Israel’s top generals want to begin a cease-fire in Gaza even if it keeps Hamas in power for the time being, widening a rift between the military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has opposed a truce that would allow Hamas to survive the war.

The generals think that a truce would be the best way of freeing the roughly 120 Israelis still held, both dead and alive, in Gaza, according to interviews with six current and former security officials.

Underequipped for further fighting after Israel’s longest war in decades, the generals also think their forces need time to recuperate in case a land war breaks out against Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has been locked in a low-level fight with Israel since October, multiple officials said.

A truce with Hamas could also make it easier to reach a deal with Hezbollah, according to the officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. Hezbollah has said it will continue to strike northern Israel until Israel stops fighting in the Gaza Strip.

Known collectively as the General Staff Forum, Israel’s military leadership is formed from roughly 30 senior generals, including the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the commanders of the army, air force and navy, and the head of military intelligence.

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Two more Palestinian men, injured during a military operation in the occupied West Bank last week, have told the BBC that Israeli soldiers forced them on to the bonnet of an army jeep and drove them – sometimes at speed – along village roads.

Their accounts came days after footage of 23-year-old Mujahid Abadi Balas clinging to the bonnet of what appears to be the same Israeli army jeep sparked international outrage.

25-year-old Samir Dabaya, now in hospital in Jenin, says he was shot in the back by Israeli forces during the Jabariyat operation, and lay face-down and bleeding for hours, until soldiers came to assess him.

He described “shooting from all sides” and said he tried to run away but was shot in the leg, after which an army unit arrived to collect him and another man. “They ordered us to stand up, and undressed us,” he said, “then they asked us to get onto the front of the jeep.” The car was so hot, it felt “like fire”, he says.

“I was barefoot and undressed. I tried to put my hand on the jeep and I couldn’t, it was burning hot. I was telling them it was very hot, and they were forcing me to get on – telling me that if I didn’t want to die, I should do it.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett yesterday called on Israelis not to leave Israel, “which is going through its most difficult times since 1948”.

“We are in the most difficult period since the War of Independence: Change in the war, international boycotts, damage to deterrence, 120 Israelis in captivity, thousands of bereaved families, a deserted Galilee, thousands of evacuees, ministers who only care about themselves, loss of control over the economy and the deficit,” he wrote in a post on X after saying that he was “very sad” to hear a software engineer he knew was moving to Europe.

While there is no official data on the number of Israelis who have left since the beginning of the war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, the Hebrew news website the Times of Israel said on Sunday that more than half a million Israelis left and did not return in the first six months of the war.

Much of the attention on Thursday’s presidential debate fell upon President Joe Biden’s faltering performance, which has called into question whether he can even remain the Democratic candidate. In the aftermath, some have focused on former President Donald Trump’s nonstop lies.

Left largely overlooked, however, has been the open xenophobia Trump deployed against Palestinians and immigrants, and the silence with which it was met.

The most striking illustration might be Trump’s response to a prompt from CNN moderator Dana Bash, regarding Israel’s war on Gaza and the “humanitarian crisis” that Israel has created while killing thousands of Palestinians.

As Biden insisted that Hamas was the only entity standing in the way of a ceasefire, Trump actually pushed back on the idea. “You got to ask him,” Trump began, referring to Biden, “as far as Israel and Hamas, Israel is the one that wants to go. He said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas.” He continued: “Actually, Israel is the one, and you should let them go and let them finish the job. He doesn’t want to do it. He has become like a Palestinian. But, they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is a weak one.”

Smith, who has been to the enclave twice since the war began, most recently worked in Rafah and central Gaza for two months, including at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah and Al-Awada Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp. “It was carnage,” he says. They were “the most horrific scenes that I have ever seen as an emergency physician.”

“We talk about the media being complicit in Israel's violence… but they also, it would appear, actively obscured the reality of what's happening,” he says, pointing to coverage of Israel’s massacre of more than 270 Palestinians in Nuseirat that occurred just after he left Gaza. Local physicians he worked with described people lying in pools of their own blood in the hospital and patients crammed into an already overcrowded spaces. “The most horrific, unimaginable conditions. And I truly don’t think that any of the major media outlets have captured the barbarity of this violence.”

Democratic leaders did not tell members to vote against an amendment to block the State Department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s statistics.

The House of Representatives has voted to effectively conceal the death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza.

On Thursday, lawmakers voted 269-144 on an amendment to prohibit the State Department from citing statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry. The measure is part of the annual State Department appropriations bill. It was led by Democratic Reps. Jared Moskowitz, Fla., and Josh Gottheimer, N.J., and Republican Reps. Joe Wilson, S.C.; Mike Lawler, N.Y.; and Carol Miller, W.V.

Mohammed Khader, policy manager at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, told The Intercept that the amendment is part of a trend of anti-Palestinian sentiment in Congress since the start of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. “By preventing any recognition of the number of Palestinians killed since October, this amendment is a clear example of genocide denial and is no different from what was done towards victims of genocides in Rwanda and Armenia.”

The University of Waterloo in Canada has filed a lawsuit against its students for continuing its pro-Palestine encampment urging the university to disclose and divest from Israel.

According to reports in the Canadian press, administrators were suing the encampment for $1.5m in damages including "trespass[ing], damage to property, intimidation and ejectment".

The university alleges the student encampment has damaged the school's reputation, driven up administrative and operational costs for the university and depreciated the university's property values.

In statement released by organisers of the encampment, Occupy UWaterloo, the student group said it was "incredibly shameful" that the university adminstration had decided "to sue their own student body that's protesting the university's complicity in a genocide that's almost nine months in and has claimed the lives of over 40,000".

An ID verification company that works on behalf of TikTok, X and Uber, among others, has left a set of administrative credentials exposed for more than a year, as reported by 404 Media.

The Israel-based AU10TIX verifies the identity of users by using pictures of their faces and drivers’ licenses, potentially opening up both to hackers.

The Houthis in Yemen say they launched attacks on a commercial vessel after it used an Israeli port, and on a US aircraft carrier ordered home after months of responding to sea attacks launched because of the war on Gaza.

Yahya Saree, the military spokesman of the Iran-aligned group, said in a televised announcement on Saturday the Liberia-flagged bulk carrier Transworld Navigator was directly hit by ballistic missiles in the Arabian Sea.

“The ship was targeted because the company that owns it violated the ban of entry into the ports of occupied Palestine,” he said, alluding to an earlier threat that all ships docking at Israeli ports would be considered targets.

The attack came after the sinking this week of the ship MV Tutor, which appears to mark a new escalation in the campaign against commercial vessels in vital maritime corridors.

At the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, Dr Iyad, director of the Kamal Adwan hospital's maternity department, refused to leave Gaza City, opting to stay with his patients and fulfil his humanitarian mission. But after a month of intense Israeli bombardment and siege, including the targeting of hospitals, he decided to take his family to safety.

He took the road instructed by Israeli forces, assuming it would grant him safe passage. But neither that nor his identifiable medical uniform made any difference.

"Nurse, come," the soldier said when he spotted him, according to Dina. That was the last time she saw her father.

“I cried a lot that day,” Dina, 19, said. “The last words I said to him were, 'May God protect you, my father, my love.'" For the next seven months, Iyad, 53, was forcibly disappeared. Dina had no information about his whereabouts.

Her hopes of seeing him again were shattered earlier this month, when it was revealed he died "under torture" in Israeli detention, six days after his arrest.

The New York Times published the headline “Bowman Falls in House Primary, Overtaken by Flood of Pro-Israel Money” — before swapping it out for “Bowman Falls to Latimer in a Loss for Progressive Democrats.” Other coverage emphasized that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s spending wasn’t the only factor in the race and that Bowman’s flaws made him particularly vulnerable, as did changed district lines that made his reelection even tougher.

Progressive strategists, however, had a much more clear takeaway from the results. “You don’t drop $15 million on an election if your positions are popular,” said Eva Borgwardt⁩, national spokesperson for the Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow, which endorsed Bowman. “This was an act of desperation from a pro-war lobby that is at odds with the majority of Americans, including American Jews.”

The amount of spending on the race should be alarming to everyone who cares about democracy, said Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of strategic communications at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “Now we know how much it costs to buy an election,” she said. “That price tag was nearly $25 million.” “It is noteworthy that many of AIPAC’s ads did not even mention Israel,” she said. “AIPAC understands that they are losing on the issues, because voters and constituents do not want to fund a genocide.”

AIPAC invested historic amounts of money in the race because it saw that unconditional support for Israel was unpopular among Democratic voters, Ellman-Golan said. “They would not have spent this much money if they were not scared,” she said. “You don’t spend $25 million — an unheard of amount in a primary — if you’re feeling confident in your candidate.”

Hundreds of Kenyan police officers have arrived in Haiti as part of a US-backed security intervention aiming to rescue the Caribbean country from a criminal insurrection that toppled the prime minister and brought death and chaos to the streets.

About 400 members of the Kenya-led multinational police operation stepped off a Kenyan Airways plane at Port-au-Prince’s international airport on Tuesday. The US president, Joe Biden, hailed their arrival as the start of “an effort that will bring much-needed relief to Haitians”.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down part of a federal anti-corruption law that makes it a crime for state and local officials to take gifts valued at more than $5,000 from a donor who had previously been awarded lucrative contracts or other government benefits thanks to the efforts of the official.

By a 6-3 vote, the justices overturned the conviction of a former Indiana mayor who asked for and took a $13,000 payment from the owners of a local truck dealership after he helped them win $1.1 million in city contracts for the purchase of garbage trucks.

In ruling for the former mayor, the justices drew a distinction between bribery, which requires proof of an illegal deal, and a gratuity that can be a gift or a reward for a past favor. They said the officials may be charged and prosecuted for bribery, but not for taking money for past favors if there was no proof of an illicit deal.

Thirteen Palestinians were killed on Tuesday, including the sister of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, when Israel bombed the family home in the Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City.

Civil Defence crews searched the ruins of the bombed house on Tuesday for survivors with one of the dead identified as Zuhur Abdul Salam Haniyeh, Ismail Haniyeh's sister.

The Israeli army claimed it had "bombed two houses used by Hamas elements" without referring to Haniyeh's family.

Another of Haniyeh's sisters, Sabah, who holds Israeli citizenship and lives in Beersheba, was detained by Israel on 21 April but later released and placed under house arrest.

https://x.com/AIPAC/status/1805797208941350954

Edward Kang, 20, flew from Newark, New Jersey, to Jacksonville, Florida, to confront someone he had an online dispute with, Nassau County, New Jersey, Sheriff Bill Leeper said. Court records show he was charged Monday with second-degree attempted murder and attempted burglary.

A preliminary investigation indicates Kang knew the victim only online, having met him playing a fantasy video game called ArcheAge. According to the game's website, it is shutting down its North America and European servers this week because of a declining number of users.

The victim, who was not publicly identified, told authorities he took a break from playing video games when he saw Kang standing with a hammer above his head in a “strike position.” His stepfather woke up to the sounds of screams for help and found his stepson on the ground struggling with Kang above him, authorities said.

When asked about Hind’s killing, the U.S. said that, according to Israel, the Palestine Red Crescent Society and U.N. have not helped investigate.

The Israeli military never contacted the Palestine Red Crescent Society about Israel’s killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, her family members, and the paramedics sent to save her, a Red Crescent spokesperson told The Intercept, refuting the State Department’s first substantive remarks about the killing that took place 148 days ago.

“Since the attack at our ambulances that was dispatched to save Hind Rajab, there has been no investigations made by the Israelis or any contact from the Israelis to the Red Crescent,” said spokesperson Nebal Farsakh. “We as the Palestinian Red Crescent have not received any kind of communication from the Israeli military.”

“All I can tell you is what they’ve told us. And what they have said is, they went to the U.N. and the Palestinian Red Crescent and asked them to supply information that would help them, and what they claim is that they were given none,” Miller said.

His comments came on the heels of an independent investigation by the U.K.-based firm Forensic Architecture, which concluded that Israeli fire was most likely responsible for the attack, and that it was “not plausible” that Israeli forces would not have seen who they shot 335 bullets at.