Gaza activist boat carrying aid docks after being seized by Israel

Sofia Ferreira Santos and Ben Hatton

BBC News

Image source, ABIR SULTAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Image caption, The boat arriving at the Israeli Port of Ashdod

The Madleen has been taken to the Port of Ashdod in Israel after being intercepted in the early hours of the morning.

The Israeli foreign ministry shared a picture of activist Greta Thunberg, who was aboard the vessel, in front of an Israeli flag. It also said she and the 11 other passengers were undergoing medical examinations.

We first heard the boat had been intercepted near the Egyptian coast just after 05:30 local time (03:30 BST).

The activist group Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which organised the journey, said it was seeking to defy the Israeli blockade and deliver aid to Gaza – and that the crew had been “kidnapped by Israeli forces”.

You can see video footage showing the moment the boat was intercepted here.

Image source, Reuters Image caption, The yacht, carrying 12 people, set off from Catania, Italy on 3 June

Israel called it a “media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity” and said the crew were being taken “safely” to Israel where they would be deported.

The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen writes that it was clear the boat was never going to reach Gaza and that its mission was designed to produce controversy and debate.

We’re bringing this live page to a close now, but you can read more in our news story here.

An Israeli strike hit a street in central Gaza on Thursday where witnesses said a crowd of people was getting bags of flour from a Palestinian police unit that had confiscated the goods from gangs looting aid convoys. Hospital officials said 18 people were killed.

The strike was the latest violence surrounding the distribution of food to Gaza’s population, which has been thrown into turmoil over the past month. After blocking all food for 2 1/2 months, Israel has allowed only a trickle of supplies into the territory since mid-May.

Efforts by the United Nations to distribute the food have been plagued by armed gangs looting trucks and by crowds of desperate people offloading supplies from convoys.

The strike in the central town of Deir al-Balah on Thursday appeared to target members of Sahm, a security unit tasked with stopping looters and cracking down on merchants who sell stolen aid at high prices. The unit is part of Gaza’s Hamas-led Interior Ministry, but includes members of other factions.

A horrific scene

Witnesses said the Sahm unit was distributing bags of flour and other goods confiscated from looters and corrupt merchants, drawing a crowd when the strike hit.

Video of the aftermath showed bodies, several torn, of multiple young men in the street with blood splattering on the pavement and walls of buildings. The dead included a child and at least seven Sahmt members, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital where casualties were taken.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. Israel has accused the militant Hamas group of stealing aid and using it to prop up its rule in the enclave. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck Gaza’s police, considering them a branch of Hamas.

An association of Gaza’s influential clans and tribes said Wednesday they have started an independent effort to guard aid convoys to prevent looting. The National Gathering of Palestinian Clans and Tribes said it helped escort a rare shipment of flour that entered northern Gaza that evening.

It was unclear, however, if the association had coordinated with the U.N. or Israeli authorities. The World Food Program did not immediately respond to requests for comment by The Associated Press.

“We will no longer allow thieves to steal from the convoys for the merchants and force us to buy them for high prices,” Abu Ahmad al-Gharbawi, a figure involved in the tribal effort, told the AP.

Accusations from Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz in a joint statement Wednesday accused Hamas of stealing aid that is entering northern Gaza, and called on the Israeli military to plan to prevent it.

The National Gathering slammed the statement, saying the accusation of theft was aimed at justifying the Israeli military’s “aggressive practices.” It said aid was “fully secured” by the tribes, which it said were committed to delivering the supplies to the population.

The move by tribes to protect aid convoys brings yet another player in an aid situation that has become fragmented, confused and violent, even as Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians struggle to feed their families.

Throughout the more than 20-month-old war, the U.N. led the massive aid operation by humanitarian groups providing food, shelter, medicine and other goods to Palestinians even amid the fighting. U.N. and other aid groups say that when significant amounts of supplies are allowed into Gaza, looting and theft dwindles.

Israel, however, seeks to replace the U.N.-led system, saying Hamas has been siphoning off large amounts of supplies from it, a claim the U.N. and other aid groups deny.

Israel has backed an American private contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has started distributing food boxes at four locations, mainly in the far south of Gaza for the past month.

Thousands of Palestinians walk for hours to reach the hubs, moving through Israeli military zones where witnesses say Israeli troops regularly open fire with heavy barrages to control the crowds.

Health officials say hundreds of people have been killed and wounded. The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots.

A trickle of aid

Israel has continued to allow a smaller number of aid trucks into Gaza for U.N. distribution. The World Health Organization said on Thursday it had been able to deliver its first medical shipment into Gaza since March 2, with nine trucks bringing blood, plasma and other supplies to Nasser Hospital, the biggest hospital still functioning in southern Gaza.

In Gaza City, large crowds gathered Thursday at an aid distribution point to receive bags of flour from the convoy that arrived the previous evening, according to photos taken by a cameraman collaborating with the AP.

Hiba Khalil, a mother of seven, said she can’t afford looted aid that is sold in markets for astronomical prices and was relieved to get flour for the first time in months.

“We’ve waited for months without having flour or eating much and our children would always cry,” she said.

Another woman, Umm Alaa Mekdad, said she hoped more convoys would make it through after struggling to deal with looters.

“The gangs used to take our shares and the shares of our children who slept hungry and thirsty,” she said.

Separately, Israeli strikes overnight and early Thursday killed at least 28 people across the Gaza Strip, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. More than 20 dead arrived at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, while the bodies of eight others were taken to Nasser Hospital in the south.

___ Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how governments respond could haunt them for years to come

8 June 2025 Share Save Jeremy Bowen • @BowenBBC International Editor Share Save

BBC

Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides. If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan. That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again. At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda. The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

AFP/ Getty Images An estimated 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by January this year, according to Unicef

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza. Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting. It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire. Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

Getty Images On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people, many of them at the Nova Music Festival site

To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions. I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza. In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power. As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail. Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined a request for an interview. Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party, repeated his leader’s positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder. Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.

BBC / Matt Goddard The latest version of the Geneva Conventions, pictured, was formulated after World War Two to stop cruelty to civilians

It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away. It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state. He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

Evidence in the numbers

The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel’s security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages. Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead. Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached. The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups. According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Anadalou/ Getty Images Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year but negotiations on a longer-term deal have failed

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services. When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates. A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care. Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive “total victory” over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023. Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved. A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat. Weaponising food is a war crime.

A failure of humanity

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world. After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”. Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe’s most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif. But for Ms Spoljaric, constantly aware of the ICRC’s role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice since 7 October and says that it is worse than hell on earth. “Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Ms Spoljaric told me. “It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”

Anadalou/ Getty Images A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”

More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity. “It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.” I asked her about Israel’s justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October. “It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions,” she said. “Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention. “A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”

BBC / Matt Goddard Swiss diplomat Mirjana Spoljaric, who is president of the ICRC, said “humanity is failing in Gaza”

Mirjana Spoljaric spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides. She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.

‘We will turn them into rubble’

On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel’s troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world. Speaking from Israel’s military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism. The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. “We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens. “All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.” Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their “unreserved support”. He had spoken to them, he said, “to ensure freedom of action”.

AFP/ Getty Images It is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead

But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected. “You’re never entitled to break the law,” says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School. “How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either. “So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn’t give you additional licence to use additional violence. “The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war.”

The headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva

What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada. Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians. “I’m shaken to my core,” Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. “I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare. “It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened.”

But now the UK, France and Canada want an immediate halt to Israel’s latest offensive. On 19 May, prime ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, and President Emmanuel Macron, stated, “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.” Sanctions may be coming. The UK and France are actively discussing the circumstances in which they would be prepared to recognise Palestine as an independent state.

War and revenge

Netanyahu quoted from a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, in his TV speech to the Israeli people on 7 October as they wrestled with fear, anger and trauma. He chose the line: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan.” It comes from In the City of Slaughter, which is widely regarded as the most significant Hebrew poem of the 20th Century. Bialik wrote it as a young man in 1903, after he had visited the scene of a pogrom against Jews in Kishinev, a town then in imperial Russia and now called Chişinǎu, the capital of present-day Moldova. Over three days, Christian mobs murdered 49 Jews and raped at least 600 Jewish women. Antisemitic brutality and killing in Europe was a major reason why Zionist Jews wanted to settle in Palestine to build their own state, in what they regarded as their historic homeland. Their ambition clashed with the desire of Palestinian Arabs to keep their land. Britain, the colonial power, did much to make their conflict worse. By 1929 Vincent Sheean, an American journalist, was describing Jerusalem in a way that is grimly familiar to reporters there almost a century later. “The situation here is awful,” he wrote. “Every day I expect the worst.” He added that violence was in the air, “The temperature rose – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.” Sheean’s account of the 1920s illustrates the conflict’s deep root system in the land that Israelis and Palestinians both want and have not found a way, or a will, to share or separate.

Getty Images Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent

Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent, which they call the Catastrophe. But Netanyahu, and many other Israelis and their supporters abroad connected the October attacks to the centuries of persecution Jews suffered in Europe, which culminated with Nazi Germany killing six million Jews in the Holocaust. Netanyahu used the same references to hit back when Macron said in May that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was “shameful” and “unacceptable”. Netanyahu said that Macron had “once again chosen to side with a murderous Islamist terrorist organisation and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels”. The blood libel is a notorious antisemitic trope that goes back to medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of killing Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals. After a couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC were shot dead, the gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” Netanyahu connected the murders with the criticisms of Israel’s conduct made by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada. In a video posted on X, he declared: “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history. “For 18 years, we had a de facto Palestinian state. It’s called Gaza. And what did we get? Peace? No. We got the most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

BBC / Matt Goddard

Netanyahu has also referred to the long history of antisemitism in Europe when warrants calling for his arrest, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who was defence minister for the first 13 months of the war, were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The court had also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind 7 October. All three have since been killed by Israel. A panel of ICC judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility. “As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” In a defiant statement, Netanyahu rejected “false and absurd charges”. He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island for treason in 1894. Dreyfus, who was innocent, was eventually pardoned but the affair caused a major political crisis. “The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial – and will end the same way,” the statement said. “No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organisation launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

The legacy of persecution

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism. “We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.” But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

BBC / Matt Goddard British barrister Helena Kennedy KC said a history of persecution did not give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed. “You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.” Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”. The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

EPA Lord Sumption believes Israel should have learned from its own history

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, believes Israel should have learned from its own history. “The terrible Jewish experience of persecution and mass killing in the past should give Israel a horror of inflicting the same things on other peoples.” History is inescapable in the Middle East, always present, a storehouse of justification to be plundered.

America: Israel’s vital ally

Israel could not wage war in Gaza using its chosen tactics without American military, financial and diplomatic support. President Donald Trump has shown signs of impatience, forcing Netanyahu to allow a few cracks in the siege that has brought Gaza to the edge of famine. Netanyahu himself continues to express support for Trump’s widely condemned proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Mediterranean”, by emptying it of Palestinians and turning it over to the Americans for redevelopment. That is code for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, which would be a war crime. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist allies want to replace them with Jewish settlers. Trump himself seems silent about the plan. But the Trump administration’s support for Israel, and its actions in Gaza, looks undiminished.

BBC / Matt Goddard Nobel peace prize medal at ICRC headquarters

On 4 June, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire, the release of all the hostages and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. The other 14 members voted in favour. The next day the Americans sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was protecting the sovereignty of the US and Israel against “illegitimate actions”. “I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel.” Instead the ICC has had statements of support and solidarity from European leaders. A broad and increasingly bitter gap has opened up between the US and Europe over the Gaza war, and over the legitimacy of criticising Israel’s conduct. Israel and the Trump administration reject the idea that the laws of war apply equally to all sides, because they claim it implies a false and wrong equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Jan Egeland can see the split between Europe and the US growing. “I hope now that Europe will grow a spine,” he says. “There have been new tones, finally, coming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, from Brussels, after all these months of industrial-scale hypocrisy where they didn’t see that there was a world record in killed aid workers, in killed nurses, in killed doctors, in killed teachers, in killed children, and all while journalists like yourself have been denied access, denied to be witnessing this. “It’s something that the West will learn to regret really — that they were so spineless.”

The question of genocide

The question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza outrages Israel and its supporters, led by the United States. Lawyers who believe the evidence does not support the accusation have stood up to oppose the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide against Palestinians. But it will not go away. The Netanyahu loyalist Boaz Bismuth answered the genocide question like this. “How can you accuse us of genocide when the Palestinian population grew, I don’t know how many times more? How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them? How can you accuse me when I lose soldiers in order to protect my enemies?” It is hard to prove genocide has happened; the legal bar prosecutors have to clear has been set deliberately high. But leading lawyers who have spent decades assessing matters of legal fact to see if there is a case to answer believe it is not necessary to wait for the process started in January last year by South Africa to make a years-long progress through the ICJ. We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion. “Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part. “Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

BBC / Anastassia Zatopolskai Boaz Bismuth from Netanyahu’s Likud party, said: “How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them?”

South Africa based much of its genocide case against Israel on inflammatory language used by Israeli leaders. One example was the biblical reference Netanyahu used when Israel sent troops into Gaza, comparing Hamas to Amalek. In the Bible God commands the Israelites to destroy their persecutors, the Amalekites. Another was Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration just after the Hamas attacks when he ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of international law, also believes there is proof of genocide. “Unfortunately, yes, and there is now no doubt legally as to that, and indeed that has been the case for some time.” He points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. Prof Wilde compares Western governments’ responses to the war in Gaza to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “There has been no court decision as to the illegality of Russia’s action in Ukraine. Nonetheless, states have found it possible already to make public proclamations determining the illegality of that action. There is nothing stopping them doing that in this case. “And so, if they are suggesting that they are going to wait, the question to ask them is, why are you waiting for a court to tell you what you already know?” Helena Kennedy KC is “very anxious about the casual use of the word genocide and I avoid it myself because I do think that there has to be a very high level in law, a very high level of intent necessary to prove it”. “Are we saying that it’s not genocide but it is crimes against humanity? You think that makes it sound okay? Terrible crimes against humanity? I think we’re in the process of seeing the most grievous kind of crimes taking place. “I do think we’re on a trajectory that could very easily be towards genocide, and as a lawyer I think that there’s certainly an argument that is being made strongly for that.” Baroness Kennedy says her advice to the British government if it was asked for would be, “We’ve got to be very careful about being complicit in grievous crimes ourselves.”

Getty Images Even people who have seen many wars say they find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage in Gaza

Eventually, a ceasefire will come. It will not end the conflict, or head off the certainty of a long and bitter epilogue. The genocide case at the ICJ guarantees that. So do the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Once journalists and war crimes investigators can get into the Gaza Strip, they will emerge with more hard facts about what has happened. Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble. I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

Israel has closed crossings into northern Gaza, cutting the most direct route for aid to reach hundreds of thousands of people at risk of famine, as airstrikes and shelling killed dozens more people in the devastated Palestinian territory.

The move to close the crossings on Thursday will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as attention shifts from its brief conflict with Iran, back to the violence and grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

During the 12 days Israel was fighting Iran, more than 800 Palestinians were killed in Gaza – either shot as they desperately sought food in increasingly chaotic circumstances or in successive waves of Israeli strikes and shelling.

Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister and an outspoken critic of Israel’s offensive, on Thursday became the most prominent European leader to describe the situation in Gaza as a “genocide”.

Speaking before an EU summit in Brussels, Sánchez mentioned an EU report that found “indications” Israel was breaching its human rights obligations under the cooperation deal, which forms the basis for trade ties.

The text cited Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid for the Palestinian territory, the high number of civilian casualties, attacks on journalists and the massive displacement and destruction caused by the war.

Israel vehemently denies the allegation of war crimes and genocide, which it says are based in anti-Israel bias and antisemitism.

Q&A Why is it so difficult to report on Gaza? Show Coverage of the war in Gaza is constrained by Israeli attacks on Palestinian journalists and a bar on international reporters entering the Gaza Strip to report independently on the war. Israel has not allowed foreign reporters to enter Gaza since 7 October 2023, unless they are under Israeli military escort. Reporters who join these trips have no control over where they go, and other restrictions include a bar on speaking to Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinian journalists and media workers inside Gaza have paid a heavy price for their work reporting on the war, with over 180 killed since the conflict began. The committee to protect journalists has determined that at least 19 of them “were directly targeted by Israeli forces in killings which CPJ classifies as murders”. Foreign reporters based in Israel filed a legal petition seeking access to Gaza, but it was rejected by the supreme court on security grounds. Private lobbying by diplomats and public appeals by prominent journalists and media outlets have been ignored by the Israeli government. To ensure accurate reporting from Gaza given these restrictions, the Guardian works with trusted journalists on the ground; our visual​​ teams verif​y photo and videos from third parties; and we use clearly sourced data from organisations that have a track record of providing accurate information in Gaza during past conflicts, or during other conflicts or humanitarian crises. Emma Graham-Harrison, chief Middle East correspondent Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback.

The spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said Israeli forces had killed 56 people on Thursday, including six who were waiting for food in two separate locations.

There was no independent confirmation of the claim, but medical records of field hospitals run by the International Committee of the Red Cross and other NGOs seen by the Guardian detail hundreds of injuries from bullets among civilians seeking aid in the last two weeks. Witnesses have also described lethal fire from Israeli troops.

The Israeli military said soldiers had “fired warning shots” in order to prevent “suspects from approaching them” near the Netzarim corridor in central Gaza, where Palestinians gather each night, often in the hope of stopping trucks.

Food has become extremely scarce in Gaza since a tight blockade on all supplies was imposed by Israel throughout March and April, threatening many of the 2.3 million people who live there with a “critical risk of famine”.

Since the blockade was partly lifted last month, the UN has tried to bring in aid but has faced major obstacles, including rubble-choked roads, Israeli military restrictions, continuing airstrikes and growing anarchy.

Reaching the north, where the need is greatest, has been hardest but became much easier when Israel opened the Zikim crossing, allowing wheat and other basics to be transported there directly.

Aid officials in the territory described Thursday’s closure of Zikim, which Israel said was necessary to stop Hamas seizing aid, was “very problematic” and would directly impact aid distribution.

New food distribution points set up by a secretive US- and Israel-backed private organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are located in central and south Gaza, out of reach of most of the million people estimated to be in the north.

The Israeli government ordered the closure of the northern crossing points after footage surfaced on social media showing armed men guarding a shipment of aid. Israeli rightwing rivals to Netanyahu claimed they were Hamas, but aid workers and others in Gaza said the guards were loyal to a council of local community leaders who had organised protection for a convoy of much-needed supplies.

The Higher Commission for Tribal Affairs, which represents influential clans in the territory, said the guards had been organised “solely through tribal efforts” and that no Palestinian faction – a reference to militant groups in Gaza including Hamas – was involved.

“The clans came … to form a stance to prevent the aggressors and the thieves from stealing the food that belongs to our people,” said Abu Salman Al Moghani, a representative of the Commission.

On Monday, 79 trucks from aid organizations and the international community containing food for children, medical supplies and medications were transferred into Gaza after undergoing thorough security inspections, Israeli authorities said. On Tuesday, the total was 71.

The World Health Organization said on Thursday that it had delivered its first medical shipment into Gaza since 2 March, adding however that the nine truckloads were “a drop in the ocean”.

Last week the WHO said only 17 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were minimally to partly functional, with the rest unable to function at all.

Israel launched its campaign aiming to destroy Hamas after the group’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 251 hostage. The militants still hold 49 hostages, fewer than half of them alive.

The overall death toll in Gaza in the 20-month conflict has now reached 56,259, mostly civilians.

Hopes of a third ceasefire were raised on Wednesday when the US president, Donald Trump, told reporters he believed “great progress is being made on Gaza”. But Hamas and Israeli officials have since suggested no agreement is close.

Taher al-Nunu, a Hamas official, said on Wednesday that talks with mediators had “intensified” but that the group had “not yet received any new proposals” to end the war.

Israeli officials said only that efforts to return the hostages were ongoing “on the battlefield and via negotiations”.

Seven Israeli soldiers were killed in a single attack in southern Gaza on Tuesday, the military’s deadliest day in the territory since it broke a ceasefire with Hamas in March.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is facing growing calls from opposition politicians, relatives of hostages in Gaza and much of the Israeli public to bring an end to the fighting.

Central Baotou, an industrial hub of 2.7 million people that abuts the Gobi desert in north China, feels just like any other second-tier Chinese city. Large shopping malls featuring western chains including Starbucks and KFC stand alongside street after street of busy local restaurants, where people sit outside and children play late into the evening, enjoying the relative relief of the cooler temperatures that arrive after dark in Inner Mongolia’s baking summer.

But a short drive into the city’s suburbs reveal another typical, less hospitable, Chinese scene. Factories crowd the city’s edges, with chimneys belching white plumes of smoke. As well as steel and silicon plants, Baotou is home to China’s monopoly on rare earths, the metallic elements that are used in oil refining equipment and car batteries and that have become a major sticking point in the US-China trade war.

More than 80% of China’s rare earth reserves are in Baotou. Metals such as cerium and lanthanum are crucial for modern technologies ranging from smartphone screens to vehicle braking systems. Certain rare earths, such as samarium, are used in military-grade magnets, including by the US.

View image in fullscreen A satellite image showing the city of Baotou and its rare earth mines. One of the most notorious tailings ponds in the area is the Weikuang tailings dam, owned by the state-owned Baogang Group. Photograph: EJ Atlas

That has made them a useful bargaining chip for Beijing in the trade war. China has long objected to Washington’s embargo on the export of advanced semiconductors to China, and now appears to be returning in kind by cutting off western manufacturers from critical elements in their supply chain.

In April, Beijing restricted the export of several rare earths, before agreeing to reinstate export licences for some of them after recent talks in London.

The restrictions have already had global effects, with Ford temporarily closing a car factory in Chicago because of the shortage. On Monday, a Ford executive said the company was living “hand to mouth” to keep its factories open. In a fiery speech last week, the president of the European commission, Ursula von der Leyen, accused China of “weaponising” its dominance of the rare earths supply chain. Access to the commodities is reportedly top of the agenda for an upcoming EU-China summit.

An economic boon, an environmental hazard

Rare earths have been central to life in Baotou since long before the region’s geology made global headlines.

The metals were first discovered in China in Bayan Obo, a mining district 150km north of Baotou, in the 1930s. But production did not ramp up until the 1990s, when China entered a period of rapid economic reform and opening up. Between 1990 and 2000, China’s production increased by 450% to 73,000 metric tonnes. At the same time, production in other countries, namely the US, declined, giving China a near monopoly on the global supply. In 2024, the government’s quota for rare earths production was 270,000 tonnes. The Bayan Obo mining district is now a closely guarded community of people living in the shadow of massive mines and their toxic waste products.

View image in fullscreen A map of mines in Bayan Obo. Rare earths were first discovered in the area, north of Baotou, in the 1930s. Photograph: EJ Atlas

Baotou’s rich reserves of natural resources have been good for the economy. The city’s GDP per capita is 165,000 yuan (£17,000), compared with the national average of 95,700 yuan, although locals grumble about an economic slowdown, which is affecting the whole country. According to state media, last year the industry generated more than 100bn yuan for the city for the first time. But the industry also has an environmental impact.

Toxic, often radioactive byproducts of rare earths processing are dumped into man-made ditches known as “tailings ponds”. One of the most notorious tailings ponds in the area is the Weikuang tailings dam, owned by the state-owned Baogang Group. For many years it was the world’s biggest dumping ground for rare earths waste products. It was not properly lined and there were fears about its toxic contents seeping into the groundwater and towards the nearby Yellow River, a major source of drinking water for northern China. According to the Ministry for Ecology and Environment, a clean-up project of one of the Yellow River’s tributaries in Baotou resulted in levels of ammonia nitrogen, a rare earths processing byproduct, decreasing by 87% between 2020 and 2024.

View image in fullscreen Pipes coming from a rare earth smelting plant spew polluted water into a vast tailings dam near Xinguang Village, located on the outskirts of the city of Baotou in China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region in 2010. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

In the 2000s and 2010s, investigations into the villages around Baotou revealed orthopaedic problems, birth defects and an “epidemic” of cancer. Because microscopic rare earth elements can cross the blood-brain barrier and deposit in the brain, exposure has been linked to a number of neurological problems such as motor and sensory disabilities, and they can also affect the neurological development of foetuses in pregnant women.

A study published in 2020 found that children in Baotou were particularly likely to be exposed to rare earth elements through road dust, something that the researchers described as a “serious risk”. Another study found that the daily intake of airborne rare earths elements in mining areas was up to 6.7mg, well above the 4.2 mg level that is considered to be relatively safe.

“Large-scale extraction quite often proceeds at the expense of the health and well-being of surrounding communities, pretty much regardless of the context,” says Julie Klinger, an associate professor at the University Delaware who specialises in rare earths.

Although the technologies to process rare earths in less environmentally harmful ways exist in theory, they are rarely used because of cost.

“I doubt they could maintain their production costs if they took such steps,” says Craig Hart, a lecturer at John Hopkins University who focuses on rare earths.

Cleaning up in Baotou

Environmentalists note that part of the reason that China has been able to dominate global supplies of rare earths at competitive prices is because, as well as being rich in natural resources, it has also been willing to let poor, rural people bear the brunt of the toxic, dirty work. But now China wants to clean up its image.

View image in fullscreen The demolished site of Xinguang Number One Village, one of the so-called cancer villages in Baotou. Photograph: Amy Hawkins/The Guardian

In 2022, state media announced that Baotou’s major tailings pond had been transformed into an urban wetland. Birdwatchers could come and enjoy the pristine waters of the newly purified pond, which apparently attracted a range of migratory birds. When the Guardian visited the site of the new birders paradise, however, most of the site was blocked from view behind a newly built concrete wall. A peek over the wall revealed an expanse of arid mud. Around the area the demolished remains of the once notorious “cancer villages” were scattered among rusting pipes and dilapidated warehouses. One overgrown, abandoned dumpling restaurant was the only evidence of the communities that used to live there.

At the site of another village once cited locally as having particularly high cancer rates, a large silicon factory occupied the area.

It’s not clear where the residents have been moved to. A nearby, newly built complex of multi-storey apartment buildings appeared to be intended as housing for the relocated villagers, but few people roamed the streets. Local officials physically blocked the Guardian from speaking to any residents around the villages.

Baotou’s local government did not respond to a request for comment.