[🇧🇩] Israel and Hamas war in Gaza-----Can Bangladesh be a peace broker?

[Saif]

Gaza ceasefire a deadly illusion: UNICEF

The ceasefire declared in Gaza more than eight months ago is a ‘deadly illusion’, the UN charged on Friday, with 265 children killed there since the fighting was supposed to have stopped.

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Gaza ceasefire a deadly illusion: UNICEF
Agence France-Presse . Geneva, Switzerland 19 June, 2026, 22:57

Displaced Palestinian women mourn loved ones killed in an Israeli airstrike, prior to being taken for burial from the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, on Thursday. | AFP photo

The ceasefire declared in Gaza more than eight months ago is a ‘deadly illusion’, the UN charged on Friday, with 265 children killed there since the fighting was supposed to have stopped.

Despite a ceasefire being declared in October 2025, Israel has continued to launch strikes across Gaza, killing at least 992 Palestinians since then, according to the occupied territory’s health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

The UN children’s agency said the number of Palestinian children killed since the ceasefire was announced between Israel and Hamas, which runs Gaza, was an ‘absurd and devastating figure’.

‘During a period supposedly defined by restraint and protection, a child has been killed, on average, every single day for more than eight months,’ UNICEF spokesman James Elder told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Amman.

‘For many, many months, the world has been told there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet for Palestinian children, this so-called ceasefire has become a cruel and a deadly illusion.’

Elder stressed that the children killed since the ceasefire was declared ‘were not killed in a war zone’.

‘They were killed in their homes. In their schools. Playing football. Fishing. They were shot, bombed struck by quadcopters,’ he said.

‘If a child is being killed every day, surely the debate is no longer about the quality of the ceasefire. It is about the credibility of calling it one.’

This week, he pointed out, ‘a two-year-old boy was shot and killed by Israeli forces; a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed inside his tent; a five-year-old boy and his father were killed by an Israeli strike, and on and on it goes’.

In addition to those killed, more than 400 children had been injured since the ceasefire was declared, ‘many with catastrophic wounds’, Elder said.

Currently, he said, ‘hundreds of children urgently require medical evacuation’, even as Israeli ‘restrictions on essential medicines mean wounded children are enduring greater pain and face an increased risk of infection, complications and further amputations’.

Elder also highlighted the deep trauma suffered by Gaza’s children.

‘Fear, loss and violence... is woven into the very fabric of their childhood,’ he said, pointing out that ‘the trauma is so profound that it affects children’s ability to eat, sleep and, of course, to develop normally’.

Elder insisted: ‘The continued killing of children is not the consequence of a lack of options. It is the consequence of a lack of political will.’

‘We must stop accepting levels of child deaths that would provoke international outrage anywhere else in the world,’ he said.

‘We must stop normalising the abnormal.’​

 

[Saif]

Israeli army kills journalist in Gaza

The Israeli military said on Saturday it had carried out a strike that killed Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Wishah in Gaza, claiming that he was a .Hamas terrorist’...

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Israeli army kills journalist in Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Jerusalem 21 June, 2026, 01:54

Effluent water runs from the camps housing displaced families towards the Mediterranean sea, after the infrastructure and homes of hundreds and thousands of Palestinian families were destroyed in Israeli military bombardment since 2023, causing disease across the territory in Gaza City on Saturday.

The Israeli military said on Saturday it had carried out a strike that killed Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Wishah in Gaza, claiming that he was a .Hamas terrorist’.

‘The IDF confirms it carried out a strike on Ahmed Wishah, who was a Hamas terrorist,’ a military spokesperson told AFP.

The spokesperson did not immediately provide evidence to support the military’s claim about Wishah, but said that ‘there will be a statement issued with further details’.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera said that an Israeli strike killed one of its journalists, Ahmed Wishah, in the Gaza Strip, the latest of a string of people working for the broadcaster killed in the Palestinian territory since October 7, 2023.

‘Ahmed Wishah, a cameraperson for Al Jazeera, has been killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza,’ Al Jazeera said on its website.

A correspondent for the channel said the strike was carried out by a drone in the refugee camp and also injured several people.

The broadcaster said Wishah’s brother and fellow Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed was killed in April ‘by Israeli shelling when he was travelling in his vehicle’.

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders said at the time that Israeli forces killed more than 220 journalists, at least 70 of whom were killed in the context of their professional duties.

The Israeli army has repeatedly said it never deliberately targets journalists.

But since October 2023, it has claimed to have killed a number of people who, it says, were Palestinian ‘terrorists’ working under the guise of being media professionals.​

 

[Saif]

Israel’s targeting of Gaza children part of genocide: UN

Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children in what has become a key factor in an on-going ‘genocide’ in Gaza, United Nations investigators charged on Tuesday, in a report slammed by Israel.

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Israel’s targeting of Gaza children part of genocide: UN
Agence France-Presse . Geneva, Switzerland 23 June, 2026, 23:56

Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children in what has become a key factor in an on-going ‘genocide’ in Gaza, United Nations investigators charged on Tuesday, in a report slammed by Israel.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry said it had found evidence that ‘Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli security forces’.

This, it said, was a key factor in establishing ‘the genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the larger Palestinian group in Gaza’.

The three-member investigative team, which does not speak for the UN itself, first determined in a report last September that Israel had committed ‘genocide’ in the war in Gaza — a finding Israel flatly rejected.

In Tuesday’s follow-up report, they said the intense scale and systematic nature of Israeli military operations had continued, resulting in the ‘unprecedented’ death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children.

There were ‘reasonable grounds’ to conclude that Israel’s authorities and security forces ‘have continued to commit the crime of genocide’ in Gaza, they said.

Israel, which has long been harshly critical of the commission, slammed the report as ‘defamatory’ and a ‘libellous sham’.

It accused the investigators of ignoring ‘the brutal tactics of Hamas, which ruthlessly attacks Israeli children and uses Palestinian children as human shields’.

The commission, which was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, examined for its latest report crimes affecting Palestinian children, and how living conditions imposed by Israel in Gaza were ‘resulting in preventable mortality of children’.

‘Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and war crimes in the West Bank,’ the team said in a statement.

The commission said that severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare had ‘erased childhood’ in Gaza and would continue to affect the children throughout their lives.

‘By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future,’ said Indian judge Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chairs the inquiry.

As for documenting crimes, Muralidhar added: ‘Israeli soldiers have themselves put in the public domain so much incriminating evidence about what they’ve been doing.’

The report comes days after the UN children’s agency UNICEF said at least 265 children had been killed and hundreds more wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect.

The Hamas October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory response in Gaza has killed more than 72,800 people, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry,

The UN inquiry said that during the first two years of the war at least 20,179 children were killed and 44,143 injured ‘as a direct result of the hostilities in Gaza’.

The killing and maiming of Palestinian children ‘was part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group’, it said.

Israel was responsible for causing a ‘severe orphan crisis’, while wounded youngsters ‘face a lifetime of disability’, the report said.

The siege of Gaza ‘directly undermined reproductive and new-born health’, while the collapse of public health programmes ‘eroded the conditions necessary for a healthy next generation’.

The report listed Israeli divisions, brigades and units that may be responsible for killing children, in specific incidents in Gaza and the West Bank.

‘We know who they are,’ commissioner Chris Sidoti told a press conference.

‘Every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children — and they need to be held accountable.’

Addressing Israeli citizens directly, he said: ‘What kind of people are your leaders when they give orders, they make statements, that encourage this kind of conduct: not merely permit it, but encourage it?’

Besides Gaza, the commission also documented a sharp increase in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian children in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.

The commission urged all UN member states, including Israel, to ensure accountability for crimes committed.​

 

[Saif]

Fate of Gaza Strip eclipsed by Middle East war

More than two-and-a-half years later, Gaza remains mired in a severe humanitarian crisis, and despite a fragile ceasefire reached between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, efforts to bring the war to a definitive end have stalled for months

www.thedailystar.net

Fate of Gaza Strip eclipsed by Middle East war

AFP, Gaza City

Palestinian children swim in the ocean in Gaza City on July 3, 2026. The Gaza war was triggered by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, prompting Israel to launch a retaliatory campaign against the territory. Photo: AFP

The Gaza war was the spark that touched off years of Middle East conflict culminating in the US-Israeli war with Iran, but as Washington and Tehran wrangle over terms for peace, the devastated territory's fate seems largely out of mind.

"Ever since the United States went to war with Iran, the whole world has forgotten Gaza and its tragedy. We no longer have anyone standing by us," Palestinian Ahmed Jamali, 53, told AFP from the displacement camp in Gaza where he lives.

"We are weak and oppressed, and Israel is doing whatever it wants: killing, destroying and occupying Gaza, while no one in the world lifts a finger."

The apparent inattention paid to the Palestinian territory is all the more striking because it sits at the heart of the chain of events that plunged the region into its most dangerous confrontation in decades.

Hamas's unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on Israel triggered a devastating military response in Gaza, drawing in Tehran-backed allies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Yemen's Houthi rebels -- and eventually Iran itself.

What began as a local war between Israel and Hamas evolved into a regional conflict and, in turn, a direct confrontation between arch-foes Tehran and Washington.

More than two-and-a-half years later, Gaza remains mired in a severe humanitarian crisis, and despite a fragile ceasefire reached between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, efforts to bring the war to a definitive end have stalled for months.

Although Iranian officials initially spoke of an agreement to end the Middle East war that would encompass the entire region, the preliminary text endorsed by Tehran and Washington last month contains no mention of Gaza.

For analysts, that shows a shift in regional priorities.

"It reflects Hamas's declining strategic value in Iran's eyes," Hugh Lovatt of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told AFP.

Iran has long armed and financed Hamas as part of its "axis of resistance" -- an array of regional forces opposed to Israel and the US -- but the October 2023 attack appears to have fundamentally altered that relationship.

"Iranians do not really care about Gaza. Hamas was an ally, not an Iranian tool," said Israeli military expert Eado Hecht.

"It betrayed them. They did not want war in autumn 2023, it was too early for them."

- 'Gradually fading' -

Michael Milshtein, another Israeli military analyst, argued that Tehran's calculations have shifted elsewhere.

"It places greater value on preserving Hezbollah as a pillar of the regional balance," he said.

The diplomatic focus has also shifted, with a growing sense of international fatigue over Gaza.

"Gaza is gradually fading from international attention," said Lovatt.

One diplomat involved in negotiations described a widespread belief among governments that "most actors see the issue as insoluble in the short to medium term".

Another veteran diplomat based in Jerusalem told AFP that Gaza's absence from the discussions reflected political paralysis rather than progress.

"Gaza is absent from the agreement not because the war is over, but because no credible political framework exists for the day after," he said.

Israel insists that Hamas must fully disarm before any political transition can begin, while Hamas refuses to surrender its weapons without guarantees that an alternative Palestinian governing authority will replace it.

Neither an international stabilisation force nor a credible transitional mechanism has emerged in the months since the ceasefire took effect, both of which were called for in the US-brokered framework that halted the fighting.

- Cairo talks -

Behind the scenes, negotiations over Gaza's future continue in Cairo.

The talks bring together Palestinian factions, including Hamas, alongside the Board of Peace set up by US President Donald Trump and regional players including Qatar and Turkey.

"Trump may want to give this process a chance," said a source close to the negotiations.

"Whether it succeeds remains to be seen."

Although few details have emerged publicly, diplomatic and security sources told AFP that negotiators are working on a roadmap combining the gradual disarmament of Hamas with the creation of transitional governing authorities for Gaza.

Israeli media has reported that the government would reject such a framework.

"For now, this diplomatic process exists only around the negotiating table," Lovatt said.

"There has been progress, but reconstruction remains a distant prospect, and nothing is changing for the people on the ground."

- Return to combat? -

With diplomacy stalled, concerns are mounting that the fighting could yet resume.

Israeli media have reported military preparations for a possible summer 2026 offensive against Hamas should political negotiations fail.

But military expert Hecht cautioned against assuming that contingency planning meant another war was inevitable.

"Having the military opportunities is not the same as having the political opportunity," he said.

"Preparations are not the same as implementation."

Analyst Milshtein argued that Israel had little leverage left.

In his view, Washington could ultimately pressure Israel to accept a phased disarmament of Hamas alongside a transitional political framework -- or even to withdraw from Gaza.

"Alternatively, Israel could embark on another military adventure. Given this government's record... (it) cannot be ruled out," Milshtein said, adding that Israeli leaders still lacked a coherent long-term strategy.​