The Israeli Army dropped thousands of leaflets over Gaza City on July 10 urging all residents to flee a heavy offensive that has rocked the main city of the besieged Palestinian territory.

The leaflets, addressed to “everyone in Gaza City”, set out designated escape routes to the south and warned that the urban area, previously home to more than half a million people, would “remain a dangerous combat zone”.

The warning follows three partial evacuation orders and came as Israeli troops, backed by tanks and aircraft, have fought Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the heaviest combat operations the city has seen in months.

In one operation, the Army said it had killed militants and found weapons inside the long-vacated Gaza City headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Elsewhere across Gaza, deadly strikes have hit four schools used as shelters in four days, sparking international outrage.

The upsurge in fighting and displacement came as mediator Qatar was due to resume talks on Wednesday toward a truce and hostage release deal to end the war, now grinding on into its 10th month.

An Israeli delegation led by Mossad chief David Barnea arrived in Doha for the talks, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their sensitivity.

CIA director William Burns was also expected in the Qatari capital, after holding talks in Cairo on Tuesday.

The latest fighting in Gaza has newly displaced 3,50,000 civilians, said UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, who spoke before the latest leaflet drop and said “there is absolutely no safe space in Gaza”.

One woman carrying her scant belongings through the bombed-out wasteland, Nimr al-Jamal, told AFP on Tuesday that “this is the 12th time” her family has had to flee.

“How many times can we endure this? A thousand times? Where will we end up?”

Hamas, whose October 7 attack started the war, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of escalating the fighting to derail the latest ceasefire talks.

Also Read | Israel’s new strikes in Gaza City threaten truce talks: Hamas

The Islamist group’s armed wing said this week the resurgent battles in Gaza City were “the most intense in months”, while deadly strikes have also hit elsewhere across the territory.

Israel’s military said it had “eliminated” Palestinian militants operating from inside the city’s UNRWA headquarters and found “large amounts of weapons” inside.

The U.N. agency’s head of communications Juliette Touma told AFP it was hard to know if people were sheltering in the building “as we don’t have regular access to Gaza City”.

‘Death and misery’

The Israeli Army said it was reviewing an attack on Tuesday in which hospital sources said at least 29 people were killed in a school used as a shelter in the southern Khan Younis area.

Germany said the strike was “unacceptable” and called for a rapid investigation into the incident.

“Civilians, especially children, must not get caught in the crossfire,” the Foreign Ministry posted on X. “The repeated attacks on schools by the Israeli army must stop and an investigation must come quickly.”

Gaza’s Hamas government said a “majority” of the dead were women and children.

AFP footage showed the wounded being rushed to the nearby Nasser hospital, many screaming in pain, as relatives wailed in grief for the dead.

One wounded man, Osama Abu Daqqa, recounted that “suddenly the strike hit, people were injured and martyred and there was no one to help them”.

Also Read | Airstrike kills 25 in southern Gaza as Israeli assault on Gaza City shuts down medical facilities

Another survivor, Mohamed Sukkar, said that “without any warning, rockets were fired at a group of people who were browsing the internet. They were not part of the resistance nor were they armed, they were all civilians.”

The military said that the strike had killed a Hamas “terrorist” who had taken part in the October 7 attack and that it was “looking into the reports that civilians were harmed, adjacent to the Al Awda school”, which it acknowledged was “near the location of the strike”.

“The incident is under review.”

Three previous Israeli strikes since Saturday on Gaza schools used by displaced Palestinians have killed a total of at least 20 people, according to Gaza officials and rescue services.

Mr. Lazzarini wrote on social media site X that “schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery”.

‘She is alone’

Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 the military says are dead.

Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed at least 38,295 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

Israel has also imposed a punishing siege on Gaza’s 2.4 million people, eased only by sporadic aid deliveries.

Independent U.N. rights experts on Tuesday accused Israel of carrying out a “targeted starvation campaign” that constituted “a form of genocidal violence”.

Israel’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva accused the panel’s members of “spreading misinformation” and “supporting Hamas propaganda”.

Elad Goren of Israel’s COGAT, the military department handling aid to Gaza, said an average of 250 trucks were entering through the Kerem Shalom crossing, half of the daily capacity — a shortfall he blamed on problems on the Palestinian side.

In Israel, meanwhile, protesters have regularly taken to the streets to demand the Netanyahu government strike a deal to bring home the hostages.

Some of the captives’ relatives spoke about their fear, especially of the risk of female captives being abused, at a virtual press conference by the Hostages Families Forum.

“My life stopped on the 7th of October,” said Simona Steinbrecher, mother of the hostage Doron Steinbrecher. “I know she is alone there and I cannot help her.”

Gaza:

Tank tracks still fresh on his field in southern Gaza’s coastal area of Al-Mawasi, Nedal Abu Jazar lamented the damage war has wrought on his trees and crops.

“Look at the destruction,” the 39-year-old farmer told AFP, holding an uprooted tomato plant.

He pointed to his greenhouse’s metal frame and its white plastic sheeting strewn across the plot, inside an area designated a humanitarian zone by the Israeli army.

“People were sitting peacefully on their farmland … and suddenly tanks arrived and fired at us, and then there were (air) strikes.”

Abu Jazar said the Israeli operation in late June destroyed about 40 dunams (10 acres) of land and killed five labourers.

His is not an isolated case. Across Gaza, 57 percent of agricultural land has been damaged since the war began, according to a joint assessment published in June by the UN’s agriculture and satellite imagery agencies, FAO and UNOSAT.

The damage threatens Gaza’s food sovereignty, Matieu Henry of the Food and Agriculture Organization told AFP, because 30 percent of the Palestinian territory’s food consumption comes from agricultural land.

“If almost 60 per cent of the agricultural land has been damaged, this may have a significant impact in terms of food security and food supply.”

The Gaza Strip exported $44.6 million worth of produce in 2022, mainly to the West Bank and Israel, with strawberries and tomatoes representing 60 percent of the total, according to FAO data.

That number fell to zero after the October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 38,098 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

The damage assessment on the agricultural land comes as the UN’s hunger monitoring system estimated in June that 96 percent of Gaza faces high levels of acute food insecurity.

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army said it “does not intentionally harm agricultural land”.

In a statement, it said Hamas “often operates from within orchards, fields and agricultural land”.

No work, no income

The impact is worse in the Palestinian territory’s north, where 68 percent of agricultural land is damaged, although the southern area encompassing parts of Al-Mawasi has seen the most significant increase in recent months due to military operations.

UNOSAT’s Lars Bromley told AFP the damage is generally “due to the impact of activities such as heavy vehicle activity, bombing, shelling, and other conflict-related dynamics, which would be things like areas burning”.

Near the southern city of Rafah, 34-year-old farmer Ibrahim Dheir feels helpless after the destruction of 20 dunams (five acres) of land he used to lease, and all his farming equipment with it.

“As soon as the Israeli bulldozers and tanks entered the area, they began bulldozing cultivated lands with various trees, including fruits, citrus, guava, as well as crops like spinach, molokhia (jute mallow), eggplant, squash, pumpkin and sunflower seedlings,” he said, before listing more damage in a testimony of the area’s past agricultural abundance.

Dheir, whose family exported its produce to the West Bank and Israel, now feels destitute.

“We used to depend on agriculture for our livelihood day by day, but now there’s no work or income.”

Lasting damage

Farmer Abu Mahmoud Za’arab also finds himself with “no source of income”.

The 60-year-old owns 15 dunams (3.7 acres) of land on which crops and fruit trees used to grow.

“The Israeli army passed through the land, completely wiping out all trees and crops,” he told AFP.

“They bulldozed and shelled the land, turning it into barren pits.”

The harm done to farmland in Gaza will last far beyond tank tracks and explosions, said Bromley of UNOSAT.

“With modern weaponry, a certain percentage is always going to fail. Tank shells won’t explode, artillery shells won’t explode … so clearing that unexploded ordnance is a massive task,” he said.

It will require “probing every centimetre of the soil before you can allow the farmers back onto it”.

Despite the risks, Dheir wants to return to farming.

“We want the war to stop and things to return to how they were so we can farm and cultivate our lands again.”

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Cairo:

On October 6, 2023, Palestinian karate champion Mais Elbostami went to bed thrilled after winning a competition in the Gaza Strip. She awoke the next day to a different world.

“I’d won first place,” the shy 18-year-old told AFP from a Cairo suburb, where her family now lives after escaping the war and where she is training in the hope to one day represent her country internationally.

She said she “hadn’t even hung up the medals” she won on October 6 before Hamas militants launched an unprecedented attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

Immediately, she and her family fled south from their home in the northern Gaza Strip as Israel launched a relentless retaliatory military campaign.

Over the past nine months, the war has reduced much of the besieged Palestinian territory to rubble and killed more than 38,000 people, according to Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry.

Amid the hell of bombing and displacement, “every hour that passed felt like it aged you by a year”, said Elbostami.

Death was all around her.

“In the first 10 days alone, I lost my coach Jamal al-Khairy, and his granddaughter who used to train with me,” she said.

When the family made it to the Egyptian capital in April, Elbostami had two things on her mind: making sure relatives back home were safe, and getting back to her karate training.

‘Raise the flag’

Despite being trapped in Gaza, Palestinian national team coach Hassan al-Raiy put her in touch with the Egyptian team, and within two weeks she was back on the mat.

“My coaches here in Egypt have practically adopted me, and they’re working with me so I can get good enough to compete in the next championships,” she said.

Whenever she can, she spars on the mat. But with limited resources and gym time, Elbostami has also had to train in the streets and gardens around her house.

She often finds her mind wandering to Gaza’s Mediterranean shore.

“Training back home was different. Every Friday my teammates and I would go and train by the sea,” she said.

Karate is known for its strong focus on discipline and self-control, and this has helped the young karateka to “detach from reality” — living as a refugee from a brutal war — even for a little while.

“My emotions sometimes get the best of me. There are times I can’t get through a full session” without remembering “fleeing on foot as air strikes fell all around us”, she said.

Elbostami tries to focus on her goal — “to represent my country and raise its flag in international competitions”.

‘It’s for my country’

She has a long way to go, and her first stop on that journey is Egypt’s own national championships in August.

“It’s a tough challenge,” she said, because Egyptian karate athletes have historically outperformed their Palestinian counterparts.”

“But it will bring my level up, too.”

Elbostami’s Egyptian coach, Mamdouh Salem, told AFP that the teenager was an “athlete with a lot of potential, dedication and persistence”.

“We’re working on her technique, but ultimately karate is more a game of skill than talent — I expect Mais will excel.”

He said he wants to help her raise the Palestinian flag around the world.

“If we can’t fight with them” in Gaza, “we can at least help them represent their country abroad”, he said, echoing widespread Egyptian solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Her Gazan teammates, coaches and most of her relatives may remain trapped in Gaza — and she said dozens of them have been killed — but against all odds, Elbostami has survived.

“So I don’t have any excuse to keep me from achieving my goal,” she said.

“I’ll do everything I can to highlight the Palestinian cause. Every championship and every time I represent Palestine, it’s for my country, for the martyrs and for the wounded.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Geneva:

Around nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been displaced at least once since the war between Israel and Hamas began, the UN humanitarian agency said Wednesday.

Andrea De Domenico, head of the United Nations’ OCHA agency in the Palestinian territories, said that around 1.9 million people are thought to be displaced in Gaza.

“We estimate that nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not up to 10 times, unfortunately, since October,” he told reporters in New York and Geneva, speaking from Jerusalem.

“Before we were estimating 1.7 (million) but since that number, we had the operation in Rafah, and we had additional displacement from Rafah,” he said, explaining the increase.

“Then we had also operations in the north that has also moved people,” he added.

He said such military operations had forced people to reset their lives, over and over again.

“Behind these numbers, there are people… that have fears and grievances. And they had probably dreams and hopes; the less and less, I fear today, unfortunately,” De Domenico said.

“People who in the last nine months have been moved around like pawns in a board game.”

He said the Gaza Strip had been cut in two by Israel’s military operations, with OCHA estimating that there were 300,000-350,000 people living in the north of the besieged territory who were unable to go to the south.

Meanwhile he added that since the war began, an estimated 110,000 people had managed to leave the Gaza Strip before the Rafah crossing into Egypt was closed in early May.

De Domenico said some had remained in Egypt while others had since moved onwards.

The bloodiest-ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive since then has killed at least 37,953 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Israeli tanks take position near the Israel-Gaza border, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza said Tuesday that 1.9 million people 80% of the territory’s population were now displaced, adding she was “deeply concerned” by reports of new evacuation orders for Khan Yunis.

The United Nations has estimated that up to 250,000 people are impacted by the Israeli military order for civilians to leave parts of Khan Yunis and Rafah in Gaza, which has a total population of 2.4 million.

“Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering — their home lives shattered, their lives upended,” the UN coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the Security Council.

“Over one million people have been displaced once again, desperately seeking shelter and safety, (and) 1.9 million people are now displaced across Gaza,” she said.

“I’m deeply concerned about reports of new evacuation orders issued in the area of Khan Yunis,” Kaag added.

“The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”

She said that not enough aid was reaching the war-torn strip, and that the opening of new crossings, particularly to southern Gaza, was necessary to avert a humanitarian disaster.

Kaag said the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt should be reopened, and also pleaded with the international community to do more to fund relief efforts.

Aid volumes entering Gaza had “dropped significantly” since the start of the Israeli operation in Rafah, she added.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman said “yesterday’s orders for the evacuations of 117 square kilometers in Khan Yunis and Rafah governorates apply to about a third of the Gaza Strip, making it the largest such order since October.”

“An evacuation of such a massive scale will only heighten the suffering of civilians,” said the spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel — which triggered the Israeli offensive — resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,925 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Israel has not specifically said there will be a military operation in southern Gaza, but so far nearly every evacuation order has heralded major battles.

Looking beyond the conflict, the UN ambassador for Security Council member Slovenia questioned whether a ceasefire would significantly ease the humanitarian crisis.

“What’s the guarantee that it will be easier to deliver aid? Because there will be still checkpoints there… there will be still no trucks,” said the envoy, Samuel Zbogar.

“There might be still problems, and big expectations, after a ceasefire.”

Palestinian Territories:

Israeli forces carried out deadly strikes Tuesday on southern Gaza after the army again ordered Palestinians to leave areas near the besieged territory’s border with Israel and Egypt.

Witnesses reported intense bombing and shelling around Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s main city from which Israeli forces withdrew in early April after a devastating months-long battle.

A hospital source in the city said shelling killed eight people and wounded more than 30 others.

The bombardment came after a rocket barrage at southern Israel claimed by the group Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas.

This was followed by an order to evacuate most areas east of the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah, including the towns of Al-Qarara and Bani Suhaila.

Bani Suhaila resident Ahmad Najjar said the Israeli order has spurred “fear and extreme anxiety”, and “there is a large displacement of residents”.

Six consecutive days of intense battles followed a similar evacuation order issued last week for the Gaza City district of Shujaiya.

An AFP correspondent reported artillery shelling in the northern area on Tuesday, and witnesses said gun battles raged on.

The military said its forces were operating in Shujaiya, central Gaza and Rafah, where aircraft carried out strikes and troops “ambushed an armed terrorist squad” in a car and killed them.

Over the past day, the Israeli air force “struck approximately 30 terror targets” across Gaza, said a military statement.

In Shujaiya, Palestinian militants “were eliminated and dozens of terrorist infrastructure sites above and below ground were dismantled, including tunnel shafts”, it added.

‘Downshift’ 

In central Gaza, witnesses said strikes hit the Nuseirat refugee camp where the Palestinian Red Crescent reported at least one dead, a child.

Other parts of the Gaza Strip were reeling from continued fighting nearly nine months into the war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

Months of on-and-off talks towards a truce and hostage release deal have meanwhile made little progress, even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently declared that the “intense phase” of the war was winding down.

“We’ve heard the Israelis talk about a significant downshift in their operations in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday.

“It remains to be seen.”

The latest order to leave parts of southern Gaza follows an evacuation of Rafah nearly two months ago which had signalled the start of a long-feared Israeli ground offensive.

The fighting since then has again uprooted many Palestinians and led to the closure of a key aid crossing.

The United Nations and relief agencies have voiced alarm over the dire humanitarian crisis and the threat of starvation the war and Israeli siege have brought for Gaza’s 2.4 million people.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The operatives also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive aimed at eradicating the Palestinian militants in Gaza has killed at least 37,900 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Israeli authorities on Monday released Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital — the territory’s largest medical complex — along with dozens of other detainees returned to Gaza for treatment.

Speaking after his release, Abu Salmiya said he had suffered “severe torture” during his detention.

“Several inmates died in interrogation centres and were deprived of food and medicine,” he said.

‘Try peace’

Israel has accused Hamas of using Al-Shifa and other hospitals as a cover for military operations, claims Gaza militants have rejected.

Netanyahu, who has faced growing anger from protesters over his handling of the conflict as well as pressure from hardline coalition partners, criticised the release which he said had been made without his knowledge.

The Israeli premier said Abu Salmiya belongs “in prison” because Israeli hostages were “murdered and held” in the now ravaged hospital he runs.

Successive Israeli raids have reduced large parts of Al-Shifa to rubble.

The director’s return to Gaza was “a serious mistake and a moral failure”, Netanyahu said.

According to Abu Salmiya, Israel brought no charges against him during his seven-month detention.

Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency said the release was “to free up places in detention centres”.

Those freed “represent a lesser danger” and were not directly involved in attacks on Israeli civilians, it said.

In the Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Monday, thousands attended an event calling for an end to the war and “a better reality” for Israelis and Palestinians, according to activist Ibrahim Abu Ahmad.

“At any moment, we can start making peace,” said Israeli historian and author Yuval Noah Harari.

“We have already tried to make peace, and we weren’t good at it. So what? We aren’t that successful at making war either, and that doesn’t stop us from trying… It’s time to try peace again.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

AIMIM chief and the party’s lone Lok Sabha MP Asaduddin Owaisi claimed his home in Delhi’s high-security Ashoka Road area was vandalised with black ink by some unknown miscreants today.

Sharing a video of police officers wiping the ink off the plaque outside his residence, the MP wrote: “Some “unknown miscreants” vandalised my house with black ink today. I have now lost count of the number of times my Delhi residence has been targeted. When I asked the Delhi Police officials how this was happening right under their noses, they expressed helplessness.”

Some “unknown miscreants” vandalised my house with black ink today. I have now lost count the number of times my Delhi residence has targeted. When I asked @DelhiPolice officials how this was happening right under their nose, they expressed helplessness. @AmitShah this is… pic.twitter.com/LmOuXu6W63

— Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) June 27, 2024

Tagging Home Minister Amit Shah and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Mr Owaisi said. “Amit Shah, this is happening under your oversight. Om Birla, please tell us if MPs’ safety will be guaranteed or not.”

The MP, who registered a decisive win from Hyderabad by defeating the BJP’s firebrand candidate Kompella Madhavi Latha by over 3.38 lakh votes, also sent out a message for the “two-bit goons who keep targeting my house”.

“To the two-bit goons who keep targeting my house: this does not scare me… be men enough to face me. Do not scurry away after throwing some ink or pelting a few stones,” he wrote.

Last year, his Delhi home was attacked twice – once in August, when two glass panels on a door were found broken and another in February, when stones were thrown and the nameplate was damaged.

In 2022, his convoy came under fire in Uttar Pradesh while the MP was travelling from Meerut to Delhi. Mr Owaisi, who had a close shave, had said that four shots were fired at his cavalcade. Later two men were arrested in the case.

The five-time Hyderabad MP stirred a huge controversy earlier this week as he expressed solidarity with war-torn Palestine while taking oath as an MP.

The mention triggered massive outrage and strong reactions from members of the treasury benches, prompting the Chair to expunge it.

However, Mr Owaisi defended his Palestine chant and said: “Other members are also saying different things. I said ‘Jai Bheem, Jai Meem, Jai Telangana, Jai Palestine’. How is it wrong? Tell me the provision of the Constitution. You should also listen to what others said. I said what I had to. Read what Mahatma Gandhi had said about Palestine.”

Asked why he mentioned Palestine, Mr Owaisi clarified, “They are oppressed people”.

The Hyderabad MP could be disqualified for “demonstrating adherence to a foreign State, that is Palestine”, sources in the BJP said.

Union Minister and BJP leader Shobha Karandlaje wrote to the Home Minister’s office objecting to the speech and requested the pro tem Speaker to ask Mr Owaisi to take oath once again.

Modiin, Israel:

On a Tel Aviv overpass, former spy Gonen Ben Itzhak addresses a small gathering of flag-waving protesters worried about the future of Israel under longest-serving premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Motorists honk enthusiastically to the group from the road as they drive past, and a man on a scooter passing underneath shouts “Traitor!”

A former Shin Bet intelligence agent, Ben Itzhak once handled the son of a Hamas co-founder as an informant, to prevent attacks in the occupied West Bank.

Now he protests on the streets against Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition government.

“Netanyahu is really the biggest danger to the state of Israel, and believe me I arrested some of the biggest terrorists during the Second Intifada,” the 53-year-old told AFP at his home in Modiin, referring to the 2000-2005 Palestinian uprising.

“I know what is a terrorist. I think Netanyahu is dragging Israel into destruction.”

He cites Netanyahu’s recent tensions with US President Joe Biden — he accused him of delaying American arms deliveries for Israel’s Gaza war — as an example of why many believe the Israeli leader must go.

“Biden is the biggest supporter of Israel… and Netanyahu spit on his face,” said Ben Itzhak.

“He’s destroying the very important relationship with the United States.”

 ‘The Green Prince’ 

Ben Itzhak — who joined the security services in the 1990s after premier Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination — has become a leading figure in protests against Netanyahu.

He is part of the “Crime Minister” movement, and once stepped in front of the premier’s motorcade during a 2018 anti-corruption protest.

He ended up being tackled by the very security service he once worked for.

Prosecutors are still pressing ahead with a corruption trial against Netanyahu despite the war, and some protesters have tried to break through police lines to get to his home.

Years before his own protest, Ben Itzhak was the handler for Mosab Hassan Yousef, known as “The Green Prince” and the eldest offspring of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef.

He worked with the Hamas collaborator to follow Palestinian militants to thwart suicide operations, including arresting jailed Fatah figurehead Marwan Barghouti.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel could have been prevented by a double agent like Yousef reporting the plan, and the country’s security elite underestimated Hamas, the former spy believes.

“You need an old asset to call you and to tell you something is going wrong. And it seems like we didn’t have it,” he said.

“We think that our enemy is stupid. In the end, Hamas was smarter. It’s very hard to say.”

Ben Itzhak believes it is time to “change the equation” in Gaza — end the war and rally international support to put Mahmud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in charge.

 ‘Everything is explosive’ 

“The military rules the West Bank, rules Gaza. Enough. We need to find the solution,” he said.

Ben Itzhak accuses Netanyahu of propping up Hamas while seeking to nix any peace process so he can stay in power.

“Netanyahu thinks only about himself, about his criminal problems, how to survive politically in Israel,” he said.

Netanyahu has repeatedly denied allegations of corruption, and on Monday reiterated that Israeli forces will eliminate Hamas.

“We will not end the war (in Gaza) until we eliminate Hamas, and until we return residents of the south and north to their homes securely,” he told parliament.

The former agent also claims the Israeli leader has let ultranationalist security minister Itamar Ben Gvir use the police as his own “militia” to disrupt weekly anti-government protests in Tel Aviv.

He questions Netanyahu’s allegiance with the far-right Jewish Power party frontman who was once barred from the Israeli military and investigated by the country’s security services for extremism.

“God… didn’t help us on October 7, the way he didn’t help us in Auschwitz,” he said.

Ben Itzhak said he himself has jumped in front of a water cannon to protect protesters from increasing police brutality, which landed him with a conviction that was overturned in March.

“Today Israel from the inside is destroyed. He (Netanyahu) is destroying everything,” he said.

The more Netanyahu bends to the ultranationalist allies, the weaker Israel’s security, says Ben Itzhak, claiming that they are also taking control of the army and prison service.

“Everything is explosive now,” he said.

“I will tell Netanyahu… resign. This will be the biggest help you can do to the people of the State of Israel.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Nearly 166 million people worldwide are estimated to need urgent action against hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global partnership which measures food insecurity.

That includes nearly everyone in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military launched an offensive in October following an attack on Israel by Hamas militants. More than one million of Gaza’s inhabitants face the most extreme form of malnutrition – classified by the IPC as ‘Catastrophe or Famine.’

Seven-month-old Majd Salem is one of them.

Born on Nov. 1, three weeks after Israel launched the offensive, the child was being treated for a chest infection in the neonatal ICU at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on May 9. The nurse caring for him said he was suffering from severe malnutrition.

Majd was born at a healthy weight of 3.5 kg (7.7 pounds), said his mother, Nisreen al-Khateeb.

By May, when he was six months old, his weight had barely changed to 3.8 kg, she said – around 3 kg less than would be expected for a baby his age.

Majd, whose eyes keenly followed visiting reporters in the ward, had to be given antibiotics for the infection and fortified milk to boost his weight, his mother said. Reuters was unable to trace them after May 21, when the hospital was evacuated following an Israeli raid.

One in three children in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished or suffering from wasting, according to the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, citing data from its partners on the ground. Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run government media office, said their records showed 33 people had died of malnutrition in Gaza including 29 children, but added that the number could be higher.

COGAT, an Israeli defence ministry agency tasked with coordinating aid deliveries into Palestinian territories, did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Israel’s foreign ministry in late May issued a detailed statement questioning the IPC’s methods of analysis, which it said omitted measures Israel had taken to improve access to food in Gaza. The IPC declined to comment.

The plight of Gaza’s children is part of a bigger trend. Globally last year more than 36 million children under 5 were acutely malnourished, nearly 10 million of them severely, according to the Global Report on Food Crises, a collaborative analysis of food insecurity by 16 international organizations.

The food shortage in Gaza, while particularly widespread, comes amid a broader spike in extreme hunger as conflicts around the world intensify.

Two other countries – South Sudan and Mali – each have thousands of people living in zones listed on the IPC website as facing famine. Another 35 – including Sudan, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo – have many people in the IPC’s next-most acute category of food deprivation.

The IPC, a grouping of United Nations agencies, national governments and non-governmental organizations, is expected to update its assessment of the picture in war-torn Sudan in the coming weeks. A preliminary projection reported by Reuters earlier this month said as many as 756,000 people in Sudan could face catastrophic food shortages by September.

Gaza’s hunger crisis is also a product of war. The Israeli military invaded the Strip in response to the Oct. 7 cross-border assault by Hamas on Israel. More than 37,000 Palestinians and nearly 1,500 Israelis have been killed since then, Gazan and Israeli tallies show.

The Israeli assault has destroyed swathes of Gazan farmland. In the early days of the war, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza. It later allowed some humanitarian supplies to enter but is still facing international calls to let in more.

The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, in seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, last month accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, among other alleged crimes. Netanyahu, calling that move “a moral outrage of historic proportions,” said Israel is fighting in full compliance with international law and taking unprecedented measures to ensure aid reaches those in need.

Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid, which Hamas strongly denies. Israel has also said any distribution problems within Gaza are the fault of the international agencies.

Even when children survive, nutrition experts say food deprivation in the early years can do lasting damage.

A child’s brain develops at its fastest rate in the first two years of life. So even if they don’t starve to death or die from illness due to their weakened immune system, children may face delays in growth and development, said Aashima Garg, adviser on nutrition at UNICEF for the Middle East and North Africa.

“While they may be alive, they may not thrive that well in childhood and beyond,” she said.

Three families in Gaza told Reuters about their day-to-day diets, and four global health experts explained how such deprivation affects the growing body. Damage done in weeks manifests over years, they said.

“It can have a long-term impact on their immune system, their ability to absorb good nutrition, and on their cognitive and physical development,” said Hannah Stephenson, global head of nutrition and health at Save The Children, a non-profit.

FIRST DAYS

Gaza has the most households globally in the most extreme stage of food poverty, according to the IPC, which classifies levels of hunger in five categories, the worst of which is famine.

Households in North Gaza, where Majd lives, are already suffering a full-blown famine, Cindy McCain, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, said on May 5.

It can take months for the international measurement system to declare a famine. But the first damage to a child’s body is counted in days.

Nine out of 10 children aged 6 months to 2 years in Gaza live in severe child food poverty, a UNICEF survey in late May found. This means they are eating from two or fewer food groups a day, which UNICEF’s Garg said means grains or some form of milk.

This has been the case since December 2023, with only a slight improvement in April 2024, she said. As many as 85% of children of all ages did not eat for a whole day at least once in the three days before the survey was conducted.

The main cause of acute malnutrition in North Gaza is a lack of diversity in the diets of children and pregnant and breastfeeding women, according to a report in February 2024 from the Global Nutrition Cluster, a group of humanitarian agencies led by UNICEF.

This deficient intake, both prior to and during pregnancy and breastfeeding, harms both mothers and infants.

Abed Abu Mustafa, 49, a father of six, was still living in Gaza City in early April. He said people there already had eaten “almost every green plant we could find” and he hadn’t had meat or chicken for at least five months.

In Rafah in the south, Mariam, 33, a mother of five, has been living in a school along with two dozen of her relatives. She described a typical meal for her family before the conflict and what they are currently eating, shown below.

Before the war, Majd’s mother said an average family meal consisted of rice with chicken or meat, along with vegetables such as okra, cauliflower or peas. During the war, flour scarcity forced the family to make bread from animal feed. Recently, bread and canned goods like tuna and beans started to reappear, but these are not widely available.

Unable to find food to feed herself and forced to flee Israeli bombardment early in the war, Khateeb said she had found great difficulty in breastfeeding Majd.

She said she could find neither good quality baby formula nor clean water to mix it, so she fed him various types of powdered feed mixed with rainwater or brackish water from Gaza’s polluted wells, causing diarrhoea.

“There is no chance to get proper food to have breastmilk, there is no meat, no proteins, no calcium, none of the elements that produce good milk for the child,” she said.

Garg, the UNICEF adviser, said the nutrition of breastfeeding mothers in Gaza was severely compromised, and with it their ability to produce milk.

“They are not eating fruits and vegetables. They are not eating meat. They are not having much milk,” she said. This lack of nutrients translates into poor quality breast milk. Diluted formula is not safe and risks diarrhoea, which itself can be deadly.

Moderately malnourished mothers can still breastfeed, with their bodies effectively sacrificing their own nutritional needs to save the child. But severely malnourished women struggle.

Ahmed al-Kahlout, the nurse who heads the unit, said Majd’s infection was due to malnutrition.

“There is no immunity, so any disease that the child catches in the shelters … afflicts the child with these severe lung infections,” he said.

Susceptibility to infections typically increases after two weeks with insufficient food.

The body’s consumption of its fat reserves eats away muscle tissue, which is why aid workers in the field use basic tape measures to assess the gravity of children’s conditions.

The tapes measuring Mid-Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC) have been used for decades. If the upper arm’s circumference is 11.5 cm (4 1/2 inches) or smaller for a child between 6 months and 5 years old, the child is assessed as having severe acute malnutrition, according to standards drawn up by the United Nations.

MUAC screening data across Gaza since mid-January found more than 7,000 children aged 6 months to about 5 years were already acutely malnourished as of May 26, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said.

This is how that looks.

Gaza has the most people at risk of starvation, but according to the IPC classifications, many millions are one step behind the enclave in food poverty.

The IPC categorises the severity and scale of food insecurity and malnutrition. Readings of 3, 4 or 5 on the five-category scale require urgent action.

Households in Phase 3 are in “Crisis,” the IPC says. They have high or more than usual acute malnutrition, or can meet their minimum food needs but only by selling assets or through crisis measures.

Phase 4 is an “Emergency.” Households have either “very high” acute malnutrition and death rates or are only able to make up for the lack of food by taking emergency measures and selling assets.

Phase 5 is “Catastrophe” or “Famine.” Households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs and starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident. An entire area is only classified as in Famine if high food insecurity comes with certain levels of acute malnutrition and mortality.

For the IPC, areas in Famine meet at least two of the following three criteria:

* the area has at least 20% of households facing an extreme lack of food,

* About one in three children there suffer from acute malnutrition,

* Two adults or four children out of every 10,000 die each day due to outright starvation, or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.

The IPC report issued in March projected that the entire population of the Gaza Strip would fall into Phases 3 to 5 between March and July. U.N. officials told Reuters they expect the next IPC analysis on Gaza to be released on June 25.

South Sudan and Mali are the other two other countries with households projected to fall into the same Phase 5 category as Gaza, based on the IPC’s latest published analyses.

Overall, the three countries with the largest numbers of people at Phase 3 and above are Nigeria (25 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo (23.4 million) and Sudan (17.7 million), according to the IPC website.

The IPC said its latest analysis of Sudan, conducted in December, was too outdated to include in the tables Reuters used for this chart.

As a consequence of severe malnutrition, various complications arise.

This is the impact of starvation after just three weeks. Like many children in Gaza, Majd’s lack of adequate food dates back months.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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