Israel kills 71 Palestinians in the past 24 hours: health ministry (2025)

Gaza’s Health Ministry has just issued its daily statistical report on Palestinian casualties in Israel’s military offensive on the enclave, Al Jazeera reports.

In the past 24 hours, Gaza hospitals have reported 71 people killed by Israeli forces, including 14 bodies recovered from under the rubble, and 153 injured.

Israel has killed at least 52,314 Palestinians since launching its military offensive on October 7, 2023. A further 17,792 people have been injured.

Since resuming its offensive on March 18, Israel has killed at least 2,222 people.

Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands reports that the UN is presenting its arguments at the International Court of Justice hearing, stating that Israel has a two-fold obligation under international law.

“It has an obligation as an occupying power in the Palestinian territories, and that obligation runs to essentially being burdened with looking after the well-being of Palestinians,” Challands reports.

“That includes children’s education and welfare systems, medical facilities, including UN-established hospitals, and humanitarian relief operations. If it doesn’t do those things, then it’s in contravention of its obligations under international law.”

He adds that Israel also has an obligation as a signatory to the UN Charter, because the UN under that charter has immunities and exemptions that set it apart from other institutions and other multilateral organisations.

“Now, those obligations mean that you should not arrest or detain or attack UN staff, that you should not bomb UN facilities and buildings, and if you do you are in contravention of international law and the UN Charter, and Israel is a signatory to that charter, which is debated,” Challands reports.

At least 36 people have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza since dawn, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

The majority of the deaths, as many as 30, were reported in Gaza City and northern Gaza.

Palestinian Civil Defence says ambulances in southern Gaza have run out of fuel, with eight out of 12 vehicles out of order amid an ongoing Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid, Al Jazeera reports.

In a statement, it warned that with only four vehicles, its responses to residents will be limited, “threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelters”.

“We hold the Israeli occupation responsible for the worsening suffering of our people in the Gaza Strip due to the ongoing war and the continued imposition of the blockade,” the statement said.

“We renew our call to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and international organisations to take immediate action to open the Gaza Strip crossings, allow the entry of fuel, and supply institutions and equipment working in the humanitarian field.”

Al-Khidmat Foundation Pakistan has sent 40 tons of relief goods to the people of Gaza in Amman, the capital of Jordan, APP reports.

It has sent relief goods from Karachi on behalf of the people of Pakistan for the oppressed Palestinians.

President of Al-Khidmat Foundation Dr Hafeez-ur-Rehman told APP that the relief goods, sent with the support and cooperation of the government of Pakistan and the National Disaster Management Authority, include 20 tons of medicines, 5 tons of hygiene kits and 15 tons of tents.

He said that the foundation had already sent 900 tons of relief goods by air cargo to help the besieged and affected people of Gaza during Ramadan, but unfortunately, due to the closure of all border crossings between Egypt and Jordan, the relief goods could not reach Gaza during Ramadan.

At least 32 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip since dawn, including 26 in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera reports citing medical sources.

At least seven Palestinians, including two children, were killed in Israeli drone strikes on several areas west of Gaza City, the report added.

Israel’s army is flattening the remaining ruins of the city of Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, residents say, in what they fear is a part of a plan to herd the population into confinement in a giant camp on the barren ground.

Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported on Saturday that the military is setting up a new “humanitarian zone” in Rafah, to which civilians would be moved after security checks to keep out Hamas fighters. Aid would be distributed by private companies.

The Israeli military has yet to comment on the report and did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Residents said massive explosions could now be heard unceasingly from the dead zone where Rafah had once stood as a city of 300,000 people.

“Explosions never stop, day and night, whenever the ground shakes, we know they are destroying more homes in Rafah. Rafah is gone,” Tamer, a Gaza City man displaced in Deir Al-Balah, further north, told Reuters by text message.

Abu Mohammed, another displaced man in Gaza, told Reuters by text: “We are terrified that they could force us into Rafah, which is going to be like a cage of a concentration camp, completely sealed off from the world.”

Read more here.

Juliette Touma, the director of communications at UNRWA, has called for Israel’s ban on the agency to be lifted immediately.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Touma said “international staff of the agency can no longer get visas from Israel to work in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

“We rely on the frontline, Palestinian local workers, 17,000 of them have been holding the fort and delivering services, including education, in East Jerusalem,” she added.

Touma stressed the dangers faced by UNRWA’s staff, saying: “Humanitarian workers have become a target in this war. We see this only at UNRWA – we are seeing nearly 300 of our colleagues have been killed, many of them during the line of duty while serving their communities.”

Despite the escalating challenges, Touma said UNRWA’s local staff continue to provide essential services to Palestinian communities, even as international staff are increasingly blocked from working on the ground.

Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands reports that Israel will not participate in oral proceedings at the International Court of Justice.

“We might not get a detailed look at what Israel’s defence is until some way down the line, because of its absence from the proceedings here in our coverage over the next five days or so,” he reports.

“We are not going to hear from an Israeli representative standing up in the court behind me and arguing Israel’s case.”

According to Challands, Israel has submitted written advice and objections, but they will not be participating in the actual verbal proceedings.

“However, we do have some idea of what they might be saying, because in the UK last week, lawyers representing Israel said in a paper that it had a right to terminate the agreement with UNRWA and ban the agency’s activities on its sovereign territory, especially in wartime,” Challands adds.

Iran has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of trying to dictate US policy in negotiations, after he called for the complete dismantling of Tehran’s nuclear programme and the inclusion of its ballistic missile capabilities in any deal, AFP reports.

“What is striking … is how brazenly Netanyahu is now dictating what President Trump can and cannot do in his diplomacy with Iran,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a post on X.

“Israel’s fantasy that it can dictate what Iran may or may not do is so detached from reality that it hardly merits a response,” Araghchi said.

He noted that Iran was able to thwart “any attempt by malicious external actors to sabotage its foreign policy or dictate its course”.

“We can only hope our US counterparts are equally steadfast,” he added.

A top Palestinian official told the International Court of Justice that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza as a “weapon of war”, at the start of a week of hearings at the UN’s top court, AFP reports.

Israel is not participating at the ICJ but hit back immediately, dismissing the hearings as “part of the systematic persecution and delegitimisation” of the country.

The ICJ is hearing dozens of nations and organisations to draw up a so-called advisory opinion on Israel’s humanitarian obligations to Palestinians, more than 50 days into its total blockage on aid entering besieged Gaza.

Top Palestinian official Ammar Hijazi told judges that “all UN-supported bakeries in Gaza have been forced to shut their doors”.

“Nine of every 10 Palestinians have no access to safe drinking water.Storage facilities of the UN and other international agencies are empty,” added Hijazi.

“These are the facts. Starvation is here. Humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war,” concluded the Palestinian representative.

Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 24 people across the enclave since dawn, Al Jazeera reports.

In Jabalia, 10 family members were killed in an air strike on a residential area. Another home in Jabalia was also targeted in an air strike, killing eight people in one family.

In Khan Younis, four bodies were recovered from underneath the rubble of a bombed house.

A girl succumbed to her wounds from an air strike on a tent shelter in western Khan Younis city. A baby girl also succumbed to the wounds she sustained in the air strike.

Palestine’s ambassador to the Netherlands Ammar Hijazi, has just concluded his oral argument at the International Court of Justice, Al Jazeera reports. Here are some of his main points:

• Israel has not allowed food, water, medicine, medical supplies, or fuel into Gaza for over two months, with the Israeli Supreme Court supporting this policy by rejecting multiple petitions for aid, leading to a man-made humanitarian catastrophe, including deaths by starvation.

• The United Nations secretary-general has described Gaza as a “killing field”.There is no doubt about the court’s jurisdiction to hear this case; the legal questions are valid under international law, and the issue of Palestine is central to the UN’s mandate, as reaffirmed in previous advisory opinions.

• The State of Palestine will present evidence showing how Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) aim at permanent annexation, ethnic cleansing, and violate Palestinians’ fundamental rights and existence.

• Israel is an unlawful occupying power standing trial for genocide, and its prime minister is wanted by the ICC.

• Israel is attempting to destroy the Palestinian people and erase Palestine, including by barring and obstructing humanitarian organisations, thus also violating its obligations under the UN Charter and other instruments of international law.

“The background to this hearing is a UN General Assembly resolution introduced last year by Norway and a group of other countries, which asked the ICJ to give an opinion on whether Israel, as a signatory to the UN Charter, acted unlawfully in overriding the immunities afforded to the UN body,” Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands reports from The Hague, the Netherlands.

“What it comes down to is, does Israel’s treatment of UNRWA — the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees — adhere to its obligations, its humanitarian obligations?

“At issue are two bills that passed in the Israeli Knesset last year, in October, that declared that UNRWA harboured “Hamas terrorists”, as they put it, and instructed the Israeli government to end all cooperation and contact with the organisation, including supplying visas to UNRWA international staff, which has had a huge impact on the flow of food and aid into the besieged Gaza Strip,” he said.

“Now, five days of hearings will take place over the whole week, and at the end of that, we will have to wait, perhaps several more weeks, before we find out what the judges conclude from all this.

“Over the five days, we will hear from representatives from numerous different countries.

“Now it is likely that it’s not going to be until Wednesday that we actually hear from any country that is going to be supportive of Israel. That’s when the US and that’s when Hungary are speaking.”

Israeli settlers have once again stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, under the protection of Israeli police, according to Wafa.

After entering the compound, the settlers, who are Israeli citizens living illegally on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, are reported to have performed Talmudic rituals.

Students on their way to school suffered from suffocation after inhaling toxic gas fired by Israeli forces in the town of al-Khader, south of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, the Wafa news agency reports.

Local sources told Wafa that the Israeli forces stormed al-Khader, positioning themselves in the Tall area of ​​the Old City, and fired sound bombs and tear gas, causing several students to suffocate.

More recently, schools in al-Khader have experienced an escalation in Israeli attacks on students, either through the firing of sound bombs and tear gas or by pursuing and detaining several of them.

A “new inferno” has been unleashed on Gaza following the restart of conflict in the Palestinian territory, the director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said, AFP reports.

“Gaza is experiencing and enduring… death, injury, multiple displacements, amputations, separation, disappearance, starvation and denial of aid and dignity on a massive scale, and just when the all important ceasefire led people to believe they had survived the worst, a new inferno was unleashed,” Pierre Krahenbuhl said.

“This includes the trauma of families of Israeli hostages who face a never ending nightmare, and of the families of Palestinian prisoners, over 400 aid workers and 1,000 health care workers have been killed in Gaza, including 36 from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement,” he told the annual Global security forum in Doha.

“This horror and dehumanisation will haunt us for decades to come,” Krahenbuhl added.

Sixty-eight bodies have been recovered in Yemen, and 47 others have been wounded by a US strike on Saada hit a detention centre hosting African migrants, Reuters reports citing Yemen’s Houthi-run Al Masirah TV.

According to Yemen’s ministry of the interior, the detention center was housing 115 African migrants.

Israeli attacks across Gaza have killed 23 Palestinians since last night, Al Jazeera reports.

Air raids have killed 23 Palestinians since midnight, seven Palestinians were killed northwest of Gaza City.

Ten were killed in the north of the Gaza Strip, and four bodies were retrieved from the rubble of a home hit last evening.

A girl and an infant have also died from injuries sustained in an attack on a tent near Khan Younis yesterday.

Israel will face accusations of breaking international law by refusing to let aid into the Gaza Strip when dozens of nations present arguments at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) during a week of hearings starting in The Hague today, reports Reuters.

United Nations representatives will start the five days of sittings at 10am (1pm PKT), followed by a Palestinian submission, according to AFP. Another 38 countries will then address the 15-judge panel, including the US, China, France, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Israel is not among the roughly 40 nations that will speak during the five days of hearings scheduled through Friday. The US will state its opinion on Wednesday. The League of Arab States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the African Union will also make submissions.

Advisory opinions of the ICJ, also known as the World Court, carry legal and political weight, although they are not binding and the court has no enforcement powers.

After the hearings, the ICJ will likely take several months to form its opinion.

Several Palestinians have been wounded after Israeli forces shelled a home in the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.

The latest casualties come as Israeli forces launched more attacks on southern Khan Younis as well as northern Gaza City.

Al Jazeera, citing medics, said at least 17 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the early hours of this morning.

The victims include 10 people who were killed in the bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp.

The Government Media Office in Gaza has released new figures on the victims of Israel’s military onslaught on the strip, Al Jazeera reports.

Israel has “wiped out more than 2,180 Palestinian families, where the father, mother, and all family members were killed, and it has obliterated more than 5,070 additional Palestinian families, leaving only a single surviving member in each”, the office was quoted as saying.

The media office said more than 65 per cent of the 52,243 people killed by Israel were women, children and the elderly. More than 18,000 were children and more than 12,400 were women.