Here’s how things stand on Monday, February 26, 2024:
Fighting and humanitarian crisis
- The Israeli military shelled and fired on crowds of Palestinians waiting for food aid trucks to arrive in Gaza City, killing 10 people, the Wafa news agency reported.
- At least 15 people were injured in the attack, which occurred on the coastal road in northern Gaza City on Sunday evening. They have been transferred to the nearby al-Shifa Hospital.
- “Reports that a two-month-old baby died of hunger in Gaza are horrific,” said UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, in a post on social media.
- Photos and testimonies have documented the Israeli army targeting two Palestinian sisters, killing one of them, as they searched for food on farmland in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.
- The Israeli war cabinet has approved a military plan for “providing humanitarian assistance” in the Gaza Strip.
- Meanwhile, an Israeli military offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah could be “delayed somewhat” if a deal is reached for a weeks-long truce between Israel and Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
Regional tensions and diplomacy
- On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gave Israel one month to “submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect” to its order in the genocide case brought by South Africa. Israel is expected to submit that report today, Monday, February 26.
- Meanwhile, the final day of public hearings has begun in a separate ICJ case on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967.
- In the United States, an active US military service member set himself on fire, in an apparent act of protest against the war in Gaza, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, authorities said. US media reports said Aaron Bushnell, 25, livestreamed himself on Twitch, wearing fatigues and declaring he would “not be complicit in genocide” before dousing himself in liquid. He then lit himself on fire while yelling “Free Palestine!” until he fell to the ground.
Violence in the occupied West Bank
- Israeli forces have erected a tower and placed surveillance cameras on it at the western wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, the Wafa news agency reports.
- The report comes as the Israeli government is expected to place restrictions on worshippers trying to pray at Islam’s third-holiest site during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which will likely start on March 10.
- Israel plans to build more than 3,300 new homes in settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in response to a fatal Palestinian shooting attack, a senior cabinet minister said. The decision drew an angry response from the US at a time of growing tensions over the course of Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
