ICRC director says 'new inferno was unleashed' with restart of Gaza onslaught (2025)

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.

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.

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.

Gaza’s civil defence agency has said that Israeli strikes yesterday killed 50 people in the territory, AFP reports.

“Fifty martyrs have been counted as a result of continuous Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip since dawn,” civil defence official Mohammed al-Mughayyir told AFP.

They included nine people killed in a strike on a group of civilians in the east of Gaza City in the north of the territory.

The hospital in the southern town of Khan Younis said it had received the bodies of seven people killed in a strike on a house. The hospital in al-Awda said it had received four bodies and several people wounded from a strike on a cafe near the central Bureij camp.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has said that police were investigating a series of incidents that have erupted from clashing pro-Palestinian protests and pro-Israeli counter-protests, including the reported assault on Thursday of two women by a pro-Israeli crowd, Reuters reports.

Demonstrations have taken place in recent days during a visit to New York by far-right Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a West Bank settler who has pressed for an intensification of U.S ally Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip.

“The NYPD is investigating a series of incidents stemming from clashing protests on Thursday that began when a group of anti-Israel protesters surrounded the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters — a Jewish place of worship — in Brooklyn,” Adams said on social media.

“Initial reports indicate that one female protester was isolated from her group, harassed by counter-protesters and suffered injuries. In another incident, a second woman was surrounded and subjected to vile threatening by counter-protesters,” he added.

A clip from the incidents had nearly 9 million views on X. Adams said police were working to identify those related to this assault and one person was arrested. He added “hate has no place” in New York City.

The New York Times reported that chants of “death to Arabs” were made and that in one of those incidents, hundreds of men and boys surrounded a woman while shouting racist and sexist profanities.

The US military has said it will not reveal specific details about its military strikes in Yemen, citing what it called the need “to preserve operational security” while also saying the strikes had “lethal effects” on Houthi rebels, Reuters reports.

Recent US strikes have killed dozens, including 74 at an oil terminal in mid-April in what was the deadliest strike in Yemen under Trump so far, according to the health ministry.

“To preserve operational security, we have intentionally limited disclosing details of our ongoing or future operations. We are very deliberate in our operational approach, but will not reveal specifics about what we’ve done or what we will do,” the US Central Command said in a statement.

The military said it has struck over 800 targets since mid-March that it says killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders as well as destroyed the group’s facilities.

The military statement said the strikes “have destroyed multiple command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, advanced weapons manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an affidavit before the Supreme Court, described as a “liar” the country’s internal security chief, whom the government is trying to fire, AFP reports.

Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar’s dismissal, announced by the government last month but frozen by the country’s top court, triggered mass protests.

“The accusation according to which I allegedly demanded action against innocent civilians, or against a non-violent and legitimate protest during the protests of 2023, is an absolute lie,” Netanyahu said in his court statement.

Bar denied accusations by Netanyahu and his associates that the Shin Bet had failed to warn in time about Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the conflict in Gaza.

“Nothing was hidden” on that night from the security apparatus or the prime minister, Bar said.

Read more here.

The Israeli military says the attack on the Beirut suburbs has destroyed “an infrastructure where precision missiles” were stored by Hezbollah, Al Jazeera reports.

It did not provide proof for its claim. No secondary explosions were reported after the Israeli attack.

“Storing missiles in this infrastructure constitutes a blatant violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon and a threat to the state of Israel and its citizens,” the military said in a statement.

Joseph Aoun has condemned the Israeli attack on Beirut and called on the US and France to “assume their responsibility” as the sponsors of the ceasefire agreement and tell Israel to end its violations of the deal, Al Jazeera reports.

The Lebanese president said Israel is undermining stability in Lebanon and escalating tensions, posing “real dangers to the security” of the region.

Smoke could be seen rising from the Beirut suburbs of Dahiyeh after the Israeli strike, but there have been no reports of casualties.

Israel has carried out an air attack on southern Beirut after issuing a forced evacuation warning, Al Jazeera reports.

Footage showed a huge plume of black smoke rising over the capital’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh after the attack.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports that the demolition of homes is still taking place in Rafah and the eastern side of Gaza City.

“Over the past hour, we have also recorded a major surge in Israeli attacks, not just on the central areas, but in the north as well,” he adds. “Israeli fighter jets have targeted two areas in Deir el-Balah with two consecutive air strikes.”

Azzoum reports that the first strike took place on agricultural land in the western end of the city with no casualties reported, while the second targeted a group of civilians close to one of the central malls in a very densely populated area.

“According to medical sources in Al-Aqsa Hospital, four Palestinians were killed in the attack, and local civilians and ambulances transported other casualties,” Azzoum reports. “The strike left behind a significant level of destruction on the street that was targeted without any prior warning.”

Azzoum adds that in Khan Younis, a makeshift tent was struck by three drone missiles. “Among the casualties are three children and a woman.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said that talks with Hamas in recent days had shown that the group would be more open to an agreement that goes beyond a ceasefire in Gaza and aims for a lasting solution to the crisis with Israel, Reuters reports.

Speaking in Doha, Fidan said talks showed Hamas would be more willing to sign a deal that also addresses the issue of the occupied Palestinian territories and other issues, adding that the crisis could be turned into an opportunity to implement the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Two pro-Palestine demonstrators and supporters of the Youth Demand group have been arrested after throwing red powder paint during the London Marathon to protest against Israel’s military offensive and blockade on Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

An image shared by the group shows two people standing in the middle of the road wearing t-shirts that say: “Youth Demand: Stop Arming Israel.”

In a statement, Youth Demand said: “Gaza is running out of food. Arming genocide crosses the line. We won’t be bystanders.”

Marathon event staff intervened to remove the protesters and the race passed unobstructed, the Metropolitan Police said, adding that the paint appeared to be chalk-based and was not expected to present a hazard to the runners.

Gaza mediator Qatar has said that there has been some progress in talks in Doha this week aimed at securing a new truce in the Israel-Hamas conflict, AFP reports.

Speaking at a news conference, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani reported “a bit of progress”, in response to questions about reports of a Thursday meeting in Doha between Israel’s Mossad chief and the Qatari prime minister.

The health ministry in Gaza has announced that the death toll from Israel’s military campaign has risen to at least 52,243 people, after accounting for hundreds of individuals previously listed as missing whose deaths have now been confirmed, AFP reports.

“An additional 697 martyrs have been added to the cumulative statistics after their data was completed and verified by the committee monitoring missing persons,” the health ministry said in a statement, adding the overall toll stood at 52,243.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory, has called for an end to arms transfers to Israel, Al Jazeera reports.

“Seriously, how many children, along with their parents and grandparents, we must witness being starved, burned alive, or gathered into plastic bags after Western-manufactured bombs have shattered them?” she said in a social media post.

Several Western countries have continued to supply lethal weapons to Israel despite the enormous human toll caused by its military offensive on the Palestinian enclave.

“Israel must be stopped, and so [should] the states supplying it with weapons,” Albanese wrote.