they face daily gunfire and mass casualties”.

Amnesty International has described the group’s operations as an “inhumane and deadly militarised scheme”, while the UN insists that the model is violating humanitarian principles.

Palestinians under bombardment in Gaza, where a famine looms as Israel maintains a crippling blockade, have no choice but to seek aid from the GHF despite the risks involved.

Washington, DC – The White House says Donald Trump’s “utmost priority” in the Middle East is to end the war in Gaza.

But as the United States president hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, the two leaders have heaped praise on each other. Meanwhile, Israel continues its assault on the Palestinian territory, where more than 57,575 people have been killed.

Analysts say that, if Trump is truly seeking a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, he must leverage his country’s military aid to Israel to pressure Netanyahu to agree to a deal.

Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group nonprofit, drew a parallel between Trump’s mixed messaging and that of his predecessor Joe Biden. Both men, he said, called for a ceasefire but showed unwillingness to press Israel to end the fighting.

“It’s like deja vu with the Biden administration, where you would hear similar pronouncements from the White House,” said Finucane.

“If a ceasefire is indeed the ‘utmost priority’ of the White House, it has the leverage to bring it about.”

The US provides Israel with billions of dollars in military assistance each year, on top of offering it diplomatic backing at international forums like the United Nations.

While US officials expressed optimism about reaching a 60-day truce this week that could lead to a permanent ceasefire, Netanyahu told reporters in Washington, DC, that Israel still has to “still to finish the job in Gaza” and eliminate the armed group Hamas.

Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, described Netanyahu’s comments as “maximalist rhetoric” and “bluster”, stressing that Trump can push Israel to stop the war.

He said Trump can use the “threat of suspension of military support” to achieve the ceasefire, “which very much would be in the interest of the United States and the interest of the president himself in terms of scoring a diplomatic win”.

Trump and Netanyahu ‘in lockstep’

Netanyahu arrived in Washington, DC, on Monday and took a victory lap with Trump to celebrate their joint attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities during a 12-day war last month.

From the start, the Israeli prime minister appeared to play to Trump’s ego. As he sat down to a White House dinner on Monday night, Netanyahu announced he had nominated the US president for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The two leaders met again on Tuesday, with Trump saying that their talks would be all about Gaza and the truce proposal.

A day later, Netanyahu said he and Trump are “in lockstep” over Gaza.

“President Trump wants a deal, but not at any price,” the Israeli prime minister said. “I want a deal, but not at any price. Israel has security requirements and other requirements, and we’re working together to try to achieve it.”

But Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that Israel is the party standing in the way of a ceasefire. She noted that Hamas has already demanded a lasting end to the war, which is what the Trump administration says it is seeking.

“While we know Trump has said he wants a ceasefire, thus far we’ve not seen Trump being willing to use America’s extensive leverage to actually get there,” Sheline told Al Jazeera.

Far from stopping the flow of arms to Israel, the Trump administration has taken pride in resuming the transfer of heavy bombs — the only weapons that Biden temporarily withheld during the war on Gaza.

Dire situation in Gaza

While truce talks are ongoing, the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza — which UN experts and rights groups have described as a genocide — are intensifying.

Hospitals are running out of fuel. Cases of preventable diseases are on the rise. Hunger is rampant. And hundreds of people have been killed by Israeli fire over the past weeks while trying to receive food at US-backed, privately run aid distribution sites.

Nancy Okail, the president of the Center for International Policy, said Trump appears to be interested in a Gaza ceasefire in part to boost his own image as a peacemaker and to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to bring peace to the world, seizing on Americans’ weariness of war after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But so far, he has failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And he oversaw the outbreak of war between Israel and Iran, even ordering the US’s participation in it.

The US president took credit for a Gaza truce that came into effect in January, only to let it unravel as he supported Israel’s decision to resume the war in March.

Okail said the atrocities in Gaza cannot be stopped with just verbal calls for a ceasefire.

“If it is not accompanied by action — as in the suspension of aid or suspension of arms to Israel — Netanyahu doesn’t have any reason to actually go forward seriously with the peace negotiations,” she told Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu pushes displacement

Even if a 60-day truce is reached, rights advocates are concerned that Israel not only may return to war afterwards, but it might also use the time to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and further entrench its occupation.

Hamas said on Wednesday that it agreed to release 10 Israeli captives as part of the proposed deal, but the remaining sticking points are about the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and guarantees for a permanent ceasefire.

Before Netanyahu arrived in Washington, DC, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz revealed a plan to create a concentration camp for Palestinians in southern Gaza, according to the newspaper Haaretz.

The publication quoted Katz as saying that Israel would implement an “emigration plan” to remove Palestinians from Gaza, which rights groups say would amount to ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity.

The idea of depopulating Gaza is not new. Far-right Israeli ministers have been publicly championing it since the start of the war.

But the international community started taking the idea seriously when Trump floated it in February, as part of his desire to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Netanyahu brought it up again during his visit, saying that Palestinians in Gaza should be free to leave the territory if they choose.

‘Involuntary transfer’

While the Trump administration has not re-endorsed the ethnic cleansing scheme in Gaza this week, the White House still suggested that Palestinians cannot remain in Gaza.

“This has become an uninhabitable place for human beings, and the president has a big heart,” Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters.

“He wants this to be a prosperous, safe part of the region where people and families can thrive.”​​

Rights advocates have stressed that people under bombardment and with no access to basic necessities cannot have a “free” choice to stay or leave a place.

Sheline said the international fears that Trump and Netanyahu are working to ethnically cleanse Gaza and displace its Palestinian residents elsewhere are warranted.

“There was a lot of discussion of the idea that, maybe because the US helped Israel with its war on Iran, that would be the leverage used for a ceasefire in Gaza,” she said.

“But instead, it sort of seems to be something like: If Netanyahu agrees to a ceasefire, then the US will facilitate this involuntary transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza.”

For her part, Okail likened pushing people to leave Gaza under the threat of bombardment and starvation to shoving Palestinians out of the enclave at gunpoint.

“If expanding the occupation and ethnic cleansing is their approach to ceasefire, it means they want to kill any ceasefire attempt, not negotiate one,” she told Al Jazeera.

Trump administration says it is targeting Francesca Albanese for encouraging ICC war crime prosecution against Israel’s Netanyahu.

Washington, DC – The administration of United States President Donald Trump has imposed sanctions on United Nations expert Francesca Albanese over her documentation of Israel’s abuses against Palestinians during its war on Gaza.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the penalties on Wednesday, accusing Albanese of waging a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel”.

Albanese, who serves as UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, has been a leading global voice in calling for action to end Israel’s human rights violations.

Israel and its supporters have been rebuking Albanese and calling for her to be removed from her UN position for years.

Earlier on Wednesday, she called out European governments for allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crime charges in Gaza – to use their airspace while travelling.

“Italian, French and Greek citizens deserve to know that every political action violating the [international] legal order, weakens and endangers all of them. And all of us,” Albanese wrote in a social media post.

Rubio cited Albanese’s push for the prosecution of Israeli officials at the ICC as the legal basis for the sanctions.

Trump had issued an executive order in February to impose penalties on ICC officials involved in “targeting” Israel.

Last month, the Trump administration sanctioned four ICC judges.

On Wednesday, Rubio accused Albanese of anti-Semitism.

“That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant,” he said.

The ICC charged Netanyahu and Gallant with crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza for depriving Palestinians in the enclave of “objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine”.

Rubio also highlighted a recent report by Albanese that documented the role of international companies, including US firms, in the Israeli assault on Gaza, which she describes as a genocide.

“We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty,” the top US diplomat said.

Trump’s ICC decree freezes the assets of targeted individuals in the US and bans them and their immediate family members from entering the country.

Nancy Okail, head of the Center for International Policy (CIP) think tank, decried the sanctions against Albanese as “devastating”.

“Sanctioning a UN expert gives the signal that the United States is acting like dictatorships and rogue states,” Okail told Al Jazeera.

Over the past 21 months, Israel’s US-backed campaign in Gaza has levelled most of the territory and killed at least 57,575 Palestinians, according to local health officials.

Footage from the occupied West Bank city of Hebron shows Israel installing mobile housing units in a section of the city formally under the control of the Palestinian Authority, raising fears of further settlement expansion.

Rome Statute signatories Italy, France and Greece accused of ‘violating’ international legal order by letting alleged war criminal fly over territory.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, has hit out at countries that allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fly over their airspace en route to the United States, suggesting that they may have flouted their obligations under international law.

Albanese said on Wednesday that the governments of Italy, France and Greece needed to explain why they provided “safe passage” to Netanyahu, who they were theoretically “obligated to arrest” as an internationally wanted suspect when he flew over their territory on his way to meet United States President Donald Trump on Sunday for talks.

All three countries are signatories of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002, which last year issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated during Israel’s war on Gaza.

“Italian, French and Greek citizens deserve to know that every political action violating the int’l legal order, weakens and endangers all of them. And all of us,” Albanese wrote on X.

Albanese was responding to a post by human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber, who had said the previous day that the countries had “breached their legal obligations under the treaty [Rome Statute], have declared their disdain for the victims of genocide, and have demonstrated their contempt for the rule of law”.

Netanyahu’s visit to the US, during which he and Trump discussed the forced displacement of Palestinians amid his country’s ongoing ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, was not his first sortie since the ICC issued the warrant for his arrest.

In February, Netanyahu travelled to the US, which is not party to the Rome Statute, becoming the first foreign leader to meet Trump after his January inauguration.

Then, in April, Netanyahu visited Hungary’s leader Viktor Orban in Budapest, the latter having extended his invitation just one day after the ICC issued the arrest warrant, withdrawing the country’s ICC membership ahead of the Israeli leader’s arrival.

From Hungary, Netanyahu then flew to the US for a meeting with Trump, his plane flying 400km (248 miles) further than the normal route to avoid the airspace of several countries that could enforce an arrest warrant, according to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.

Member states of the ICC are expected to take subjects of arrest warrants into custody if those individuals are on their territory.

In practice, the rules are not always followed. For instance, South Africa, a member of the court, did not arrest Sudan’s then-leader Omar al-Bashir during a 2017 visit, despite an ICC warrant against him.

European Union countries have been split on the ICC warrant issued for Netanyahu.

Some said last year they would meet their ICC commitments, while Italy has said there were legal doubts. France has said it believes Netanyahu has immunity from ICC actions.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called for British support to recognise the state of Palestine and help defend Ukraine as he arrived in the United Kingdom for the first state visit by a European leader since Brexit.

Macron, in a rare address to both houses of the British parliament on Tuesday, celebrated the return of closer ties between France and the UK, and said the two countries must work together to end “excessive dependencies” on the United States and China.

The French president’s three-day trip came at the invitation of King Charles III. Macron was earlier greeted by the royal family, including heir-to-the-throne Prince William and his wife, Princess Catherine, before they travelled in horse-drawn carriages to Windsor Castle.

Macron then set out to parliament where he said the two countries needed to come together to strengthen Europe, including on defence, immigration, climate and trade.

“The United Kingdom and France must once again show the world that our alliance can make all the difference,” the French president said in English. “The only way to overcome the challenges we have, the challenges of our times, will be to go together hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder.”

Macron also promised that European countries would “never abandon Ukraine” in its war against invading Russian forces, while demanding an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza.

He then urged the UK to work together with France on recognising a Palestinian state, calling it “the only path to peace”.

“With Gaza in ruin and West Bank being on a daily basis attacked, the perspective of a Palestinian state has never been put at risk as it is,” Macron said. “And this is why this solution of the two states and the recognition of the State of Palestine is… the only way to build peace and stability for all in the whole region.”

He listed the geopolitical threats France and the UK face, and argued they should also be wary of the “excessive dependencies of both the US and China”, saying they needed to “de-risk our economies and our societies from this dual dependency”.

Macron went on to set out the opportunities of a closer union, saying they should make it easier for students, researchers and artists to live in each other’s countries, and seek to work together on artificial intelligence and to protect children online.

The speech symbolised the improvement in relations sought by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s centre-left Labour Party, as part of a broader reset of ties with European allies following the rancour over London’s departure from the European Union.

‘Entente Amicale’

Later on Tuesday evening, King Charles hosted a banquet for the Macrons at Windsor Castle, with 160 guests, including politicians, diplomats and celebrities such as Mick Jagger and Elton John.

Charles used his speech at the opulent state banquet to christen a new era of friendly relations, upgrading the “entente cordiale” – an alliance dating from 1904 that ended centuries of military rivalries – to an “entente amicale”.

“As we dine here in this ancient place, redolent with our shared history, allow me to propose a toast to France and to our new entente. An entente not only past and present, but for the future – and no longer just cordiale, but now amicale,” the king said.

The UK and France marked the three-day visit with an announcement that French nuclear energy utility EDF would invest 1.1 billion pounds ($1.5bn) in a nuclear power project in eastern England.

The two also said France would lend the UK the Bayeux Tapestry, allowing the 11th-century masterpiece to return for the first time in more than 900 years, in exchange for London loaning Paris Anglo-Saxon and Viking treasures.

Politics will take centre stage on Wednesday, when Macron sits down for talks with Starmer on migration, defence and investment.

Despite tensions over post-Brexit ties and how to stop asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel in small boats, the UK and France have been working closely to create a planned military force to support Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire with Russia.

The two leaders will dial in to a meeting of the coalition on Thursday “to discuss stepping up support for Ukraine and further increasing pressure on Russia”, Starmer’s office confirmed on Monday.

They will speak to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, according to the French presidency.

Starmer is hoping the UK’s support for Ukraine will help persuade Macron to take a different approach to stopping people smuggling, with London wanting to try out an asylum seekers’ returns deal.

This would involve the UK deporting one asylum seeker to France in exchange for another with a legitimate case to be in the country. A record number of asylum seekers have arrived in the UK on small boats in the first six months of this year. Starmer, whose party is trailing Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party in the polls, is under pressure to find a solution.

France has previously refused to sign such an agreement, saying the UK should negotiate an arrangement with all EU countries.

‘Hospitals are rationing. Ambulances are stalling. Water systems are on the brink,’ UN humanitarian office says.

The United Nations humanitarian office, OCHA, has warned that the fuel crisis in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade has reached a “critical point” and will cause further deaths and suffering in the besieged Palestinian territory.

OCHA said the fuel powering vital functions in Gaza, including water desalination stations and hospitals’ intensive care units, is running out quickly, with “virtually no additional accessible stocks left”.

“Hospitals are rationing. Ambulances are stalling. Water systems are on the brink,” the office said in a statement.

“The deaths this is likely causing could soon increase sharply unless the Israeli authorities allow new fuel in – urgently, regularly and in sufficient quantities.”

Israel has imposed a suffocating siege on Gaza since early March.

Over the past weeks, it has allowed some food into Gaza to be distributed through a United States-backed group at sites where hundreds of aid seekers have been shot dead by Israeli fire.

But fuel has not entered the territory in months.

Senior World Food Programme official Carl Skau also decried the lack of fuel in Gaza.

“The needs are greater than ever, and our capacity to respond has never been more constrained. Famine is spreading, and people are dying trying to find food,” Skau said in a social media post.

“Our teams in Gaza are doing their best to deliver aid and are often caught in the crossfire. We are suffering from shortages of fuel, spare parts and essential communications equipment.”

The director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, said that the situation at the medical centre is alarming due to the lack of fuel supplies.

“We don’t have enough fuel left until morning. If fuel is not available, generators cannot run, and hospitals find it difficult to provide care,” Abu Salmiya told Al Jazeera.

“Blood banks, nurseries and oxygen stations are not operating because of a lack of fuel. Patients will be doomed to certain death if fuel is not provided to hospitals.”

The health sector in Gaza has already been pushed to the brink under Israeli bombardment and repeated displacement orders.

Aid workers and health experts have been reporting a rise in preventable diseases in the territory amid the dire humanitarian situation.

On Tuesday, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said the enclave is seeing an uptick in cases of meningitis, a potentially deadly disease, especially among children.

“The catastrophic conditions in shelters, the severe shortage of drinking water, the spread of sewage, and the accumulation of waste are driving the health situation to further deterioration,” the ministry said.

Meningitis, which causes inflammation around the brain and spinal cord, can be caused by a bacterial infection.

In addition to the humanitarian crisis, Israel is pressing on with its intense bombardment of the territory. Medical sources told Al Jazeera that Israeli attacks killed at least 95 Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday.

Israeli attacks killed dozens of displaced people in and around tents in the al-Mawasi area near Khan Younis and in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp.

UN experts and rights groups have described Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza as a genocide.

United States President Donald Trump has met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for a second time in 24 hours to discuss a possible ceasefire deal in Gaza.

The unscheduled talks on Tuesday evening lasted just over an hour, with no media access.

Ahead of the meeting, Trump said he would be speaking with Netanyahu “almost exclusively” about Gaza.

“We gotta get that solved. Gaza is… it’s a tragedy, and he wants to get it solved, and I want to get it solved, and I think the other side wants to,” he said.

The two men had also met for several hours during a dinner at the White House on Monday during Netanyahu’s third visit to the US since the president began his second term on January 20.

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said the latest meeting was “tightly sealed with very little information coming out”.

“The fact that it was so hermetically sealed, the fact that there has been no clear readout of exactly what was discussed, the fact that the meeting lasted just over an hour before the prime minister returned to his residence – all of it may indicate that there’s some kind of stumbling block, something that is clouding the optimistic position that the two leaders have adopted over the past 24 hours,” Hanna said.

Shortly before the unscheduled meeting, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said the issues keeping Israel and Hamas from agreeing had dropped to one from four, and he hoped to reach a temporary ceasefire agreement this week.

“We are hopeful that by the end of this week, we’ll have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day ceasefire. Ten live hostages will be released. Nine deceased will be released,” Witkoff told reporters at a meeting of Trump’s Cabinet.

But Netanyahu, meeting with the speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, said Israel’s campaign in the Palestinian enclave was not done and that negotiators are “certainly working” on a ceasefire.

“We have still to finish the job in Gaza, release all our hostages, eliminate and destroy Hamas’s military and government capabilities,” the Israeli leader said.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Jordan, said Israeli media are reporting that Netanyahu is facing “extreme pressure” to reach a deal on Gaza.

“But still, there’s been no breakthrough,” she said from the Jordanian capital, Amman.

“Israeli media is also talking about a delay in the travel plans of Witkoff to Doha, although earlier in the night, he had sounded very optimistic about possibly reaching a deal. Because according to him, only one issue remained problematic – which is, ‘Where will the Israeli army redeploy to?’” Odeh said.

“Now, this is important, because Israel wants to maintain control over the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. According to the Israeli minister of defence, Israel plans to build a tent city in Rafah, where it will concentrate the population, control who enters, not allow anyone to leave, and then push the population out of Gaza to implement, according to the Israelis, the Trump plan of depopulating Gaza and taking over the enclave,” she added.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed at least 57,575 Palestinians and wounded 136,879 others. Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the war, and nearly half a million people are facing famine within months, according to United Nations estimates.

An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and more than 200 were taken captive.

Some 50 captives remain in Gaza, with 20 believed to be alive.

Trump has strongly supported Netanyahu, even wading into domestic Israeli politics by criticising prosecutors over a corruption trial against the Israeli leader on bribery, fraud and breach-of-trust charges, which Netanyahu denies.

In his remarks to reporters at the US Congress, Netanyahu praised Trump, saying that there has never been closer coordination between the US and Israel in his country’s history.

Top British diplomat David Lammy says the US-backed aid distribution mechanism in Gaza is ‘not doing a good job’.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has decried the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying that the United Kingdom could take further action against Israel if a ceasefire deal to end the war in the Palestinian territory does not materialise.

Speaking to the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, Lammy also criticised the new aid distribution mechanism in Gaza via a group backed by the United States and Israel, dubbed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

“We’ve been very clear that we don’t support the aid foundation that has been set up,” Lammy said. “We it’s not doing a good job. Too many people are close to starvation. Too many people have lost their lives. We have led globally on our condemnation the system that has been set up.”

Hundreds of Palestinians have been gunned down by Israeli fire while seeking GHF assistance over the past weeks.

Asked by a legislator whether the British government will take measures against Israel if the “intolerable” situation in Gaza continues, Lammy said: “Yes, we will.”

Last month, the UK joined Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway in sanctioning Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for inciting violence against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank.

Weeks earlier, the UK had also suspended talks for a free trade agreement with Israel over the blockade on Gaza, which has sparked a starvation crisis in the territory. And last year, London halted some arms exports to Israel.

While welcoming the moves, some Palestinian rights supporters have criticised them as symbolic and failing to impose serious consequences on Israel for its apparent abuses of international humanitarian law.

On Tuesday, Lammy condemned settler violence and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that they are “flouting international law”.

Pressed on whether the UK’s pressure on Israel has led the Israeli government to alter its behaviour, Lammy acknowledged that the change is “not sufficient”. Still, he defended London’s record, including recent moves against Israel and support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

“I am very, very comfortable that you would be hard pressed to find another G7 partner or another ally across Europe that’s doing more than this government has done,” he said.

Ultimately, Lammy played down the UK’s sway in the Middle East, saying that it is “but one actor”.

The UK is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. It is also a major trade partner of Israel. And according to numerous media reports, the British Royal Air Force has conducted hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza to help locate Israeli captives in the territory.

The UK has also cracked down on Palestinian rights activists at home, recently banning the advocacy group Palestine Action and arresting dozens of its supporters.

The Labour government in the UK has not recognised Palestine as a state – a move that several European countries have made over the past year.

Lammy said London wants its recognition of Palestine to be part of a concrete push towards the two-state solution, not just a symbolic gesture.

He added that the UK wants to recognise Palestine at a moment that helps shift “the dial against expansion, against violence, against the horrors that we’re seeing in Gaza, and towards the just cause that is the desire for Palestinian statehood”.

But Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Emily Thornberry warned Lammy that with settlement expansion and annexation threats, if the UK continues to delay the decision to recognise Palestine, “there won’t be anything left to recognise”.

“We should recognise a Palestinian state and then work towards ensuring that one happens practically,” Thornberry said. “But if we continue to hold back, it’ll slide through our fingers.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met United States President Donald Trump at the White House, with the two leaders repeating their controversial proposal to forcibly transfer thousands of Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip.

Trump and Netanyahu met for dinner in the Blue Room of the White House on Monday as indirect talks in Qatar between Israel and Hamas on US-backed proposals for a 60-day ceasefire to end the 21-month Gaza war appeared to gather some momentum.

Netanyahu told reporters present at the meeting that the US and Israel were working with other countries to give Palestinians a “better future”, suggesting that the residents of Gaza could move to neighbouring nations.

“If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a prison. It should be an open place and give people a free choice,” Netanyahu said.

“We’re working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realise what they always say, that they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future. I think we’re getting close to finding several countries.”

Trump, who earlier this year caused outrage when he floated his idea of relocating Palestinians and taking over the Strip to turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, said there had been “great cooperation” on the matter from “surrounding countries”.

“So something good will happen,” he added.

‘Recipe for catastrophe’

“This is something the Israelis have been saying for some time, calling it the ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians from their homelands. But of course, this has been condemned as ethnic cleansing,” Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said, reporting from Amman, Jordan.

Former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera that just because there are ongoing reports and statements about relocating Palestinians in Gaza to other countries, it does not mean that there is a “practical plan”.

“The fact that the Israeli defence minister blurts some ideas out, or even the prime minister, or even the president of the United States, doesn’t mean there is a plan,” he said.

“In early February, Trump spoke about a Palestinian Riviera, and within 36 hours, he changed that from a Riviera for the Palestinians to the Palestinians will be expelled,” he added.

Pinkas explained that amid reports that the Boston Consulting Group, which has been asked to come up with a plan to relocate Palestinians, it “doesn’t mean it’s implementable, it doesn’t mean it’s practical”.

“[It] is a recipe for catastrophe because it ensures that no [post-war] agreement in Gaza is durable,” Pinkas said.

Trump and Netanyahu met as Israeli and Hamas negotiators held a second day of indirect talks in Qatar, seated in different rooms in the same building. Proposals for a 60-day pause in fighting envisage a phased release of Hamas-held captives and Palestinian prisoners, Israeli troop withdrawals from parts of Gaza, and discussions on completely ending the war.

But a sticking point is whether the ceasefire will end the war altogether. Hamas has said it is willing to free all the captives in exchange for all Palestinian prisoners and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Netanyahu says the war will end once Hamas surrenders, disarms and goes into exile – something the Palestinian group refuses to do.

In advance of Netanyahu’s visit to the US, Trump predicted that a ceasefire deal could be reached this week. But Netanyahu appeared cagey, ruling out a full Palestinian state, saying Israel will “always” keep security control over the Gaza Strip.

Monday’s talks in Qatar ended with no announcements. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who played an important role in crafting the proposals, is expected to join negotiators in Qatar this week.

Coveted Nobel nomination

Trump and Netanyahu’s discussions came just over two weeks after the former ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites in support of Israeli air strikes, before announcing a ceasefire in the 12-day Israel-Iran war.

During their meeting, Netanyahu gave Trump a letter that he said had been used to nominate the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump, appearing pleased by the gesture, thanked him.

“So much of this is about optics,” said Al Jazeera’s Phil Lavelle, reporting from Washington, DC. “Of course, the [Israeli] prime minister will be very keen to make sure that this is seen back home as a major success … He is very keen to make sure that he is portrayed as being back in the good favours of Donald Trump.”

Trump has made little secret of the fact that he covets a Nobel, trumpeting recent truces that his administration facilitated between India and Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda.

During the meeting, Trump indicated that Iranian officials have reached out to the US to schedule talks about Iran’s nuclear programme. Negotiations had started in April but were scuppered after Israel launched attacks last month.

“We have scheduled Iran talks, and they … want to talk. They took a big drubbing,” said the US president.

Sitting at the table with Trump, Witkoff said the meeting would be soon, perhaps in a week.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, released on Monday, that he believed Tehran could resolve its differences with Washington through dialogue.

Netanyahu, who also met Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, is due to meet Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday morning (about 13:30 GMT).

A July 5 CNN article reported on three incidents in Melbourne, Australia: attempted arson at a synagogue, a confrontation at a restaurant and three cars set on fire near a business. The piece was scant on the details of the alleged crimes and the identities of the perpetrators, but it did clarify that the business “has been targeted by pro-Palestine protesters in the past”.

That the author chose to conflate activism in support of the Palestinian cause with violent acts that are low on facts and high on conjecture is indicative of how Western media have come to operate. Media reports are increasingly linking by default acts of aggression to activism they call “pro-Palestinian”.

Here are more examples: Before his name was released, we learned that a gunman shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” in a shooting rampage that killed two Israeli embassy staff members outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on May 21. Reports linked the suspect to what news outlets described as “pro-Palestinian” advocacy.

When on June 1 an Egyptian national attacked demonstrators voicing support of Israel in Colorado, the media also linked the incident to “pro-Palestinian protests”.

Softly landing on the term “pro-Palestinian” allows reporters to meet editorial standards for brevity. But brevity is not a fixed journalistic value. Accurately informing the public is.

The word “pro-Palestinian” has become political shorthand for a well-worn and misleading coupling: Palestinian advocacy and violence. Stripped of critical context, the term offers news consumers a reductive explanation – a violent act distilled and opaquely linked to “Palestinian” entities as imagined and understood through a narrow and distorted lens.

A failure to engage with contexts is not neutral omission. Rather, it is an affront to knowledge processes and a bow to power structures that govern mainstream journalistic storytelling.

What historical, cultural and religious claims do Palestinians make? Most news consumers in the West are unprepared to answer this question. In a closed information ecology, they rarely encounter these claims in full – or at all.

Like many who have followed the historical arc of all things Palestine or reported on it, I’ve used the term pro-Palestinian myself. It felt functional at the time: concise and seemingly understood.

Now, however, that shorthand misleads. Any word that is prefaced by “pro-” demands honest re-examination. When circumstances shift and new meanings emerge, the hyphenation clanks as anachronistic. We’re in one of those moments – a circumstance that is the epicentre of global opprobrium, humanitarian collapse and spectacular moral failure.

To describe activism and peaceful protests against the genocidal violence in Gaza as “pro-Palestinian” is disparaging. Opposing the strategic starvation of a trapped population is hardly pro-Palestinian. It is pro-humanity.

Is it “pro-Palestinian” to call for the end of violence that has claimed the lives of more than 18,000 children? Is it “pro-Palestinian” to call for the end of starvation that has killed dozens of children and elderly? Is it “pro-Palestinian” to express outrage at Gaza parents forced to carry body parts of their children in plastic bags?

The term “pro-Palestinian” operates within a false linguistic economy. It flattens a grossly unequal reality into a story of competing sides as if an occupied, bombarded and displaced people were an equal side to one of the most advanced armies in the world.

Gaza is not a side. Gaza is, as one UNICEF official put it, a “graveyard for children”. It is a place where journalists are killed for bearing witness, where hospitals are obliterated and universities reduced to rubble, where the international community is failing to uphold minimal standards of human rights.

In an era of impatience with rigour, “pro-Palestinian” is the rhetorical crutch that satisfies the manufactured need for immediate alignment (fandom) without critical thought. It permits bad-faith actors to stigmatise dissent, dismiss moral clarity and delegitimise outrage.

To call Elias Rodriguez, who carried out the shooting in Washington, DC, a “pro-Palestinian” shooter is a framing device that invites readers to interpret words of Palestinian solidarity as potential precursors to violence. It encourages institutions, including universities, to conflate advocacy with extremism and put a chill on free expression on campus.

Obfuscations in the conventions of reportage, euphemism or rhetorical hedging are the last things we need in this catastrophic moment. What’s needed is clarity and precision.

Let us try something radical: Let us say what we mean. When people protest the destruction of lineage and tillage in Gaza, they are not “taking a side” in some abstract pro-and-con debate. They are affirming the value of life. They are rejecting the idea that one people’s suffering must remain invisible for another’s comfort.

If people are advocating for human rights, then say so. If they believe that Palestinian life is worthy of dignity, safety and memory, say so.

And if they are calling for the “liberation” of Palestine and use phrases like “free Palestine” – phrases charged with decades of political, historical and emotional weight – that too deserves clarity and context. Liberation and freedom in most of these calls do not imply violence but a demand for freedom from occupation, siege, starvation, statelessness, and killing and imprisonment with impunity.

Collapsing these diverse expressions into a vague label like “pro-Palestinian” blurs reality and deepens public misunderstanding.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Negotiations resume in Qatar as the Israeli leader is set to hold talks with the US president, who has said a deal could be reached this week.

Israel and Hamas are set to hold indirect talks in Qatar for a second day, aimed at securing a ceasefire and a captive deal in Gaza, ahead of a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States President Donald Trump in Washington, DC.

The latest round of negotiations on the war in Gaza began on Sunday in Doha, aiming to broker a deal on a truce and the release of captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The US president has said a deal could be reached this week.

Before departing for the US on Sunday, Netanyahu said Israeli negotiators were given clear instructions to achieve a ceasefire under conditions that Israel has accepted.

“We’ve gotten a lot of the hostages out, but pertaining to the remaining hostages, quite a few of them will be coming out,” he told journalists, adding that his meeting with Trump could “definitely help advance this” deal.

Of the 251 captives taken by Palestinian fighters during the October 2023 attack, 49 are still being held in Gaza, including 27 people the Israeli military says are dead.

Netanyahu had previously said Hamas’s response to a draft US-backed ceasefire proposal, conveyed through Qatari and Egyptian mediators, contained “unacceptable” demands.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Jordan because Israel has banned the network from reporting in Israel and the occupied West Bank, said Netanyahu “cannot seem to be going against Trump’s wishes”, adding that the Trump-Netanyahu meeting is being set up as a “very important meeting” for Israel’s regional agenda, not just on Gaza.

“There are disagreements within the Israeli cabinet that it will find difficult to adopt, especially on the issues of redeployment and food aid distribution,” she said, stressing that Netanyahu is under pressure both from Trump and his coalition back home.

Trump is expected to meet the Israeli leader around 6:30pm local time (22:30 GMT) on Monday, the White House said, without the usual presence of journalists.

The truce talks have been revived following last month’s 12-day Israeli and US air strikes on Iran.

Ending war the sticking point

The US-backed proposal for a 60-day ceasefire envisages a phased release of captives, Israeli troop withdrawals from parts of Gaza and discussions on ending the war entirely.

Concluding the war has been the main sticking point in past rounds of talks, with Hamas demanding a full end to the conflict in return for releasing all captives, and Israel insisting it would fight on until Hamas is dismantled.

Some of Netanyahu’s hardline coalition partners oppose ending the fighting. But, with Israelis having become increasingly weary of the 21-month-old war, his government is expected to back a ceasefire.

Since Hamas’s October 2023 attack and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, mediators have brokered two temporary halts in the fighting. They have seen captives freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

Recent efforts to broker a new truce have repeatedly failed, with the primary point of contention being Israel’s rejection of Hamas’s demand for a lasting ceasefire.

Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has killed more than 57,500 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health authorities, led to a hunger crisis, displaced nearly all the population, and left most of the besieged territory in ruins.

Three-year-old Amr al-Hams lies immobile in his southern Gaza hospital bed with shrapnel embedded in his brain from an Israeli air strike.

Unable to walk or speak, his eyes dart around, searching for his mother, his aunt Nour believes.

Amr’s mother, Inas, was nine months pregnant when she took the family to visit her parents in northern Gaza. That night, their tent was struck. The attack killed his mother, her unborn baby, two of Amr’s siblings and his grandfather.

Amr survived after being rushed to intensive care with a breathing tube. His grief-stricken father is nearly speechless.

Now at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Amr has left intensive care but suffers from severe malnutrition. The fortified milk he requires vanished during Israel’s months-long blockade.

Nour feeds him mashed lentils through a syringe. She sleeps beside him, changes his nappies and comforts him during seizures.

“I tell him his mother will be back soon,” she says. “Other times, I give him a toy. But he cries. I think he misses her.”

Doctors say Amr needs immediate evacuation from the conflict zone. Without specialised care and therapy, his brain injuries will likely cause permanent damage.

“His brain is still developing,” Nour says. “Will he walk again? Speak again? So long as he is in Gaza, there is no recovery.”

“There’s a lot more settler violence than we saw a couple of months ago.”

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Israeli attacks across Gaza have killed at least 82 people as negotiations between Israel and Hamas towards a ceasefire deal begin in Qatar.

On Sunday, at least 39 people were killed in Gaza City alone. A midnight attack on the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in the region also trapped victims under debris.

Witnesses have described apocalyptic scenes as neighbours retrieve body parts, including those of children.

Mahmoud al-Sheikh Salama, a survivor of one strike, said it took place at 2am (23:00 GMT on Saturday) while he was sleeping.

“We heard a loud explosion and shortly after, another one. We rushed over… and people were trapped under the rubble – four families, a large number of residents,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We tried to search for survivors and managed to pull out two people alive from under the debris after about three hours of struggle and breaking through. We got two out alive – the rest were martyred and are still trapped.”

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said Israel’s current military escalation in Gaza is “a chilling and brutal reminder” of the opening weeks of the war because of the intensity and scale of each attack.

“In the span of two hours, we have counted at least seven air strikes across the Gaza Strip,” he said.

“A local community kitchen in the northern part of Deir el-Balah was also struck and three people were killed, including the main operator behind it.”

Attacks near aid sites

Besides Gaza City, medical sources at hospitals told Al Jazeera that at least nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli army fire near aid distribution centres operated by the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) since the morning.

Five were killed near the Netzarim Corridor, located just south of Gaza City, which splits the Strip down the middle. The Palestinian Ministry of Health said Israeli forces killed at least 743 Palestinians in attacks at sites run by the GHF since late May.

The GHF has drawn widespread criticism, with multiple reports that its contractors, as well as Israeli forces, have opened fire on desperate aid seekers. Two American contractors were wounded with non-life-threatening injuries on Saturday during an attack on an aid site.

“The attack – which preliminary information indicates was carried out by two assailants who threw two grenades at the Americans – occurred at the conclusion of an otherwise successful distribution in which thousands of Gazans safely received food,” the GHF said.

The United States on Saturday blamed Hamas for the attack. Gaza’s Government Media Office rejected these accusations.

“We categorically and unequivocally reject the claims issued by the US State Department alleging that the Palestinian resistance threw explosives at American personnel operating at sites run by the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – GHF,’” the media office said in a statement.

Possible ceasefire?

Meanwhile, indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas towards a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip have begun in Qatar.

“Negotiations are about implementation mechanisms and hostage exchange, and positions are being exchanged through mediators,” an unnamed official told the AFP news agency.

US President Donald Trump on Sunday said that there is “a good chance” a Gaza captive release and ceasefire deal could be reached with Hamas this week, “as they’re close”.

Trump told reporters such a deal meant “quite a few hostages” could be released. Trump is set to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday at the White House.

The US president said last week that Israel has agreed to the conditions for a 60-day ceasefire, and negotiators could meet to carve out a path to finally end Israel’s nearly 21-month war on Gaza.

On Friday, Hamas said it responded to a US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal in a “positive spirit”.

On Sunday, before boarding his flight to Washington, DC, Netanyahu also said he believed his discussions with Trump on Monday would help advance talks on a Gaza deal.

“I believe the discussion with President Trump can certainly help advance these results,” he said, adding that he is determined to ensure the return of captives held in Gaza and remove the threat of Hamas to Israel.

Analysts, however, say that Netanyahu wants to continue the retaliatory war on Gaza until he can gain enough political leverage to dismiss the court cases against him in Israel and build enough popular support to remain the country’s leader.

Netanyahu is on trial for corruption and is still widely blamed in Israeli society for the security failures that led to Hamas’s deadly attack on October 7, 2023.

“Israel and Netanyahu are not interested in reaching a ceasefire,” Adnan Hayajneh, a professor of international relations at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera, adding that there is a “very slim chance” of a ceasefire.

“What Israel wants is clear… a land without a people,” Hayajneh said.

“So, Palestinians are given three choices… starve to death… get killed… [or] leave the land. But Palestinians have so far proven they will not leave the land, no matter what.”

BRICS countries have been in disagreement over how strongly to denounce Israel’s bombing of Iran and its actions in Gaza.

Brazil’s president says the world must act to stop what he describes as an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza as leaders from 11 emerging BRICS nations gathered in Rio de Janeiro.

“We cannot remain indifferent to the genocide carried out by Israel in Gaza, the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians and the use of hunger as a weapon of war,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told leaders from China, India and other nations on Sunday.

His comments came as Gaza truce talks between Israel and Hamas resumed in Doha and as pressure mounted to end the 21-month war, which began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel.

Lula said “absolutely nothing could justify the terrorist actions” of Hamas on that day, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly Israeli civilians.

But he also offered fierce criticism of Israel’s subsequent actions. Israel’s military campaign has killed at least 57,418 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians.

BRICS countries have been in disagreement over how strongly to denounce Israel’s bombing of Iran and its actions in Gaza.

‘Autonomy in check once again’

Leaders in Rio called for reform of traditional Western institutions while presenting BRICS as a defender of multilateral diplomacy in an increasingly fractured world.

With forums such as the G7 and G20 groups of major economies hamstrung by divisions and the disruptive America First approach of United States President Donald Trump, expansion of BRICS has opened new space for diplomatic coordination.

In his opening remarks, Lula drew a parallel with the Cold War’s Non-Aligned Movement, a group of developing nations that resisted formally joining either side of a polarised global order.

“BRICS is the heir to the Non-Aligned Movement,” Lula told leaders. “With multilateralism under attack, our autonomy is in check once again.”

BRICS nations now represent more than half the world’s population and 40 percent of its economic output.

Leaders from Brazil, Russia, India and China gathered for the  its first summit in 2009. The bloc later added South Africa and last year included Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as members. This is the first summit of leaders to include Indonesia.

Some leaders were missing from this year’s summit, however. Chinese President Xi Jinping chose to send his prime minister in his place. Russian President Vladimir Putin is attending online because of a warrant issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court.

Still, several heads of state were gathering for discussions at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art on Sunday and Monday, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

More than 30 nations have expressed interest in participating in BRICS, either as full members or partners.

Since October 7, 2023, the war of images has eclipsed the war of weapons. From Gaza’s pulverised hospitals and starving infants to mass graves and desperate fathers digging through rubble, every pixel captured on a smartphone strikes deeper than a missile.

These raw, unfiltered, and undeniable images have a far greater impact than any press conference or official speech. And for the first time in its history, Israel cannot delete them or drown them in propaganda.

The horrifying images of the Israeli army massacring people at aid distribution locations prompted newspaper Haaretz’s Gideon Levy to write on June 29: “Is Israel perpetrating genocide in Gaza? […] The testimonies and images emerging from Gaza don’t leave room for many questions.”

Even staunchly pro-Israel commentator and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman no longer buys into the Israeli narrative. In a May 9 op-ed, addressed to US President Donald Trump, he declared: “This Israeli government is not our ally,” clarifying that it is “behaving in ways that threaten hard-core US interests in the region”.

Once, Israel’s narrative was protected by the gates of editorial rooms and the gravity of Western guilt. But the smartphone shattered those gates. What we see now is no longer what Israel tells us — it’s what Gaza shows us.

The platforms carrying these images — TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, X — don’t prioritise context; they prioritise virality. While older generations might look away, younger ones are glued to the stream of suffering, absorbed by every pixel, every siren, every moment of destruction. The global public is agitated, and this works against the Israeli interest. Israel is no longer just at war with its neighbours; it is at war with the lens itself.

The psychological toll of this visual war is reverberating deep inside Israeli society. For decades, Israelis were conditioned to see themselves as global narrators of trauma, not subjects of international scrutiny. But now, with videos of Israeli bombardment, flattened Gaza neighbourhoods, and emaciated children flooding every platform, many Israelis are grappling with a growing ethical predicament.

There is unease, even among centrists, that these visceral images are eroding Israel’s moral high ground. For the first time, public discourse in Israeli society includes fear of the mirror: what the world now sees and what Israelis are forced to confront.

Internationally, the effect has been even more destabilising for Israel’s diplomatic standing. Longstanding allies, once unconditionally supportive, now face growing domestic pressure from citizens who are not consuming official statements but TikTok’s live streams and Instagram’s image feed.

Lawmakers in Europe and North America are openly questioning arms shipments, trade deals, and diplomatic cover, not because of the briefings they have on Israeli war crimes but because their inboxes are flooded with screenshots of scattered body parts and starving children.

The battlefield has expanded into parliaments, campuses, city councils, and editorial rooms. This is the backlash of a war Israel cannot win with brute force. To regain control of the narrative, Israeli officials have pressured social media platforms to curb content they dislike. Yet even Israel’s most sophisticated public diplomacy efforts are struggling to keep pace with the virality of raw documentation.

Behind closed doors, the Israeli military is no longer merely worried about public relations; it is concerned about prosecution. The Israeli army has admonished soldiers for taking selfies and filming themselves demolishing Palestinian homes, warning that such material is now being harvested as evidence by international human rights organisations.

Footage and images from social media have already been used by activists to target Israeli servicemen abroad. In a number of cases, Israeli citizens have had to flee countries they were visiting due to war crimes complaints filed against them.

In the age of smartphones, the occupation is no longer just visible — it’s indictable.

In the past, Israel fought wars that it could explain. Now, it fights a battle it can only react to — often too belatedly and too clumsily. The smartphone captures what the missile conceals. Social media disseminates information that official briefings attempt to suppress. The haunting images, digitally preserved, ensure that we never forget any devastating atrocity, or act of brutality.

Images of conflict do not just convey information; they can also redefine our perceptions and influence our political positions. The powerful “Napalm Girl” photo that captured the aftermath of an attack by the US-allied South Vietnamese army on civilians during the Vietnam War had a profound impact on American society. It helped create a significant shift in public opinion regarding the war, accelerating the decision of the US government to end it.

Today, in Gaza, the stream of powerful images does not stop. Despite Israel’s best efforts, the global opinion is overwhelmingly against its genocidal war.

Smartphones have completely changed the nature of conflict by putting a camera in the hands of every witness. In this new era, Israel struggles to defeat the relentless, unfiltered visual record of its crimes that calls for justice.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting the United States on Monday, a visit analysts expect will focus on celebrating Israel and the US’s self-anointed victory against Iran and discussing a proposal for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

This is the third time this year Netanyahu will be meeting US President Donald Trump, who claims the US and Israel “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme during a 12-day war and that he would resume bombing Iran if it restarts nuclear activities.

Last week, Trump said Israel had agreed to conditions for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza, which would allow all parties to work towards an end to Israel’s 21-month-long war on the besieged enclave.

On July 4, Hamas gave a “positive” response to Qatari and Egyptian mediators about the latest ceasefire proposal.

Is a ceasefire realistic?

On Friday, after Hamas’s response to the proposal, Trump said there could be a “deal next week” and promised to be “very firm” with Netanyahu to ensure a ceasefire.

Israel has since said that Hamas has requested changes to the proposal that it found “unacceptable”, but that Israeli negotiators would be going to Qatar on Sunday to discuss the proposal.

According to a leaked copy of the deal obtained by Al Jazeera, the ceasefire entails a 60-day pause in hostilities and a phased release of some of the 58 Israeli captives held in Gaza since a Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 57,000 people, mostly women and children, in what United Nations experts, legal scholars and human rights groups describe as a genocide against Palestinians.

Many experts told Al Jazeera that they are not optimistic a temporary ceasefire will lead to a permanent end to the war.

“The way [the ceasefire talks] are being framed leaves me sceptical,” said Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council for Global Affairs.

Rahman added that he believes Trump was focused on getting the Israeli captives released, but not on ending the war and the suffering of the people of Gaza.

Trump previously promised an end to the war after pushing for a ceasefire just days before he became president in January.

However, two months later, Trump did nothing when Israel unilaterally resumed its attacks on Gaza, killing thousands more people.

Mairav Zonszein, an expert on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, said that could happen again.

“It all rests on Trump and the US to sustain real pressure [on Netanyahu], but that is highly doubtful,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I’m optimistic there could be some kind of ceasefire, but longevity and the terms are highly questionable,” Zonszein said.

“It’s also possible we could see a ceasefire that does not last because … Israel still every so often just bombs something without repercussions [in Gaza],” she added.

Yaser al-Banna, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, said many in the Strip are divided over whether a ceasefire will end the war. While everyone prays it will, some people cannot imagine Netanyahu sticking to a deal.

Netanyahu insists that the war will not end without a “total victory” over Hamas, a concept he has not defined.

“About half the people in Gaza are very pessimistic… The other half believes this time could be different due to shared interests among Israel, the Palestinians, Arab states and the US to end this war,” he said.

Glory and pragmatism

Many analysts believe that Trump is driven by his desire to strike grandiose deals in order to boast about his achievements in global affairs.

On Monday, he is likely to take credit for ostensibly dismantling Iran’s nuclear programme – even though that may not be true – and express his desire to retrieve the rest of the Israeli captives in Gaza.

He also wants to get the “Gaza issue” out of the way to pursue more normalisation deals between Israel and neighbouring Arab states, said Khaled Elgindy, an expert on Israel-Palestine and a professor of Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

“Trump wants to be able to say that he got back the Israeli hostages… and got a Palestinian state… Then he can call himself master of the universe, but getting those things is much harder than he thinks,” Elgindy told Al Jazeera.

It’s unclear whether Netanyahu’s political calculations align with Trump’s ambitions.

Israel’s next parliamentary elections have to take place before October 2026, and Netanyahu could go to the polls sooner, riding on a likely wave of popularity if he succeeds in returning the remaining captives.

Like Trump, he would also tout what he terms a stunning victory against Iran to the Israeli public.

Those considerations are important because it is likely that Netanyahu’s frail far-right coalition, held together by pressure to prolong the war on Gaza, would collapse if a permanent ceasefire is reached, said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“At the end of [the possible] 60-day ceasefire, [Netanyahu] could go to elections by committing to a full end to the war and collapse his coalition; or he could go back to war to keep his [far-right] coalition together should he judge the time not right for elections,” he told Al Jazeera.

A possible, nearly unfathomable, outcome

Staying in office is particularly important for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who faces several domestic legal charges of fraud and bribery.

During his much-anticipated meeting with Trump, experts expect them to discuss Netanyahu’s trial, which many believe plays a large role in dictating his political calculations.

Netanyahu’s position as prime minister has enabled him to undermine the Israeli judicial system by appointing loyalists to high courts and delaying court hearings – an influence he would lose if his coalition unravels.

Trump is acutely aware of Netanyahu’s dilemma.

On June 25, he called on Israel to drop the charges against Netanyahu, referring to the trial as a “witch hunt”.Trump’s comments suggest that he is trying to pressure Netanyahu’s opponents to issue a pardon in exchange for ending the war on Gaza, said Georgetown’s Elgindy.

Elgindy referenced Trump’s recent social media post where he alluded to suspending military aid to Israel unless charges against Netanyahu were dropped.

“The United States of America spends Billions of Dollars a year, far more than any other Nation, protecting and supporting Israel. We are not going to stand for this,” Trump wrote on June 28.

That would be a major – almost unfathomable – decision to emerge out of the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, said Elgindy.

“I don’t see him following through, but this is a typical [threat] that Trump would make,”  he told Al Jazeera.  “His [modus operandi] is to blackmail and coerce. That is his version of diplomacy.”

Elgindy added that it was distressing that Trump would threaten to cut military aid to Israel to protect Netanyahu and not beleaguered, starving Palestinians in Gaza.

The decision to pardon Netanyahu lies with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, but such a move would be unprecedented, and the president has not indicated that he plans to do so.

Analysts believe Herzog may be willing to pardon Netanyahu if he agrees to exit political life, but not simply to secure a ceasefire.

Zonszein, from Crisis Group, adds that there are lawyers and justices in Israel who have warned “for years” that it is in the public’s interest to reach a plea bargain with Netanyahu due to the power he holds over the country.

Their only condition is for Netanyahu to agree to leave politics.

“I don’t think that is something Netanyahu is considering. If he was willing to leave political life, then he could have already negotiated a plea bargain,” she told Al Jazeera.