Israeli strike kills senior Gaza rescue service official and four family members – health officials
The deputy director of the Gaza Civil Emergency Service and four members of his family have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia on Sunday, health officials in Gaza said.
Mohammad Morsi was deputy director of the Gaza Civil Emergency Service in the northern areas of the Gaza Strip.
The Civil Emergency Service said in a statement that Morsi’s death raised to 83 the number of its members killed by Israeli fire since 7 October, Reuters reported.
There was no immediate Israeli comment on Morsi’s death.
Residents said Israeli forces had also blown up several houses in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City 5 km from Jabalia.
Medical teams said they were unable to answer desperate calls by some of the residents who had reported being trapped inside their houses, some wounded.
“We hear constant bombing in Zeitoun, we know they are blowing up houses there, we don’t sleep because of the sounds of explosions, the roaring of tanks sound close and the drones don’t stop circling,” said one resident of Gaza City, who lives about 1km away.
“The occupation is wiping out Zeitoun, we are afraid about the people trapped in there,” he told Reuters via a chat app, refusing to be named.
Key events
Hamas official ‘praised’ Allenby Bridge crossing attack – Reuters
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri praised the attack, referring to it as a response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
“We expect many more similar actions,” he said.
Netanyahu says ‘loathsome terrorist’ murdered civilians ‘in cold blood’
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has commented following the attack in which three Israeli civilians were killed near the Allenby Bridge crossing.
He said:
This is a difficult day. A loathsome terrorist murdered in cold blood three of our civilians.
Here is more on the earlier incident (see 9.08am post) in which three Israelis were killed.
Reuters reports that Israeli authorities said a gunman crossing from Jordan killed the three civilians at the Allenby Bridge border in the occupied West Bank on Sunday before being shot dead by security forces.
The Israeli manager of the crossing said three workers were shot at close range by the driver.
The Israeli military said:
A terrorist approached the area of the Allenby Bridge from Jordan in a truck, exited the truck, and opened fire at the Israeli security forces operating at the bridge.
The terrorist was eliminated by the security forces, three Israeli civilians were pronounced dead as a result of the attack.
Jordan is investigating the shooting.
The Israel Airports Authority closed its land border crossings with Jordan following the attack.
A Jordanian border official said at least two dozen Jordanian truck drivers in the offloading area had been detained by Israel’s military for interrogation.
It was the first attack of its kind along the border with Jordan since 7 October, when Hamas carried out an assault on southern Israel, sparking the war in Gaza that has since escalated throughout the region.
The crossing, also known as the King Hussein Bridge, lies about midway between Amman and Jerusalem just north of the Dead Sea.
Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and have close security ties.
Dozens of trailers cross daily from Jordan, with goods from Jordan and the Gulf that supply both the West Bank and Israeli markets.
Israel has closed its land border crossings with Jordan, following the attack at Allenby Bridge crossing, according to the Israel Airports Authority.
Israeli strike kills senior Gaza rescue service official and four family members – health officials
The deputy director of the Gaza Civil Emergency Service and four members of his family have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia on Sunday, health officials in Gaza said.
Mohammad Morsi was deputy director of the Gaza Civil Emergency Service in the northern areas of the Gaza Strip.
The Civil Emergency Service said in a statement that Morsi’s death raised to 83 the number of its members killed by Israeli fire since 7 October, Reuters reported.
There was no immediate Israeli comment on Morsi’s death.
Residents said Israeli forces had also blown up several houses in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City 5 km from Jabalia.
Medical teams said they were unable to answer desperate calls by some of the residents who had reported being trapped inside their houses, some wounded.
“We hear constant bombing in Zeitoun, we know they are blowing up houses there, we don’t sleep because of the sounds of explosions, the roaring of tanks sound close and the drones don’t stop circling,” said one resident of Gaza City, who lives about 1km away.
“The occupation is wiping out Zeitoun, we are afraid about the people trapped in there,” he told Reuters via a chat app, refusing to be named.
King Hussein Bridge closed as authorities investigate shooting – Jordanian official
More on the shooting in which three Israeli civilians were killed. (see 9.08am post)
Jordan has closed the King Hussein Bridge crossing (also known as the Allenby Bridge) as it investigates the incident, a Jordanian official told Reuters.
The incident occurred in a commercial cargo area under Israeli control where Jordanian trucks offload cargo entering the occupied West Bank from the kingdom.
West Bank residents tell of teargas then shots before US woman’s death
US officials have insisted that a ceasefire in Gaza is close even as fighting rages unabated in the blockaded Palestinian territory and violence spirals in the occupied West Bank, where witnesses told the Observer an American-Turkish dual national was killed by Israeli forces on Friday.
William Burns, who is also the US’s chief negotiator in the indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, echoed secretary of state Antony Blinken during a speech in London on Saturday in which he said that “90% of the text had been agreed but the last 10% is always the hardest”.
But pressure from the US, Israel’s most important ally, and the two mediators speaking to Hamas, Qatar and Egypt, has done little to assuage the fighting in Gaza or rising tensions in the West Bank.
The US has also said it is urgently seeking more information about the killing of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, who witnesses said was shot in the head by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops during an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank on Friday. Several of Israel’s western allies, including the US, have recently imposed sanctions on individuals and organisations associated with Israel’s settler movement, despite blowback from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which includes far-right supporters of Israeli extremism in the West Bank.
Eygi’s family have called for an independent investigation into her killing, adding to the pressure on the Biden administration to end what critics say is US complicity in the Israeli occupation.
Read the full report here.
Three civilians killed near Jordan border crossing – Israeli army
Israel’s army said three Israeli civilians were killed in what police described as a “shooting attack” near the Allenby Crossing between the occupied West Bank and Jordan on Sunday morning.
A Magen David Adom emergency service statement said:
We found three men lying unconscious, with no pulse and not breathing, with gunshot wounds. Together with the IDF (Israeli military) medical team, we performed resuscitation efforts, but unfortunately, we had to declare their deaths on scene.
Israeli police said an attacker had been “neutralised”, Agence France-Presse reported.
The Israeli army said the shooter had approached Allenby Bridge from Jordan in a truck, got out and opened fire, Reuters reported.
Hezbollah says rockets fired at Israeli town after attack kills Lebanon rescuers
Hezbollah announced retaliatory rocket fire targeting a town in northern Israel early Sunday, hours after Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli attack killed three civil defence personnel in the country’s south, AFP reports.
Hezbollah said it had bombarded “Kiryat Shmona with a volley of Falaq rockets” early Sunday “in response to the enemy attacks … and particularly the attack” that killed the emergency workers in the Lebanese village of Froun.
On Saturday, Lebanon’s health ministry said three emergency personnel were killed and two wounded in an Israeli attack on a civil defence team that had been fighting fires in the country’s south.
“Israeli enemy targeting of a Lebanese civil defence team that was putting out fires sparked by the recent Israeli strikes in the village of Froun led to the martyrdom of three emergency responders,” the health ministry said in a statement.
Two others were wounded, one of them critically, the ministry added.
Lebanon’s civil defence said in a statement that three of its employees were killed in “an Israeli strike that targeted a firefighting vehicle after they had finished a firefighting mission”.
More than a dozen people killed in air raids on Gaza
Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip have killed more than a dozen people, the Associated Press reports.
In central Gaza’s urban refugee camp of Nuseirat, Al-Awda hospital said it received the bodies of nine people killed in two air raids. One hit a residential building, killing four people and wounding at least 10, while five people were killed in a strike on a house in western Nuseirat.
Separately, Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, central Gaza’s main hospital, said a woman and her two children were killed in a strike on a house in the nearby urban refugee camp of Bureij.
In northern Gaza, an airstrike on a school turned shelter for displaced people in the town of Jabaliya killed at least four people and wounded about two dozen others, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense authority, which operates under the territory’s Hamas-run government.
Israel’s military said it struck a Hamas command post embedded in a former school compound.
Violence has also spiked in the occupied West Bank. A days-long military operation in Jenin left dozens of dead.
Thousands rally across Israel in new wave of protest
Huge numbers of Israelis again poured into the streets to protest against the government’s failure to secure the return of remaining hostages in Gaza, the Associated Press reports.
The new protest came a week after one of the largest demonstrations of the war after the discovery of another six dead hostages in Gaza, and after prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against pressure for a ceasefire deal and declared that “no one will preach to me”.
Israel has been under increasing pressure from the US and other allies to reach a ceasefire deal, but Netanyahu insists on continued Israeli control of the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow band along Gaza’s border with Egypt where Israel contends Hamas smuggles weapons. Egypt and Hamas deny it.
Opening summary
Welcome back to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider crisis in the Middle East.
Huge numbers of demonstrators rallied on Saturday evening in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities to protest against the government’s failure to secure the return of remaining hostages in Gaza, the Associated Press reports.
In Gaza, hospital and local authorities said Israeli air raids in the territory killed more than a dozen people overnight into Saturday.
More details on those stories shortly, in other key developments:
-
Israeli military strikes across the Palestinian Gaza Strip killed at least 61 people in the space of 48 hours, local medics said on Saturday, as Israeli forces battled Hamas-led militants in the territory. Eleven months into the war, numerous rounds of diplomacy have so far failed to clinch a ceasefire deal to end the conflict and bring the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza as well as many Palestinians jailed in Israel.
-
British and American spy chiefs have said they are together “working ceaselessly” for a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, in a rare public statement. MI6 chief Sir Richard Moore and CIA director Bill Burns said the two agencies have “exploited our intelligence channels to push hard for restraint and de-escalation” in the Middle East, PA Media reported.
-
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said it was incumbent on both Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to make concessions to reach a deal. On Saturday, senior Hamas official Hossam Badran said the group had made no new demands and remained committed to a 2 July proposal put forward by the United States, accusing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of attaching new conditions that would not end the war. Netanyahu says it was Hamas that introduced unacceptable conditions.
-
The UK decision to suspend some arms exports to Israel has bolstered the case for Congress to follow the example of its ally, US campaigners for a ban have said. The campaigners are pressing the US Senate and the house to pass a joint resolution of disapproval blocking authorisation for an unprecedented $20bn (£15.2bn) weapons sale. The massive transfer was notified to Congress last month when it was in recess.
-
Residents of Khan Younis and displaced families from Rafah continued to crowd medical facilities, bringing their children to be vaccinated against polio. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said at least 160,000 children received the drops on Thursday in southern areas of Gaza, where medical staffers began the second stage in the huge immunisation campaign.