Middle East

Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Taliban government have agreed to an immediate ceasefire, mediated by Qatar and Turkiye. The agreement was reached after a week of deadly clashes and strikes along their disputed border.

Mouin Rabbani from the Center For Conflict & Humanitarian Studies talks about the violence in Gaza since the ceasefire began and how he believes it’s being fuelled by Israel.

Hamas has rejected a statement from the United States State Department in which it cited “credible reports” indicating the Palestinian group would imminently violate the ceasefire deal with Israel.

In a statement on Sunday, Hamas said the US allegations were false and “fully align with the misleading Israeli propaganda and provide cover for the continuation of the occupation’s crimes and organised aggression against our people”.

The US State Department had claimed that Hamas is planning an attack against civilians in Gaza “in grave violation of the ceasefire” and called on mediators to demand that the group uphold its obligations under the US-backed peace deal.

In a statement late on Saturday, the State Department said it had obtained “credible reports indicating an imminent ceasefire violation by Hamas against the people of Gaza”.

“Should Hamas proceed with this attack, measures will be taken to protect the people of Gaza and preserve the integrity of the ceasefire,” it said, without giving specific details on the planned attack.

The United States has informed the guarantor nations of the Gaza peace agreement of credible reports indicating an imminent ceasefire violation by Hamas against the people of Gaza.  

This planned attack against Palestinian civilians would constitute a direct and grave violation…

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 18, 2025

Hamas called on the US to “stop repeating the [Israeli] occupation’s misleading narrative and to focus on curbing its repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement”.

“The facts on the ground reveal the exact opposite, as the occupation authorities are the ones who formed, armed, and funded criminal gangs that carried out killings, kidnappings, theft of aid trucks, and assaults against Palestinian civilians. They have openly admitted their crimes through media and video clips, confirming the occupation’s involvement in spreading chaos and disrupting security,” it said.

Hamas said its police forces in Gaza, “with broad popular and community support, are fulfilling their national duty in pursuing these gangs and holding them accountable according to clear legal mechanisms, to protect citizens and preserve public and private property”.

‘Attempt to stoke civil conflict’

Palestine scholar and Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani described the US State Department warning as mind-boggling.

“I think this is really an attempt to stoke civil conflict within the Gaza Strip … to achieve what so far Israel has failed to achieve,” Rabbani said.

The Dutch-Palestinian analyst pointed out that Israel has already attempted to “wreak havoc” in Gaza by joining forces with “armed gangs and collaborator militias” who act as Israeli proxies in the war-torn enclave.

“To suggest that this is in any way the United States coming to the defence of those whose genocide it has unconditionally supported for two entire years just boggles the mind and defies the imagination,” Rabbani said.

Hamas and Israel have been trading blame over violations of the US-mediated ceasefire since it came into force last week, threatening the success of the week-old deal.

Gershon Baskin, an American-Israeli analyst, told Al Jazeera that throughout the history of agreements between Palestinians and Israelis, all of them have been “breached” one way or another.

“If the Americans are serious that they want this to work, they have to be engaged every single day and several times a day” to make sure the steps agreed on are carried out on the ground, he said.

The Gaza Government Media Office said on Saturday that it had counted almost 50 Israeli violations of the peace deal, resulting in 38 Palestinian deaths and 143 injuries since the ceasefire took hold.

It called Israel’s actions “flagrant and clear violations of the ceasefire decision and the rules of international humanitarian law”.

According to the office, Israeli forces in Gaza fired directly at and bombed civilians, attacks that reflected Israel’s “continued aggressive approach despite the declaration of a ceasefire”.

Israel has also been accused of failing to comply with the ceasefire deal by continuing to block efforts to reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

The opening of Rafah has been called for in order to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into the Strip and to allow Palestinians to travel abroad.

Amid growing frustration with Israel’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing, Rawhi Fattouh, the president of the Palestinian National Council – the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislative body – urged the international community on Saturday to deploy international forces in Gaza to protect Palestinians and ensure the ceasefire deal is implemented.

Hamas has turned over the remains of two more deceased Israeli captives from Gaza, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced, as the Palestinian group accused Israel of continuing to commit ceasefire violations and repudiating the commitments made to peace mediators.

“Israel has received, via the Red Cross, the bodies of two hostages”, which were returned to Israeli security forces in Gaza, Netanyahu’s office said in a post on the X social media platform early on Sunday.

The prime minister’s office said the families of the Israeli captives have been updated on the return of the remains, although no names have been released so far.

The office said the two bodies have been transferred to the Israeli National Centre of Forensic Medicine, and “upon completion of the identification process, formal notification will be delivered to the families”.

“The effort to return our hostages is ongoing and will not cease until the last hostage is returned,” the prime minister’s office added.

With the handover late on Saturday, Hamas has now returned the remains of 12 of the 28 captives who died in Gaza, a key demand by Israel in the week-old ceasefire deal to end the two-year war.

According to the deal, Hamas was to return all of the Israeli captives – both the living and the dead – within 72 hours of its signing. In exchange, Israel was to release 360 bodies of deceased Palestinians and some 2,000 prisoners.

Hamas has said the widespread devastation in the Palestinian territory and the Israeli military’s continuing control of certain parts of Gaza have slowed the recovery of the bodies of deceased captives.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said Palestinian authorities do not have adequate equipment to help with the search for captives’ bodies beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings.

“It’s very difficult, with recovery teams on the ground facing extraordinary challenges. [They have] no bulldozers, no trucks, no cranes and no heavy equipment… to speed up the process and help with the recovery and return of bodies,” Mahmoud said.

Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, who is reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Al Jazeera is banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank, said that Netanyahu’s government has known “for some time” that the recovery of bodies of captives would be “an incredibly difficult and daunting task”.

Netanyahu, however, has accused Hamas of not doing enough to return the remains of the 28 and that all of the bodies need to be returned immediately, Salhut said.

“Until that happens, that’s when Israel is going to honour more of the commitments of the ceasefire, like letting in more humanitarian assistance, talking about opening the Rafah border crossing,” she said.

For days, Hamas and Israel have traded blame over violations of the US-mediated ceasefire.

On Saturday, Hamas accused the Netanyahu government of “fabricating flimsy pretexts” to not follow through on its commitments to the peace deal, as well as denouncing Israel’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt as “a blatant violation” of the agreement.

On Friday, Israeli forces killed 11 members of a single family, including seven children, in an attack east of Gaza City.

The Palestinian Embassy in Egypt announced earlier on Saturday that the Rafah crossing, the main gateway for people in Gaza to leave and enter the enclave, would reopen on Monday.

But Netanyahu said the border crossing would remain closed until Hamas hands over the bodies of all the deceased Israeli captives.

The delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza also remains slow despite the ceasefire deal.

On Saturday, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it had enough humanitarian food supplies to feed Gaza for three months, but trucks carrying the life-saving cargo are unable to enter Gaza and are stuck in warehouses in Jordan and Egypt.

“We must be allowed to get all this aid into Gaza without delay,” UNRWA said, adding that it also has equipment to provide shelter to as many as 1.3 million people.

Thousands converged on New York’s Times Square Saturday for a ‘No Kings’ protest against President Donald Trump. It was part of a nationwide event that comes amid military crackdowns in US cities, deportations and revenge indictments of political foes and in the wake of the Gaza peace deal.

Hamas agreed to return all of the Israeli captives – both the living and the dead – within 72 hours of signing a ceasefire deal with Israel.

It has been more than a week, and 18 bodies have yet to be handed over.

The Palestinian group is calling for heavy machinery to retrieve the remains.

It accuses Israel of purposely hampering the search, while Israel insists that Hamas is dragging its feet.

All the while, the lives of Palestinians in Gaza depend on the return of Israel’s dead.

Will Israel resume the war? And is the US prepared to give it the green light?

Presenter: Tom McRae

Guests:

Ori Goldberg – Israeli political commentator

Xavier Abu Eid – political analyst

Mehmet Celik – editorial co-ordinator at the Daily Sabah

Does grassroots organising have the power to hold governments and corporations accountable for genocide? And where does the US labour movement stand today?

This week on Upfront Marc Lamont Hill speaks to labour organiser and activist Chris Smalls, who cofounded Amazon’s first US labour union.

Smalls has also been a vocal critic of the United States’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza and argues that labour unions in the country have a role to play to stop Israel:

“If our dock workers did the same as our brothers and sisters overseas, we wouldn’t see a genocide,” he says.

The judge ruled NSO caused ‘irreparable harm’ to Meta, but said an earlier award of $168m in damages was ‘excessive’.

A United States judge has granted an injunction barring Israeli spyware maker the NSO Group from targeting WhatsApp users, saying the firm’s software causes “direct harm” but slashed an earlier damages award of $168m to just $4m.

In a ruling on Friday granting WhatsApp owner Meta an injunction to stop NSO’s spyware from being used in the messaging service, district judge Phyllis Hamilton said the Israeli firm’s “conduct causes irreparable harm”, adding that there was “no dispute that the conduct is ongoing”.

Hamilton said NSO’s conduct “serves to defeat” one of the key purposes of the service offered by WhatsApp: privacy.

“Part of what companies such as WhatsApp are ‘selling’ is informational privacy, and any unauthorised access is an interference with that sale,” she said.

In her ruling, Hamilton said that evidence at trial showed that NSO reverse-engineered WhatsApp code to stealthily install its spyware Pegasus on users’ phones, and repeatedly redesigned it to escape detection and bypass security fixes.

NSO was founded in 2010 and is based in the Israeli seaside tech hub of Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.

Pegasus – a highly invasive software marketed as a tool for law enforcement to fight crime and terrorism – allows operators to remotely embed spyware in devices.

NSO says it only sells the spyware to vetted and legitimate government law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But Meta, which owns WhatsApp, filed a lawsuit in California federal court in late 2019, accusing NSO of exploiting its encrypted messaging service to target journalists, lawyers and human rights activists with its spyware.

Independent experts have also said NSO’s software has been used by nation states, some with poor human rights records, to target critics.

Judge Hamilton said her broad injunction was appropriate given NSO’s “multiple design-arounds” to infect WhatsApp users – including missed phone calls and “zero-click” attacks – as well as the “covert nature” of the firm’s work more generally.

Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said in a statement that the “ruling bans spyware maker NSO from ever targeting WhatsApp and our global users again”.

“We applaud this decision that comes after six years of litigation to hold NSO accountable for targeting members of civil society. It sets an important precedent that there are serious consequences to attacking an American company,” he said.

Meta had asked Hamilton to extend the injunction to its other products – including Facebook, Instagram and Threads – but the judge ruled there was no way for her to determine if similar harms were being done on the other platforms without more evidence.

Hamilton also ruled that an initial award of $168m against NSO for damages to Meta in May this year was excessive, determining that the court did not have “sufficient basis” to support the jury’s initial calculation.

“There have simply not yet been enough cases involving unlawful electronic surveillance in the smartphone era for the court to be able to conclude that defendants’ conduct was ‘particularly egregious’,” Hamilton wrote.

The judge ruled that the punitive damages ratio should therefore be “capped at 9/1”, reducing the initial sum by about $164m to just $4m.

Hamas has handed over the remains of a tenth deceased Israeli captive, while Palestinians are struggling to identify loved ones among the 135 bodies Israel has released under the fragile new ceasefire.

Cameroon-flagged tanker issues distress call about 60 nautical miles (110km) south of Yemen’s Ahwar in Gulf of Aden.

A ship has caught fire in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen after being struck by a projectile, the British military said, with one report suggesting its crew was preparing to abandon the vessel.

The incident on Saturday comes as Yemen’s Houthi rebels have maintained their military campaign of attacking ships through the Red Sea corridor in solidarity with Palestinians under fire in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

The Houthis did not immediately claim an attack, though it can take them hours or even days to do so.

The British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) a centre issued an alert about the vessel, describing the incident as taking place some 210km (130 miles) east of Aden.

“A vessel has been hit by an unknown projectile, resulting with a fire,” the UKMTO said. “Authorities are investigating.”

The maritime security firm Ambrey described the ship as a Cameroon-flagged tanker that issued a distress call as it passed about 60 nautical miles (equivalent to 110km) south of Yemen’s Ahwar while en route from Sohar, Oman, to Djibouti.

It said radio traffic suggested the crew was preparing to abandon ship, and a search-and-rescue effort was under way.

Ambrey said the tanker was not believed to be linked to the target profile of Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis.

The group has launched numerous attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since 2023, targeting ships they deem linked to Israel or its supporters.

The attacks have disrupted trade flows through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

But no attacks have been claimed by the rebel group since the ceasefire began in Gaza on October 10.

The rebels’ most recent attack hit the Dutch-flagged cargo ship Minervagracht on September 29, killing one crew member on board and wounding another. The Houthi campaign against shipping has killed at least nine mariners and seen four ships sunk.

Israel has repeatedly struck what it says are Houthi targets in Yemen in recent months, killing dozens of Yemeni civilians. The Houthis have fired missiles towards Israel, most intercepted, but some breaking past Israel’s much-vaunted US-supplied air defences and causing injuries and disruptions at airports.

On Thursday, Israel claimed responsibility for killing the Houthi military’s Chief of Staff Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari.

The Houthis said in a statement that the conflict with Israel had not ended and that Israel will “receive its deterrent punishment for the crimes it has committed”.

In August, Israel said it targeted senior figures from the group, including al-Ghamari, in air strikes on the capital Sanaa that killed the prime minister of Yemen’s Houthi-run government and several other ministers.

As Donald Trump tries to take credit for a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel continues to kill Palestinians. And as both Israeli and Palestinian captives are released, the glaring double standards in coverage lay bare how this genocide was allowed to go on for so long.

Contributors: 
Tahani Mustafa – Visiting Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations
Mouin Rabbani – Co-editor, Jadaliyya
Kenneth Roth – Former Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
Oren Ziv – Journalist, +972 Magazine

On our radar

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado, chose to dedicate her award to Donald Trump. Meenakshi Ravi reports on what motivated the Venezuelan opposition leader to pander to the United States president.

All the president’s women: the rise of the ‘womanosphere’

For years, the right-wing media space has been dominated by men. But the 2024 election shone a light on a rising parallel force within Donald Trump’s MAGA movement: the so-called “womanosphere”. Across YouTube channels, social media and podcasts, conservative women are rebranding right-wing politics for a female audience.

Featuring: 
Annie Kelly – UK Correspondent, QAA Podcast
Nicole Kiprilov – Republican Party strategist
Eviane Leidig – Author, The Women of the Far Right

It has been a week since the ceasefire was announced in Gaza. When we heard the news in the occupied West Bank, we celebrated. We felt relief and hope that the genocide is finally over. But we also realised that there is no ceasefire for us.

The daily violence we have been subjected to for decades is showing no signs of abating. Since October 7, 2023, the brutality of our occupier has only intensified. Today, life in the West Bank has become almost impossible.

Violence, dispossession and paralysis

After the ceasefire deal was announced, a friend’s little daughter cheered; she then asked to go with her grandparents to pick olives. He told her that it would be difficult to do, to which she responded, “Why? Isn’t the war over?”

How do you explain to a child that the war ending in Gaza does not mean Palestinian families in the West Bank still can access their land to harvest olives? People still cannot reach their groves because of barriers set up by the Israeli military or they fear attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers, or both.

There are daily violent assaults on Palestinian farmers and their land. Since October 7, 2023, there have been 7,154 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestian people and property – some of them deadly.

Almost 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and settler mobs, including 212 children; more than 10,000 Palestinians have been displaced. Settlers and soldiers have destroyed 37,237 olive trees since October 7, 2023.

Even life in urban areas has become unbearable.

As a resident of Rawabi, a city north of Ramallah, I, too, feel the suffocation of the occupation every day.

If I need to travel outside my city to run errands, shop, obtain official paperwork, or anything else, I could get stuck at a checkpoint for hours and never make it to my destination. There are four iron gates, a military tower, and a barrier between Rawabi and Ramallah; they can make the 10-minute trip between Rawabi and Ramallah last an eternity.

Throughout the West Bank, there are 916 Israeli barriers, barriers and iron gates, 243 of which were constructed after October 7, 2023. These open and close at the Israeli army’s whim, meaning a Palestinian can get stuck at one barrier for hours. This disrupts every aspect of life – from family visits to urgent medical care to school attendance and transportation of goods.

We have also been denied access to Jerusalem and thus our freedom of worship at Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Few Palestinians are given the special permits needed to enter the city. We last had access to Jerusalem more than 20 years ago. This means an entire generation of young people know nothing about the city except from the pictures and stories told by their parents and grandparents.

Even at night, the Palestinians are not left alone by the occupation. Any Palestinian home may be subject to a raid by the Israeli army, with soldiers breaking the front door, terrorising the family inside and detaining without charge some of its members. Neighbours would, too, be terrorised with Israeli soldiers firing tear gas canisters for no reason, just to cause more suffering.

The right to a normal life—to worship, to spend quality time with friends and family, to move freely, to access regular medical care and education —are all denied to the Palestinians in the West Bank.

The spectre of annexation

Over the decades since the occupation of 1967, Israel has managed to control almost half of the land of the West Bank. It has done so by constructing settlements and confiscating land from its Palestinian owners by declaring it either “state land” or “military zone”. The theft of Palestinian land accelerated after October 7; at least 12,300 acres (4,9787 hectares) were seized in two years.

In many cases, confiscated land is used to establish new settlement outposts or to expand existing settlements.

Settlement construction in the West Bank is not random. Rather, land is selected in a way that encircles Palestinian villages and towns, creating a settlement belt around them that prevents any form of geographical continuity between Palestinian territories, thus thwarting the dream of a future state.

To maintain these illegal settlements, Israel has also laid its hands on the West Bank’s natural resources. It has seized almost all water resources. This has ensured a massive water reservoir in the West Bank to serve the settlement expansion.

For the Palestinians, this has been disastrous. They are now almost completely dependent on Israeli water company “Mekorot”, which gives very small quotas of water to densely populated Palestinian areas, while settlers receive several times the Palestinian share per capita.

Every summer, when drought settles in, Palestinians are forced to buy extra water at exorbitant prices from Mekorot. Meanwhile, Palestinian wells and rain water tanks are often attacked and destroyed.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has accelerated its efforts to carry out annexation. We feel that the seizure of Area C – an area established by the Oslo Accords where Israel has full civilian and security control – is imminent. This would mean razing Palestinian villages and communities and expelling people towards Area A, which constitutes just 18 percent of the West Bank. Area B will follow. The process of forced expulsion has already started with Bedouin communities in the two areas.

This is our reality here in the West Bank. While peace conferences and meetings were held and peace in the Middle East is declared, we know nothing of it. Every day, every hour, every minute, we are harassed, intimidated, dispossessed and killed.

For decades, Israel has rejected political solutions and pursued a policy of controlling land, people, and resources. It has continued to wage war on us even when its bombardment has stopped. The only way to achieve true peace is to acknowledge the occupation and end it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Strike on civilian vehicle by Israeli military in Gaza City marks deadliest violation of eight-day ceasefire with Hamas.

Israeli forces have killed 11 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza, the deadliest single violation of the fragile ceasefire since it took effect eight days ago.

The attack happened on Friday evening when a tank shell was fired by Israeli forces at a civilian vehicle carrying the Abu Shaaban family in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, according to Gaza’s civil defence.

Seven children and three women were among those killed when the Israeli military fired on the vehicle as the family attempted to reach their home to inspect it, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said in a statement.

“They could have been warned or dealt with differently,” Basal said, adding that “what happened confirms that the occupation is still thirsty for blood, and insists on committing crimes against innocent civilians.”

Hamas condemned what it called a “massacre” and said the family was targeted without justification. The group called on United States President Donald Trump and mediators to pressure Israel to respect the ceasefire agreement.

In that attack, Israeli soldiers opened fire on people who crossed the so-called “yellow line”, the demarcation to which Israel’s military was supposed to pull back under the ceasefire terms.

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from Gaza, said many Palestinians lack internet access and are unaware of where Israeli forces remain positioned along the demarcation lines, putting families at risk.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said that the yellow lines in Gaza will be soon marked out for clarity.

Israeli forces remain in control of approximately 53 percent of Gaza, Khoudary said.

As the exchange of captives for Palestinian prisoners under the provisions of the deal has continued, Israel has killed at least 28 Palestinians, and heavily restricted the flow of desperately needed aid, including food and medical supplies.

Last week, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians in the Shujayea neighbourhood, also in Gaza City.

Israel has continued to seal the Rafah crossing with Egypt and blocked other key border crossings, preventing large-scale aid deliveries into the enclave.

The United Nations warned this week that aid convoys are struggling to reach famine-hit areas, with 49 percent of people accessing less than six litres of drinking water per day – well below emergency standards.

The World Food Programme said it has brought an average of 560 tonnes of food daily into Gaza since the ceasefire began, far below what is needed to address widespread malnutrition and prevent famine.

Hamas has said it remains committed to the ceasefire terms, including returning the remains of Israeli captives still under Gaza’s rubble.

The group handed over the body of another captive on Friday evening, bringing the total to 10 since the truce began. Hamas said it needs heavy machinery and excavation equipment to retrieve more remains, but Israel has blocked their entry.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said by blocking heavy equipment and machinery from entering, Israel is creating “a challenge for the residents of Gaza who are experienced and have the expertise to search and to dig out bodies from under the rubble” with that type of equipment.

Mahmoud Abu Foul heard his mother’s voice after eight months in Israeli detention, but could not see her face.

A 28-year-old from northern Gaza, Abu Foul was arrested from Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya in late December and imprisoned in Israeli detention facilities, where he says guards tortured and beat him so severely that he lost his sight.

He was released this week as part of a United States-brokered ceasefire deal that has seen nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees let out from Israeli jails, many bearing visible signs of abuse.

Abu Foul, who had already lost his leg in a 2015 Israeli bombing, told Al Jazeera he endured relentless torture during his imprisonment. At Sde Teiman prison, a facility other detainees describe as “the prison that breaks men”, Abu Foul endured repeated beatings and torture.

One day, guards struck him on the head with such force that he fell unconscious. When he regained consciousness, he discovered he had lost his sight, he said.

“I kept asking for medical treatment, but they only gave me one type of eye drops, which did nothing,” he said. “My eyes kept tearing constantly, with discharge and pain, but no one cared.”

He tried a hunger strike to demand treatment but said prison authorities did not respond to his demands.

When Abu Foul was finally released and transferred to Nasser Hospital, he waited anxiously for his family. He had heard northern Gaza was devastated and feared the worst. Then his mother arrived.

“When I heard her voice, I hugged her tightly,” he said. “I couldn’t see her, but just hearing her was worth the whole world.”

Abu Foul now lives in a tent near ruins, still without treatment for his eyes, and is seeking help to travel abroad for medical care.

His account aligns with a growing body of evidence documenting systematic abuse in Israeli prisons. Many of the Palestinians released this week emerged emaciated or with visible injuries. One prisoner had lost nearly half his body weight during detention.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights documented testimonies from 100 former detainees held between October 2023 and 2024, finding that torture was systematic across all Israeli prison facilities, not just notorious sites like Sde Teiman.

All were held incommunicado without access to judges, lawyers or family members.

Israel has returned at least 100 bodies of Palestinians who died in detention. Medical sources told Al Jazeera they found evidence of abuse on some of the corpses, and some indicated possible executions.

“They did not die naturally, they were executed while restrained,” said Dr Munir al-Bursh, director-general of Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The United Nations estimates that at least 75 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem described the prison system last year as a “network of torture camps” where detainees face systematic physical abuse, are denied food and medical care, and suffer sexual violence.

Despite hundreds of reported abuse cases since October 2023, Israeli authorities have brought indictments in only two incidents, with no prison service personnel charged, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), an Israeli rights group documenting torture.

Dr Ruchama Marton, founder of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, says her decades-long campaign exposed the use of torture in Israel but has failed to stop it. “Maybe people didn’t deny it any more, but in practice it became normalized,” she told Haaretz.

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees the prison service, has defended the harsh treatment of Palestinian prisoners and said “summer camps and patience for the terrorists are over”.

Ben-Gvir has also been filmed taunting high-profile Palestinian political leader and detainee Marwan Barghouti.

Earlier this week, Barghouti’s son said he fears for his father’s life in Israeli prison amid reports from witnesses that he was beaten by guards last month.

In an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday, Arab Barghouti accused Israel of targeting his father because he is a unifying figure among Palestinians.

The family told media outlets this week that they had received testimonies from Palestinian detainees released as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal that Barghouti was beaten by guards in mid-September as he was being transferred between two Israeli prisons.

About 9,000 Palestinian prisoners remain in Israeli jails, many without trial or any proper legal process. Israel has denied allegations of systematic abuse but has not provided evidence to counter the claims.

The Israeli military and prison service did not respond to requests for comment.

Iran also expresses commitment to diplomacy as landmark 10-year nuclear deal with Western powers officially ends.

Iran has said it is no longer bound by restrictions on its nuclear programme as a landmark 10-year deal between it and world powers expired, though Tehran reiterated its “commitment to diplomacy”.

From now on, “all of the provisions [of the 2015 deal], including the restrictions on the Iranian nuclear programme and the related mechanisms are considered terminated,” Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Saturday, the day of the pact’s expiration.

“Iran firmly expresses its commitment to diplomacy,” it added.

The deal’s “termination day” was set for exactly 10 years after the adoption of resolution 2231, enshrined by the United Nations Security Council.

Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement between Iran and China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States saw the lifting of international sanctions against Iran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear programme.

But Washington unilaterally left the deal in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term in office and reinstated sanctions. Tehran then began stepping up its nuclear programme.

Talks to revive the agreement have failed so far, and in August, the UK, Germany and France triggered the so-called “snapback” process, leading to the re-imposition of the UN sanctions.

“Termination day is relatively meaningless due to snapback,” Arms Control Association expert Kelsey Davenport told the AFP news agency.

Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, told AFP that while the nuclear deal had been “lifeless” for years, the snapback had “officially buried” the agreement, with “its sorry fate continuing to cast a shadow over the future”.

Western powers and Israel have long accused Iran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, a claim Tehran denies.

Neither US intelligence nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said they found any evidence this year that Iran was pursuing atomic weapons.

Nuclear talks between Iran and world powers are currently deadlocked.

“Iran remains sceptical of the utility of engaging with the US given its history with President Trump, while Washington still seeks a maximalist deal,” Vaez told AFP.

On Monday, Trump said he wanted a peace deal with Iran, but stressed the ball was in Tehran’s court.

Tehran has repeatedly said it remains open to diplomacy with the US, provided Washington offers guarantees against military action during any potential talks.

The US joined Israel in striking Iran during a 12-day war in June, which hit nuclear sites, but also killed more than 1,000 Iranians, including hundreds of civilians, and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Angered that the IAEA did not condemn the attacks and accusing the agency of “double standards”, President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a law in early July suspending all cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog and prompting inspectors to leave the country.

For its part, the IAEA has described its inability to verify Iran’s nuclear stockpile since the start of the war “a matter of serious concern”.

The three European powers last week announced they will seek to restart talks to find a “comprehensive, durable and verifiable agreement”.

Iranian top diplomat Abbas Araghchi said during an interview last week that Tehran does “not see any reason to negotiate” with the Europeans, given they triggered the snapback mechanism.

A New York jury has found that French banking giant BNP Paribas’s work in Sudan helped to prop up the regime of former ruler Omar al-Bashir, making it liable for atrocities that took place under his rule.

The eight-member jury on Friday sided with three plaintiffs originally from Sudan, awarding a total of $20.75m in damages, after hearing testimony describing horrors committed by Sudanese soldiers and the Popular Defence Forces, the government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed.

The plaintiffs – two men and one woman, all now American citizens – told the federal court in Manhattan that they had been tortured, burned with cigarettes, slashed with a knife, and, in the case of the woman, sexually assaulted.

“I have no relatives left,” Entesar Osman Kasher told the court.

The trial focused on whether BNP Paribas’s financial services were a “natural and adequate cause” of the harm suffered by survivors of ethnic cleansing and mass violence in Sudan.

A spokesperson for BNP Paribas said in a statement to the AFP news agency that the ruling “is clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict”.

Bobby DiCello, who represented the plaintiffs, called the verdict “a victory for justice and accountability”.

“The jury recognised that financial institutions cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions,” DiCello said.

“Our clients lost everything to a campaign of destruction fuelled by US dollars, that BNP Paribas facilitated and that should have been stopped,” he said.

BNP Paribas “has supported the ethnic cleansing and ruined the lives of these three survivors”, DiCello said during closing remarks on Thursday.

The French bank, which did business in Sudan from the late 1990s until 2009, provided letters of credit that allowed Sudan to honour import and export commitments.

The plaintiffs argued that these assurances enabled the regime to keep exporting cotton, oil and other commodities, enabling it to receive billions of dollars from buyers that helped finance its operations.

Defence lawyer Dani James argued, “There’s just no connection between the bank’s conduct and what happened to these three plaintiffs.”

The lawyer for BNP Paribas also said the French bank’s operations in Sudan were legal in Europe and that global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) partnered with the Sudanese government during the same period.

Defence lawyers also claimed that the bank had no knowledge of human rights violations occurring at that time.

The plaintiffs would have “had their injuries without BNP Paribas”, said lawyer Barry Berke.

“Sudan would and did commit human rights crimes without oil or BNP Paribas,” Berke said.

The verdict followed a five-week jury trial conducted by US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who last year denied a request by BNP Paribas to get the case thrown out ahead of trial.

Hellerstein wrote in his decision last year that there were facts showing a relationship between BNP Paribas’s banking services and abuses perpetrated by the Sudanese government.

BNP Paribas had in 2014 agreed to plead guilty and pay an $8.97bn penalty to settle US charges it transferred billions of dollars for Sudanese, Iranian and Cuban entities subject to economic sanctions.

The US government recognised the Sudanese conflict as a genocide in 2004. The war claimed some 300,000 lives between 2002 and 2008 and displaced 2.5 million people, according to the United Nations.

Al-Bashir, who led Sudan for three decades, was ousted and detained in April 2019 following months of protests in Sudan.

He is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on genocide charges.

In the months that followed al-Bashir’s ousting in 2019, army generals agreed to share power with civilians, but that ended in October 2021, when the leader of the army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, seized control in a coup.

In April 2023, fighting broke out between the two sides, and forces on both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.

Hamas has handed over the remains of an additional captive it recovered in the ravaged Gaza Strip, as the Palestinian group urges mediators and the international community to pressure Israel to open border crossings and allow aid in.

The armed wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, said in a statement on Friday that its fighters handed over the remains at 11pm local time (20:00 GMT), without elaborating on where the body was retrieved.

According to the group, the remains were pulled out earlier in the day and were those of an “occupation prisoner”, suggesting they belonged to an Israeli rather than one of the captives of several other nationalities also taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed a short while later that Israel had received the coffin of a captive after it was handed over to the Red Cross by Hamas in Gaza.

The coffin will be transferred to Israel’s Ministry of Health’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, where a formal identification process will be conducted before the family is informed.

The Israeli military requested that “the public act with sensitivity and wait for the official identification”. It also added that “Hamas is required to uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the deceased hostages”.

Hamas has said it’s committed to the terms of the United States-mediated ceasefire deal, including the handover of captive bodies still unaccounted for under Gaza’s ruins. It has repeatedly said it has returned all the bodies it was able to recover, but needs help locating remaining captives trapped under the rubble following Israeli strikes.

“There are still 18 bodies held inside Gaza,” said Al Jazeera’s Hamda Salhut, reporting from Amman on Friday. “Hamas says that they’re waiting for the assistance they need in the help in the form of heavy machinery and teams on the ground.”

Israel is ‘not cooperating’

Former Israeli ambassador Alon Liel said the return of the bodies of the dead captives is being treated very emotionally in the country, creating pressure on the government.

He said many Israelis believed that Hamas was cheating on the ceasefire agreement by not returning all the bodies of the deceased captives. “There is a lot of anger,” Liel said.

In a statement earlier on Friday, Hamas said some captives’ remains were in tunnels or buildings that were later destroyed by Israel, and that heavy machinery was required to dig through rubble to retrieve them. It blamed Israel for the delay, saying it had not allowed any new bulldozers into the Gaza Strip.

Most heavy equipment in Gaza was destroyed during the war, leaving only a limited number as Palestinians try to clear massive amounts of rubble across the bombarded territory.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, said Israel is “not cooperating with countries that are lending help to possibly look for those remains”.

“Turkiye, for example, was ready to send 81 experts in the retrieval of bodies, and Israel has not allowed it to enter. It has also not allowed it to provide equipment that could possibly facilitate that,” Odeh said.

On Friday, two bulldozers ploughed up pits in the earth as Hamas searched for captives’ remains in Hamad City, a complex of apartment towers in Khan Younis. Israeli forces repeatedly bombarded the towers during the war, toppling some, and troops conducted a weeklong raid there in March 2024.

US President Donald Trump has warned Hamas that he would greenlight Israel to resume the war on Gaza if the group does not live up to its end of the deal and return all captives’ bodies, totalling 28. So far in the past days, Hamas handed over the remains of nine captives, along with a 10th body that Israel claims was not that of a captive.

The return of the 10th dead captive on Friday comes as Gaza’s civil defence said more than 10,000 slain Palestinians remain trapped under debris and rubble across the enclave. Only 280 have so far been retrieved.

Hamas has urged mediators to ensure the increased flow of essential aid into Gaza, expedite the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and start reconstruction. Despite the ceasefire deal agreed last week, Israel has yet to allow the entry of aid in scale and is still operating in about half of the Gaza Strip, as attacks continue in some areas.

Two years of Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians – including 20,000 children.

For now, the bombing campaign has largely halted after a ceasefire was agreed last week.

But the Israeli military’s actions in the past 24 months were livestreamed, documented and archived in unprecedented detail.

In September, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. And this week, South Africa said the ceasefire will not affect its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

But the ICJ lacks the resources to carry out arrests unless United Nations member countries decide to act.

So, will Israel be held accountable, or will impunity become the new norm?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests:

Sawsan Zaher – Palestinian human rights lawyer

Dr Mads Gilbert – Researcher and medical doctor who has worked in Palestinian healthcare for more than 30 years

Neve Gordon – Professor of international law at Queen Mary University of London

A week into the ceasefire, Israel has continued to seal Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt despite repeated international calls to allow in large-scale aid deliveries. Meanwhile, Israeli attacks killed and wounded several Palestinians in northern Gaza.

For several days, the United Nations has warned that there has been little progress in aid deliveries into Gaza and that assistance must enter at scale through all border crossings to meet urgent humanitarian needs. Under the deal to end Israel’s genocide, which has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians in two years, Israel was to allow for a surge in aid deliveries.

The UN said on Friday that aid convoys were struggling to reach famine-hit areas of northern Gaza due to bombed-out roads and the continued closure of other key routes – Zikim and Beit Hanoon (called Erez in Israel) – into the enclave’s north.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it has brought an average of 560 tonnes of food per day into Gaza since the ceasefire began last week, but the amount is still below what is needed. The UN agency said it has enough food to feed all of Gaza for three months.

UN humanitarian affairs chief Tom Fletcher said this week that thousands of aid vehicles would have to enter weekly to tackle widespread malnutrition, displacement, and a collapse of infrastructure.

“We’re still below what we need, but we’re getting there … The ceasefire has opened a narrow window of opportunity, and WFP is moving very quickly and swiftly to scale up food assistance,” WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa told a news briefing in Geneva.

But the WFP said it had not begun distributions in Gaza City, pointing to the continued closure of Zikim and Beit Hanoon, with Israeli forces remaining in the north of the enclave where the humanitarian crisis is most acute.

As part of the US-brokered ceasefire deal, which calls for their gradual withdrawal, Israeli forces remain in approximately 53 percent of Gaza.

“Access to Gaza City and northern Gaza is extremely challenging,” Etefa said, adding that the movement of convoys of wheat flour and ready-to-eat food parcels from the south of the territory was being hampered by broken or blocked roads.

“It is very important to have these openings in the north; this is where the famine took hold. To turn the tide on this famine … it is very important to get these openings.”

Global medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initial MSF, said many relief agencies had not fully returned to the north, where hospitals are barely functioning, leaving many still unable to access regular care.

More Palestinians killed

As calls for much-needed aid continue, Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza have also gone on unabated.

Gaza’s civil defence said its teams are carrying out rescue operations after an Israeli artillery strike hit a small bus carrying a displaced family who were heading to inspect their homes east of Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood.

The attack caused “several deaths and injuries”, the agency said. One injured boy was rescued, while the fate of the others remains unknown “due to the danger at the site” as attempts to reach the area continue.

Separately, three Palestinians were injured, with varying severity, after Israeli forces opened fire towards them in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, the Wafa news agency reported.

Meanwhile, Hamas insisted it was committed to returning the remains of Israeli captives still unaccounted for under Gaza’s ruins. The group’s armed wing said it has handed over all the bodies it was able to recover, adding that returning more remains would require allowing heavy machinery and excavation equipment into Gaza, much of which has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombardment.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said there is “a clear disconnect” from what the Israeli government is demanding from an area that has been “reduced to rubble”.

With heavy equipment and machinery being blocked by the Israeli military, Israel is creating “a challenge for the residents of Gaza who are experienced and have the expertise to search and to dig out bodies from under the rubble,” Mahmoud said.

He noted that it is not just the bodies of deceased Israeli captives under the rubble, it is the “thousands of Palestinian bodies buried and missing and trapped under tonnes and tonnes of rubble and debris”.

Authorities in Gaza have also been struggling to identify dozens of bodies of slain Palestinians that were returned by Israel earlier this week. Only six out of 120 bodies have been formally identified so far, according to the Health Ministry.

The ministry said the bodies exhibit signs of torture, including hanging and rope marks, bound hands and feet, and gunfire at close range.

The bodies showed “conclusive evidence of field executions and brutal torture”, Gaza’s Government Media Office said.

Hamas disarmament

The next phases of the truce are expected to address the disarmament of Hamas, possible amnesty for its leaders who lay down their weapons, and the question of who will govern Gaza after the war.

Hamas politburo member Mohammad Nazzal said the group intends to maintain security control in Gaza during an interim period, adding that he could not commit to disarmament.

He told the Reuters news agency Hamas was prepared for a ceasefire lasting up to five years to allow for the reconstruction of Gaza, provided Palestinians are offered “horizons and hope” towards statehood.

Asked whether Hamas would give up its weapons, Nazzal replied, “I can’t answer with a yes or no. Frankly, it depends on the nature of the project. The disarmament project you’re talking about – what does it mean? To whom will the weapons be handed over?”

He added that any discussion about weapons would not concern Hamas alone but also other armed Palestinian factions, and would require a collective Palestinian position in the next round of negotiations.