Not if the US is drawing it

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Following butchering and starvation, Israel has ignored US demands over aid for Gaza. There have been no consequences

This is a story about an apparently invincible fortress: the west’s official narrative about Israel’s war on Gaza. No matter how depraved the atrocity, or overwhelming the evidence, or confessed-to the crime, the fortress will not crumble. In fact, even when Israel flagrantly insults its main sponsor, the US, as it did this week, nothing changes.

The case in point here starts with a letter that the US sent to Israel last month, which set out in detail how life-saving aid was being systematically blocked from entering Gaza and threatened undefined action if specific demands to reverse the siege were not taken within 30 days. As the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen suggested, the letter was a political ruse to woo voters in the run-up to the election (given most Democratic voters correctly believe that Israel is committing genocide).

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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Sam Rose warns of severe consequences amid weakened US stance and points to ICJ demand to protect aid efforts

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel’s plan to close the UN Palestinian relief agency, Unrwa, within three months is impossible and unrealistic without causing further untold suffering to the Palestinian people, its director of operations in Gaza has warned.

Just returned from Gaza, where he said he had seen levels of suffering unprecedented since the war started, Sam Rose warned that Unrwa could collapse with severe implications for schools and hospitals not just in Gaza but in the West Bank if Israel goes ahead with its plan.

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Restless Development, a global youth agency, asked photographers aged 18-25 from around the world to submit images for the WHO global campaign to end violence against children on the theme of feeling safe. The resulting photo essays were displayed in Bogotá, Colombia, earlier this month

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Humanitarian groups say almost none of the US’s demands that Israel improve conditions in Gaza have been met

Donald Trump has chosen the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as the next US ambassador to Israel .

Huckabee has a track record of hardline, occasionally provocative, pro-Israel rhetoric and previously said Israel has a rightful claim to the West Bank , which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria .

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US may soon impose sanctions as organisations say Israel has failed to help relieve dire humanitarian situation

A coalition of international aid organisations have accused Israel of ignoring a US ultimatum that threatened sanctions if Israel did not implement a series of measures to counter the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The 30 day ultimatum– due to expire on Tuesday or Wednesday – was delivered on 13 October, and almost none of its demands have been met, the humanitarian groups say.

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Settlers have been dreaming of a return to Gaza for nearly 20 years – and Trump’s presidency may only embolden them

Last week, Brig Gen Itzik Cohen, a senior IDF officer, quietly admitted what the international community has long been reluctant to acknowledge: that Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, and deceiving the world about its true objectives in the besieged territory. He made the admission during a closed briefing to Israeli journalists last Tuesday regarding the army’s activities in the north of the strip. Israel’s forces, he boasted , were getting closer to the “complete evacuation” of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya – Gaza’s three northernmost cities, which have been under intense Israeli bombardment since early October. “There is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes,” Cohen continued , before adding that his “clear orders” were to “create a cleansed space”.

The army hastened to distance itself from Cohen’s comments after they garnered the attention of the international media: what may have sounded like war crimes, a spokesperson clarified, was merely a remark taken out of context. Yet what we see playing out on the ground in northern Gaza is exactly as Cohen described it: tens of thousands of civilians forced out of homes, shelters and hospitals , day after day, by airstrikes, artillery fire, quadcopter drones or armed battalions arriving at their door – who make sure to demolish or burn whatever is left behind.

Ben Reiff is a senior editor at +972 magazine

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His house was bombed and his relatives killed, before he escaped to the US. Now he is on a relentless, restless drive to tell the stories of all those left behind

This time last year, Mosab Abu Toha was standing in a queue waiting to pass a checkpoint. He had already made the difficult decision to tell his parents that he and his wife, Maram, were leaving Gaza with their three young children; the checkpoint was on the road to the Rafah crossing into Egypt. He greeted people he recognised, tried to reassure his children. And then he was called out of the queue. “The young man with the black backpack who is carrying a red-haired boy. Put the boy down and come my way.”

Abu Toha was born in Gaza and had lived there for most of his 31 years, frequently under Israeli bombardment, but this was the first time he had encountered Israeli soldiers in person. He was ordered, by megaphone, to strip naked. When dressed again he was blindfolded, and a numbered bracelet attached to his wrist. He was sworn at, punched and kicked, including in the face, and forced into a truck; when the blindfold was pulled off, “a soldier is aiming an M16 at my head,” he wrote, a month later, in the New Yorker . “Another soldier, behind a computer, asks questions and takes a photo of me. Another numbered badge is fastened to my left arm.” He spent much of two days kneeling on the rubbled ground.

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Comments from Israel Katz follow remarks from fellow minister yesterday that ‘certain progress’ had been made

Overnight Israel has announced the deaths of four soldiers in combat in the northern Gaza Strip.

The IDF says that “since the beginning of ground operations in the Gaza Strip on 27 October 2023, 373 soldiers have fallen in combat.”

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