Israel kills 21 children in Gaza following ceasefire announcement
- At least 21 Palestinian children and 25 women are among 87 people killed in Gaza since the announcement of a ceasefire deal expected to start on Sunday as Israel’s relentless air attacks intensify.
- Israel’s cabinet is set to meet on Friday to vote on the ceasefire deal, according to media reports.
UN chief Guterres in ‘solidarity visit’ to Lebanon
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is in Lebanon for a “solidarity visit”, his deputy spokesman said, as the country reels from months of devastating Israeli attacks.
“The secretary-general has just arrived in Beirut for a solidarity visit to Lebanon” to meet Lebanese political officials, Farhan Haq told a press briefing.
Haq said Guterres would visit United Nations peacekeepers during his trip. UNIFIL troops are stationed in southern Lebanon, an area that suffered the heaviest bombardments.
CPJ says Israel world’s second-highest jailor of journalists in 2024
More than 360 media workers were behind bars in the final month of 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported, highlighting China and Israel as jailing the highest number.
In its annual census, the New York-based organisation counted 361 reporters as being in prison on December 1, 2024, its highest total since 2022, when 370 were counted.
China, Israel, and Myanmar – with 50, 43 and 35 journalists detained, respectively – “emerged as the world’s three worst offenders in another record-setting year for journalists jailed because of their work”, the CPJ said.
The CPJ said that Israel had rarely appeared on the annual list before the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.
It nonetheless “catapulted to second-place last year as it tried to silence coverage from the occupied Palestinian territories”, CPJ said, noting all journalists detained by Israel were Palestinians.
At least $10bn needed to rebuild Gaza health system: WHO
A World Health Organization assessment has found that at least $10bn will likely be needed to rebuild Gaza’s devastated healthcare system over the next five to seven years.
“The needs are massive,” the UN health agency’s representative in Palestine, Rik Peeperkorn, told reporters.
The initial assessment of the cost to rebuild just the health sector was “even more than $3bn for the first 1.5 years and then actually $10bn for the five to seven years”.
Israeli cabinet to vote Friday on Gaza deal, official tells AFP
The cabinet is scheduled to meet on Friday to vote on a ceasefire and captive release deal in Gaza, an Israeli official has told the AFP news agency, following reports of the meeting in the Israeli media.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called off a cabinet vote on the deal on Thursday, claiming that Hamas has “reneged” on some terms – accusations the Palestinian group vehemently denies.
Human rights watchdog calls out Biden’s ‘double standard’ on Gaza, Ukraine
US President Joe Biden demonstrated “a double standard” on human rights, providing “arms without restriction” to Israel despite its war crimes in Gaza while condemning Russia for “similar violations” in Ukraine, a leading human rights group says.
Human Rights Watch’s 2025 world report, published on Thursday, noted how the US withheld funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, amid Gaza’s starvation crisis due to the Israeli siege.
At the same time, the Biden administration provided Israel with an unprecedented $17.9bn in security aid and approved more than 100 arms sales.
The report highlighted the “often-disregarded reality” that liberal democracies such as the US were “not always reliable champions of human rights” at home or abroad.
