Israeli air strike in Khan Younis wounds residents (2025)

Residents have been injured following an Israeli air strike on a house in the Al-Manara neighbourhood, south of Khan Younis, Al Jazeera’s correspondent on the ground reports.

Since Israel resumed its incursion on Gaza on March 18, approximately 2,000 Palestinians have been killed and 5,200 others injured.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered condolences on behalf of Israel following the death of Pope Francis, AFP reports.

“The State of Israel expresses its deepest condolences to the Catholic Church and the Catholic community worldwide at the passing of Pope Francis. May he rest in peace,” Netanyahu’s office posted on X late Thursday.

It was Netanyahu’s first statement since the announcement of the pope’s death on Monday.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose role is largely ceremonial, was among the first world dignitaries to respond to the Pope’s death, praising him as “a man of deep faith and boundless compassion”.

Israel’s forcible displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank is rising, the UN warns, with 14 more families ordered to leave Tulkarem city while tens of thousands are being prevented by the military from returning to their homes in the Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps, Al Jazeera reports.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also reports in its latest situation update that Israeli settler violence and home demolitions displaced seven families in Ramallah.

A Palestinian man suffered a fatal heart attack triggered by tear gas deployed by Israeli troops during an attack by settlers on a Palestinian village earlier this week that was aided by the Israeli soldiers.

In another settler attack, six Palestinians were injured include one who was shot and later had to have their leg amputated.

Between April 15 and 21, six Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, including one child, in the occupied West Bank. Over the same period, two Palestinians died in Israeli custody in what the UN called “unclear circumstances”.

The US federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism has praised Yale University for its response to student protests opposing the visit of Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to New Haven this week, Al Jazeera reports.

Yale accused the campus protest group, Yalies4Palestine, of briefly setting up an encampment on Tuesday and consequently withdrew its status as a registered student organisation. Yalies4Palestine has denied it organised the protest.

The federal task force praised the college administration in a statement, saying they were “cautiously encouraged by Yale’s actions”.

“Yale University appears to have enforced its time, place, and manner policies, cleared the area, de-registered a student organization involved in the incident, and started an investigation into individual discipline for students who crossed the line from speech into unlawful conduct,” it said.

The Trump administration has taken aim at numerous US colleges – threatening to withdraw federal funding, among other punitive measures – over pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.

Citing local Palestinian media, Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces have launched numerous attacks on Gaza in the early hours of this morning.

There are reports of people across Gaza feeling the force of detonations in southern Gaza’s Rafah city, where the Israeli army is deployed and reportedly using explosives to destroy residential structures.

Israeli military aircraft bombed a medical clinic in the east of Gaza City earlier this morning, and warplanes have more recently targeted other areas in the city.

Air strikes and artillery shelling have hit Khan Younis in the south of the territory after an earlier attack on tents sheltering forcibly displaced people killed at least five in the al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis. Victims from the attack were reported to be a family of five: Ibrahim Khalil Abu Taima, his wife Hanadi, and their three children, ages 4, 6 and 8.

Israeli artillery has shelled the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

Casualties resulting from the latest attacks are not yet known.

Israeli fighter jets have bombed a tent in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing at least five members of one family, Al Jazeera Arabic reports.

The camp, previously designated a “safe zone” by the Israelis and home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, has come under repeated attack in recent days.

Posting on X, Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik announced that Marie Antoinette Sedin has been appointed as the country’s ambassador to Palestine.

Kravik was sworn in by Norway’s King Harald at a ceremony on Thursday.

In May last year, Norway – alongside Ireland and Spain – announced its decision to formally recognise Palestinian statehood based on the pre-1967 borders.

Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said Norway’s decision was an investment in the “only solution” that can bring lasting peace in the Middle East — “two states living side by side in peace and security”.

As hunger spreads in Gaza due to Israel’s blockade that has prevented all food, water, medicines and fuel from entering the war-torn territory, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said it has 3,000 trucks of humanitarian aid ready and waiting to enter the enclave, Al Jazeera reports.

In its latest situation update, UNRWA said that it has run out of flour to feed Palestinians in Gaza, and other “critical humanitarian supplies are rapidly depleting” as well as food parcels the agency provides to families to stave off hunger.

UNRWA also reports that at least 742 Palestinians have now been killed in Israeli attacks while sheltering at their facilities in Gaza, and more than 2,400 injured. More than 290 of their own UN personnel have also been killed in Israeli attacks, the agency said.

UNRWA said it is continuing to run 115 shelters across the Gaza Strip, where 90,000 forcibly displaced people are now residing.

Appeals judges at the International Criminal Court have ordered a lower panel to reconsider Israel’s objections to the court’s jurisdiction over arrest warrants issued against Israeli leaders last year, Reuters reports.

The appeals chamber said the court had not properly weighed challenges by Israel to its jurisdiction and the legality of arrest warrant requests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for their conduct of military operations in Gaza.

The so-called Pre-Trial Chamber had ruled that Israel’s challenges had been premature, but the appeals judges now said that had been an “error of law”. It said Israel’s argument that it was entitled to challenge the jurisdiction was not sufficiently addressed.

“The Appeals Chamber therefore reversed the decision and remanded the matter to the Pre-Trial Chamber for a new ruling on the substance of Israel’s challenge to the jurisdiction of the Court,” they said.

The office of the ICC Prosecutor said it was studying the new ruling, without offering further comment.

AFP reports that Bulgaria “received an official apology from Israel” over the death of one of its citizens, a UN worker killed in Gaza in March.

In a statement announcing Israel’s apology, Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister Georg Georgiev said such tragedies should not happen again and again expressed his condolences to the family of Marin Marinov.

“The protection of humanitarian workers had to be a top priority,” Georgiev added.

Israel’s army chief has threatened to expand the ongoing military offensive in the Gaza Strip if captives being held there by Hamas are not freed soon, AFP reports.

“If we do not see progress in the return of the hostages in the near future, we will expand our activities to a larger and more significant operation,” Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir said during a visit to Gaza.

The Israeli military issued an evacuation order for Palestinians residing in two north Gaza areas ahead of a planned attack, AFP reports.

“To all of the civilians of the Gaza Strip staying in the areas of Beit Hanoun and Sheikh Zayed. This is a preliminary and a final warning … move west immediately toward Gaza City,” the military’s Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X.

Gaza rescue teams and medics said Israeli air strikes killed at least 36 people since dawn, including a family of six whose home was struck in Gaza City, AFP reports.

Six members of one family — a couple and their four children — were killed when an air strike levelled their home in northern Gaza City, the civil defence said in a statement.

Nidal al-Sarafiti, a relative of the family, said the strike came as the family was sleeping.

“What can I say? The destruction has spared no one,” he told AFP.

The Israeli military has said that the initial findings from an investigation into the death of a UN worker in the central Gaza Strip last month show he was killed by Israeli tank fire, AFP.

“According to the findings collected so far, the examination indicates that the fatality was caused by tank fire from IDF (Israeli military) troops operating in the area. The building was struck due to assessed enemy presence and was not identified by the forces as a UN facility,” the military statement said, referring to the incident on March 19.

At least 50 more Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in the last 24 hours, bringing the death toll from Israel’s military campaign since October 2023 to 51,355, Anadolu reports citing the enclave’s health ministry.

A ministry statement said that 152 more injured people were also transferred to hospitals, taking the number of injured to 117,248.

“Many victims are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them,” it added.

Israel’s president said in Poland that the return of hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza was a “universal moral imperative” and called on the international community to help end “this horrific humanitarian crime”, AFP reports.

Isaac Herzog spoke from the southern city of Oswiecim, the site of the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the occasion of the annual March of the Living to commemorate its victims.

“With a broken heart, I remind us all that even though after the Holocaust we swore ‘never again’, today — here and now — the souls of dozens of Jews are once again yearning within a cage, longing for water and freedom,” Herzog said at a ceremony.

Nearly 60 “of our brothers and sisters remain held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity”, he added.

“The return of the hostages is a universal moral imperative, and I call from here — from this sacred place — for the entire international community to mobilise and end this horrific humanitarian crime.”

In Gaza, where hunger gnaws and hope runs thin, flour and bread are so scarce that they are carefully divided by families clinging to survival, AFP reports.

“Because the crossing points are closed, there’s no more gas and no flour, and no firewood coming in,” said Umm Mohammed Issa, a volunteer helping to make bread with the few resources still available.

“We’ll be in the situation where we can no longer feed our children,” the Palestinian woman said. Until the end of March, Gazans gathered each morning outside the few bakeries still operating, in the hope of getting some bread. But one by one, the ovens cooled as ingredients — flour, water, salt and yeast — ran out.

Fidaa Abu Ummayra thought she had found a real bargain when she bought a large sack of flour for the equivalent of 90 euros at Al-Shati refugee camp in the north of the territory.

“If only I hadn’t bought it,” the 55-year-old said. “It was full of mould and worms. The bread was disgusting.”

The funeral has taken place for Palestinian journalist Saeed Abu Hassanein, who was killed in an Israeli air strike on the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

The Al-Aqsa Radio journalist was killed along with his wife and daughter after their tent was bombed.

An Israeli airstrike hit a police station in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, killing at least 10 people, local health authorities said, and Israel’s military said it had struck a command centre of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad groups, Reuters reports.

Medics said two Israeli missiles hit the police station, located near a market, which led to the wounding of dozens of people in addition to the 10 deaths. The identities of those killed were not immediately clear.

The Israeli military said in a statement apparently referring to the same incident that it attacked a command and control centre operated by Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad groups in Jabalia, which fighters used to plan and execute attacks against Israeli forces.

Local health authorities said Israeli strikes have killed at least 16 other people in separate airstrikes across the enclave, bringing Thursday’s death toll to 26.

Gaza rescue teams and medics said Israeli air strikes have killed at least 22 people, including a family of six whose home was struck in Gaza City, reports AFP.

Six members of one family — a couple and their four children — were killed when an air strike levelled their home in northern Gaza City, the civil defence said in a statement.

Nine people were killed and several wounded in another strike on a former police station in the Jabalia area of northern Gaza, according to a statement from the Indonesian hospital where the casualties were brought.

Elsewhere, five people died when the tents they had sought refuge in were hit.

Another two people were killed in a strike on a home in the southern city of Khan Younis.

The funeral has taken place for Palestinian journalist Saeed Abu Hassanein, who was killed last night in an Israeli air strike on the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

The Al-Aqsa Radio journalist was killed along with his wife and daughter after their tent was bombed.

Dozens more Israeli settlers have once again stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, under the protection of Israeli police, Al Jazeera reports.

The settlers carried out provocative tours in the courtyards and performed Talmudic rituals, according to Palestinian sources in the occupied territory.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has published an itinerary for public hearings it will hold in The Hague next week to discuss Israel’s legal obligations around allowing United Nations, NGO and neutral state activity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera reports.

The UN has asked the ICJ to provide a legal opinion on Israel’s right to limit or bar UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) operations, as well as Israel’s weeks-long ban on humanitarian aid entering Gaza.

Some 45 countries and international organisations have submitted written statements before the hearings, which will start on April 28.

Israeli representatives are not expected to attend, but Israel’s Foreign Ministry has said it will submit a written statement to the court.