Six people killed in Jerusalem shooting attack, Israel’s foreign minister says
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said six people were killed in the Jerusalem attack (not five as Israel’s ambulance service had said) after Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a crowded bus stop in the northern outskirts of the city.
Saar made the comments as he was speaking via a translator at a joint briefing with Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto in Budapest.
Saar described a “terrible terror attack”, adding: “We are in a war with radical Islamist terrorism. Europe and the international community, every country, must now make a clear choice. Are they on Israel’s side, or are they on the side of the jihadists?”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the scene after the attack at the Ramot junction on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
As my colleagues note in this story, hundreds of members of the security forces were deployed at the scene to search for additional attackers or explosives that could have been planted around the area.
The Israeli military said it was encircling Palestinian villages on the outskirts of the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah in response to the attack.
Hamas praised two Palestinian “resistance fighters” who it said had carried out the attack but stopped short of claiming responsibility. Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group, also praised the shooting without claiming responsibility.
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Updated at 12.29 BST
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Sam Jones
Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities expressed its “profound sorrow” over the murder of the Spanish citizen, and declared a day of mourning on Monday.
In a statement, it added: “We extend our condolences to his family, to the Jewish community of Melilla of which he was a part, and we express our solidarity with Israeli society, which is marked by terrorism.”
It pointed out that two Spanish citizens – Iván Illarramendi and Maya Villalobo – were murdered in the 7 October attacks.
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Spanish citizen killed in Jerusalem shooting
Sam Jones
The Spanish government has confirmed that a Spanish citizen was among the six people murdered in the east Jerusalem attack.
“The government wishes to express its solidarity and extend its deepest condolences to the families of the victims, especially those of the murdered Spanish citizen, and to express its hope that the injured recover as quickly as possible,” the Spanish foreign ministry said in a statement.
“Spain reiterates its commitment to peace in the Middle East and its firm condemnation of terrorism.”
The statement came as Spain and Israel are engaged in an escalating diplomatic row after Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, renewed his scathing criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, accusing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of “exterminating a defenceless people” by bombing hospitals and “killing innocent boys and girls with hunger”.
Speaking on Monday morning to announce a raft of measures designed to increase the pressure on Netanyahu to stop the military campaign, Sánchez said that while the Spanish government would always support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, it felt compelled to try to “stop a massacre”.
The Israel government responded by accusing Sánchez’s administration of deploying “wild and hateful rhetoric” and of using a “continuous anti-Israel and antisemitic attack” to distract from corruption allegations. It also announced that two Spanish ministers, including one of the country’s deputy prime ministers, would be banned from entering Israel because of their criticisms of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
The Spanish foreign ministry described the Israeli government’s words as “false and slanderous”, called the entry ban “unacceptable”, and said the country would not be “intimidated in its defence of peace, international law and human rights”.
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Updated at 13.33 BST
The United Nations human rights chief condemned Israel on Monday for “mass killing” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and “hindering of sufficient lifesaving aid”, saying the country had a case to answer before the International Court of Justice.
Volker Turk, who heads the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), stopped short of describing the Gaza war as an unfolding genocide, as hundreds of UN staff had urged him to do, Reuters reported.
But in his opening address to the 60th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Turk expressed horror at what he called “the open use of genocidal rhetoric” and “disgraceful dehumanisation” of Palestinians by senior Israeli officials.
“Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; its infliction of indescribable suffering and wholesale destruction; its hindering of sufficient lifesaving aid and the ensuing starvation of civilians; its killing of journalists; and its commission of war crime upon war crime, are shocking the conscience of the world,” said Turk.
“Israel has a case to answer before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the evidence continues to mount,” Turk said, referring to the ICJ’s ruling in January that Israel had a legal obligation to prevent acts of genocide.
Israel accused Turk of not bothering with “facts and complexities”.
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Here are some of the latest images that are being sent to us over the newswires from Gaza:
Relatives of Palestinian people killed by Israeli gunfire mourn as the bodies are brought to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesRelatives of one-and-a-half-year-old Palestinian child Ayman Muhammad Abd al-Ghafur, who lost his life due to severe malnutrition, oxygen deprivation, and muscle wasting, mourn as the body is taken from Nasser hospital. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesRelatives of Palestinian people, who were reportedly killed by Israeli soldiers’ gunfire while waiting for American aid in Rafah, perform funeral prayers as the bodies are brought to Nasser hospital in southern Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesShare
Death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza reaches 64,522, says health ministry
At least 64,522 Palestinian people have been killed and 163,096 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday.
At least 65 Palestinian people were killed and 320 others injured in the last 24 hours alone, the ministry said.
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Gaza’s health ministry said in a post on Telegram that over the past day it recorded six new deaths, including two children, caused by “famine and malnutrition”.
This brings the total number of Palestinian people who have died from famine and malnutrition to 393, including 140 children.
“Since the IPC declared famine in Gaza, 115 deaths have been recorded, including 25 children,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Israel has been widely accused of using food as a political weapon and was accused of flagrantly breaking international law by collectively punishing the civilian population of Gaza by its total 11 week blockade of aid (which began in March), which was only slightly eased in response to international pressure, particularly from US senators.
Aid organisations were bringing somewhere between 500 and 600 aid trucks a day into Gaza during the ceasefire earlier this year, but now ongoing Israeli restrictions mean much less aid is being allowed into the territory and distributed.
In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognised organisation that classifies the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition, said that an “entirely man-made” famine was taking place in Gaza’s largest city, Gaza City, and its surrounding area.
Palestinian children wait with empty pots as a charity distributes food in the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesShare
Updated at 12.08 BST
Six people killed in Jerusalem shooting attack, Israel’s foreign minister says
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said six people were killed in the Jerusalem attack (not five as Israel’s ambulance service had said) after Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a crowded bus stop in the northern outskirts of the city.
Saar made the comments as he was speaking via a translator at a joint briefing with Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto in Budapest.
Saar described a “terrible terror attack”, adding: “We are in a war with radical Islamist terrorism. Europe and the international community, every country, must now make a clear choice. Are they on Israel’s side, or are they on the side of the jihadists?”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the scene after the attack at the Ramot junction on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
As my colleagues note in this story, hundreds of members of the security forces were deployed at the scene to search for additional attackers or explosives that could have been planted around the area.
The Israeli military said it was encircling Palestinian villages on the outskirts of the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah in response to the attack.
Hamas praised two Palestinian “resistance fighters” who it said had carried out the attack but stopped short of claiming responsibility. Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group, also praised the shooting without claiming responsibility.
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Updated at 12.29 BST
France and Germany have both condemned the deadly shooting attack in Jerusalem this morning in which at least five people were killed and seven seriously injured.
“France strongly condemns the terrorist attack that has just occurred in East Jerusalem”, French President Emmanuel Macron wrote in a post on X.
“The spiral of violence must come to an end. Only a political solution will bring back peace and stability for all in the region,” he added.
Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, meanwhile, said he was “deeply shocked” by the attack in East Jerusalem, describing it as a “cowardly terror attack”.
“My thoughts are with the victims’ families. I wish those who were injured a speedy recovery,” Wadephul wrote on X.
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Spanish PM says Israel is ‘exterminating a defenceless people’ in its ‘genocide in Gaza’
Sam Jones
Sam Jones is Madrid correspondent for the Guardian
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has stepped up his scathing criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, accusing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of “exterminating a defenceless people” by bombing hospitals and “killing innocent boys and girls with hunger”.
Speaking on Monday morning to announce a raft of measures designed to increase the pressure on Netanyahu to stop the military campaign, Sánchez said that while the Spanish government would always support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, it felt compelled to try to “stop a massacre”.
“Protecting your country and your society is one thing, but bombing hospitals and killing innocent boys and girls with hunger is another thing entirely,” he said.
“What Prime Minister Netanyahu presented in October 2023 as a military operation in response to the horrific terrorist attacks has ended up becoming a new wave of illegal occupations and an unjustifiable attack against the Palestinian civilian population – an attack that the UN special rapporteur and the majority of experts already describe as a genocide.”
Pedro Sánchez said Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was ‘killing innocent boys and girls with hunger’. Photograph: LA MONCLOA/AFP/Getty Images
The Spanish prime minister pointed to the numbers of dead, injured, displaced and malnourished. “That isn’t defending yourself; that’s not even attacking,” he said. “It’s exterminating a defenceless people. It’s breaking all the rules of humanitarian law.”
Sánchez also hit out once again at the international community, saying major world powers had ended up “paralysed between indifference over a conflict without end and complicity with the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu”.
You can read the full story here:
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Updated at 10.47 BST
Yair Golan, leader of the opposition Democrats party, has called for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to leave office immediately, calling him a danger to the country.
In a post on X, Golan wrote:
The prime minister, who called “Hamas an asset,” is a serial saboteur of every deal to return the hostages, rejects every initiative to end the fighting, to lift the country out of the state of emergency, andons the Gaza envelope and the security of its citizens.
There is no security strategy here. The war to annex Gaza is designed to preserve his rule and allow him to complete the regime coup under its cover.
Netanyahu is dangerous to Israel and must not remain in power for even one more day. We will replace him, save our kidnapped brothers, end the war, and restore security to Israel.
Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, has repeatedly been accused of prolonging the assault on Gaza and obstructing hostage negotiations to ensure his own political survival.
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Updated at 10.24 BST
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is holding an “assessment” with the heads of the “security establishment” after the deadly attack in Jerusalem this morning, according to the prime minister’s office.
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Updated at 10.00 BST
Five people killed in Jerusalem shooting attack, paramedics say
Paramedics said at least five people were killed in the shooting attack in Jerusalem, in an update of the death toll.
The Israeli emergency service said four people had died at the scene and one person died in hospital.
Nine people with gunshot wounds were taken to local hospitals to receive treatment along with three others injured by broken glass, the emergency service said.
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Palestinian prisoners not being given adequate food, Israel’s supreme court says in rare ruling
Israel’s supreme court has ruled that the state is failing to provide adequate food to Palestinian prisoners, and ordered authorities to increase the amount and improve the quality of food served to deprived Palestinian inmates.
Sunday’s decision was a rare case in which the country’s highest court ruled against the government’s conduct during the nearly two-year war, which a number of leading rights organisations have classed as a genocide against the civilian population of Gaza.
The current war on Gaza began after about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in October 2023.
Since then Israel has seized thousands of people in Gaza that it claims have links to Hamas. Thousands of people have also been released without charge, often after months of detention.
Rights groups have documented widespread abuse in prisons and detention facilities, including insufficient food and health care, as well as poor sanitary conditions and beatings.
The three-judge panel ruled unanimously that the Israeli government had a legal duty to provide Palestinian prisoners with three meals a day to ensure “a basic level of existence” and ordered authorities to fulfil that obligation.
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Trump issues ‘last warning’ to Hamas to accept Gaza ceasefire deal
Donald Trump on Sunday issued what he called his “last warning” to Hamas, urging the Palestinian militant group to accept a deal to release hostages from Gaza.
“The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”
Hamas said in a later statement that it received some ideas from the US side through mediators to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza.
The group said it was discussing with mediators ways to develop those ideas, without giving specifics.
US president Donald Trump speaks to reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Hamas also reiterated its readiness for negotiations to release all hostages in exchange for a “clear announcement of an end to the war” and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the enclave.
On Saturday, Israel’s N12 News reported that Trump has put forth a new ceasefire proposal to Hamas.
Under the deal, Hamas would free all the remaining 48 hostages on the first day of the truce in exchange for thousands of Palestinian prisoners jailed in Israel and negotiate an end to the war during a ceasefire in the enclave, according to N12.
An Israeli official said Israel was “seriously considering” Trump’s proposal but did not elaborate on its details.
ShareEmma Graham-Harrison
Emma Graham-Harrison is the Guardian’s chief Middle East correspondent and has this summary of what we know so far about the Jerusalem shooting:
Four men have been killed by the two gunmen, who were killed by police, according to emergency services.
One of the victims was in his 50s and three others in their thirties. Five other people have been taken to hospital with gunshot wounds.
The two attackers were shot dead by police at the scene.
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Updated at 09.12 BST
Four people killed in Jerusalem shooting, Israeli emergency service says
We have some more information on the Jerusalem shooting (see opening post).
Four people were killed in the shooting attack at the Ramot junction in Jerusalem, Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency service has confirmed.
Israeli police officers work at the scene where a suspected shooting attack took place in Jerusalem. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/ReutersShare
Updated at 09.13 BST
Israel’s defence minister says Gaza City will be hit by a ‘powerful hurricane’ later today
Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has warned that a “powerful hurricane” will “strike the skies of Gaza City” later today as the military continues to expand its assault on the territory’s largest city.
“Today, a powerful hurricane will strike the skies of Gaza City, and the roofs of the terror towers will,” he wrote in a post on X.
“This is a final warning to the murderers and rapists of Hamas in Gaza and in luxury hotels abroad: Release the hostages and lay down your weapons- or Gaza will be destroyed, and you will be annihilated.”
Israeli airstrikes and demolitions have destroyed dozens of buildings in areas of Gaza City, with intense bombardments having reportedly levelled several neighbourhoods in recent weeks.
Palestinian people inspect the damage seen in the aftermath of an overnight Israeli airstrike on a tent in Gaza City. Photograph: Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
Israel has bombed Gaza City residential high-rises in recent days ahead of a long-threatened ground offensive.
Gaza City residents are being told to move to the southern part of the territory to areas that are under frequent Israeli bombardment and are already overcrowded.
As my colleague William Christou notes in this story, tens of thousands of people have already left the city as Israel has stepped up its bombardment, and the roads leading south have been packed with residents carrying their belongings in carts and trucks.
Gaza City is being gripped by famine caused by Israel’s restrictions on aid and the expanded assault will only deepen the widespread suffering of the civilian population there and could forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people, many of whom are ill or frail.
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Updated at 08.54 BST
At least 15 people injured in shooting in Jerusalem, Israel’s emergency service says
We are restarting our live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Israel’s ambulance service has received reports of at least 15 people who were injured in a shooting incident in Jerusalem.
Paramedics said six people are in serious condition. Police said two attackers were “neutralised” (killed) soon after the shooting began.
The shooting, which was called into the paramedics at 10.13am local time, took place at the Ramot junction on Yigal Yadin Street in Jerusalem, according to Israel’s emergency rescue service.
Israeli police officers and emergency personnel work at the scene where a suspected shooting attack took place on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/ReutersShare
Updated at 09.08 BST