UN expert says 'no validity' to Israel West Bank 'self-defence' claim

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A US-based aid group said on Friday an Israeli airstrike killed four people accompanying its convoy in Gaza the day before, while the Israeli military said it had struck armed assailants.

"An Israeli air strike yesterday killed four Palestinians in the lead vehicle of an Anera aid convoy carrying food and fuel to the Emirati Red Crescent Hospital," Anera said in a statement.

It identified the dead as "four community members with experience in previous missions and engagement in community security", noting that they were not Anera staff.

They "stepped forward and requested to take command of the leading vehicle, citing concern that the route was unsafe and at risk of being looted", the Anera statement said.

"The four community members were neither vetted nor coordinated in advance, and Israeli authorities allege that the lead car was carrying numerous weapons. The Israeli air strike was carried out without any prior warning or communication."

A statement from the Israeli military, which did not give a death toll, claimed the strike occurred after "a number of armed assailants seized control of the vehicle".

It also said "the presence of armed individuals was not coordinated" before the convoy departed.

"After ruling out potential harm to the trucks, as well as a clear identification of weapons, a strike was carried out targeting the armed individuals. The truck arrived at its planned destination," the military said.

Anera said none of its staff were harmed in the strike "though one Anera employee, who was in the second vehicle, witnessed the incident at close range".

The Palestinian Red Crescent says its crews have dealt with one person who was killed in Jenin in the occupied West Bank and the body is being transferred to hospital, The New Arab's Arabic edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reports.

A volunteer doctor for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society was shot in the hand and two other medics suffered facial injuries from shrapnel after Israeli forces attacked an ambulance in the occupied West Bank, the humanitarian group says.

The organisation says the incident targeting its ambulance took place in Jenin.

It comes amid a deadly three-day Israeli assault on the north of the West Bank.

🚨 A PRCS volunteer doctor was shot in the hand, and two other EMTs sustained facial injuries from shrapnel after an Israeli occupation force targeted a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance in #Jenin. #NotATarget #WestBank

— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) August 30, 2024

The latest round of Gaza negotiations in the Qatari capital Doha made little progress on the red lines held to by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Haaretz newspaper reports, citing unnamed Israeli sources.

This is not incompatible with reports by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper and the Kan Reshet Bet radio, which say there has been progress but not on key issues like the Salah Al-Din (Philadelphi) corridor, a strategic strip of land on the border between Gaza and Egypt.

An Israeli missile hit a convoy carrying medical supplies and fuel to an Emirati hospital in the Gaza Strip, killing several people from a local transportation company, the American Near East Refugee Aid group said Friday.

Israel claimed without immediate evidence that it opened fire after gunmen seized the convoy.

The strike killed several people employed by a transportation company that the aid group was using to bring supplies to the Emirates Red Crescent Hospital in Rafah, said Sandra Rasheed, Anera's director for the Palestinian territories.

The strike happened Thursday on the Salah Al-Din Road in the Gaza Strip and hit the convoy's first vehicle.

"The convoy, which was coordinated by Anera and approved by Israeli authorities, included an Anera employee who was fortunately unharmed," Rasheed said in a statement.

"Despite this devastating incident, our understanding is that the remaining vehicles in the convoy were able to continue and successfully deliver the aid to the hospital. We are urgently seeking further details about what happened."

Anera planned to release more information later Friday.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday from The Associated Press. However, Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Avichay Adraee claimed on social media platform X that "gunmen seized a car at the head of the convoy [a jeep] and began driving".

"After the seizure operation and after confirming the possibility of attacking the militants' vehicle alone, the raid was carried out, as the rest of the convoy vehicles were not harmed and reached their target according to the plan," Adraee said.

"The operation to target the militants removed the risk of seizing the humanitarian convoy."

The Israeli military has deployed additional reinforcements to Jenin in the occupied West Bank as the invasion of the city continues, The New Arab's Arabic edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reports.

A UN expert says Israel claiming its actions in the occupied West Bank are justified under the law of self-defence is an argument with "no validity".

"SELF-DEFENCE? Israel claims that what it is doing in the West Bank is justified under the law of self-defence. This claim has no validity," says Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).

She adds in her post on X that 20 years ago the International Court of Justice (ICJ) "determined that Israel could not invoke self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter to justify its wall" in the oPt.

"This past July the court indicated that Israel’s very presence in the oPt is itself unlawful," she adds, referring to a non-binding advisory ICJ opinion.

"As an ongoing unlawful use of force, Israel’s occupation of the oPt cannot be justified by any claim of self-defence.

"Israel's perversion of the law on self-defence must be recognised for what it is: a brazen attempt to provide an imprimatur of 'legality' to the maintenance of its unlawful aggression against the territorial integrity and political independence of the State of Palestine.

"If Israel truly wants to achieve its claimed security, the best and most obvious way to do that would be to cease its colonisation of another people’s land, withdraw from all of it, and make appropriate reparation for damage caused (as requested by the ICJ), while being sure to apologise to its victims on the way out."

SELF-DEFENSE?
Israel claims that what it is doing in the West Bank is justified under the law of self-defence. This claim has no validity.
Twenty years ago the @CIJ_ICJ determined that Israel could not invoke self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter to justify its Wall in… https://t.co/81dSjf5rxW

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) August 30, 2024

United Nations officials are preparing to launch a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza on Sunday that will rely on a series of limited pauses in fighting.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says it will need to vaccinate at least 90 percent of the children in Gaza for the campaign to succeed but it faces huge challenges in the Palestinian enclave, which has been largely destroyed by nearly 11 months of Israeli war.

The campaign has been organised after the WHO said on 23 August that a baby had been paralysed by the type-two polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years, and UN agencies appealed for an urgent vaccination effort.

The planned pauses are unconnected with negotiations that have been underway for months to try to agree a halt in the fighting in Gaza and an exchange of Israeli and foreign captives for Palestinians held by Israel.

COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates administration in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the pauses would be coordinated as part of a series of so-called humanitarian pauses implemented periodically since the start of the Israeli campaign in Gaza last October.

Hamas has also agreed to the pauses, which the UN says are needed for the campaign to begin at all.

A second round of vaccinations will be needed once the first round is complete.

The WHO has said the Israeli military and Hamas have agreed to three separate, zoned three-day pauses in fighting to allow the first round of vaccinations to be undertaken by UN agencies in coordination with the Palestinian health ministry.

More than 2,180 staff have been trained to provide vaccinations and information about the campaign to people in Gaza.

The pauses, due to run for three days between 6am and 3pm (3am to 12pm GMT), will begin in central Gaza, before moving to south and then northern Gaza.

However due to the logistical and security challenges facing the campaign, an extra day may be needed for each round, WHO officials have said.

Most of Gaza's hospitals have been damaged or destroyed with only 17 out of the 36 hospitals in the territory partially functional and less than half of the 132 primary health centres still operational, according to WHO figures.

(Reuters)

Israeli forces killed a local commander of the Islamist movement Hamas in the flashpoint city of Jenin on Friday as they pressed a major assault in the occupied West Bank for a third day, the Israeli military said.

The military said Border Police forces had killed Wassem Hazem, who it claimed was the head of Hamas in Jenin and was involved in shooting and bombing attacks in the Palestinian territory.

Two other Hamas gunmen who tried to escape the car they were all travelling in were killed by a drone, it said, alleging that weapons, explosives, and large sums of cash were found in the vehicle.

Hamas confirmed the death of all three men, who it said were members of its Al-Qassam Brigades armed wing.

In the village of Al-Zababdeh, just outside Jenin, a burnt-out car riddled with bullet holes stood against a wall where the vehicle came to a halt after being pursued by an Israeli special forces unit, residents said.

Villager Saif Ghannam, 25, said one of the two other men who escaped from the vehicle was killed just outside his house by a small drone strike that shattered the windows, while a second man was killed a short distance away.

Ghannam said Israeli forces had removed the bodies but large pools of blood lay on the ground where he said the men were killed.

(Reuters)

The Israeli military said Friday it had wrapped up a month-long operation in southern and central Gaza that it claimed killed more than 250 Palestinian fighters.

"The troops of the 98th Division have completed their divisional operation in the Khan Yunis and Deir Al-Balah area, after about a month of simultaneous above and underground operational activity," a military statement said.

"As part of the operation, the troops eliminated over 250 terrorists and destroyed dozens of [pieces of] terrorist infrastructure."

A military spokesman told AFP that no other operations were taking place in those two areas for now.

Residents of Khan Younis said they had returned to scenes of widespread destruction in the Gaza Strip's main southern city.

Amal Al-Astal, 48, described demolished homes and bodies decomposing in the open.

"We found our house destroyed and our neighbours' [houses] destroyed as well. One of our neighbours' corpses was decomposed there," Astal said.

"As soon as we entered, there were tragedies and we could not recognise the landmarks of the neighbourhood."

Palestinians who returned to parts of Deir Al-Balah earlier this week said they witnessed similar devastation.

British MP Zarah Sultana called for an immediate end to UK arms sales to Israel on Thursday.

"While continuing its genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel has launched its largest invasion of the occupied West Bank since 2002 – with armoured vehicles, bulldozers, fighter jets, drones & ground forces," the left-wing independent MP said on social media platform X.

"Enough is enough. The UK government must end all arms sales to Israel now."

While continuing its genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel has launched its largest invasion of the occupied West Bank since 2002 — with armoured vehicles, bulldozers, fighter jets, drones & ground forces.

Enough is enough. The UK government must end all arms sales to Israel now.

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) August 29, 2024

A Palestinian was killed and others injured after Israeli bombing of a home in the Al-Saftawi area north of Gaza City, The New Arab's Arabic edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reports.

The UN's Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, says it has been forced to suspend its services in a number of occupied West Bank refugee camps because of Israeli military operations, The New Arab's Arabic edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reports.

Some 1.2 million vaccine doses have already been delivered to Gaza ahead of a 1 September campaign to vaccinate more than 640,000 children against polio, a World Health Organization (WHO) official said on Friday.

Some 400,000 additional doses are en route to the territory, said Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO's representative for the occupied Palestinian territories.

(Reuters)

The British government said on Friday it was "deeply concerned" by Israel's ongoing assault in the occupied West Bank, warning that risk of instability was serious and that there was an urgent need for de-escalation.

"We continue to call on Israeli authorities to exercise restraint, adhere to international law, and clamp down on the actions of those who seek to inflame tensions," a spokesperson for Britain's Foreign Office said in a statement.

The Israeli assault has so far killed at least 20 people, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.

"We recognise Israel's need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods Israel has employed and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure," the Foreign Office spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added the UK "strongly condemns settler violence", and that it was in "no one’s interest for further conflict and instability" to spread in the West Bank.

(Reuters)

Gaza's civil defence authorities said the bodies of three killed people and a number of injured have been recovered after Israeli bombing of a home in the town of Abasan Al-Kabira in the south of the strip.

The Israeli military said it killed three Palestinians in an airstrike on Friday, the third day of a major assault on the occupied West Bank, claiming they were militants of Hamas.

Witnesses told AFP the strike hit a car in the town of Al-Zababdeh, southeast of the northern city of Jenin.

An AFP journalist saw human remains being removed from the vehicle by paramedics.

Three people were killed after a strike that targeted a vehicle in the town of Al-Zababdeh near Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank, Palestinian media report.

Israeli forces detained the bodies of the dead, the reports indicate.

A Palestinian was killed and others were injured after Israeli bombing of the Al-Masdar area in central Gaza, The New Arab's Arabic edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reports.

In a rare rebuke, the United States sharply criticised Israel's attacks on United Nations vehicles and called for an end to assaults and threatening rhetoric against the UN and humanitarian organisations.

At a UN Security Council meeting on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, US deputy ambassador Robert Wood singled out the Israeli military's repeated firing at a clearly marked vehicle of the UN food agency, which was hit by at least 10 bullets as it was moving towards an Israeli military checkpoint at the central Wadi Gaza bridge, despite having received multiple clearances from Israeli authorities.

In response, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced Wednesday it is pausing all staff movement in Gaza until further notice.

UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said Thursday that all WFP convoys and staff remain on hold, though the staff was in contact with some humanitarian partners who deliver aid in Gaza.

Wood expressed alarm at the WFP incident and said Israel has told the US their initial review said it was "a result of a communication error" between Israeli military units.

On 23 July, UNICEF said two of its vehicles were hit with live ammunition while waiting at a designated holding point near the Wadi Gaza checkpoint, waiting to reunite five children including a baby with their father.

It was the second shooting involving a UNICEF car in 12 weeks.

Hamas has accused the Palestinian Authority (PA) security services of pursuing fighters who belonged to the "resistance" in Nablus in the occupied West Bank, criticising what it said was "an arrest campaign" against them.

The group said in a statement late on Thursday that the campaign had targeted "resistance fighters, activists and released prisoners".

It also criticised "the smear campaigns that aim to assassinate them morally by spreading rumours and fabricated accusations against them".

Hamas also accused the PA of supporting Israel and its "growing offensive", amid an ongoing massive Israeli army assault on the northern West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, dubbed Operation Summer Camps.

The head of Yemen's Houthi rebel movement, Abdel Malek Al-Houthi, has said in a televised address that the group was continuing its preparations to attack Israel.

The Houthi leader said that "our response is coming and we are proceeding with qualitative operations… against the Zionist enemy".

He said that "despite complications" operations are continuing and that there was a marked decline in the number of vessels passing through the Red Sea and headed for Israel.

He added that his movement had "not yet achieved what we had hoped for" with the continuing "aggression on Gaza", while also condemning this week's Israeli army raids on four occupied West Bank towns and cities, which he said were being done "with US support".

He also strongly criticised Arab nations for "protecting the Israeli enemy", calling it a "betrayal" of the Palestinians.