Gaza ceasefire talks fail as UN warns of ‘slaughter’ in Israeli ground invasion of Rafah - latest

The Senate early Tuesday passed an emergency spending package that would provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel; replenish US weapons systems; and provide food, water, and other humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.

The Senate jettisoned from the package a bipartisan effort to boost immigration enforcement at the US-Mexico border after most Republican senators, following the lead of former president Donald Trump, deemed the bipartisan proposal inadequate. Abandoning the border proposal brought the price tag of the bill down to about $95.3bn.

Now that the Senate has approved the emergency spending package, it is up to the Republican-led House to take it up, change it or let it die.

Speaker Mike Johnson cast new doubt on the package in a statement Monday evening, making clear that it could be weeks or months before Congress sends the legislation to president Joe Biden’s desk — if at all.

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More than 7,000 Palestinians have been detained in the occupied West Bank since Hamas’s 7 October attack on South Israel, according to rights groups.

About 440 children and 220 women were among those detained by Israeli forces in four months, the Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), and the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association said in a joint statement.

The groups said Israeli forces detained 53 journalists, 36 of whom were still in detention, and placed 21 others under administrative detention.

Hamas claimed it targeted an Israeli armoured personnel vehicle with a mortar shell in Khan Younis and blew up three tunnel shafts around Israeli troops in the southern Gaza city.

The organisation later said it also fired mortar shells at a tank and a military bulldozer north of Khan Younis and detonated a boobytrapped house with Israeli troops inside in the same area.

Sir Keir Starmer is at the centre of a second antisemitism storm after Labour was forced to suspend a would-be MP just 24 hours after it ditched its candidate in the Rochdale by-election.

The party acted after Graham Jones, the prospective Labour MP for Hyndburn, appeared to say that Britons who volunteer to fight for the Israel Defense Forces “should be locked up”.

His taped comments, in which he also referred to “f***ing Israel”, were reportedly made in a rant to Labour’s former candidate in Rochdale, Azhar Ali, at a now infamous meeting at which Mr Ali claimed that Israel had “allowed” last October’s Hamas terror attacks to take place so that it could use them as a pretext to attack Gaza.

The latest row erupted just hours after Sir Keir insisted he had taken decisive action following accusations that the two-day delay in withdrawing support for Mr Ali was “shambolic”.

Kate Devlin and Archie Mitchell report.

The government of South Africa lodged an “urgent request” with the UN’s International Court of Justice to consider whether Israel’s military operations targeting the southern Gaza city of Rafah are a breach of provisional orders the court handed down last month in a case alleging genocide.

South Africa said it asked the court to weigh whether Israel’s strikes on Rafah, and its intention to launch a ground offensive on the city where 1.4 million Palestinians have sought shelter, breaches both the UN Genocide Convention and preliminary orders handed down by the court last month in a case accusing Israel of genocide.

South Africa said Rafah was “the last refuge for surviving people in Gaza” while asking the UN court to consider using its powers to issue additional preliminary orders telling Israel to halt the deaths and destruction there.

During the final hours of debate on the security supplemental package, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland excoriated the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.

In doing so, he all but accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of committing international war crimes.“Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food,” he said on the floor of the United States Senate.

“In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true. That is a war crime.”

Van Hollen is one of only a handful of Democratic senators who supports a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. And hearing any United States senator say Israel has effectively committed war crimes is unprecedented, given widespread support for Israel across both parties.

Van Hollen joined 47 other Democratic Senators in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to vote for a national security legislative package that included $14.1bn in security assistance to Israel, along with aid to Ukraine and allies in the Indo-Pacific to push back against China.

Eric Garcia reports.

Talks involving the US, Egypt, Israel and Qatar on a Gaza truce ended without a breakthrough on Tuesday as calls grew for Israel to hold back on a planned assault on the southern end of the enclave, crammed with over a million displaced people.

The city of Rafah, whose pre-war population was about 300,000, teems with homeless people living in tent camps and makeshift shelters who fled there from Israeli bombardments in areas of Gaza farther north during more than four months of war.

Israel says it wants to flush out Hamas militants from hideouts in Rafah and free Israeli hostages being held there. Its military is making plans to evacuate Palestinian civilians. But no plan has been forthcoming and aid agencies say the displaced have nowhere else to go in the shattered territory.

The United States has urged Israel to protect journalists working in Gaza following Al Jazeera reporters who were severely injured in an Israeli drone strike.

“Let me offer, of course, condolences to your colleagues who have been injured. And I know that they are not the first Al Jazeera journalists to have been harmed during this conflict. So they have our sincere condolences, as do their families, as do all of you at Al Jazeera,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.

“We continue to engage with the government of Israel to make clear that journalists ought to be protected.”

Ibrahim Hasouna trudged over the rubble of the destroyed house, pointing out where family moments had taken place — where his mother and sister-in-law used to sleep, where he played with his five-year-old nieces, where he helped his one-year-old nephew take his first steps.

His entire family was now dead — his parents, his two brothers, and the wife and three children of one of those brothers.

The house was reduced to rubble on top of them in the barrage of airstrikes that Israeli warplanes inflicted across Rafah before dawn Monday as cover for troops rescuing two hostages elsewhere in the town on the southern Gaza border.

At least 74 Palestinians were killed in the bombardment, which flattened large swaths of buildings and tents sheltering families who had fled to Rafah from across Gaza.

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