/w=2048,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
A leaked video showed the alleged gang-rape of a Palestinian detainee by Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman detention camp.
The footage, published by Israeli Channel 12 on Tuesday, showed dozens of soldiers entering the facility before moving one blindfolded man aside.
The detainee is then surrounded by a group of soldiers holding shields before they allegedly rape him.
According to Israeli media, the detainee was hospitalised after the assault with a torn rectum among other injuries.
The Israeli military police detained nine soldiers suspected of involvement in the incident for questioning. The soldiers deny wrongdoing.
Footage is released of Israeli soldiers covering themselves with shields, as they rape a Palestinian hostage at the Sde Teiman torture camp.The unnamed hostage was hospitalized with a torn rectum, broken ribs, ruptured bowels & damaged lungs. https://t.co/jctKdaZgf0 pic.twitter.com/b9k46crFLY
Ambassadors from western countries including the United States will skip a ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki after Israel was snubbed, officials said on Wednesday.
Nagasaki's mayor said last week that Israel's ambassador Gilad Cohen was not invited to Friday's event in the southern Japanese city because of the risk of possible protests over the Gaza conflict.
The US and British embassies said on Wednesday that their ambassadors would not take part as a result, and that their countries would be represented by lower-ranking diplomats.
Media reports said that Australia, Italy, Canada and the European Union, who together with the United States, Britain and Germany signed a strongly worded joint letter to Nagasaki's mayor last month, would follow suit.
US ambassador Rahm Emanuel will not attend "after the mayor of Nagasaki politicised the event by not inviting the Israeli ambassador", an embassy spokesperson told AFP.
Instead, Emanuel, 64, who was ex-president Barack Obama's chief of staff, will go to a separate event at a temple in Tokyo, the spokesperson said.
The British embassy said that ambassador Julia Longbottom would also not be in Nagasaki, saying that not inviting Israel "creates an unfortunate and misleading equivalency with Russia and Belarus -- the only other countries not invited to this year's ceremony".
A spokesperson for the French embassy said that its number two would attend, telling AFP that the "decision not to invite the representative of Israel is regrettable and questionable".
Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki said last week that the decision not to invite Cohen was "not politically motivated" but based on a desire to "hold the ceremony in a peaceful and sombre atmosphere".
Reporting by AFP
There should be nothing surprising about the revelation that troops at Sde Teiman, a detention camp set up by Israel in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel, are routinely using rape as a weapon of torture against Palestinian inmates.
Last week, nine soldiers from a prison unit, Force 100, were arrested for gang-raping a Palestinian inmate with a sharp object. He was hospitalised because his injuries.
At least 53 prisoners are known to have died in Israeli detention, presumed in most cases to be either through torture or following the denial of access to medical care. No investigations have been carried out by Israel and no arrests have been made.
Why should it be of any surprise that Israel’s self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” uses torture and rape against Palestinians? It would be truly surprising if this was not happening.
After all, this is the same military that for 10 months has used starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3 million people of Gaza, half of them children.
It is the same military that since October has laid waste to all of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as destroying almost all of its schools and 70 percent of its homes. It is the same military that is known to have killed over that period at least 40,000 Palestinians, with a further 21,000 children missing.
It is the same military currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world.
If there are no red lines for Israel when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged into its dungeons?
Read more: Israel is in a death spiral. Who will it take down with it? by Jonathan Cook
Right-wing Israelis demonstrate outside Sde Teiman camp near Beersheba against the detention of military reservists suspected of abusing Palestinian detainees, on 29 July 2024 (Menahem Kahana/AFP)
An Israeli air strike on a home in Gaza City killed a father, a mother and their child on Wednesday morning, according to Wafa news agency.
Others were wounded in shelling across the central Gaza Strip, the agency added.
The father of an Israeli captive held in the Gaza Strip said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delaying a deal with Hamas that could be made immediately, Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
Eshel Gat, father of Carmel Gat, said the Israeli public should be aware of this "simple and brutal truth".
"This is not speculation or journalistic interpretation, but a simple and brutal truth based on direct testimony from those who deal with the subject of negotiations on a daily basis," Gat said.
He accused Netanyahu of taking steps in negotiations marketed as necessary security needs when in reality they were done to delay the deal.
The Israeli army will operate "forcefully and immediately" in the northernmost town of the Gaza Strip, Beit Hanoun, the military's Arabic spokesperson said.
In a post on social media platform X, Avichay Adraee announced new displacement orders for Palestinians in the area, instructing them to move south towards Gaza City.
Both Beit Hanoun and Gaza City have been largely decimated after repeated Israeli ground incursions and relentless air strikes in the past 10 months.
The United States has communicated to Iran and Israel that conflict in the Middle East must not escalate, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday, even as the Pentagon warned that it would not tolerate attacks against its forces in the region.
"We've been engaged in intense diplomacy with allies and partners, communicating that message directly to Iran. We've communicated that message directly to Israel," Blinken said.
The United States will continue to defend Israel against attacks, Blinken said, but noted that everyone in the region should understand the risks of escalation and miscalculation.
"Further attacks only raise the risk of dangerous outcomes that no one can predict and no one can fully control."
Reporting by Reuters
Our live coverage from Gaza will shortly be closing until tomorrow morning.
Here are some of the day's key developments:
Israeli forces have killed at least 30 Palestinians and wounded 66 others in the past 24 hours, according to the Palestinian health ministry. This brings the death toll since 7 October to 39,653, with more than 91,535 wounded and an estimated 10,000 missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.
Health officials report that around 70 percent of the victims are children and women.
Hamas announces Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement
Meta Platforms META.O apologised on Tuesday for erroneously removing Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's social media posts in which he expressed condolences to a Hamas official about the assassination of the group's leader Ismail Haniyeh
The Gaza Strip must be transferred to the control of legitimate Palestinian authorities, and Israeli plans for temporary control of the enclave are unacceptable, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Russia's RIA news agency in remarks published on Tuesday
An Israeli air strike in the southern Lebanese town of Maifadoun killed at least four people on Tuesday, according to the Lebanese health ministry
Iran has yet to make any arrests linked to the suspected Israeli killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the Iranian judiciary said Tuesday
Dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators have broken into an Israeli army base in Tel Aviv to protest the conscription of members of the community
The Government Media Office in Gaza has announced that the number of journalists killed by Israel has risen to 166 since the start of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group congratulated Yahya Sinwar on being selected as Hamas’s new leader, saying it “confirms goals that the enemy (Israel) seeks from killing leaders and officials failed in achieving its outcome".
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has sent an update about the humanitarian situation in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza where a significant number of forcefully displaced Palestinians are concentrated.
“People are living in a constant state of unpredictability, not knowing what is going to come next, be it more displacements, more relocations, or a regional escalation,” Hassan Morajea, regional access advisor for the NRC, says from Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.
NRC estimates that recent relocation orders have reduced the size of Israel’s unilaterally designated “humanitarian zones” in Gaza from 20 percent to 14.5 percent, displacing more than 200,000 people from Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah between 22 and 28 July.
“The streets are uninhabitable, crowded with people using anything that will offer some semblance of a roof over their heads, even if that is in a damaged building scarred with holes, and destruction around them. It’s shocking to see people living in ruins, but that’s what’s happening here in Gaza, because there is no other option. There aren’t open fields to even set up a tent. There aren’t even tents for them to set up,” Morajea said.
The US military claims that it had "successfully destroyed" one drone and two ballistic missiles launched from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen over the Red Sea.
August 6 U.S. Central Command Update
In the past 24 hours, U.S. Central Command forces successfully destroyed one Iranian-backed Houthi uncrewed aerial vehicle and two Iranian-backed Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles launched from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen over the Red… pic.twitter.com/OxzII8RcDz
Hamas on Tuesday announced that it had chosen Yahya Sinwar, who heads the movement inside the Gaza Strip, as the new leader of the group's political bureau, following the killing of Ismail Haniyeh last month in Tehran.
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan said that Sinwar was unanimously chosen as the new leader, reflecting the movement's understanding of the current needs of the group. He added that Sinwar was always involved in the negotiations for a ceasefire with Israel.
"The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas announces the selection of Commander Yahya Sinwar as the head of the political bureau of the movement, succeeding the martyr Commander Ismail Haniyeh, may Allah have mercy on him," Hamas said in a brief statement.
Sinwar, who was close to Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and was known for founding the internal security bodies of Hamas, was previously sentenced by Israel to four life terms in the late 1980s.
Sinwar served 23 years for leading the group’s first internal security apparatus, Majd, which targeted and killed Palestinians it suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Canada’s embassy in Tel-Aviv will evacuate the families of diplomats from the country tomorrow, according to The Times of Israel, amid the growing anticipation of a retaliatory attack by Iran and its proxies.
A senior Hamas official told AFP that Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar’s selection as Hamas’s new political leader sends a “strong message… of resistance” to Israel.
The choice is “a strong message to the occupation (Israel) that Hamas continues its path of resistance,” the official says on condition of anonymity, as he’s not authorised to speak publicly on the issue.