Australia urges Israel not to take military control of Gaza
"Australia calls on Israel to not go down this path, which will only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza,' Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in a statement on Friday.
Wong said permanent forced displacement was a violation of international law and repeated calls for a ceasefire, aid to flow unimpeded and for militant group Hamas to return the hostages taken in October 2023.
'A two-state solution is the only pathway to secure an enduring peace – a Palestinian state and the State of Israel, living side-by-side in peace and security within internationally-recognised borders,' she added.
Australia has not yet joined Western allies such as the U.K., Canada and France in announcing it would recognise Palestinian statehood, opens new tab but has said it would make a decision "at an appropriate time", while escalating its criticism of Israel's actions.
Wong's comments come in response to Netanyahu saying Israel intended to take military control of all of Gaza during an interview with Fox News.
He said Israel wanted to hand over the territory to Arab forces that would govern it, without elaborating on the governance arrangements or which Arab countries could be involved.
After a security cabinet meeting on Friday, Netanyahu's office confirmed a plan to take over Gaza City had been approved.
A statement said the Israeli Defence Forces would prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Global outrage mounts as funeral held for five journalists killed by Israel
The death of the prominent Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, killed along with four colleagues in an Israeli airstrike on Sunday, prompted condemnation from around the world, as hundreds of mourners carried their bodies through the streets of Gaza City. Sharif, one of Al Jazeera's most recognisable faces in Gaza, was killed while inside a tent for journalists outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Sunday night. Seven people were killed in the attack, including the Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and the camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, according to the Qatar-based broadcaster. On Monday, the Guardian visited the site where the journalists were killed. Wadi Abu al-Saud, a Palestinian journalist who was near the tent when the Israeli strike occurred on Sunday, said the attack happened at 11.22pm, just after he had finished filming his latest news bulletin. 'I entered the tent opposite theirs, raised my phone to make a call, and then the explosion occurred, Saud said. 'A piece of shrapnel hit my phone. I looked back and saw people burning in flames. I tried to extinguish them. Anas and the others had died instantly from the strike.' In two videos of the aftermath of the strike, Saud can be seen carrying the bodies of those killed. 'From now on, I will not continue the coverage,' he said. 'I will return to my life as a citizen. The truth has died and the coverage has ended.' The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitted carrying out the attack, claiming Sharif was the leader of a Hamas cell responsible for rocket attacks against Israel – an allegation that Al Jazeera and Sharif had previously dismissed as baseless. It was the first time during the war that Israel's military has swiftly claimed responsibility after a journalist was killed in a strike. Pro-Israel advocates on social media hailed the killing of Sharif and posted photos handed out by the IDF of photos the journalist took with the former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, taken before Hamas's attack on 7 October. Sara Qudah, the Middle East and north Africa director at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said: 'Israel's pattern of labelling journalists as militants without providing credible evidence raises serious questions about its intent and respect for press freedom.' In July, Sharif told CPJ that he lived with the 'feeling that I could be bombed and martyred at any moment'. Reporters Without Borders condemned the 'acknowledged murder by the Israeli army' of Sharif in Gaza and called on the international community to intervene. Keir Starmer's spokesperson said: 'We are gravely concerned by the repeated targeting of journalists in Gaza. Reporters covering conflicts are afforded protection under international humanitarian law and journalists must be able to report independently without fear, and Israel must ensure journalists can carry out their work safely.' The UN human rights office condemned the targeting of the journalists' tent, saying it was 'in grave breach of international humanitarian law'. Al Jazeera said the attack was 'a desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza' and called Sharif 'one of Gaza's bravest journalists'. People gathered at Sheikh Radwan cemetery in the heart of the Gaza Strip to mourn the journalists, whose bodies lay wrapped in white sheets at al-Shifa hospital before their burial. Friends, colleagues and relatives embraced and consoled one another. The area where the attack took place was crowded with media workers on Monday, some speaking to cameras or mobile phones, others taking photos. Islam al-Za'anoun, a news correspondent for Palestine TV and several Arab channels who participated in the funeral, said Sunday's attack was 'a turning point in the world of journalism'. She said: 'Despite all the threats he received and the Israeli media's incitement against him, al-Sharif continued reporting. Now one question haunts me: Who will be next on the list? Will it be me?' Bilal Abu Khalifa, a presenter at Al Jazeera, said he had met Sharif four days ago. 'He told me he was in danger,' Abu Khalifa said. 'I asked him not to go out or appear publicly too often. He gave me a very simple answer: Bilal, I will not leave Gaza except to the sky! I will not leave Gaza even if I am killed. I know I am on the assassination list, but I will continue to expose the crimes of the Israeli army against my people and show the world, and everyone who stands by them, the truth.' In a final message, which Al Jazeera said had been written on 6 April and which was posted to Sharif's X account after his death, the reporter said he had 'lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification.' He continued: 'Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.' After the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel barred international journalists from entering Gaza – one of the rare moments when international reporters have been denied access to an active war zone. Since then, the task of documenting the war has fallen heavily on Palestinian journalists, often at the cost of their lives – themselves caught in its devastation, displaced multiple times, their homes reduced to rubble, friends and relatives killed, and at times queueing for food at perilous distribution points. According to Gaza's government media office, 238 journalists have been killed by Israel since the war started. CPJ said at least 186 journalists had been killed in the Gaza conflict. Israel denies deliberately targeting journalists. In a report released this year, the Watson School of International and Public Affairs' costs of war project said more journalists had been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the US war in Afghanistan combined.
Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
Settlers and segregation: Inside the conflict forcing Palestinians from their homes
By Stuart Ramsay, chief correspondent On the side of a busy road outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, I'm speaking to Mohammed Robin. I'd read how he left his smallholding one morning to go to work, and when he came back he found it had been taken over by Israeli settlers. He was not allowed in - they simply told him to leave. We agreed that I'd follow his pick-up truck to a hill overlooking his property so I could see. He said it was far enough away from the settlers below to be safe. We turned off the main road on to a dirt track and drove about half a mile across rolling rocky hills, before pulling up to a stop. As we spoke on the hilltop, we noticed movement at his property down below. Two men jumped into an all-terrain buggy, along with a large black dog. They started moving up the hill towards us - we had obviously been spotted. The buggy pulled up and two heavily-armed settlers climbed out and exchanged a few words with Mohammed. I introduced myself and asked about Mohammed's home and why he couldn't return to it. They basically ignored me and said nothing. The men then manoeuvred the buggy sideways, blocking the track so we couldn't get past them. Still ignoring me, they walked to Mohammed's truck, looked inside, then walked back over and glanced into our vehicle. They still hadn't said a word to us. The two men talked to each other in whispers, and one stayed behind with us, while the other drove back towards Mohammed's occupied home. Settlers can be notoriously volatile and clearly Mohammed felt uncomfortable, if not a little scared that more settlers might return with the driver who'd just gone back down the hill. With nobody talking and not much happening, we decided to leave. Mohammed's family had owned the property since 1952, when the land was developed by his grandfather. "He built olive trees on it," Mohammed had told me. "Then my father was a teacher and supported the land and invested in it." "When I was growing up I used to come here and play, we used to come and visit our grandfather and grandmother." "I have to go the legal route to defend my land, but even with a legal process, I'm not... there's not much chance. This is aggression." Settler encroachment is perhaps the most important issue in the West Bank at the moment, and it's got worse since the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza. The settlers feel emboldened, the government is largely supporting them, they act with impunity and are in many ways enabled by Israel security forces. It's left Palestinians like Mohammed traumatised and angry, but perhaps worse, overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. I spent two weeks in the West Bank and saw that fundamental human rights are being whittled away daily, while the world watches on. It's different to the war in Gaza of course, but Palestinians in the West Bank are involved in a conflict nonetheless. THE ISOLATED TOWN I'd heard about Sinjel, a Palestinian town in the West Bank I was told was cut off from the outside world. It isn't yet completely surrounded but a five-metre-high metal fence around its eastern edge, and the early stages of construction on the other side, indicates the direction it's going. We entered the town on a small road that is the only exit and entry now available to its 8,000 residents. The main entry point has been permanently shut by the Israeli army since the 7 October attack. Israel says the barricades and fence are there to protect the main road from attack by stone-throwing villagers – security concerns are used as a catch-all reasoning for virtually everything. Sinjel is the first town in the West Bank to be slowly encircled and many here believe it won't be the last. It's a particularly vivid example of Israeli segregation. The mayor, Mutaz Tawafsha, told me that people who live here have two big issues. One is the encroachment of settlers on their land and the other is the fence and barricaded gates. "They're trying to make Sinjel a jail by isolating people from their land, from the north side, south side, east side, and west side." We walked along the fence towards a large, thick, orange iron barrier gate closing off the main entrance to the town. "We've had this gate from before October 7th by the way, and the army opens it and closes it as they like, but since October 7th it's been closed," Mutaz explained. I asked him if they could not just cut the padlocks to the gate and open it. "They have a camera over there, you will see it and they're going to come and take you," he said, pointing to a CCTV camera just above. "They are watching us right now." As we spoke, it became clear that the other big issue - the settlers - is in many ways more dangerous to their community. The mayor took out his phone and showed me a video he'd filmed of a settler attack on a farm on the edge of town. The video, included above, shows a farm building being ransacked and later set on fire by a large group, and a second video shows sheep and goats being herded away from the farm by the settlers. He took me to the place he had filmed that from, and I asked him if we could get a little closer to the area. He looked at me incredulously. "If you just try to go close to the settlers, you will see them, they are going to come and start to attack you." The West Bank would form the largest territorial part of a Palestinian state if it were to be recognised. It's geographically on the west bank of the River Jordan – hence its name – and it is, nominally at least, divided into areas A, B, and C under the terms of the Oslo Agreement. 'A' areas are the most densely populated, largely major towns and cities fully governed by the Palestinian Authority and its security services. 'B' areas are governed by the Palestinian Authority, but they have an Israeli security presence. Area 'C' is entirely administered by Israel and its security forces and takes up 60% of the West Bank. There are signs for these different areas everywhere in the West Bank, and the striking red 'Area A' sign clearly states that Israeli citizens are not allowed to enter "by Israeli law". But movement for Palestinians, even in Area A, is now so disrupted by Israeli security checks and barrier gates locked at will that normal life is effectively suspended. For example, leaving one part of town to reach another involves walking past a closed gate, across the road, past another closed gate and then the journey home. Car journeys are characterised by hours-long queues at checkpoints, and treatment can be arbitrarily unpleasant. At an armed checkpoint, we watched as a man in the car in front of us was told to get out and hand over ID documents for himself and the other passenger. He handed over his documents to one of the two soldiers and was told to get back in his car and wait. The soldier then gestured for the man to collect the documents, and as he got out of his car to get them, the soldier threw the documents on the ground. The man leaned down, picked them up, and quietly drove away. Israeli military seen in Hebron in the West Bank The Israeli military uses a range of obstacles like iron gates and concrete roadblocks across the West Bank. The Israeli justification for these barriers is security – what's undeniable is the impact they have on movement across the West Bank for Palestinians. The obstacles can range from earth mounds to checkpoints that are accompanied by inspections and guarded 24/7. The use of these obstacles has intensified. Since the 7 October attack, the number of obstacles has risen by more than 200. In early 2023, the United Nations documented a total of 645 obstacles in the West Bank. By early 2025, it had risen to 849. And from what we've seen while travelling around the West Bank, that number is growing all the time. Beneath the hilltop village of Al Mughayyir, we watched as IDF soldiers oversaw a digger working on a roadway, while a new barrier gate was being moved into position from the back of a lorry. I introduced myself to the two soldiers and told them I was trying to get to the village. They were immediately uncomfortable, telling me it was a "military area" and to stop filming, and go away. THE SETTLER Daniel Winston is an American-born Israeli settler, who has lived in Israel for more than 25 years. He, his wife and 10 children live in Yitzhar – considered one of the most hardcore settler communities in the West Bank. Some members of the settlement and the religious school in Yitzhar have been sanctioned by the British government, for example, for aggressive behaviour or for 'promoting violence against non-Jewish people'. We weren't allowed to meet at his settlement, so he invited me to a lookout point in another one. He wanted to show me the valley where Joshua led the Israelites to the promised land, according to scriptures. He, like all the settlers, believe the land is theirs and reject any notion of a Palestinian state. Like the Israeli government, Daniel refers to the West Bank by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. "I've chosen to live in the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, truly out of a biblical imperative to make this happen and make it happen better, even though the entire world has this mythology around it being occupied territory and being the so-called the land of the Palestinians," he told me as we drove. Interestingly, Daniel is a relationship therapist. He struck me as well-mannered, and well read, but his views on the modern day, like many of the settlers, appear to be thousands of years old. Throughout our conversation he made it clear that in his mind the Bible trumped any type of modern international law. "I am not one of those frothing at the mouth settlers who are going to yell and scream and start throwing things at you because I don't like what you're saying," he said when I challenged him on the creation of a Palestinian state. "I don't like what you're saying because what you are saying is wrong, it is not consistent with a historical record, there was never a Palestinian state." "Even if I were to say, okay well these poor people they have to do something, they have to go somewhere, I would say, well, not on my account, not on my watch. "Because not only is it inimical to my essential national interests of settling the entire land of Israel, it's also an intrinsic danger, a clear and present danger to our physical survival." Daniel consistently argued that the presence of Israelites in the West Bank going back 3,000 years justified his claims that the land belongs to them. I pointed out that Romans controlled London thousands of years ago as well, but no Italian has ever claimed ownership of Park Lane. "The problem is that first of all the Italians aren't interested, second of all, the Italians can't claim that God sent them there, I can whether you believe it or not and I understand that people don't buy into that," he replied. "It's like, oh, that's just a religious thing, yeah, that's what it is, you know, God's real, and he wrote the Bible, and the Bible says, 'I made this land, and I want you to be here'." A TWO-STATE SOLUTION? The UK, France and Canada are all threatening to recognise Palestine as a state in the coming months, much to the condemnation of Israel. All these countries talk of the so-called two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side. Israel rejects it and despite decades of negotiation and sometimes apparent agreement, the two-state solution remains a theoretical possibility – although many here doubt it's actually achievable. Yossi Beilin is one of the original architects of a two-state solution plan. He has worked on it for years and points out that because of this it remains viable if both parties were willing, as many technical issues have been addressed in the past. "If you don't want to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, you will always have good enough reasons on both sides why never to do that," he told me at his home in Tel Aviv. "But if you want to solve the problem, you will find you will solve it." Beilin is a rare voice of optimism in what is a largely depressing state of affairs. I asked him if we'd reached a tipping point where a two-state solution was just no longer possible. He fixed his eyes on me as he delivered his assessment. "We are in a situation whereby both sides need the two-states solution badly," he said. "The Palestinians, because this is the only way for them to fulfil their vision of said determination. "For the Israelis, it is the way to have a border, unless we do it unilaterally, and we already know that unilateral decisions about borders are not usually fulfilled - so we need an agreement about the border in order to assure that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, otherwise, we are doomed." CREDITS Reporting: Stuart Ramsay, Sky News chief correspondent Production: Sameer Bazbaz and Dominique Van Heerden Camera Operator: Mostyn Pryce Shorthand production: Michael Drummond, foreign news reporter OSINT Producer: Olive Enokido-Lineham Editing: Adam Parris-Long, assistant editor Design: Arianne Cantwell, Eloise Atter, Anisa Momen and Carmela Joannou Top Built with Shorthand
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Palestinian activist killed by settler filmed his shooting, footage shows
Awdah Hathaleen, the prominent Palestinian activist who was killed late last month by an extremist Jewish settler in the West Bank, filmed the moment he was shot, newly released video footage reveals. Hathaleen, who worked on the filming of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which examined settler violence against the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, was killed by Yinon Levi, a settler who was already under sanctions in the UK and EU for violent acts against Palestinians. The footage – released by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem – appears to offer clear evidence of Levi's direct involvement in the killing of Hathaleen, an English teacher and activist resident in Umm al-Khair in the south Hebron hills, on 28 July, in an incident that sparked international outrage. Levi was arrested over the killing but quickly released by a court after a ruling that the evidence he had fired at Hathaleen had 'weakened'. Levi has denied he fired the shot that killed Hathaleen. However, the footage filmed by Hathaleen himself shows Levi draw his weapon and fire in Hathaleen's direction. Hathaleen is then heard groaning and falling to the ground. Hathaleen was filming settlers operating an earth mover when he was shot. According to witnesses, a confrontation that was taking place between Levi and Palestinian residents became more heated when the digger attempted to approach a fenced-off grove belonging to a Palestinian family, with at least one stone thrown. The footage, filmed from some distance away, shows Levi waving a gun and scuffling with residents as they attempt to block the earth mover. Levi can then be seen taking several steps to his right before raising his gun, aiming it in Hathaleen's direction, and firing. The footage sharply contradicts claims by Levi's lawyer, Avichai Hajbi, that he had been 'forced to fire his weapon into the air' because he felt his life was in danger. Hathaleen's footage is backed up by witness evidence provided to B'Tselem, including by his brother-in-law Alaa Hathaleen, who was present at the time of the killing and is seen in the footage remonstrating with Levi at close quarters and attempting to film the events himself with his phone. 'The settler Yinon Levi arrived,' Alaa Hathaleen told B'Tselem. 'The residents shouted at him, and he drew his gun. I tried to film him pulling out the gun, but he attacked me and grabbed my phone. 'Suddenly, while we were trying to move people away and the excavator was already on the road leading to the settlement, Yinon Levi fired one shot, and then another shot. 'I heard shouts: 'Awdah! Awdah!' I turned around and found my cousin Awdah lying in the public garden of Umm al-Khair's community centre. He was bleeding heavily from the chest and mouth. It turned out he had been shot while filming the events, from about 40 meters away, behind a metal fence we had put up around the garden.' Levi was sanctioned by the UK in 2024, along with others, because he 'used physical aggression, threatened families at gunpoint, and destroyed property as part of a targeted and calculated effort to displace Palestinian communities'. Levi's treatment by the courts since the shooting is in line with a long history of lenient treatment by both the Israeli civilian and military courts of Israelis who kill Palestinians.
