People gather at cafes and outdoor screenings to support team after Spain’s backing for Palestinian rights

The Spanish football team’s World Cup win has been celebrated in the streets of Gaza, where Spain’s support for Palestinian rights and Israel’s backing for the Argentinian team turned the competition into more than a football showdown.

Gathered at cafes and outdoor screenings, Palestinians defied the risk of Israeli attacks to cheer on a team they had taken to their hearts.

Local truckers’ association says it may suspend operations, after several eyewitnesses decried Ahmad Esleem’s murder

A Palestinian driver bringing food aid from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) into Gaza has been killed by an Israeli soldier “in a field execution”, according to witnesses and the local truckers’ association, which said it may suspend operations in protest.

Ahmad Esleem was shot in the head on Wednesday when an aid convoy stopped because of a breakdown to one truck soon after entering Gaza, according to three accounts. Israeli soldiers ordered the drivers to dismount and one of them shot Esleem in the head when his hands were raised.

Mohamed al-Wahidi died when a missile struck his taxi shortly before Egypt played Argentina in their last 16 match

• Gaza’s World Cup screenings – in pictures

A Palestinian aid worker who had organised screenings of World Cup matches in Gaza was killed by an Israeli missile strike just before the game between Egypt and Argentina on Tuesday evening.

Two brothers aged eight and 10 and another man who was in the street near the site of the attack were also killed.

Militant group’s statement makes no promise to disarm unilaterally as Israel and the US have demanded

Hamas has announced its intention to hand over governing authority in Gaza after two decades in power, and has invited a US-backed interim administration to take over the running of the Palestinian territory.

It was not immediately clear how far Monday’s announcement would go towards strengthening an only partially observed ceasefire in Gaza or improving conditions in the besieged coastal strip which is still in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

Even though most of their instruments have been destroyed, teachers are restarting classes, using music to give relief to traumatised people

The three tents line a stretch of overcrowded, windswept sand, their windows open on to a view of the breaking waves of the Mediterranean. From inside comes the sound of singing, a strummed guitar, a violin and then a flute.

But if the music evokes calm and harmony, the surroundings do not: rows of crowded makeshift shelters swelter in Gaza’s summer heat, young children picking their way through rubble, battered cars and pony carts clogging a potholed road. Above, Israeli military drones hum and buzz.

Exclusive: Recovery efforts remain slow and passing of time makes it more likely they will be skeletonised

The International Committee of the Red Cross has said the risk that the thousands of Palestinians buried beneath Gaza’s rubble may never be identified is increasing by the day, as recovery efforts remain slow and many victims have yet to be retrieved, the Guardian can reveal.

“There is no doubt that these bodies could soon become difficult to identify,” said Pat Griffiths, the ICRC spokesperson in Jerusalem. “The longer it takes for human remains to be recovered, the more difficult it can be to identify them. The longer the deceased lie beneath the rubble, the more likely they will be in advanced stages of decomposition – even skeletonised – when eventually recovered.”

Ayoub Junaid, seven, given new pair but needs surgery as Gaza’s children remain unable to access treatment

A video of a seven-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza who suffers from a severe visual impairment crying over his shattered glasses has drawn widespread attention across social and international media.

The footage of Ayoub Junaid has shone a light on the plight of the many visually impaired children in Gaza who, because of Israel’s blockade and the devastation caused by the war, have been unable to access eye examinations, corrective lenses or specialist ophthalmic surgery.

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya now in cell barely big enough to sit in, says son, after UN experts demanded his release in March

The son of a prominent Palestinian doctor who was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza in late 2024 and held for more than 500 days without formal charges has spoken of his deep concern for his father’s wellbeing after he was transferred without explanation to solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison.

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, was detained at work on 27 December 2024. Physicians for Human Rights Israel said last week it had received information indicating that the 53-year-old had been transferred from Ketziot prison to Ramon prison, part of the Ganot prison complex, where he had been put in solitary confinement. PHRI said it had not been told the reasons for the transfer.

With food and medicine already scarce, emergency services, bakeries and water supplies are increasingly being pushed to the brink

Palestinians in Gaza already grappling with limited supplies of food and medicine face new threats to their day-to-day existence: shortages of engine oil, spare parts and gas. The knock-on effects are impacting everything from bread production to water supplies and emergency response efforts, producing one fresh crisis after another.

Over the weekend, the main hospital in central Gaza warned of an imminent health disaster as its electrical generators failed.

Speaking in West Bank settlement, Israeli PM, who is fighting for political survival before elections, says ‘we are squeezing Hamas’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has given orders to the Israeli army to seize control of 70% of the Gaza Strip in a move that threatens to torpedo an already fragile ceasefire and create catastrophic humanitarian conditions in the already devastated territory.

Under the US-brokered ceasefire in October, the Israeli army withdrew to a demarcation line which gave Israel direct control of 53% of the occupied territory. Since then, Israeli forces have steadily advanced their positions westward into the Hamas-controlled half of the strip, and declared an ever-expanded no man’s land west of that, within which they claim the right to decide who can enter and open fire on anyone perceived as a threat.

Residents waking to find line has moved overnight and they are now in free-fire zone as army takes more territory

Israeli forces have been moving an agreed truce line in Gaza westwards over the six months since the ceasefire, expanding their zone of control and making the state of limbo ever more dangerous for Palestinians.

The “yellow line” agreed in the US-brokered ceasefire in October was supposed to be temporary pending further Israeli withdrawals, but the partially observed truce has stalled after its first phase amid disagreements over the disarming of Hamas, and continued Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Five months after a ceasefire was announced in Gaza, airstrikes are still killing civilians and the humanitarian situation remains dire

There is little left that connects Palestinians in Gaza with their prewar existence. The contours of life have become darker and far more brutal, as if the population has been stripped of its past.

“Drones never stop buzzing overhead, gunfire and shelling continue almost daily and naval boats fire towards fishermen,” said 56-year-old Ahmed Baroud, a father of five displaced in Deir al-Balah.

Palestinians say the move is part of a wider Israeli strategy to leverage security tensions to tighten restrictions

For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – was closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they could to the sealed site.

On Friday morning, hundreds of worshippers were forced to pray outside the Old City, as Israeli police barricaded the entrances to the site.

Israel has closed all crossings into Gaza, threatening to plunge 2 million people into a new hunger crisis

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

Israel closed all crossings into Gaza indefinitely when it attacked Iran, imposing a siege that has already pushed up food prices and threatens to plunge 2 million people into a new hunger crisis.

After more than two years of war, and with Israeli forces in control of about 60% of the territory, almost all of Gaza’s food must be brought in.

Fresh fruit and other items now available but at high prices in territory where unemployment is estimated at 80%

Every morning, Mansour Mohammad Bakr sets out from the small rented room in Gaza City he shares with his pregnant wife and two very young daughters. The 23-year-old walks past the port and the breaking waves of the Mediterranean where he once earned his living.

Before the two-year war that devastated Gaza, Bakr was a fisher, sharing tackle and a boat with his father and brothers. Now his brothers are dead, his father is too old, and his equipment was destroyed during the conflict. Like hundreds of thousands of others across Gaza, Bakr needs a job.

Satellite images and witness testimony show destruction as IDF claims it was forced to take defensive measures

Israeli forces have bulldozed part of a Gaza cemetery containing the war graves of dozens of British, Australian and other allied soldiers killed in the first and second world wars, satellite imagery and witness testimony reveal.

Satellite imagery of the Gaza war cemetery in al-Tuffah, a district of Gaza City, shows extensive earthworks in the southernmost corner of the graveyard. Bomb craters can be seen around the cemetery, but in this area the destruction appears to have been more systematic.

Thousands of Palestinian cancer patients are living without treatment as they await medical evacuation

When the Gaza war began, Ismail Abu Naji was just 18 months old, his small body covered in swollen, bleeding lesions. Months earlier, doctors had diagnosed him with a rare blood cancer, one that, if untreated, is often a death sentence.

In the weeks before the war, Ismail’s family had arranged for him to be transferred to Al-Makassed hospital in Jerusalem, a charitable institution for Palestinians, for specialised care. But the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack that triggered the conflict meant Ismail could not leave the territory.

Thousands have blown down in storms and tents from China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia found to be not waterproof

Thousands of tents supplied by China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to shelter displaced Palestinians in Gaza offer only limited protection against rain and wind, an assessment compiled by shelter specialists in the devastated territory has revealed.

The assessment will undermine claims that Palestinians in Gaza are being supplied with adequate shelter. Fierce storms in recent weeks blew down or damaged thousands of tents, affecting at least 235,000 people, according to UN estimates.

The term ceasefire ‘risks creating a dangerous illusion life is returning to normal’ for Palestinians squeezed into the remaining 42% of their land behind Israel’s ‘yellow line’

When Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi went to look for firewood their parents thought they would be safe. They were just young boys, aged nine and 10 and, after all, a ceasefire had been declared in Gaza.

Their mother, Hala Abu Assi, was making tea in the family’s tent in Khan Younis when she heard an explosion, a missile fired by an Israeli drone. She ran to the scene – but it was too late.

Relatives and experts tell of the human and societal need to find and identify the dead, while images and data shed light on the scale of the job

It has been described as one of the most gruelling recovery efforts in modern warfare.

As negotiations over the fragile Gaza ceasefire continue, Palestinians have started to dig through 61m tonnes of debris, 20 times more than the combined mass of all debris generated by conflicts since 2008. Underneath, at least 10,000 people are thought to be buried.