Palestine weekly wrap: Israel presses deeper into Gaza as Cairo talks begin

Eight months into the Gaza ceasefire agreement that exists more on paper than on the ground, the past week saw the agreement’s terms continue to erode.

While Palestinian factions convened in Cairo, ostensibly to help move the agreement past its first phase, Israel pressed its hold on Gaza further – extending barriers of earth along an ever-widening “Yellow Line,” demolishing homes nightly, and killing displaced families in strikes that, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, pushed the post-ceasefire death toll past 970. Immediately following the latest exchange of fire with Iran on Sunday, Israel sealed Gaza’s last open crossings entirely, before announcing they would reopen on Tuesday.

And in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settler violence, land seizures and military raids continued to intensify – much of it, according to residents and rights monitors, with soldiers standing by or actively assisting.

Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls last week to extend Israel’s control to “first 70 percent [of Gaza]”, far beyond the lines agreed upon by the October ceasefire agreement, residents and local monitoring networks in Gaza reported Israeli forces extending mounds of earth known as berms along the “Yellow Line” – the line their troops are nominally meant to hold – westward across the Strip: digging land at al-Zaarba in southern Gaza’s Mawasi Rafah, levelling farmland and greenhouses south of Khan Younis, planting rows of yellow concrete markers near Ard al-Limon and in Rafah’s al-Bardawil neighbourhood, and burning farmland towards the Netzarim corridor.

Amid this push, residents and local activists also reported evacuation warnings used to stage demolitions across the Gaza Strip. Residents reported the army demolishing residential blocks east and northeast of Khan Younis almost nightly, in blasts heard across the central Strip.

Satellite imagery analysed by Israeli researcher Or Fialkov showed the line pushed further into Beit Lahia, Netzarim and southern Khan Younis – in the north, centre and south of Gaza – with preliminary assessments that Israel is roughly a month from controlling 70 percent of Gaza.

As Israel expanded its control of the Strip, military raids repeatedly hit displaced civilians in tents and crowded apartment blocks. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that 11 people were killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza City on June 4 .

Five members of the Labad family were among those killed – Hassan Rabah Labad, his wife Manar, sons Mohammed and Tamim, and daughter Rahaf – leaving nine-year-old Hala the sole survivor, according to Gaza activist Hamza al-Masri. The Israeli army and domestic intelligence later told Israeli media the strikes had killed senior commanders of Hamas’s internal security apparatus, naming Hassan Labad as a deputy head.