Death toll in Gaza today rises to 25
The death toll in Gaza today has increased to 25, Al Jazeera reports, adding that 12 people were killed while seeking aid.
Between 27 May and 8 August, the Red Cross field hospital in Rafah treated more than 4,500 wounded patients, with most saying they were injured while trying to access food distribution sites, according to the UN.
Condemning the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said: “It is imperative that the UN and its humanitarian partners are enabled to deliver aid at scale, using community-based mechanisms to reach the most vulnerable.”
Key events
The Metropolitan police has said that 60 more people will be prosecuted for showing support for Palestine Action, which was proscribed by the UK government last month.
More than 700 people have been arrested for supporting the group since its proscription on 5 July.
Last weekend 522 people – half of whom were over 60 – were arrested under section 13 of the Terrorism Act at a demonstration in central London for carrying placards that stated: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
In a statement released on Friday evening, the Met police said the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), a non-departmental public body, holds records of people convicted of offences under the Terrorism Act. It warned that employers and universities check DBS records, and can refuse applicants who are found to have had terrorism convictions.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has said civilians in Gaza are forced to choose between drinking water or using it to wash themselves and keep clean.
An NRC spokesperson told the Guardian:
We are deeply concerned about the unimaginable crisis in Gaza, which is having a terrible impact on civilians and especially the children.
Starvation is deepening. Water scarcity is increasing very much each day. Colleagues on the ground are reporting that people are now basically rationing between either using water for drinking or for hygiene.
There is an urgent need to allow assistance into Gaza and for humanitarian organisations to be allowed to do their jobs. Denial of access is now costing lives every single day with people starving to death.
Unrwa has warned that women and girls in Gaza are forced to adopt “increasingly dangerous survival strategies like venturing out in search of food and water at the extreme risk of being killed”.
The agency added that one million women and girls in Gaza are now facing “mass starvation, violence and abuse”.
It called for the “siege” on Gaza to be lifted and aid allowed in “at scale”.
Four Palestinians have been wounded in an attack by Israeli settlers north of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera reports.
One person was also wounded after reportedly being shot in the Sheikh Saad area of al-Eizariya, a town bordering occupied East Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
Microsoft has launched an “urgent” external inquiry into claims Israel’s military surveillance agency has used the company’s technology to facilitate the mass surveillance of Palestinians.
The company said the formal review was in response to a Guardian investigation that revealed how the Unit 8200 spy agency has relied on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast collection of everyday Palestinian mobile phone calls.
The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call discovered that Unit 8200 made use of a customised and segregated area within Azure to store recordings of millions of calls made daily in Gaza and the West Bank.
Microsoft said “using Azure for the storage of data files of phone calls obtained through broad or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank” would be prohibited by its terms of service.
The inquiry, to be overseen by lawyers at the US firm Covington & Burling, is the second external review commissioned by Microsoft into the use of its technology by the Israeli military.
You can read more about Microsoft’s external inquiry by the Guardian’s investigations correspondent, Harry Davies, and Israeli investigative journalist, Yuval Abraham, below.
Turkey’s president has said the “tragedy unfolding in Gaza” should be considered a “deepening humanitarian catastrophe that wounds the collective conscience of humanity with each passing day”.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said cities in Gaza have been rendered “uninhabitable”, adding: “Homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship have been reduced to rubble; essential services such as food, water, healthcare, and electricity have collapsed.”
He condemned the world’s “feeble responses” to the crisis in Gaza, which he said “stands before us as a litmus test of whether the international community is willing and able to uphold the most fundamental human values”.
Israel has repeatedly denied targeting Palestinian civilians, saying its strikes in Gaza seek to eliminate Hamas.
Eight Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza – report
Eight Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza and the Mawasi al-Qarara area, north of Khan Younis, it has been reported.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that six of the casualties, including four children, were killed as a result of an Israeli strike on a house in the Bureij refugee camp, citing sources at the al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat.
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has described her Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu as a “problem”, accusing Israel’s government of going “too far”.
Frederiksen condemned the “absolutely appalling and catastrophic” humanitarian situation in Gaza and the Israeli government’s new settlement plans in the occupied West Bank in an interview with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
“We are one of the countries that wants to increase pressure on Israel, but we have not yet obtained the support of EU members,” she said.
Israel’s controversial settlement project, named E1, aims to build more than 3,000 homes in the occupied West Bank. Earlier this week, the Israeli far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the plans would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Frederiksen added that she wanted to consider “political pressure, sanctions, whether against settlers, ministers, or even Israel as a whole”, referring to trade or research sanctions.
Two former officials who worked under Joe Biden’s administration have said they received no evidence that “Hamas was physically diverting US-funded goods provided by the World Food Programme or international nongovernmental organizations”.
The remarks were made in a joint op-ed in Foreign Affairs by Jacob Lew, who served as US ambassador to Israel from 2023 to 2025, and David Satterfield, a former US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues from 2023 to 2024.
The pair wrote that “there was no evidence of substantial Hamas diversion of any major assistance funded by the UN or nongovernmental organisations (NGOs)”.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of stealing aid from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, either to consume it or sell it at higher prices.
Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s Middle East live blog.
Here’s an overview of the latest developments in the region:
-
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) warned that malnutrition in Gaza City has reached 21.5%, meaning about one in five young children are now malnourished.
-
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said earlier this week that almost 13,000 new admissions of children for acute malnutrition treatment were recorded in July 2025 across Gaza.
-
Two more people were killed near aid distribution sites in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported, after the UN said the death toll near the humanitarian centres has risen to 1,760 since May.
-
Foreign Ministers of 31 Arab and Islamic countries and the secretaries-general of the League of Arab States released a statement condemning the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s backing of the notion of a “Greater Israel”. Asked by i24News whether the prime minister “connects” with the vision of a Greater Israel, he said: “Very much.” The term is often used to describe biblical Israel, which includes parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Responding to the remarks, the Arab and Islamic nations said the remarks amount to “a grave disregard” of international law and “a direct threat to Arab national security”.
-
A special unit in Israel’s military was tasked with identifying reporters it could smear as undercover Hamas fighters, the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine reports. This comes after Israel claimed responsibility for prominent Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, who it accused of leading a Hamas cell.
-
The Israeli military claimed an air strike in southern Lebanon in the late hours of last night, saying it targeted sites run by Hezbollah.
-
This comes after Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem accused Lebanon’s government of “handing” the country to Israel by pushing for the group’s disarmament, warning it would fight to keep its weapons.
-
Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir published a video on Friday showing him confronting the most high-profile Palestinian detainee in Israeli custody in his prison cell. Marwan Barghouti, a leading member of the Palestinian Fatah party, has spent more than 20 years behind bars after being sentenced for his role in anti-Israeli attacks in the early 2000s.
