Hamas seeks ceasefire guarantees as scores more killed in Gaza
According to medics at Nasser Hospital further south, at least 20 people were killed by Israeli fire en route to an aid distribution site.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports and its forces were taking precautions to mitigate harm to civilians as it battled Palestinian militants in Gaza.
The war began when Hamas fighters stormed into Israel on October 7 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel's subsequent military assault has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, while displacing most of the population of more than two-million, triggering widespread hunger and leaving much of the territory in ruins.
Israel says it won't end the war while Hamas is still armed and ruling Gaza. Hamas, severely weakened, says it won't lay down its weapons but is willing to release the hostages still in Gaza if Israel ends the war.
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Mail & Guardian
3 hours ago
- Mail & Guardian
The Hague Group revives the possibility of a new internationalism
A vigil remembering journalists killed in Palestine held at Cathedral in Cape Town on 28 January 2024. Photo by Leanne Brady Imperialism is on a genocidal offensive in Gaza, and has recently bombed its way through Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran too. But there is also a growing international pushback. In the West, young people are standing with Palestine in growing numbers. In Africa, the rise of anti-imperialist sentiment across West Africa and the Sahel marks one of the most significant political shifts in a generation. In Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and now Senegal, we are witnessing a rupture with the neocolonial order — a rejection of French military presence, International Monetary Fund tutelage and elite subservience to Western interests. The emergence of figures such as Captain Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso reflects a desire to reclaim sovereignty not in speeches, but through concrete acts of defiance. While these new formations are uneven and at times militarised, they speak to a profound disaffection with the postcolonial consensus. There is a new assertion of a politics rooted in self-determination, resistance to external domination, and the urgent need to build new regional solidarities on African terms. South Africa has, in a very different way, led a hugely important challenge to the West by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice and then, in January this year, taking a leading role in the formation of The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations formed in response to Israel's genocidal attack on Gaza and committed to upholding international law and confronting impunity. Nine nations — Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa — came together to commit to upholding the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, which found plausible evidence that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. They pledged to prevent arms transfers that could contribute to the genocide, to block military cargo from docking at their ports, and to begin building the legal and diplomatic mechanisms required to hold states accountable for aiding and abetting war crimes. For the first time in decades, the postcolonial world stood together and spoke in a voice not dictated by Washington, Tel Aviv or Brussels. The presence of our government among those leading the charge signals a meaningful rupture with the status quo — a reminder that, at its best, the ANC tradition carries within it the embers of a once-vibrant internationalism. In standing against genocide, and in asserting the illegality of occupation and collective punishment in Palestine, the South African state returned to its historic alignment with the oppressed of the world. Internationalism has never been a luxury for the oppressed. It is a necessity. Our own struggle against apartheid was not won through domestic action alone. It was carried on the shoulders of Cuban brigades, Swedish trade unionists, Caribbean intellectuals and Indian feminists. It was amplified by the voices of Latin American and African writers. It was supported by movements across the world that understood that apartheid was not simply a local aberration, but a node in a wider system of racial capitalism. The same is true of Palestine today. To isolate what is happening in Gaza from the broader structures of occupation, imperialism and settler colonialism is to misunderstand its function in the world system. Palestine is not simply a humanitarian crisis — it is a political one. Its resolution will not come through diplomacy alone, but through the reconstruction of international solidarity as a material force. In July, the Hague Group will reconvene in Bogotá, co-hosted by South Africa and Colombia, to deepen these commitments. Discussions will focus on expanding the group, developing regional enforcement mechanisms and coordinating legal and trade responses to states and corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid. The growing power of the Hague Group gestures back toward Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement — not as nostalgic artefacts, but as unfinished projects: projects that sought to create an alternative axis of power among the formerly colonised. Internationalism in Africa has deep roots. Kwame Nkrumah, in his speech to the Conference of Independent African States in 1960, declared: 'The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.' His vision of a pan-African future was inseparable from a global anti-imperialist alignment. In 1961, he helped launch the Casablanca Group, laying the foundations for continental unity rooted in anti-colonial solidarity. Thomas Sankara insisted that internationalism without class politics is hollow. Speaking at the Organisation of African Unity summit in 1987, just months before his assassination, he said: 'The debt problem is a neo-colonial plot. We cannot repay the debt because we are not responsible for it. Instead, we must build solidarity among the peoples of the South to end this global system of plunder.' Today, Africa faces the same global forces that Nkrumah and Sankara named: imperial domination, predatory finance and extractive trade arrangements. What has changed is the scale of the crisis — from climate collapse to mass displacement — and the growing realisation that no national project can resolve these challenges in isolation. A renewed African internationalism must begin from this understanding: that we are bound to one another not just by history, but by necessity. Internationalism is not just about states. It is also about class. Gaza, like Marikana, like the imperialist stranglehold on Haiti, the brutal monarchy in Swaziland and the imperialist driven war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is nested into the system of global capital — a system that profits from weapons, from land theft, from forced displacement, from cheap labour. It is a system that organises violence through borders and banks, and calls it civilisation. To truly confront it, solidarity cannot be abstract. It must be rooted in the lived realities of working people — their dispossession, exploitation and resistance. This means reimagining our role in the world — not as supplicants or junior partners, but as protagonists of a different future. A future in which justice is not calibrated according to proximity to power, but according to our shared histories of resistance. When the Hague Group was formed in January this year, it immediately won the support of left formations and opinion across the spectrum of the often divided South African left. There was a universal recognition that this was a critical moment and one that all of us, including those of us with very strong criticisms of the ANC, must support. We will offer the same support to the meeting in Bogotá. There is now a rare opportunity to begin rebuilding forms of southern multilateralism that are not captured by elite diplomacy or reduced to symbolic performance. This will require not only coordination between states, but active connection with movements, unions, and civic organisations rooted in material struggle. Without a real grounding in democratic forces below the level of state power, any new alignment risks becoming yet another site of compromise and betrayal. The Hague Group is a critical step forward. It has shown that coordinated action by states in the Global South is possible — serious, principled and effective. But if this moment is to mark the beginning of a new internationalism, not just a high point of symbolic clarity, then its scope must expand. The same resolve brought to bear for Palestine must now be extended to the people of Swaziland, the DRC, Western Sahara and elsewhere — places where impunity still rules, and where silence has too often passed for diplomacy. The work of justice does not end in Gaza. It begins wherever brutal force is used to foreclose the future of the oppressed — and it must be carried forward with the same unity, courage, and clarity of purpose. Mbuso Ngubane is the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and writes in his personal capacity.
eNCA
5 hours ago
- eNCA
Gaza civil defence says Israeli forces kill 69 people
Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 69 people on Thursday, including 15 in a strike on a school sheltering Palestinians displaced by the war nearing its 22nd month. Israel has recently expanded its military operations in the Gaza Strip, where its war on Hamas militants has created dire humanitarian conditions and displaced nearly all of the territory's population of more than two million. Many have sought shelter in school buildings, but these have repeatedly come under Israeli attacks that the military often says target Hamas militants hiding among civilians. In an updated toll on Thursday afternoon, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that 69 people were killed by Israeli strikes, artillery or gunfire across the territory. They included 38 people waiting for humanitarian aid at three separate locations in central and southern Gaza and a child killed by a drone in Jabalia in the north. Bassal said 15 people, "the majority of them children and women", were killed and several others wounded in an Israeli air strike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City. - Ceasefire pressure - Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military (IDF) said regarding that incident that it "struck a key Hamas terrorist who was operating in a Hamas command and control center in Gaza City". "Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence," it added. Regarding numerous other strikes across the territory on Thursday, it said it could not comment in detail without precise coordinates and times. "In response to Hamas' barbaric attacks, the IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas military capabilities," it told AFP. It said it "follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm". Pressure has risen for a ceasefire to allow sorely needed humanitarian aid into Gaza at scale and permit the release of hostages seized by Palestinian militants during Hamas's October 2023 attack that sparked the war. US President Donald Trump earlier this week declared a new ceasefire push, aiming for an initial 60-day truce, which he said had Israel's backing. But Israel's leaders held firm to their aim of crushing Hamas, even as the group said Tuesday it was discussing new proposals for a ceasefire from mediators. - Strike hits school - At the Gaza City school compound hit on Thursday, AFP footage showed young children wandering through the charred, bombed out building, as piles of burnt debris smouldered. Groups of Palestinians picked through the rubble and damaged furniture that littered the floor. Umm Yassin Abu Awda, who was among mourners who gathered at the city's Al-Shifa hospital after the strike, said: "This isn't a life. We've suffered enough." "For two years, we've been fighting just to get a piece of bread," she told AFP. "Either you (Israel) strike us with a nuclear bomb and end it all, or people's conscience needs to finally wake up." AFP | Omar AL-QATTAA Bassal of the civil defence agency reported 25 people killed while seeking aid near the Netzarim area in central Gaza, six others at another location nearby and seven in Rafah, southern Gaza, with scores of people injured. They were the latest in a string of deadly incidents that have hit people trying to receive scarce supplies. Across Gaza on Thursday, Bassal said artillery shelling in the northern town of Beit Lahia killed three people. Further south, he said three people were killed in a strike that hit tents housing displaced people in the coastal Al-Mawasi area. Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency. - 'Finish the job' - Despite mounting calls at home and globally for a ceasefire, Israel's hardline National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called on Wednesday to push the offensive harder. "Let's finish the job in Gaza. We must bring down Hamas, occupy the Gaza Strip, encourage the transfer" of Palestinians out of the territory, Ben Gvir said in a television interview. To the minister, Israel was now "in a position to achieve" victory over Hamas, which he said would help free the remaining hostages still held in Gaza from the 2023 attacks. "We must bring them back, but the way to bring them back is to bring down Hamas," he said. Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack that prompted the Israeli offensive resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures. Israel's retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 57,130 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry. The United Nations considers its figures reliable.
IOL News
7 hours ago
- IOL News
What do we know about the latest push for a Gaza truce?
Smoke billows from an Israeli airstrike that targeted the area of Jabal al-Rihan in the southern Lebanese province of Jezzine. US President Donald Trump this week urged the Palestinian militant group Hamas to seize the opportunity for a 60-day truce in Gaza, saying Israel had agreed to the proposal. After almost 21 months of devastating fighting in the Palestinian territory and following a speedy resolution to Israel's 12-day war with Iran, Trump's exhortations have reignited hopes for a third ceasefire in the Gaza war. But, with familiar obstacles to a truce still in place and an upcoming meeting between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu critical to the outcome, the likelihood of a deal remains in the balance, analysts say. What's holding up a Hamas response? Efforts to strike a deal in numerous rounds of indirect talks have repeatedly failed, with the primary point of contention centred on Hamas's calls for an enduring ceasefire in Gaza. In a Wednesday statement, Hamas said it was weighing its response to the new proposal and sought "an agreement that guarantees ending the aggression" as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the entry of aid into the territory. Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said there could be flexibility in Hamas's position if they adopt a "pragmatic understanding that this is as good as they'll get for the foreseeable future". He nonetheless noted that there were "still extremely sizable gaps" on Hamas's demands, including the path to a permanent end to the war, the re-opening of Gaza to humanitarian aid and Israel's withdrawal. "Those will be ultimately the most critical matters in deciding whether that initial 60-day period is put on," he added. Andreas Krieg, a Middle East analyst at King's College London, said Hamas's "deep mistrust of Israel's intentions -- given past ceasefires that collapsed under renewed strikes -- means Hamas would need firm guarantees before agreeing" to a deal. In January, Hamas and Israel agreed to a truce which broke down in March, with the two sides unable to agree on the next steps and Israel resuming air and ground attacks.
