Netanyahu suffers food poisoning, to rest for three days, his office says
Netanyahu, 75, fell ill overnight and was found to be suffering from intestinal inflammation and dehydration, for which he is receiving intravenous fluids, a statement said.
"In accordance with his doctors' instructions, the prime minister will rest at home for the next three days and will manage state affairs from there," his office added.
Netanyahu was fitted with a pacemaker in 2023 and last December he had his prostate removed after he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BreakingNews.ie
9 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Israel's military says airdrops of aid will begin Saturday night in Gaza
Israel's military has announced that airdrops of aid will begin on Saturday night in Gaza, and humanitarian corridors will be established for UN convoys, after increasing accounts of starvation-related deaths. The statement late Saturday followed months of experts' warnings of famine. Advertisement International criticism, including by close allies, has grown as several hundred Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks while trying to reach aid. The military's statement did not say when the humanitarian corridors for UN convoys would open, or where. It also said the military is prepared to implement humanitarian pauses in densely populated areas. International criticism about the situation in Gaza has been growing (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP) The statement added that the military 'emphasises that combat operations have not ceased' in Gaza against Hamas and it said there is 'no starvation' in the territory. Advertisement Witness accounts from Gaza have been grim. Some health workers are so weakened by hunger that they put themselves on IV drips to keep treating the badly malnourished. Parents have shown their limp and emaciated children. The Israeli military statement said the airdrops would be conducted in co-ordination with international aid organisations. It was not immediately clear where they would be carried out and it was not clear what role the recently created and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, meant as an alternative to the UN aid system, might play. Advertisement Israeli airstrikes and gunshots killed at least 53 people in Gaza overnight and into Saturday, most of them shot dead while seeking aid, according to Palestinian health officials and the local ambulance service. Witness accounts from Gaza have been grim (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP) Deadly Israeli gunfire was reported twice within hours close to the Zikim crossing with Israel in the north. In the first incident, at least a dozen people waiting for aid trucks were killed, said staff at Shifa hospital, where bodies were taken. Israel's military said it fired warning shots to distance a crowd 'in response to an immediate threat' and it was not aware of any casualties. Advertisement A witness, Sherif Abu Aisha, said people started running when they saw a light that they thought was from aid trucks, but as they got close, they realised it was Israel's tanks. That is when the army started firing, he told The Associated Press. He said his uncle was among those killed. 'We went because there is no food and nothing was distributed,' he said. On Saturday evening, Israeli forces killed at least 11 people and wounded 120 others when they fired toward crowds who tried to get food from an entering UN convoy, Dr Mohamed Abu Selmiyah, director of Shifa hospital, told the AP. Advertisement Palestinians carry the bodies of people who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza that has been used as a shelter (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP) 'We are expecting the numbers to surge in the next few hours,' he said. There was no immediate Israeli military comment. Elsewhere, those killed in strikes included four people in an apartment building in Gaza City, hospital staff and the ambulance service said. Another Israeli strike killed at least eight, including four children, in the crowded tent camp of Muwasi in the southern city of Khan Younis, according to the Nasser hospital. Also in Khan Younis, Israeli forces opened fire and killed at least nine people trying to get aid entering Gaza through the Morag corridor, according to the hospital's morgue records. There was no immediate comment from Israel's military. Ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas were at a standstill after the US and Israel recalled negotiating teams on Thursday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday his government was considering 'alternative options' to ceasefire talks. A Hamas official, however, said negotiations were expected to resume next week and called the recall of the delegations a pressure tactic. Egypt and Qatar, which mediate alongside the United States, called the pause temporary and said talks would resume. They did not say when.
Reuters
39 minutes ago
- Reuters
Israel resumes airdrop aid to Gaza, military says
July 26 (Reuters) - Israel resumed airdrop aid to Gaza on Saturday, an Israeli military spokesperson said, a few days after more than 100 aid agencies warned that mass starvation was spreading across the enclave. The military also said in a separate statement that designated humanitarian corridors would be established to enable the safe movement of United Nations convoys delivering aid to the Gaza population, and that humanitarian pauses would be implemented in densely populated areas. "The airdrops will include seven pallets of aid containing flour, sugar, and canned food to be provided by international organizations," it added. Palestinian sources confirmed that aid has begun dropping in northern Gaza. Israel has faced mounting criticism from aid agencies, which accuse it of restricting aid delivery. The World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the crisis as "man-made mass starvation". Israel, which cut off all supplies to Gaza from the start of March and reopened it with new restrictions in May, says it is committed to allowing in aid but must control it to prevent it from being diverted by militants. It says it has let enough food into Gaza during the war and blames Hamas for the suffering of Gaza's 2.2 million people. Israel has also accused the United Nations of failing to act in a timely fashion, saying 700 truckloads of aid were idling inside Gaza. "The IDF emphasizes that there is no starvation in the Gaza Strip; this is a false campaign promoted by Hamas," the Israeli military said in its Saturday statement. "Responsibility for food distribution to the population in Gaza lies with the UN and international aid organizations. Therefore, the UN and international organizations are expected to improve the effectiveness of aid distribution and to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas." More than 125 people have died due to malnutrition, including 85 children, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Saturday.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Israel's food points are not just death traps – they're an alibi for the starvation of Gaza
When mass starvation grips a community, something rare and terrible occurs. Starvation is not only the biological phenomenon of the body wasting away. It's also the death rattle of society. Famine is the sight of people scavenging for food in a garbage heap. It's a woman cooking in secret, hiding food from her starving cousins. It's a family selling its grandmother's jewellery for a single meal, their faces blank and emotionless, their eyes glazed. This is the degradation, the humiliation, the shame – and, yes, the dehumanisation – that happens when human beings scrabble for food like animals. This is a reality that no statistics can capture. And the methods for measuring food emergencies and assigning them grades – 'famine' being the worst – break down when society breaks down in this way. But just as an experienced physician can diagnose a fever without having to send blood samples to the laboratory, veteran humanitarian workers, who witnessed the depths of human suffering in Biafra in 1969 or in Ethiopia in 1984, recognise these symptoms when they see them. And they see it in Gaza today. Turn to the statements of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – the US and Israel-backed organisation that began operating in May – and you enter a different world. The GHF presents itself as a professional, compassionate operation designed for the 21st century. You will see images of order and efficiency, and a proud announcement that it delivered more than 2m meals yesterday from its four 'secure distribution sites'. And alongside the pictures of those starving children, of women collapsing from hunger, there are also pictures of healthy young men. In contrast to the footage, filmed by Palestinian journalists, of the desperate scramble for the little aid still provided through the UN, the GHF has images of orderly distributions, of its own workers holding the hands of Palestinian children. Israeli spokespeople insist that the United Nations has hundreds of trucks of food inside the Gaza perimeter that it refuses to distribute. But that rosy picture doesn't stand even the simplest scrutiny. There are four reasons why it's at best an improvisation by amateurs and at worst a cover for the crime of ongoing mass starvation. First, the numbers just don't add up. In April, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN calculated the food stocks remaining in Gaza, after 18 months of siege and war, and two months of total Israeli blockade. It estimated that food availability would fall to only half what's needed to sustain life at some point between May and July. That means that the aid effort needs to cover the entirety of Gaza's food needs. Two million meals a day is less than half of what's needed. The GHF rations may have slowed the march of starvation, but not by much. Second, you can't relieve famine by numbers alone. The GHF system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations? Starvation strikes the vulnerable minority. The metric used by the UN for determining when acute food insecurity is at famine levels is when 20% of families are facing extreme food shortage. Starvation strikes the weakest, not the strongest. Over the decades, humanitarian programmes have worked out how best to target the poorest, such as women without their husbands, looking after several children and perhaps elderly parents as well. It's the last mile of aid delivery that counts. The GHF runs four ration stations. Three are in the far south of Gaza in the ruins of Rafah, one in central Gaza. They're all in military zones. They open for short periods and short notice. To get these rations, people must camp out in the rubble – ready to rush to the gates at a moment's notice, and running the gauntlet of the Israel Defense Forces' military posts. They know that the only means IDF soldiers have for crowd control is firing live ammunition – even when they're not shooting to kill. When the GHF speaks of 'secure distribution sites', it's referring to how it controls its packages up to the point of handing them over, not to how it safely delivers them to the neediest. Dozens of aid seekers are killed each day trying to reach these sites. How will the overstressed mother of hungry children, or elderly or disabled people, join this stampede? How would they run the gauntlet not only of those military posts but also of the gangsters keen to steal the most valuable foodstuffs for themselves, or to sell in the market? The GHF has no idea who is eating the rations. Theirs isn't a formula for feeding the poorest. It's the law of the jungle. Third, the assistance must be designed for what people really need. Top of the list are specialised foods to care for malnourished children who cannot consume regular meals, such as Plumpy'Nut, a ready-to-use therapeutic food. The GHF ration box typically contains flour, pasta, tahini, cooking oil, rice and chickpeas or lentils. No baby food. No Plumpy'Nut. And it has no trained nurses or nutritionists in the community to actually provide therapeutic care to starving children. Consider the desperate mother who's literally at the end of the food chain: how will she cook the rations she gets? How does she find clean water? Israel has reduced water availability to a small fraction of need, and is bombing the remaining desalination plants. What can she use to make a fire? Without electricity or cooking gas, she may burn garbage to heat food. And last and most tellingly, a truly humanitarian operation supports the afflicted people, respecting the dignity of those in need, working with the communities. The GHF, essentially, does the opposite: it humiliates and undermines. The social breakdown that we are witnessing, the degrading of human beings, is not a byproduct of the harm that Israel is inflicting. That's the central element of the crime: destroying Palestinian society. The government of Israel shows no indication that it cares in the slightest whether Palestinians live or die. It wants to avoid the stigma of being accused of starvation and genocide, and the GHF is its current alibi. Let's not be fooled. Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He has been a humanitarian worker and written on famine and related issues for 40 years Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
