Updates: Hamas suspends captive release citing Israel’s truce violations

Before you go, you can read the key takeaways from the meeting with Trump and Jordan’s King Abdullah, here.

You can also read more about Netanyahu’s threats to resume fighting in Gaza here.

And you can follow all of our coverage on the situation in Gaza and the occupied West Bank here.

• The Israeli army says it will “significantly reinforce” areas around Gaza after Hamas announced it would stop releasing Israeli captives until further notice.
• Hamas’s announcement that it would suspend the releases over Israeli violations of the ceasefire sent “shockwaves” and sparked protests in Israel.
• Analysts say US President Trump’s call for ethnic cleansing in Gaza is “front and centre” in the ceasefire agreement breakdown.
• Israeli police raided a popular East Jerusalem bookstore and cited a children’s colouring book to arrest the owners over “incitement for terrorism”.
• UN officials warned that not enough tents are reaching Gaza, with wet and freezing temperatures, even though 200,000 were promised as part of the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire deal.
• The number of Palestinians displaced because of Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank reached 40,000 as shootings, explosions, and destruction continue.

Participants at a conference held in Oslo have called for the suspension of Israel’s membership in international organisations, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reports.

The conference, organised by the groups Free Speech, Jewish Voice and Lower the Arms, and attended by academics, political figures and human rights advocates from 13 countries, called on popular movements to increase their pressure on Western governments to uphold international law in Palestine.

Participants, including the European-Palestinian Initiative Against Apartheid and Colonial Settlement, also called for European sanctions against Israel should it fail to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

The Anti-Apartheid Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization participated in the conference, with department head Ramzi Rabah speaking about the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and Israel’s actions against UNRWA.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has left much of the territory unliveable. Now, Trump says Gaza’s people should be “resettled”.

When you destroy homes, bomb hospitals, and cut off water to leave people with no other option but to leave – that’s not “voluntary immigration”; it’s ethnic cleansing.

Ceasefire or not, Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza is just beginning. And now Trump wants the US to “take over”.

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A senior Hamas official has condemned Trump’s latest remarks about US ownership of Gaza as “absurd”.

Izzat al-Risheq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said the comments “reflect a deep ignorance of Palestine and the region”.

Trump’s approach towards the Palestinian cause will fail, he added.

On Monday, Trump said Palestinians in Gaza would not have a right to return under his plan for US “ownership” of the war-torn territory, contradicting other officials in his administration who’ve sought to argue Trump is only calling for the temporary relocation of its population.

On the ground in northern Gaza, harsh weather is making life even harder for displaced Palestinians. Nearly 1 million people don’t have the kind of shelter they desperately require.

“The ceasefire is bringing a much-needed respite. We have aid coming in. But we humanitarians are not magicians. We can’t take the suffering away overnight,” said Rosaliyah Bollen from UNICEF.

“The needs of children are just enormous. There is no end to their suffering… There’s a family with three children sleeping on wet mattresses with wet blankets – no idea how they can sleep at night.”

Aid groups have warned for weeks that people in Gaza need urgent and sustained humanitarian aid to survive winter conditions. Israel has been accused of holding up the delivery of tents and other shelters into war-battered Gaza.

Abdullah Fauzi, a banker from the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, leaves home at 4am to reach his job by 8am, and he’s often late.

His commute used to take an hour – until Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. After attacking Gaza, the Israeli military also ramped up raids against Palestinians in the northern West Bank, and diverted its residents through seven new checkpoints, doubling Fauzi’s time on the road.

Now it’s gotten worse. Since the ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas took effect, Fauzi’s drive to Ramallah has become convoluted as Israel further tightens the noose around Palestinian cities.

“You can fly to Paris, while we’re not reaching our homes,” the 42-year-old said from the Atara checkpoint outside Ramallah as Israeli soldiers searched dozens of cars, one by one.

“Whatever this is, they’ve planned it well. It’s well designed to make our life hell.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended President Trump’s suggestion that the US will “take over” and “own” Gaza while expelling more than one million Palestinians from their land.

“Someone’s got to go in … you’ve got to clean it up.  You’ve got to clean all that out of there even before you begin the process of removing rubble and debris and rebuilding housing, like permanent structures.  Who’s going to do that?” Rubio said in a radio interview.

“Right now, the only one who’s stood up and said I’m willing to help do it is Donald Trump. All these other leaders they’re going to have to step up.  If they’ve got a better idea then now is the time,” he added.

“We’re still waiting for more countries to step forward and say here’s what we’re willing to do. And right now, they’ve not been willing to do anything – or at least anything concrete.”

According to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Israel’s army is pursuing an “all-out war on the Palestinian people”.

“Since the ceasefire began in Gaza, the West Bank has been on fire,” it said in a post on X, referring to the truce agreement that halted Israel’s devastating war on Gaza on January 19.

“The objective of these operations is not security related but political,” said Abdallah Kamil, the governor of Tulkarem.

“They destroy everything,” he said of the Israeli military. “They are trying to change the demographics of the region.”

Iran’s president has accused Trump of seeking to overthrow Iran as the country marked the 1979 revolution that toppled the US-backed shah.

“Trump says, ‘We want to talk’, and … [then] he signs in a memorandum all the conspiracies to bring our revolution to its knees,” President Masoud Pezeshkian told a crowd, referring to Trump’s reinstatement of sanctions against Tehran earlier this month.

“We are not looking for war,” he said, while adding that Iran “will never bow to foreigners”.

Chanting anti-US and anti-Israel slogans, crowds formed on Monday in the streets of Shiraz and Bandar Abbas in the south, Rasht in the north, Kermanshah and Sanandaj in the west, and the holy city of Mashhad in the east, according to images broadcast on television.

At the key intersection of Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor and the Salah al-Din Street, US and Egyptian security personnel, armed and wearing military fatigues, inspect vehicles carrying Palestinians.

Traffic moved slowly to the checkpoint at the crossing, which Palestinians call the Martyrs Intersection and from which Israeli forces withdrew a day earlier.

Ahmed al-Rai said the US and Egyptian officers were “respectful”, even if their checks were “slow and trying”.

Calling the reopening of the roads a “positive step forward”, Rai said he hoped the intersection would eventually be “fully open without searches by the Americans”.

At the current pace, he explained, “it takes 20 minutes to inspect each vehicle”. The 50-year-old had to wait five hours before his turn came.

An unnamed source in the Interior Ministry confirmed that “under the truce agreement between Hamas and Israel, there are American and Egyptian security personnel” at the junction linking northern Gaza and its south, AFP news agency reported.

Dozens of Palestinian families have fled the Nur Shams refugee camp in the north of the occupied West Bank as Israel’s army pushed deeper.

“We hear explosions and bombings as well as bulldozers. It’s a tragedy. They are doing here what they did in Gaza,” said Ahmed Ezza, a resident.

Ahmed Abu Zahra, another resident of the camp on the outskirts of Tulkarem, said he was forced to leave his home. “The [Israeli] army came, and we were forced to leave after they started destroying our homes.”

Three Palestinians, including two women and a young man, were killed on Sunday in Nur Shams, the Health Ministry said. Israel said its military police opened an investigation into the death of one – a woman who was eight months pregnant.

In the streets of the Nur Shams camp, under a light rain, residents continued to escape from rampaging Israeli forces as bulldozers carried out large-scale demolitions amid gunfire and explosions.

According to Murad Alyan, from the camp’s popular committee, “more than half of the 13,000 inhabitants have fled out of fear for their lives”.

Israelis protested in Tel Aviv after Hamas announced it will pause the release of the remaining captives because of Israel’s violations of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

The Israeli army says it will “significantly reinforce” areas around Gaza after Hamas announced it will stop releasing Israeli captives until further notice over Israeli violations of the ceasefire.

“In accordance with the situational assessment, it was decided to raise the level of readiness and postpone leave for combat soldiers and operational units in the Southern Command,” the Israeli army said in a statement.

“Additionally, it was decided to significantly reinforce the area with additional forces for defensive missions.”

An Israeli official tells Reuters that Netanyahu is holding security consultations after Hamas announced the suspension of its Gaza captive release scheduled for Saturday.

Israel Army Radio reported Netanyahu is meeting with the army and security leadership in the presence of Defence Minister Israel Katz, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer.

The security cabinet will also meet on Tuesday morning, it said.

More details have emerged on the Israeli police raid on a popular bookstore in occupied East Jerusalem.

The bookstore’s owners, Ahmed and Mahmoud Muna, were detained, and police confiscated hundreds of titles related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict before ordering the store’s closure, according to May Muna, Mahmoud’s wife.

She said the soldiers picked out books with Palestinian titles or flags, “without knowing what any of them meant”. She said they used Google Translate on some of the Arabic titles to see what they meant before carting them away in plastic bags.

Police raided another Palestinian-owned bookstore in the Old City in East Jerusalem last week. In a statement, the police said the two owners were arrested on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism”.

As an example, the police referred to an English-language children’s colouring book titled From the River to the Sea – a reference to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that today includes Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Supporters visited a bookshop in occupied East Jerusalem after Israeli police raided the store and arrested its owners, accusing them of “inciting terrorism”.

Al Jazeera is reporting from Jordan because it has been banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank. 

Hamas’s announcement that it would pause the release of captives has sent shockwaves throughout Israeli society and the Israeli government. You have family members of Israeli captives who have now formed spontaneous protests on the streets of Tel Aviv.

That has also prompted reactions from the Israeli government. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office released a statement saying Israel remains committed to the deal and they want to make it work.

However, behind the scenes, some Israelis say that’s not actually the case. They are hoping this issue will be solved by Saturday because that’s when the exchange is supposed to take place. But Israel’s defence minister issued orders for the military to prepare itself to the highest possible level of alert, meaning it could be preparing for all-out fighting once again.

You also have members of the former government speaking out and putting out quite egregious statements about a “fire belt” in Gaza, that Israel should continue to bomb the Palestinian territory, and even attack the aid that has already gone in there, before cutting it off entirely.

But it’s important to remember before this deal had even come to fruition, members of the right wing who are still part of the government said they got assurances from Benjamin Netanyahu that this deal would not continue after phase one – meaning a return to full-scale war would ensue and phase two and three wouldn’t happen.