At least 29,782 Palestinians have been killed and 70,043 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said. In the past 24 hours, 90 Palestinians were killed and 164 injured in Israeli strikes, the ministry said.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has criticised the UN security council for failing to adequately respond to Israel’s war in Gaza and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he said had “perhaps fatally” undermined its authority. He also said that a full-scale Israeli assault in Rafah would have devastating consequences. “An all-out Israeli offensive on the city would not only be terrifying for more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering there, it would put the final nail in the coffin of our aid programmes,” the UN chief said in a speech.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, told a press conference that he submitted his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas. Shtayyeh, an academic economist who took office in 2019, said he was resigning to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about political arrangements following Israel’s war in Gaza.
Israeli forces killed more than 30 Palestinian gunmen in Gaza City’s Zeitoun district, more than 10 in the central Gaza Strip and others in the southern city of Khan Younis, the military said on Monday in a summary of the last 24 hours’ operations.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Federation of Arab Journalists are marking 26 February as the International Day in support of Palestinian Journalists.
In a press release, the IFJ said:
One hundred journalists were killed in four months, the equivalent of seven per week. This massacre is a terrible and unjustified tragedy.
The needs of our colleagues working in Gaza have become critical. In the middle of winter, our sisters and brothers and their families lack everything and especially the essentials: clothes, blankets, tents, food, water... The scarcity of these basic necessities in this small territory of 40km long and 5km wide, that is subject to a blockade, results in a surge in prices. Basic goods, where they are available, are no longer affordable.
The IFJ is also alarmed by the poor international coverage of the conflict, resulting from the world media’s exclusion from the enclave by Israel. All over the world we deserve to know what is going on in Gaza. This deliberate denial of the right to report is an abuse of media freedom.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and other groups said in a letter to the US president, Joe Biden, in January that more media workers have been killed in the conflict since the Hamas attack on 7 October than in any single country over an entire year.
The letter urged Biden to “abjure the indiscriminate and deliberate killing of journalists, promptly and thoroughly investigate all attacks on journalists, and hold accountable individuals found to be responsible for them”.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists and their families in Gaza. Israel denies that it targets journalists, saying it only targets Hamas.
Middle East crisis live: Israeli government blocking ‘lifesaving aid’, Human Rights Watch says; Palestinian Authority PM resigns
Closing summary
An active member of the US air force has died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington over the weekend in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza, the Agence France-Presse news agency quoted the Pentagon as saying.
Israeli officials headed on Monday to Qatar, where Hamas has its political office, to work on terms of a Gaza truce and hostage release deal, a source told Reuters. The source said the Israeli working delegation, made up of staff from the military and the Mossad spy agency, was tasked with creating an operational centre to support negotiations.
Israel mounted airstrikes west of the Lebanese city of Baalbek on Monday, killing at least two Hezbollah members, sources in Lebanon told Reuters. The Israeli military said it was striking Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanon but provided no further details. Hezbollah said earlier on Monday it had shot down an Israeli Hermes 450 drone over Lebanese territory using a surface-to-air missile, the second time it has announced a downing of this type of unmanned aerial vehicle.
Israel’s military “presented the war cabinet with a plan for evacuating the population from areas of fighting in the Gaza Strip, and with the upcoming operational plan,” a statement from Benjamin Netayahu’s office said. Israel has threatened to launch a full-blown attack on Rafah, the last city at Gaza’s southern edge, despite international pleas - including from its main ally Washington - for restraint. Netanyahu, who has promised “total victory”, said an operation is necessary to root out four battalions of Hamas fighters based there.
The Israeli government has failed to comply with an order by the UN’s top court to provide urgently needed aid to desperate people in the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch said. “The Israeli government is starving Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, putting them in even more peril than before the World Court’s binding order,” Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said. “The Israeli government has simply ignored the court’s ruling, and in some ways even intensified its repression, including further blocking lifesaving aid.”
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