Israel Gaza news: Israeli airstrike kills Rafah family as US approves £21bn in aid package

The map below shows the location of a tent city reportedly being created for evacuees from Rafah ahead of Israel deploying troops to the region.

It is near Khan Younis, an area targeted by repeated Israeli military operations over recent weeks.

Israel has said it plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah during an anticipated offensive on the southern city, where hundreds of thousands of people have taken refuge during the war, now in its seventh month.

Satellite images appear to show a huge tent city being created by Israel to base evacees from Rafa as the country prepares to tkae the last city in the Gaza Strip.

Images taken by Maxar Technologies on 7 April and then 23 April show a large development of white structures near Khan Younis.

It comes as Israel Hayom newspaper claimed the sending of tropps to Rafah was to happen “very soon”.

Rafah’s population has been swollen by more than a million Palestinians who fled other parts of the Gaza Strip during the more than half-year-old war.

Israel is poised to send troops into Rafah, the Gazan city it sees as the last bastion of Hamas, Israeli media reported on Wednesday, saying preparations were under way to evacuate war-displaced Palestinian civilians who have been sheltering there.

The Rafah sweep, postponed for several weeks amid disputes with Washington, will happen “very soon,” the mass-circulation Israel Hayom newspaper said, citing a decision by the Israeli government after ceasefire talks with Hamas stalled.

Several other Israeli media outlets carried similar reports. Some noted footage on social media that appeared to show the erection of a tent city for Rafah evacuees.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and the Israeli military spokesperson’s office had no immediate comment.

The US special regional envoy for humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, told reporters in Washington that Gaza faces a high risk of famine, especially in the north. He urged Israel to get aid to those in need.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN aid agency UNRWA, said the number of aid trucks entering Gaza reached 310, the highest daily total since the war began.

“This shows that when there is a will there is a way,” he wrote on social media site X. “Famine in northern Gaza can be averted only through meaningful & uninterrupted supply including through @UNRWA.”

Tuesday saw a step up in strikes across Gaza by Israeli forces with some of the heaviest shelling in weeks, residents inside the region have said.

Among the casualties were three members of a family in Rafah, an Al Jazeera correspondent has reported.

The attacks come as Israeli’s army spokesperson Avichay Adraee urged people living in four zones in Beit Lahiya on Gaza’s northern edge to move to two designated areas.

The renewed shelling and bombing of northern Gaza comes are four months after the Israeli army announced it was drawing down troops there, saying Hamas no longer controlled those areas.

This month, Israel also drew down most of its forces in southern Gaza.

The United Nations called Tuesday for “a clear, transparent and credible investigation” of mass graves uncovered at two major hospitals in war-torn Gaza that were raided by Israeli troops.

Credible investigators must have access to the sites, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters, and added that more journalists need to be able to work safely in Gaza to report on the facts.

Earlier Tuesday, U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said he was “horrified” by the destruction of the Shifa medical center in Gaza City and Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis as well as the reported discovery of mass graves in and around the facilities after the Israelis left.

He called for independent and transparent investigations into the deaths, saying that “given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators.”

“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” Türk said. “And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are ‘hors de combat’ (incapable of engaging in combat) is a war crime.”

Read the full story here:

As the world holds its breath in the face of escalating violence in the Middle East, this conflict could come down to which country is best positioned to deal with sanctions, writes Mark Almond:

Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi warned Israel that any attack on Iranian territory could result in potentially jeopardizing the existence of the “Zionist regime”.

“If the Zionist regime once again makes a mistake and attacks the sacred land of Iran, the situation will be different, and it is not clear whether anything will remain of this regime,” Raisi said during his visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.

“Today the greatest violators of human rights are the Americans and Westerners, and their claim of defending human rights is also empty,” he said, attacking the West for claiming to defend human rights but at the same time supporting Israel’s war in Gaza.

“The people of Iran and Pakistan both defend the oppressed Palestinian nation. Islamic Iran will continue to defend the resistance and the oppressed nation of Palestine with pride,” he added.

Google has fired more employees who protested against its $1.2bn contract with Israel, the company confirmed to The Independent on Tuesday.

The company declined to say how many employees had been let go but The Washington Post reported that the number is around 20.

This is on top of the 28 employees who lost their jobs last week after staging demonstrations, bringing the total to nearly 50.

“Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity,” a Google spokesperson told The Independent on Tuesday.

The protests took place inside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California on 16 April with workers demanding that the company end its huge cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.

Vishwam Sankaran and Katie Hawkinson report:

Jack Straw was the first foreign secretary to visit Iran after the 1979 revolution and is used to negotiating with its leaders – even, on one occasion, from a train loo. Here, he explains why Netanyahu and Khamenei are throwing each other a lifeline to stay in power, and warns we could all pay a terrible price…