Updates: Israel keeps up West Bank raids; 3 Gaza children freeze to death

We’ll be closing this live page soon. Here is a recap of today’s main developments:

• Israeli forces have stormed the Imam Ali Mosque on al-Mamoun Street in the city of Nablus, blowing off its doors and confiscating surveillance camera footage, according to the Quds News Network.
• Saudi Prince Khalid bin Salman says he and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met in Washington, DC, on Monday, and “explored ways to bolster our defence cooperation”.
• US Senator Chris Van Hollen has condemned Trump’s decision to rescind a Biden-era order that required the US government to report potential violations of international law involving US-supplied weapons by allies, including Israel.
• The Palestinian Water Authority and UNICEF have begun operating 13 mobile desalination stations in Gaza, where displaced families are enduring a dire water crisis after Israeli forces destroyed 85 percent of the enclave’s water and sanitation facilities.
• Israel told mediators it would release 620 Palestinian prisoners, who were supposed to be released last Saturday, if Hamas hands over the bodies of four Israeli captives later this week “without a humiliating ceremony”, Ynet News reports.

The Vatican says Pope Francis, who has been hospitalised in critical condition with pneumonia in both lungs, is showing a “slight improvement” and he worked on Monday afternoon after receiving the Eucharist in the morning.

“In the evening he called the parish priest of the Gaza parish to express his fatherly closeness,” the Vatican statement said.

For more than a year, Francis has checked in daily via video call with the Argentinian priest, Gabriel Romanelli, who leads the Catholic community at the church, which during Israel’s war had served as a shelter for Palestinians.

Romanelli had reported hearing from Francis soon after he was hospitalised, but not since. He had sent Francis a video, and the pope called to thank him, the Vatican said.

Today, we have woken up to the news that three children have died due to the severe cold in Gaza.

The Hamas-Israel ceasefire agreement has allowed more than 600,000 Palestinians to return to their original towns and villages. They returned to find nothing but areas that are uninhabitable.

Currently, I am in the city of Khan Younis surrounded by destruction as families live in the remains of destroyed residential buildings. And children live inside these buildings without any type of essential humanitarian facilities, including electricity, water and sanitation.

That is why mobile homes and shelters are highly required by the Palestinian faction in Gaza as part of the ceasefire agreement.

But Israel, until now, has not allowed a sufficient number of mobile shelters and tents to enter the Gaza Strip.

Families have been using makeshift tents for more than one and a half years, and now they live in open spaces. In particular, children and the elderly have been left vulnerable to facing the cold weather in Gaza.

The military says interceptors were launched at two falsely identified suspected aerial targets near the towns of Haspin, Ramat Magshimim, Avnei Eitan and Yonatan in the Israeli occupied Syrian region.

In Avnei Eitan, alerts were also activated following concerns about falling fragments of interceptors with no casualties reported, the army said.

The incident has ended and is under investigation, it added.

A crowd of people gathered to watch two huge armoured bulldozers rumble into the Jenin refugee camp, tearing apart the asphalt to clear a path for three Israeli tanks.

“This is the first time I’ve seen a tank with my own eyes,” a young man said, his voice a mixture of awe and disbelief, as the sun set over one of the entrances to the camp on Sunday.

Before him, two huge bulldozers rumbled forward, destroying more of the road underneath them. The refugee camp, nearly emptied after weeks of relentless attacks, was bracing for yet another military incursion.

Ahmed, born in Jenin in 2003 at the height of the second Intifada, had witnessed military incursions before. But Israeli tanks had not been seen on the streets of Jenin since 2002, when that uprising began – and it looks like the Israelis are planning to linger.

Ahmed stood among a group of young men and boys on Haifa Street, near one of the camp’s entrances.

“It won’t be easy for them to stay,” he muttered, as the heavy machinery continued its work.

Read more here.

We have been reporting on the Israeli military’s ongoing operations in Nablus and Jenin governorates in the occupied West Bank.

The Quds News Network now reports that Israeli forces have stormed the Imam Ali Mosque on al-Mamoun Street in the city of Nablus, blowing off its doors and confiscating surveillance camera footage.

Israeli forces are also besieging a house in the town of Zababdeh, southeast of Jenin, according to Quds.

Translation: The occupation forces stormed the Imam Ali Mosque on al-Mamoun Street in Nablus, blew up its doors and confiscated surveillance camera recordings.

Oded Lifshitz will be buried today in Nir Oz kibbutz, from where he was abducted during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Hamas returned the body of the 83-year-old to Israel on February 20, along with the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her young sons, Ariel and Kfir.

“We have today, the moment we bury him, but tomorrow, we keep fighting to bring everyone back,” his wife Yocheved said, according to Israel’s Army Radio.

Israeli forensic examiners claim Lifshitz was murdered in captivity. Hamas says he and the Bibas family were killed in an Israeli air attack.

Prince Khalid bin Salman says he and Pete Hegseth met in Washington, DC, on Monday, and “explored ways to bolster our defence cooperation”.

“We also discussed regional and international developments and efforts to promote security and stability,” he wrote on X.

The Trump administration is reportedly eager to secure a deal normalising ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Trump’s proposal to “take over” and ethnically cleanse Gaza has threatened to derail this effort, however, with Riyadh reiterating its “unwavering position” that normalising relations with Israel is contingent on Palestinians receiving their own state.

Political analyst Xavier Abu Eid says Netanyahu is doing everything he can to appeal to Israel’s far-right politicians.

“It’s not just that [Netanyahu] violated the ceasefire agreement by suspending the release of over 600 Palestinian prisoners, he was at the same time giving a press conference in Tulkarem in Area A of the West Bank, symbolising annexation,” he told Al Jazeera.

Watch below:

Chris Van Hollen has condemned Trump’s decision to rescind a Biden-era order that required the US government to report potential violations of international law involving US-supplied weapons by allies, including Israel.

The statement came after The Washington Post and the Reuters news agency reported on the move.

The White House, however, is yet to publicly announce the decision.

Van Hollen, a Democrat, said Trump’s scrapping of National Security Memorandum-20 (NSM-20) was “shameful”.

“It’s a disservice to our national security, to global human rights, and to our standing around the world,” he said in a statement.

“This move also undermines American taxpayers’ right to ensure the use of their dollars aligns with our laws and our national interest. It’s another clear example of Trump’s blatant indifference to American values. This is not America first – it’s America in retreat.”

The NSM-20 was signed by Biden in February 2024 amid criticism over Israel’s use of US bombs in its war on Gaza.

The memorandum required the US government to produce reports for Congress on the use of US arms by other countries. In May 2024, in a report required by the memorandum, Biden’s administration said Israel may have breached international humanitarian law but that US officials were unable to identify specific instances of breaches that harmed civilians due to the chaos of war.

The Trump administration would have been required in the coming months to report to Congress its own assessment of Israel’s conduct.

We have been reporting on the Israeli military’s offensive that has displaced about 40,000 Palestinians from several refugee camps in the north of the occupied West Bank over recent weeks.

The Jenin camp has been especially hard hit, with images emerging showing the scale of the destruction wrought by Israeli forces there since Sunday, as tanks have rolled into the area for the first time in more than two decades.

The Palestinian Water Authority and UNICEF have begun operating 13 mobile desalination stations in Gaza, where displaced families are enduring a dire water crisis after Israeli forces destroyed 85 percent of the enclave’s water and sanitation facilities.

Ziad Mimi, the chairman of the Water Authority, said Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s critical infrastructure had receded the amount of water available per person from 30 litres (8 gallons) per day to 9 litres (2.4 gallons) per day.

He noted that the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization is 19 litres (5 litres) of water per person per day.

In December, Human Rights Watch said Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water, which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination.

These are the main developments:

• Saeed Salah, the director of the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society in Gaza City, says three more children have died from the “severe cold” as Israel continues to bar the entry of temporary homes into the enclave.
• Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank continued overnight, with Israeli forces carrying out raids and making arrests in several locations across the Palestinian territory.
• Israel told mediators they will release 620 Palestinian prisoners, who were supposed to be released last Saturday, if Hamas hands over the bodies of four Israeli captives later this week “without a humiliating ceremony”, Ynet News reports.
• Jan van Aken, the co-leader of Germany’s The Left party, condemned the country’s likely next chancellor for saying he would defy an ICC arrest warrant and host Netanyahu.
• Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) urged the ICC to investigate Biden and Trump for their complicity in war crimes related to Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has called Israel’s decision to bar entry to MEPs Rima Hassan and Lynn Boylan “outrageous”, saying it was a “calculated move to prevent European officials from witnessing firsthand the atrocities it is committing against the Palestinian people”.

The two legislators, who are both critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, were expelled upon their arrival at the Tel Aviv airport on Monday.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said both parliamentarians were travelling as part of an official EU delegation to Palestine and that Israel had “no sovereignty” over and no legal right to deny access to the occupied territory.

“We call on the European Parliament and the European Union to respond decisively to this provocation,” the ministry said. “Israel must face consequences for its actions. The European Parliament should impose reciprocal measures, including barring Israeli representatives from its premises. It is time for Europe to stop treating Israel as a state above the law.”

Earlier, the Israeli Interior Ministry said it was barring Hassan because she “consistently works to promote boycotts against Israel”.

As we’ve been reporting, Hamas official Basem Naim has said the Palestinian group will not engage in further ceasefire talks until Israel releases the 620 prisoners and detainees who were meant to be freed on Saturday.

Watch his comments in full below:

Columbia University-affiliated Barnard College has expelled two students for participating in a pro-Palestine protest in January, in what activists have decried as the latest in a “wave of repression” on campus.

The university said the students were disciplined for distributing flyers featuring “violent imagery” as they disrupted a History of Modern Israel class on January 21.

“Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but so too is our commitment to respect, inclusion, and the integrity of the academic experience,” Barnard College said in a statement on Monday.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) condemned the expulsions as a “serious escalation in the crackdown against students advocating for disinvestment from the Israeli war machine”, and said the decision was made under “pressure from billionaire donors”.

CUAD also said it would be hosting a “week of action” as it demanded Barnard College “reverse the expulsions”.

Yamil Santoro says he is introducing a bill calling for Estado de Palestina (State of Palestine) – located in Buenos Aires’s Almagro neighbourhood – to be renamed Familia Bibas, in honour of the Israeli-Argentinian family who died in Gaza.

“It is essential to remember and honour the victims of terrorism,” Santoro, who is the deputy mayor of Buenos Aires, said in a post on X. Santoro said the move is also intended to eliminate official recognition of the Palestinian Authority, arguing that Buenos Aires should not be “recognising such an entity”.

Discussions on the proposal will begin when a local congress legislative session opens on March 1. The bill will require majority approval to pass.

Hamas says Shiri Bibas and her young children, Kfir and Ariel, were killed in an Israeli air attack in November 2023.

Argentina, home to Latin America’s largest Jewish population, is led by staunchly pro-Israel President Javier Milei.

Israel’s Ynet News is reporting that Israeli authorities have told mediators they are ready to release the Palestinians who were supposed to be freed on Saturday if Hamas hands over the bodies of the captives it is slated to free later this week, “without a humiliating ceremony”.

The news outlet said Hamas in turn demanded that the 620 Palestinians, as well as more held in Israeli jails, be released at the same time as the four bodies are handed over.

Israel, however, says the release can only take place after the bodies are identified, Ynet News said.

“Hectic” negotiations for the handover continue to take place, the outlet reported, adding that Israel estimates that the talks may be successful soon.

Here are a few highlights of the pieces we’ve published about the war over the past day:

• From the West Bank: As Israeli tanks roll into Jenin, Palestinians prepare for lengthy invasion
• Explainer: Why are Israeli tanks in the occupied West Bank?
• Ceasefire: Hamas official says Netanyahu ‘intentionally sabotaging’ Gaza ceasefire
• Europe: Merz says Netanyahu will be able to visit Germany despite ICC warrant

And there’s plenty more here.