Updates: 77 Palestinians killed as Israeli attacks on Gaza City intensify

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To learn about the hundreds of Palestinians who have fled Gaza City, piling their few remaining possessions onto pick-up trucks and donkey carts, click here.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s office has urged the United States to reverse a decision to revoke the Palestinian leader’s visa, just weeks before he was set to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Read more here.

A Houthi official has promised “vengeance” against Israel after the Yemeni group confirmed that an Israeli air strike earlier this week killed the prime minister of the Houthi government in the capital, Sanaa. Read more here.

And, you can find all our coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza here.

• Israel has killed dozens more Palestinians, including aid seekers, in Gaza amid intense ground and air assaults as well as a military push to seize Gaza City in the north.
• The Israeli army says it has assessed that Abu Obeida, the longtime military spokesman of Hamas, may have been killed during an air strike on Gaza City. Hamas released a video of its assassinated leaders, but did not comment on the Abu Obeida claim.
• The Houthis in Yemen confirmed that Israeli strikes in Sanaa on Thursday killed the group’s prime minister, as well as several ministers after hitting a cabinet meeting, but signalled defiance.
• Thousands protested in Israel’s Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to denounce the government and demand a deal to bring back all captives, with more demonstrations expected tomorrow.
• The Israeli army said the body of Idan Shtivi, killed on October 7, 2023, was recently recovered from Gaza.
• Protesters called for an end to the genocide in the enclave on the sidelines of the Venice International Film Festival, as well as in several other European cities, but EU foreign ministers showed they were divided over whether to sanction Israel.
• The US is blocking Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas from attending the UN General Assembly in September, also denying visas to other officials.

Israeli soldiers arrested a Palestinian woman at the Atara military checkpoint, located north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, according to the Wafa news agency.

Local sources said that Israeli forces also detained the woman’s husband for several hours before releasing him.

At the entrance to the town of Idhna, west of Hebron, Israeli soldiers fired live bullets, sound grenades and tear gas at Palestinian civilians, but no injuries were reported. Several more towns in Hebron were raided as well.

Another raid took place in the Dheisheh refugee camp south of Bethlehem.

Translation: Israeli occupation forces search citizens’ vehicles during a raid on the city of Yatta, south of Hebron.

The war in Gaza was one of the main talking points in the lead-up to the star-studded festival, due to an open letter denouncing the Israeli government and calling on the festival to speak out.

At the beginning of the protest march, participants held a sign with the inscription, “Stop the Genocide”, and sang pro-Palestinian chants.

The Voice of Hind Rajab, which tells the story of the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza, is among the films being shown at the festival.

Golden Lion winner Giorgos Lanthimos also wore a badge with the colours of the Palestinian flag during appearances at the festival.

The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, has released previously filmed footage of Mohammed Deif, its longtime military leader who was killed during an Israeli air strike in June 2024.

The footage also shows the other heads of the group, including Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, who were killed by Israel as well.

This comes amid Israeli claims that Abu Obeida, the masked spokesman of the Qassam Brigades and a symbol of armed resistance in Gaza, has been killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Hamas has not yet commented.

Translation: Qassam Brigades publishes photos of the martyr Mohammed Deif alongside several political and military leaders of the movement who were martyred during the war.

In Gaza, the sound of Israeli drones fills the air; its purpose is to torment, unnerve and break people down, but one music teacher has turned the hum of the drones into a song.

Watch Ibrahim Al Khalili’s report from Gaza here:

Footage released by pro-Palestinian activists, verified by Al Jazeera, showed a demonstration organised by many medical professionals in front of the European Parliament headquarters in Brussels, demanding sanctions on Israel.

Participants chanted slogans condemning the attacks against Palestinians and emphasising the need for international action to stop crimes against civilians in Gaza.

After the demonstration in Frankfurt that we reported on earlier, another protest took place in western Germany’s Cologne.

Protesters marched through the city’s streets holding banners that read, “We will not die in your wars” and “No to military mobilisation”. The protesters gathered at Heumarkt Square in Cologne, and German media reported that the police demanded the protesters remove their masks and leave, and violently attacked several demonstration sites, resulting in injuries among the protesters.

Translation: The police [in Cologne] are now brutally intervening at several points to split protesters and there are multiple injuries.

A Palestinian man has been injured during an Israeli military raid on Beit Imrin village, north of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, according to Wafa.

The news agency, citing the Palestine Red Crescent Society, reported that the 61-year-old man was being treated for bruises sustained during the attack and was transferred to a nearby hospital for further care.

Local sources told Wafa that Israeli forces stormed the village, using stun grenades and tear gas against residents.

Defence Minister Israel Katz claims Thursday’s air strikes on Sanaa delivered “an unprecedented crushing blow” to the top echelons of the military and political leadership of the Houthis in Yemen.

He praised the strikes that killed the Houthi prime minister and cabinet members in a post on X.

“The fate of Yemen is the same as the fate of Tehran – and this is only the beginning.”

Israeli Army Radio has quoted unnamed military sources as claiming that in addition to the prime minister, the Houthi casualties also included the head of the political bureau, government chief of staff and secretary, and five ministers. The Houthis have not confirmed how many people were killed.

The Israeli military has confirmed that it has recovered the body of Idan Shtivi, who was killed at the Nova music festival in Israel, near the separation fence with Gaza, during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023.

This comes after the Israeli army reported on Friday that, in cooperation with Shin Bet, it had recovered the bodies of Ilan Weiss and another unnamed captive in a “complex operation” in Gaza.

Weiss was reportedly an armed guard of the Kibbutz Be’eri and was also killed on the same day.

According to Israeli authorities, about 50 captives are still held in Gaza, about 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was seized off the streets of New York and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana for 104 days, spoke to Al Jazeera at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit.

He said his “main message” was that “all the attempts to suppress me and to oppress the Palestinian voices in this country have failed”.

“Behind me, you see thousands of people who came together to this place to actually speak about Palestine, strategise together towards a mutual vision for liberation in Palestine,” he said.

“There’s a lot going into political education and into building communities, building cross-movement solidarity across different movements”, he said, adding that “the majority of the American public are now awakening to Israeli crimes, awakening to the US complicity in sustaining the Israeli occupation of Palestine”.

“We’re being faced by stubborn politicians, by a stubborn establishment that refuses to see that there is a public shift in the US streets … This is very disappointing to see that the politicians, the establishment, [are] not responding to the change that’s happening on the ground,” he said.

Thousands of people are gathering for the second annual People’s Conference for Palestine in the US city of Detroit.

The three-day event aims to strengthen the movement for Palestinian liberation in North America.

Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, reporting from the event, noted that it was “striking” how different the atmosphere was compared with the first conference.

He said this has been largely down to the “awareness that was raised by grassroots action”.

“We have 60 percent of Americans in the latest poll calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We have 77 percent of Democrats calling it a genocide in Gaza, 50 percent of Americans overall, and a lot of that’s because of the consciousness raising that happened over the last year,” he said.

“History will judge the EU very, very poorly in its response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” Carne Ross, former British diplomat, tells Al Jazeera.

“The lessons from various genocides that have taken place, and we’re talking about a genocide… in Gaza, including Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere, is that many, many people die before international actors respond, and that is not good enough,” he said via videolink from London.

“Each time this happens, there’s some kind of UN report that says countries need to respond much more quickly to stop mass death, and politicians wring their hands and say, ‘Never again’,” he said.

“The EU is doing nothing; it’s just… having arguments about what it should say. The time for statements, resolutions and bits of paper is long gone. What is clearly needed is substantive sanctions on Israel… and that is not forthcoming from the EU,” he said.

At least 71 Palestinians, including 19 aid seekers, have been killed by Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip today.

Forty-one of those were killed in Gaza City alone.

The Israeli army says that Ariel Lubliner, a major from the army’s reserve force, was killed in the southern Gaza Strip today. According to Israeli Army Radio, this is the 900th soldier killed since the start of the war on the enclave.

Two soldiers with the Golani Brigade of the Israeli army were also lightly wounded during an “operational accident” in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

Mahdi al-Mashat, a Yemeni politician and military officer who serves as the chairman of the Supreme Political Council of the Houthis, has released a defiant video message to mourn the assassinations of the prime minister and other members of the cabinet in Israeli strikes this week.

He said “the treacherous enemy has pained us with this calamity”, but pledged that “we shall take vengeance, and we shall forge from the depths of wounds a victory”.

“To our people in Gaza, our stance is steadfast, and will remain so until the aggression ceases and the siege is lifted, no matter the scale of the challenge,” al-Mashat said.

The commander said the Houthis will “continue the path of building our armed forces and developing their capabilities”.

Major General Mohammed Nasser al-Atifi, Houthi minister of defence and military production, also released a statement and said the group’s armed forces are ready “at all levels to confront the Zionist enemy supported by America”.

Local Palestinian media are reporting that a child has died in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, days after being shot by an Israeli sniper.

The child, whom the reports named as Ahmed Nader Yusuf al-Luhh, was shot near the camp’s ad-Dawa neighbourhood.

Translation: Orphaned from both parents. Martyrdom of child Ahmed Nader Yusuf al-Luhh due to injuries sustained from occupation sniper bullets days ago, near the ad-Dawa neighbourhood east of Nuseirat camp.