Closing summary
Thank you for following the Guardian’s live blog. The blog has now closed.
Here’s an overview of what happened today:
The death toll in Gaza rose to 61,897 people, with 155,600 others wounded, since 7 October 2023, according to the local health ministry.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said that Israeli attacks killed at least 22 people today. According to the agency, at least 13 people were killed while trying to access aid distribution sites.
At least 11 people, including a child, also died of hunger-related causes since yesterday.
Denmark’s prime minister condemned the “horrific images” coming out of Gaza, but said the time is not right to recognise a Palestinian state. Posting on Facebook, Mette Frederiksen said recognition must take place when a “sustainable and democratic state in Palestine without the influence of Hamas” can be created. “And of course it must happen with mutual recognition of Israel,” she added.
Four Palestinians were wounded in an attack by Israeli settlers north of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera reported. One person was also wounded after reportedly being shot in the Sheikh Saad area of al-Eizariya, a town bordering occupied East Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
A cross-party group of MPs called on the government to bring sick and injured children from Gaza to the UK for treatment “without delay”. A letter to senior ministers signed by 96 MPs stressed that children are at risk of imminent death and any barriers to their evacuation should be lifted.
Thousands of people are expected to attend a protest in Tel Aviv today to demand the release of the hostages held in Gaza. The demonstration is set to take place at Hostages Square outside Tel Aviv Museum at 8pm local time, before a nationwide strike is held on Sunday.
A spokesperson for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) told the Guardian its staff members in Gaza have witnessed “mass casualty events” as people are killed while seeking aid, with some “shot at by the Israeli army”.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) told the Guardian civilians in Gaza are forced to choose between drinking water or using it to wash themselves and keep clean.
The Metropolitan police said that 60 more people will be prosecuted for showing support for Palestine Action, which was proscribed by the UK government last month. More than 700 people have been arrested for supporting the group since its proscription on 5 July.
Humanitarian conditions in Gaza have “extremely deteriorated”, Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, has said.
He told the Guardian Israel’s plan to take over Gaza City will “forcibly displace” more than a million people to areas in the south of the territory where they will live in “open spaces with no tents”.
He added: “We have high concerns about the conditions of tens of thousands of people who cannot move, entire families who have elders, people with disabilities, widows, orphans. There is no safe place in Gaza. Where can you go? These questions are raised while Israel continues invading and destroying.”
Shawa said it was “shocking to think how anyone can displace these people while they are starving and thirsty”.
Describing Gaza City as “the heart of the Gaza Strip”, he called on the international community to block Israel’s operation.
“Day by day, we are losing hope,” he said. “It is real time for action from the international community to stop this. We need you now, to act, to stop it.”
The US state department has said it will halt all visitor visas for people from Gaza while it conducts “a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days”.
This comes after a cross-party group of 96 MPs wrote a letter calling on the UK government to bring sick and injured children from Gaza to Britain for treatment “without delay”.
The government has said its plans to bring more seriously ill or injured children from Gaza to the UK for medical treatment are being carried out “at pace”.
Gaza’s civil defence agency has said that Israeli attacks killed at least 22 people today.
According to the agency, at least 13 people were killed while trying to access aid distribution sites.
As the Guardian reported earlier today, 11 people, including a child, have also died of hunger-related causes in the past 24 hours.
Updated
A protest organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is under way outside RAF High Wycombe, calling for an arms embargo against Israel.
Recognising Palestinian state 'here and now' is not going to help Gaza crisis, Danish PM warns
Denmark’s prime minister has condemned the “horrific images” coming out of Gaza, but said the time is not right to recognise a Palestinian state.
This comes as Keir Starmer is preparing to recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel meets certain conditions, including reaching a ceasefire and committing to a long-term peace process.
Posting on Facebook, Mette Frederiksen said “Denmark is a supporter of a Palestinian state”, adding that it is “the way forward”. But she said recognition must take place when a “sustainable and democratic state in Palestine without the influence of Hamas” can be created.
“And of course it must happen with mutual recognition of Israel,” she added. “Everyone has the right to peace and security.
“Recognising Palestine here and now is not going to help the thousands of children who are currently fighting for their survival. No matter how much you want it. Instead, we need to increase the pressure on both Israel and Hamas.
“Denmark will have the presidency of the EU for the next six months. A special role where we will work to apply increased pressure.”
Updated
Images from Gaza show the aftermath of continued Israeli strikes, as the death toll in the territory today rose to 25 people, including 12 that were reportedly killed while seeking aid.
Updated
A cross-party group of MPs has called on the government to bring sick and injured children from Gaza to the UK for treatment “without delay”.
A letter to senior ministers signed by 96 MPs stressed that children are at risk of imminent death and any barriers to their evacuation should be lifted.
Gaza’s healthcare system has been “decimated”, the letter warns, urging the government to release a timeline of evacuations from the territory.
The government earlier this month said its plans to evacuate seriously ill or injured children from Gaza and bring them to the UK for treatment were being carried out “at pace”.
So far, at least three children have arrived in the UK for medical treatment with the help of the charity Project Pure Hope.
A spokesperson for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said its staff members in Gaza have witnessed “mass casualty events” as people are killed while seeking aid, with some “shot at by the Israeli army”.
The spokesperson told the Guardian:
The humanitarian situation in Gaza – in Gaza City in particular – remains absolutely dire.
It is true that [during the] past two weeks there are slightly more items on the market, there is some food that is entering, but it is absolutely not reaching everyone. People without access to cash, which are thousands upon thousands of people here in the city, still have enormous difficulty to obtain anything.
We also continue to see mass casualty incidents near the Zikim border crossing, the border crossing in the north of the Gaza Strip, where some of the trucks with food aid are entering. People are so desperate that they continue to go toward the border crossing point where the trucks are entering, where they are shot at by the Israeli army as well as getting crushed sometimes by the trucks … because obviously these scenes are extremely chaotic.
The Israeli military has repeatedly denied targeting civilians in Gaza, accusing Hamas and other militant groups in the territory of killing Palestinians seeking aid near distribution centres.
Two Palestinians have been killed and 15 wounded in an Israeli strike in southern Gaza, it has been reported.
The attack was believed to be a drone strike in an area of al-Mawasi which Israel has designated a “safe zone”, Al Jazeera reports, citing two emergency sources.
Thousands of people are expected to attend a protest in Tel Aviv today to demand the release of the hostages held in Gaza.
The demonstration is set to take place at Hostages Square outside Tel Aviv Museum at 8pm local time, before a nationwide strike is held on Sunday.
About 60,000 people attended a protest calling for the release of the hostages in the city last weekend.
Among speakers expected at today’s protest is Dana Silberman Sitton, sister and aunt of murdered hostages Shiri, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, according to the Times of Israel.
There are currently 50 hostages held in Gaza, of whom 20 are believed to be alive.
Updated
Al Jazeera has reported that an Israeli drone has crashed in the Remal neighbourhood of Gaza City because of a technical malfunction.
It cited the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation as reporting that the drone was an intelligence-gathering unit being operated by Israeli army artillery.
The Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF has ‘ruled out’ fears of intelligence leaks because of the Skylark 3 reconnaissance drone’s malfunction.
Updated
Eleven people, including a child, have died of starvation in Gaza over the past 24 hours, local health officials say.
The latest figures bring the total number of hunger-related deaths in the territory to 251, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Death toll in Gaza today rises to 25
The death toll in Gaza today has increased to 25, Al Jazeera reports, adding that 12 people were killed while seeking aid.
Between 27 May and 8 August, the Red Cross field hospital in Rafah treated more than 4,500 wounded patients, with most saying they were injured while trying to access food distribution sites, according to the UN.
Condemning the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said: “It is imperative that the UN and its humanitarian partners are enabled to deliver aid at scale, using community-based mechanisms to reach the most vulnerable.”
Updated
The Metropolitan police has said that 60 more people will be prosecuted for showing support for Palestine Action, which was proscribed by the UK government last month.
More than 700 people have been arrested for supporting the group since its proscription on 5 July.
Last weekend 522 people – half of whom were over 60 – were arrested under section 13 of the Terrorism Act at a demonstration in central London for carrying placards that stated: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
In a statement released on Friday evening, the Met police said the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), a non-departmental public body, holds records of people convicted of offences under the Terrorism Act. It warned that employers and universities check DBS records, and can refuse applicants who are found to have had terrorism convictions.
People in Gaza choosing between drinking water or showering, NRC warns
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has said civilians in Gaza are forced to choose between drinking water or using it to wash themselves and keep clean.
An NRC spokesperson told the Guardian:
We are deeply concerned about the unimaginable crisis in Gaza, which is having a terrible impact on civilians and especially the children.
Starvation is deepening. Water scarcity is increasing very much each day. Colleagues on the ground are reporting that people are now basically rationing between either using water for drinking or for hygiene.
There is an urgent need to allow assistance into Gaza and for humanitarian organisations to be allowed to do their jobs. Denial of access is now costing lives every single day with people starving to death.
Updated
Unrwa has warned that women and girls in Gaza are forced to adopt “increasingly dangerous survival strategies like venturing out in search of food and water at the extreme risk of being killed”.
The agency added that one million women and girls in Gaza are now facing “mass starvation, violence and abuse”.
It called for the “siege” on Gaza to be lifted and aid allowed in “at scale”.
Four Palestinians have been wounded in an attack by Israeli settlers north of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera reports.
One person was also wounded after reportedly being shot in the Sheikh Saad area of al-Eizariya, a town bordering occupied East Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
Microsoft has launched an “urgent” external inquiry into claims Israel’s military surveillance agency has used the company’s technology to facilitate the mass surveillance of Palestinians.
The company said the formal review was in response to a Guardian investigation that revealed how the Unit 8200 spy agency has relied on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast collection of everyday Palestinian mobile phone calls.
The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call discovered that Unit 8200 made use of a customised and segregated area within Azure to store recordings of millions of calls made daily in Gaza and the West Bank.
Microsoft said “using Azure for the storage of data files of phone calls obtained through broad or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank” would be prohibited by its terms of service.
The inquiry, to be overseen by lawyers at the US firm Covington & Burling, is the second external review commissioned by Microsoft into the use of its technology by the Israeli military.
You can read more about Microsoft’s external inquiry by the Guardian’s investigations correspondent, Harry Davies, and Israeli investigative journalist, Yuval Abraham, below.
Updated
Turkey’s president has said the “tragedy unfolding in Gaza” should be considered a “deepening humanitarian catastrophe that wounds the collective conscience of humanity with each passing day”.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said cities in Gaza have been rendered “uninhabitable”, adding: “Homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship have been reduced to rubble; essential services such as food, water, healthcare, and electricity have collapsed.”
He condemned the world’s “feeble responses” to the crisis in Gaza, which he said “stands before us as a litmus test of whether the international community is willing and able to uphold the most fundamental human values”.
Israel has repeatedly denied targeting Palestinian civilians, saying its strikes in Gaza seek to eliminate Hamas.
Eight Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza – report
Eight Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza and the Mawasi al-Qarara area, north of Khan Younis, it has been reported.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that six of the casualties, including four children, were killed as a result of an Israeli strike on a house in the Bureij refugee camp, citing sources at the al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat.
Updated
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has described her Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu as a “problem”, accusing Israel’s government of going “too far”.
Frederiksen condemned the “absolutely appalling and catastrophic” humanitarian situation in Gaza and the Israeli government’s new settlement plans in the occupied West Bank in an interview with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
“We are one of the countries that wants to increase pressure on Israel, but we have not yet obtained the support of EU members,” she said.
Israel’s controversial settlement project, named E1, aims to build more than 3,000 homes in the occupied West Bank. Earlier this week, the Israeli far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the plans would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Frederiksen added that she wanted to consider “political pressure, sanctions, whether against settlers, ministers, or even Israel as a whole”, referring to trade or research sanctions.
Updated
Two former officials who worked under Joe Biden’s administration have said they received no evidence that “Hamas was physically diverting US-funded goods provided by the World Food Programme or international nongovernmental organizations”.
The remarks were made in a joint op-ed in Foreign Affairs by Jacob Lew, who served as US ambassador to Israel from 2023 to 2025, and David Satterfield, a former US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues from 2023 to 2024.
The pair wrote that “there was no evidence of substantial Hamas diversion of any major assistance funded by the UN or nongovernmental organisations (NGOs)”.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of stealing aid from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, either to consume it or sell it at higher prices.
Updated
Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s Middle East live blog.
Here’s an overview of the latest developments in the region:
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) warned that malnutrition in Gaza City has reached 21.5%, meaning about one in five young children are now malnourished.
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said earlier this week that almost 13,000 new admissions of children for acute malnutrition treatment were recorded in July 2025 across Gaza.
Two more people were killed near aid distribution sites in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported, after the UN said the death toll near the humanitarian centres has risen to 1,760 since May.
Foreign Ministers of 31 Arab and Islamic countries and the secretaries-general of the League of Arab States released a statement condemning the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s backing of the notion of a “Greater Israel”. Asked by i24News whether the prime minister “connects” with the vision of a Greater Israel, he said: “Very much.” The term is often used to describe biblical Israel, which includes parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Responding to the remarks, the Arab and Islamic nations said the remarks amount to “a grave disregard” of international law and “a direct threat to Arab national security”.
A special unit in Israel’s military was tasked with identifying reporters it could smear as undercover Hamas fighters, the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine reports. This comes after Israel claimed responsibility for prominent Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, who it accused of leading a Hamas cell.
The Israeli military claimed an air strike in southern Lebanon in the late hours of last night, saying it targeted sites run by Hezbollah.
This comes after Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem accused Lebanon’s government of “handing” the country to Israel by pushing for the group’s disarmament, warning it would fight to keep its weapons.
Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir published a video on Friday showing him confronting the most high-profile Palestinian detainee in Israeli custody in his prison cell. Marwan Barghouti, a leading member of the Palestinian Fatah party, has spent more than 20 years behind bars after being sentenced for his role in anti-Israeli attacks in the early 2000s.
