Mazzaltov World News provides you with the latest live coverage of Current Affairs, Sports, Health, Weather, Entertainment, Business and Travel News from around the world.
Here’s where things stand on Tuesday 29 July 2025:
- The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global hunger monitoring system, has warned that the “worst-case scenario of famine” is now unfolding in Gaza, as Israel continues to severely restrict aid entering the territory.
- Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on the Strip, as medical sources say Israeli forces killed at least 62 people across Gaza since dawn on Tuesday, including 19 aid seekers, despite “pauses” in fighting to deliver essential aid.
- An Israeli settler has shot dead Palestinian activist and teacher Awdah Hathaleen in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank.
- Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 60,034 people and wounded 145,870. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks and more than 200 were taken captive.
Israeli settler kills West Bank participant in Oscar-winning film
Activist, football player and participant in Oscar-winning film Awdah Hathaleen was shot in the chest and killed by an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank.
The attacker has been under sanctions by both the EU and the US.
If you’re just joining us
Here’s what you need to know:
- Israel’s war on Gaza has now killed more than 60,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
- The IPC, a UN-backed global hunger monitor, has issued an alert in which it says the “worst-case scenario of famine” is currently unfolding in Gaza.
- Our correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, says the Israeli military conducted a bombardment overnight that left dozens dead in the central areas of Gaza, in what residents describe as one of the bloodiest nights in recent weeks.
- Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp says the Netherlands has declared two far-right Israeli ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, persona non grata for inciting settler violence and calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
What does starvation do to the human body?
The Gaza Strip is experiencing a starvation crisis, with the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global hunger monitoring system, warning earlier today that the “worst-case scenario of famine” is now unfolding in the besieged territory.
Starvation occurs when the human body is deprived of food for an extended period, resulting in severe health issues and often leading to death.
Estimates suggest the body can survive up to three weeks without food, although the actual duration varies among individuals.
Starvation occurs over three stages. The first begins as early as when a meal is skipped; the second occurs with a prolonged period of fasting where the body uses stored fat for energy.
The third, and often fatal, stage is when all stored fats have been depleted, and the body turns to bone and muscle as sources of energy.
Photos: Newborns, infants in Gaza struggle to survive amid food, medical shortages
Israeli forces kill 11 more Palestinians in southern Gaza
Medical sources at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis say seven Palestinians have been killed by Israeli gunfire near aid centres north of Rafah.
The sources also reported that four Palestinians were killed in an Israeli bombing of a tent housing displaced people in al-Mawasi. The so-called “safe” zone in Gaza has been repeatedly hit by Israeli forces since the beginning of the war on the Palestinian enclave.
We will bring you more information as we get it.
Starmer calls emergency meeting to address Gaza crisis and proposed peace plan
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will hold an emergency cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss the situation in Gaza and a proposed peace plan as he comes under mounting pressure from his own party to recognise a Palestinian state.
The United Kingdom is working on the plan with France and Germany after a call between the leaders of the three countries last week.
Starmer has not shared details of the plan, but over the weekend he compared the proposals to the “coalition of the willing”, the international effort to support Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire in its war with Russia.
With warnings that people in Gaza are facing starvation, growing numbers of lawmakers in Starmer’s Labour Party want him to recognise a Palestinian state to put pressure on Israel.
The issue has come to the fore after President Emmanuel Macron said France would recognise Palestine as a state.
Dutch government’s proposed travel bans on Smotrich, Ben-Gvir ‘too little, too late’
That’s what we’re hearing here this morning from protesters at The Hague. Other people say it is baby steps.
Others question why this is happening now because it comes after continuous rallies, continuous protests here, pressuring the government to take action. One is taking place here by the Foreign Ministry.
It is significant in the sense that the Netherlands has been one of Israel’s strongest allies for a very long time, especially since the war on Gaza.
The Netherlands had been one of the countries that refused to take any measures against Israel. So, this shift has irritated Israel.
The Netherlands has also proposed to suspend the trade part of the EU Association Agreement, which would mean that all the trade advantages Israel has with the EU, its most important trading partner, could be suspended.
‘When a society is destroyed so systematically, simply distributing rations’ is not the answer
The Israeli government denies there is starvation in Gaza – but under international pressure, it announced new measures to allow aid into the Strip.
Israel’s notoriously random restrictions, bureaucratic delays, visa cancellations and targeting of aid convoys have caused tonnes of food aid to spoil at the border.
“When a society is destroyed so systematically over such a sustained period, it gets to a place where the harms are so deep, so complex and so intertwined that the death rate escalates and bringing it back is not simply a question of distributing rations,” Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, told Al Jazeera.
Aid organisations need to bring in at least 500-600 aid trucks into Gaza every day – carrying food, medicine, hygiene products, fuel and other critically needed supplies.
The number allowed under the new measures is a fifth of that.
“They’re not enough,” Sam Rose, acting director of UNRWA in Gaza, told Al Jazeera.
“They need to be expanded and they need to be sustained and they need to be accompanied by a ceasefire, because that is the only thing that is going to stabilise conditions for hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of desperate people in Gaza.”
Reversing forced starvation ‘will need a lot more than a trickle of aid’
US President Donald Trump has contradicted Israeli claims that there is no starvation in Gaza.
But at the same time, he announced that the US and others would be setting up new aid distribution centres in Gaza – extending the patterns of accommodating Israeli demands to bypass the UN, which has 400 centres to distribute aid effectively and efficiently.
It’s part of a trend of reinventing the wheel of aid distribution in Gaza that has contributed to entrenching this catastrophic crisis, a crisis created by Israel by razing agricultural fields, prohibiting fishing, and obstructing UN aid agencies.
Now and again, Israel offers alternatives that do not resolve the crisis it created in the first place:
- Food air drops – inefficient and expensive, five air drops offer the equivalent of one truckload if the pellets fall within people’s reach without harming civilians in the process.
- The US and Israeli-backed GHF – set up to replace the UN, it’s a chaotic operation that turned into a “death trap” for more than 1,000 Palestinians.
Experts say the starvation Israel engineered took months to set in and that it will need a lot more than a trickle of aid over a few days to reverse.
Words and smokescreens will not stop the imminent threat of mass death by starvation in Gaza.
Israel’s war on Gaza has now killed more than 60,000: Health Ministry
The confirmed number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the war on Gaza has risen to at least 60,034, according to the Health Ministry in the besieged and bombarded territory.
In its latest daily update, the ministry said the bodies of 113 Palestinians, including one killed in an earlier attack, had been brought to hospitals across Gaza in the latest 24-hour reporting period.
A total of 637 injuries were also recorded, bringing the overall number of people wounded by Israeli forces during the war to 145,870, it added.
Necessary volume of humanitarian aid not getting into Gaza: WFP
The UN food agency says it is not getting the necessary volumes of humanitarian assistance into Gaza despite Israel issuing new measures to enable more supplies to enter the enclave.
“We have not gotten the authorisation, the permission to move in the volumes that we’ve requested,” Ross Smith, a senior regional programme adviser at the WFP’s Regional Bureau for East and Central Africa, said.
Ross said the disaster unfolding in Gaza is “unlike anything we have seen in this century”, adding that it was reminiscent of famines seen in Ethiopia and Biafra, Nigeria, in the 20th century.
Malnutrition leaves six-month-old baby as ‘nothing but bones’
Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim Khalili visited al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza City, where Judi al-Arour, a six-month-old baby, is struggling to survive.
At six months old, she is supposed to weigh at least 6kg (13.2lb), but born into starvation in Gaza, to a mother severely malnourished during pregnancy, her life hangs in the balance, at only 2kg (4.4lb).
Dr Mayada Jundiyeh, head of the neonatal unit at al-Rantisi Hospital, told Khalili that “the next stage of harm, after weight loss and electrolyte imbalance, can lead to permanent brain damage.
“Even if nutritional supplements and proper food are later introduced to the children, they could already be in an irreparable state, meaning their brain and cognitive function would already have been affected,” Jundiyeh said.
Al-Arour’s grandmother, Um Ashraf al-Arour, says the family has done everything to care for her, but because Israel has blocked the entry of baby formula and food, her granddaughter has been left “extremely fragile” and “nothing but bones”.
One million women in Gaza facing starvation risks: UN
Sima Bahous, the executive director of UN Women, has said one million women and girls in Gaza face the “unthinkable choice” of starving or risking their lives while searching for food.
“This horror must end,” Bahous said in a social media post, calling for unhindered access to humanitarian aid into the Strip, the release of captives, and a permanent ceasefire.
UN chief says Gaza destruction ‘intolerable’
Antonio Guterres has warned that an Israel-Palestinian two-state solution is “farther than ever”.
Speaking at a high-level United Nations conference to promote a two-state solution, the global body’s secretary-general said the destruction of Gaza and the “creeping” illegal annexation of the West Bank must come to an end.
Smotrich says rebuilding Gush Katif settlement in Gaza now ‘closer than ever’
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said Israel is “closer than ever” to rebuilding the illegal settlement of Gush Katif in southern Gaza that had been dismantled in 2005.
The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted Smotrich as also saying at a conference in the Yad Binyamin settlement in central Israel that where “there are no settlements, there is no army, and where there is no army, there is no security”.
“Gaza is an integral part of the land of Israel,” claimed Smotrich, who lives in an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. “I do not want to return to Gush Katif as it was – it was very small, very crowded, it should be much larger, much wider,” he added.
Photos: The aftermath of an Israeli attack on Nuseirat
More on the IPC alert
As we reported earlier, the global hunger monitor has said the “worst-case scenario of famine” is currently playing out in Gaza. What else is there to know:
- The IPC’s alert is short of a formal famine declaration.
- It said Gaza has teetered on the brink of famine for two years, but recent developments have “dramatically worsened” the situation, including “increasingly stringent blockades” by Israel.
- A formal famine declaration, which is rare, requires the kind of data that the lack of access to Gaza and mobility within has largely denied.
- The IPC has declared famine only a few times – in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region last year.
- The report is based on available information through July 25 and says the crisis has reached “an alarming and deadly turning point”.
- It says data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of Gaza – at its lowest level since the war began – and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
- The report says nearly 17 out of every 100 children below the age of five in Gaza City are acutely malnourished.
- The IPC’s latest analysis in May warned that Gaza would likely fall into famine if Israel did not lift its blockade and stop its military campaign.
- Its new alert calls for immediate and large-scale action and warns: “Failure to act now will result in widespread death in much of the Strip.”
Malnutrition in babies, children can have a ‘catastrophic’ long-term effect
Medical staff in Gaza’s hospitals are now seeing babies so severely malnourished “without muscles and fat tissue, just the skin over the bone”, the director of paediatrics and maternity at Nasser Hospital, Dr Ahmed al-Farra, tells Al Jazeera.
If a baby, infant or child suffers from malnutrition, their blood pressure will be low, their heartbeat slow, and they can become hypothermic and experience limited motility in the gastrointestinal tract.
They can also experience decreased pancreatic enzyme secretion, leading to an increased risk of opportunistic infections.
He said malnutrition can also have long-term effects on babies and infants as they are still developing their central nervous system during the first three years of life.
Babies who have been malnourished during the war will suffer in the future because they have no folic acid, no B1 complex, and no polyunsaturated fatty acids that are essential for the composition of the central nervous system.
Al-Farrah said malnutrition can affect cognitive development in the future, make it hard for a child to read and write, and lead to depression and anxiety.
Israeli forces kill 8 aid seekers near Netzarim
We just reported that 15 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli army gunfire while waiting for aid near the Netzarim Corridor in the central Gaza Strip, according to al-Awda Hospital in Gaza.
The hospital has now issued an update saying more than 38 Palestinians were injured by the Israeli gunfire near the Netzarim Corridor.
We’ll bring you more on this as the details come in.
‘Worst-case scenario of famine’ now unfolding in Gaza: Global hunger monitoring system
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global hunger monitoring system, has warned that the “worst-case scenario of famine” is now unfolding in Gaza.
“Latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City,” it said in a new report.
“Amid relentless conflict, mass displacement, severely restricted humanitarian access, and the collapse of essential services, including healthcare, the crisis has reached an alarming and deadly turning point.”
Food consumption has sharply deteriorated, with one in three individuals going without food for days at a time, it said.
Malnutrition rose rapidly in the first half of July, with more than 20,000 children being admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. More than 3,000 are severely malnourished.
The IPC alert comes against the backdrop of its latest analysis released in May 2025, which projected that by September 2025, the entire population of Gaza would face high levels of acute food insecurity, with more than 500,000 people expected to be in a state of extreme food deprivation, starvation, and destitution.
Israeli forces arrest Palestinians amid raids across occupied West Bank
The Wafa news agency reports arrests and raids in several locations across the Palestinian territory. Here’s a round-up of the latest:
- Israeli soldiers stormed the towns of Kafr ad-Dik and Bruqin, west of the northern Salfit governorate, raiding a number of homes and damaging property.
- The Jerusalem governorate reported that members of the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem demolished a residential facility and a car wash in the Ain al-Lawza district of occupied East Jerusalem.
- The Israeli army demolished the ground floor of a building under construction and delivered several stop-work notices to agricultural facilities east of Qalqilya.
- Israeli forces raided Palestinian homes in Jalazone refugee camp, north of Ramallah, and arrested six men.
- They also arrested two men from Tubas city and nine Palestinians from Hebron.
Israeli forces wound 15 Palestinian aid seekers near Netzarim
Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza says 15 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli army gunfire while waiting for aid near the Netzarim Corridor in the central Gaza Strip.
We’ll bring you more on this as the details come in.
Amount of aid entering Gaza ‘symbolic’ as humanitarian crisis continues to deteriorate
The humanitarian situation is taking a devastating turn on the ground, despite the latest Israeli declaration that they are carrying out a humanitarian process to allow for more aid to move into the territory and to allow airdrops of food.
The amount of airdrops and trucks are just seen as a trickle in the flood of need in Gaza.
According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, only 87 humanitarian trucks entered Gaza yesterday, and they were looted by desperate crowds.
All the humanitarian reports coming out from NGOs in Gaza say that without protected humanitarian corridors, logistical infrastructure and a ceasefire, the humanitarian crisis will continue to escalate.
The airdrops over the last 48 hours amount to about three trucks’ worth of aid – that’s not enough for even one neighbourhood in Gaza for less than a day.
So this amount of aid trickling into the Strip remains very symbolic and does little to alleviate the current humanitarian crisis.
‘One of bloodiest nights in recent weeks’ in Gaza prompts fears of expanded Israeli operation
A night of intense Israeli bombardment has left dozens dead in the central areas of Gaza, in what residents describe as one of the bloodiest nights in recent weeks.
Thirty Palestinians were killed in Nuseirat refugee camp after Israeli forces struck a number of residential houses. Among the victims are 12 children and 14 women, and witnesses say most the of the victims arrived at al-Awda Hospital torn to pieces due to the sheer force of explosions.
Local accounts indicate that Israel used booby-trapped robots, as well as tanks and drones during this attack.
This is a sign of a possible imminent Israeli ground manoeuvre, although Israel has not yet confirmed the objectives of the attack.
But elsewhere in Gaza we also see a relative surge in air attacks, including in the designated “safe zone” of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, where a father and his three children were killed in an Israeli attack on a makeshift tent.
The scale and coordination of these attacks are prompting further fears and point to a serious escalation that signals that nowhere in Gaza is truly safe.
Netanyahu planning annexation to appease right-wing ministers
Netanyahu is not just talking about annexing parts of Gaza; he’s talking about annexing the entirety of the Palestinian territory.
That’s apparently what was discussed in Israel’s Security Cabinet meeting on Monday night, when Netanyahu huddled up his security chiefs and some of his other ministers within his coalition government.
Now this is reportedly going to be done and presented in order to appease the right wing within the Netanyahu coalition, who have said from the very beginning that they want to occupy Gaza, that they want illegal settlements there, that there should be no Palestinians there, and that there should be this so called voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
That’s how they’ve been describing what has been condemned as ethnic cleansing of this territory.
So what Netanyahu’s plan would mean is a complete siege on certain parts of Gaza, even though the Israelis have said they want to now up the aid that is going into the territory because of the starvation and famine that is plaguing the Palestinian people.
A complete siege on those areas would mean no water. It would mean no fuel. It would mean no food. No humanitarian aid.
And as part of this plan, the Israeli army would be operating on the ground in places it hadn’t yet, wherever there was intelligence that there were captives that were in the area or nearby.
Some of those areas include central Gaza, where the military has not operated on the ground. That’s according to these reports within Israeli media.