Category World News

Israeli attacks have killed at least three Palestinians in Gaza in the latest violations of its tenuous ceasefire with Hamas, a day after the United States announced the start of the second phase of President Donald Trump’s plan to end Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the besieged territory.

A 10-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy and an elderly woman were killed in Israeli attacks on Friday, as members of a planned Palestinian technocratic committee sat down for the first time in Cairo to prepare for the rollout of phase two of the peace plan.

Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that Israeli forces shot dead 16-year-old Mohammad Raed al-Barawi in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya. The boy died “instantly” after being shot in the head by Israeli forces, said the agency.

Earlier, the agency reported the death of 62-year-old Sabah Ahmed Ali Abu Jamea, who was killed by troops firing from military vehicles west of Khan Younis as the army carried out “extensive demolition operations” in the south of the enclave.

Al Jazeera also understands that a 10-year-old girl was struck by a bomb dropped by an Israeli drone in Beit Lahiya, dying shortly after arriving in critical condition at al-Shifa Hospital.

In the 24 hours leading up to Friday afternoon, at least 15 Palestinians were killed, six of them in the bombing of two houses belonging to the al-Hawli and the al-Jarou families in the central town of Deir el-Balah on Thursday evening. Fatalities included a 16-year-old.

Israel announced that day that it had killed Muhammad al-Hawli, a commander in the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. It said it had hit “several terrorists … across the Gaza Strip”.

On Friday, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the group believed Israel had committed a “new violation” of the ceasefire by carrying out strikes in Gaza.

At least 463 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire entered into force on October 10, according to Gaza authorities.

Israel has reported three soldiers killed over the same period.

Seven years to clear the rubble

As the killing continued in Gaza, a Palestinian technocratic committee set to govern Gaza as part of President Trump’s multi-phase peace plan met for the first time in Cairo.

“The Palestinian people were looking forward to this committee, its establishment and its work to rescue them,” said leader Ali Shaath, an engineer and former deputy minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA), talking to Egypt’s state-owned Al-Qahera News.

The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza will run day-to-day affairs under the oversight of a Trump-led “board of peace”, which is expected to be led by Bulgarian diplomat and politician Nickolay Mladenov.

Shaath has so far been bullish on the committee’s plans, saying he expects reconstruction and recovery to take about three years.

But the United Nations Development Programme estimates it will take seven years just to clear the rubble, and only with uninterrupted supplies of fuel and heavy machinery – by no means guaranteed with Israel continuing to occupy more than 50 percent of the strip behind the so-called “yellow line“.

Little clarity

As the Trump plan enters phase two, there is little clarity over the timing and the extent of Israel’s withdrawal from the enclave.

It also remains unclear how disarmament of Hamas, a key tenet of the plan, will unfold. The armed group has so far refused to lay down weapons.

Nevertheless, Hamas welcomed the establishment of the technocratic committee on Friday, calling it “a step in the right direction” and signalling it was ready to hand over administration of Gaza.

Sultan Barakat, a professor of public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, told Al Jazeera that Hamas’s approval indicated it had “papered over” its long-running differences with the PA.

Trump has maintained a tough line on Hamas disarmament, telling the group on Thursday that it could disarm “the easy way, or the hard way”, warning it to return the remains of the last Israeli captive “IMMEDIATELY”.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said people in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of whom are living in flimsy makeshift shelters in the depths of winter, had “little expectation that political plans will translate into genuine relief”.

The Iranian authorities say at least 3,000 people have been arrested in weeks of antigovernment demonstrations, state news agencies reported, as the mass protests have largely been quelled.

The streets of the Iranian capital Tehran and other parts of the country were comparatively calm on Friday amid a heavy presence of security forces.

Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi said the public mood was mixed, with many people anxious over the possibility that the situation could escalate again and frustrated by a continuing internet shutdown.

“Internet access is unavailable for almost everyone in Iran,” Asadi said.

Online monitor NetBlocks said on Friday that a nationwide internet blackout had entered its eighth day after Iranian authorities cut off access at the height of the protests last week.

Thousands of Iranians had taken to the streets since late December in anger over soaring inflation and the steep devaluation of the local currency, prompting a harsh crackdown from the Iranian authorities.

Iranian leaders have described the protesters as “rioters” and accused foreign countries, notably the United States and Israel, of fuelling the unrest.

Human rights groups say more than 1,000 protesters have been killed since the demonstrations began, while the Iranian government said at least 100 security officers also were killed in protest-related attacks.

Al Jazeera has not been able to independently verify those figures.

The prospect of a wider escalation loomed this week as US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to order military action against Iran should more protesters be killed.

But Trump has since softened his rhetoric after telling reporters that Tehran had cancelled plans to execute hundreds of protesters.

“I greatly respect the fact that all scheduled hangings, which were to take place yesterday (Over 800 of them), have been cancelled by the leadership of Iran. Thank you!” Trump wrote on social media on Friday afternoon.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, also said on Thursday evening that he hoped “a diplomatic resolution” could be reached to quell tensions between Tehran and Washington.

Roxane Farmanfarmaian, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge specialising in international relations and the Middle East, said the Trump administration has sent “a great deal of mixed signals” in recent days.

“It’s difficult to know where the red lines are, and for [Iran] to then feel any confidence in any talks that might begin,” Farmanfarmaian told Al Jazeera.

For now, she said, the Iranian authorities are moving to “quiet things down” domestically – including by not executing any demonstrators – “and to proceed to try to improve the economic situation, which is what’s truly the threat to this regime”.

The protests were the largest since a 2022-2023 protest movement spurred by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women.

While the internet blackout has made it difficult to get information from Iran, Amnesty International warned this week that “mass unlawful killings” appear to have been “committed on an unprecedented scale”.

The rights group urged the international community to demand investigations into what happened and hold any perpetrators to account.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s Asadi said on Friday that the Iranian authorities are “trying to keep the situation under control, both domestically and internationally”, amid the possibility of any re-escalation with the US.

The Syrian army has launched a military operation against Kurdish fighters in the Kurdish-controlled area of Deir Hafer, following violent clashes in Aleppo.

The army issued warnings on Friday ahead of strikes targeting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Deir Hafer, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of Aleppo, saying it would focus on areas that Kurdish forces were using “as a launching point for their terrorist operations towards the city of Aleppo and its eastern countryside”.

SDF leader Mazloum Abdi (also known as Mazloum Kobani) said in response that his forces would withdraw to the east of the Euphrates River.

In a post on X, Abdi said that “based on calls from friendly countries and mediators … we have decided to withdraw our forces tomorrow morning at 7am [04:00 GMT]” east of Aleppo “towards redeployment in areas east of the Euphrates”.

Abdi said he was withdrawing fighters “in demonstration of … our commitment to implementing the provisions of the March 10th agreement”, referring to stalled plans to integrate the Kurdish de facto autonomous administration into the Syrian state.

Delays with implementation of the deal, which was supposed to see the Kurdish-led SDF integrating with the Syrian Ministry of Defence by the end of 2025, led to fierce clashes in Aleppo this month that left at least 23 people dead, according to Syria’s Ministry of Health.

As Syrian forces advanced, more than 150,000 fled two pockets of the city that the SDF, which controls swaths of Syria’s oil-rich north and northeast, had held since the early days of Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011.

By Sunday, Syrian troops had taken full control of Aleppo.

Friday’s attack came despite a meeting between a delegation of the United States-led coalition and Kurdish forces seeking to ease tensions.

At least 4,000 people left the Deir Hafer area on Friday after the army issued a deadline to flee, according to Syrian authorities.

Goodwill gesture

The Syrian government has been seeking to extend its authority nationwide following the removal of longtime leader Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

In an apparent gesture of goodwill following the fighting in Aleppo, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa issued a decree on Friday declaring Kurdish a “national language”.

The decree, the first formal recognition of Kurdish rights since independence in 1946, declares the minority “an essential and integral part” of Syria, where they have suffered decades of marginalisation and oppression.

Al-Sharaa also made Nowruz, the Kurdish new year falling on March 21, an official holiday and granted nationality to Kurds, as 20 percent had been stripped of it under a controversial 1962 census.