Israel’s war on Gaza live: Israel leaves bodies in wake of Khan Younis exit..

 

• Israeli forces have withdrawn from areas of eastern Khan Younis after a 22-day military operation, leaving destruction in their wake. At least nine bodies have been recovered by the Palestinian Civil Defence there so far.
• As Israel’s massive raid on the occupied West Bank continues for a third day, its army claims that it killed Hamas commander Wissam Hazem in Jenin.
• The World Health Organization has announced that Israel has agreed to limited “humanitarian pauses” to allow for vital polio vaccinations in Gaza, adding that more than 1.2 million vaccines are already in the Strip with an additional 400,000 on the way.
• China condemns Israel at the UN Security Council meeting, saying: “We must never allow the same humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza to happen in the West Bank, which will turn the West Bank into another hell on earth.”
• At least 40,602 people have been killed and 93,855 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7.

Israeli forces say it struck Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon...

 

In a war update on X, the Israeli military says fighter jets attacked several rocket launchers belonging to the Lebanese group in two areas in southern Lebanon.

It added that it fired artillery in several areas in southern Lebanon throughout the day.

Smoke rises after Israeli attacks hit an area in Khiam town, southern Lebanon [File: Ramiz Dallah/Anadolu.

Our support for Gaza is a ‘responsibility and a struggle’: Houthi military spokesman...

Yahya Saree has said in a post on X that the “flood of Yemeni anger is overwhelming, and the blood and hunger in Gaza only make it more determined to deliver a harsh response” to Israel and its allies.

He concluded the post by saying, “Our support for Gaza and Al-Aqsa… is a responsibility and a struggle”, alongside a video of the large rally in support of Palestinians in Gaza held today in Sanaa, Yemen.

Protesters, mainly Houthi supporters, rally to

 show solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen August 30, 2024 [Khaled Abdullah...

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Palestinian pollster casts doubt on Israeli claim Hamas falsified polling results

A prominent Palestinian pollster has expressed scepticism towards Israeli claims that Hamas altered polling data to inflate public support for the October 7 attacks.

The Israeli military, which has made a series of unsubstantiated claims throughout the war, stated on Thursday that it had discovered documents in Gaza showing falsified polling data put forward by the Palestinian group.

“While we continue to investigate the claim by the army, our tentative conclusion is that Hamas could not have falsified the data; and either the claim is based on a forgery or the Hamas document is genuine but the person who wrote it lied to make money from Hamas,” Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), said in a social media post.

Shikaki told the Israeli newspaper The Times of Israel that he views the Israeli military’s claim as “the army against Hamas in the battle over narratives”.

Israel ‘replacing Indigenous Palestinians with the colonial settlers’

Saleh Hijazi, apartheid-free policy coordinator for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, says Israel is a “settler colony” that is intent on “replacing Indigenous Palestinians with the colonial settlers”.

“It does so through genocide like in Gaza, … through ethnic cleansing like we’re seeing right now in the north, west, and middle of the occupied West Bank, and through apartheid against all of the Palestinian people,” Hijazi told Al Jazeera.

He called on the international community to boycott Israel for its 76 years of “criminal activity, the systematic killing, systematic torture, and systematic destruction of poverty and livelihood”.

Israel offering a three-day pause for vaccinations ‘a sick joke’

The fact that the “international community is begging Israel to vaccine children tells you to what extent this war has become immoral and genocidal”, Dr Tamer Qarmout, an associate professor in public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera.

Rather than allow temporary pauses for polio vaccinations, he said Israel’s war on Gaza needs to end he said.

“The health sector in Gaza has been systematically destroyed and targeted,” he said, adding that a three-day pause “will never be enough to vaccinate 30 or 40 percent of Gaza’s population, which are young and children”.

He described it as “a sick joke by the Israelis to say, we offer you three days to vaccine children, knowing that the entire health sector has been destroyed” with no clinics and “no basic conditions whatsoever to provide this vaccine..

Aid missions rejected by Israel nearly doubled in August: UN

The United Nations humanitarian affairs office says Israel nearly doubled its rejections of aid missions in Gaza this month despite calls for much more assistance for desperate Palestinians.

“In August, the number of humanitarian missions and movements within Gaza that have been denied access by Israeli authorities has doubled in the north (68 vs 30) and almost doubled in the south (99 vs 53) compared with July,” the group said in a situation update.

“Between 1 and 29 August, out of the 199 planned humanitarian missions coordinated with the Israeli authorities for northern Gaza, 74 (37 percent) were facilitated, 68 (34 percent) were denied access, 42 (21 percent) were impeded (including missions that succeeded), and 15 (8 percent) were cancelled due to logistical, operational, or security issues.”

The International Court of Justice has issued numerous legally binding orders for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, but Israeli authorities have instead consistently blocked large portions of humanitarian assistance.