Middle East latest: Israeli strikes kill scores in Gaza as Egypt offers new ceasefire proposal

— By Samy Magdy in Cairo

Here's the latest:

Israel says it fired on a Red Cross office in Gaza by mistake.

The Israeli military says its troops shot at the building after identifying a threat from Palestinian militants.

“It was later determined that the identification was false,” the military said, adding that the soldiers didn’t realize the building was being used by the Red Cross.

“The incident will be reviewed,” the brief statement said.

The Red Cross says the building was damaged but no staff members were hurt.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says an Israeli drone strike in south Lebanon has killed one person.

State-run News Agency quoted a Health Ministry statement as saying that the Monday night drone strike took place in the village of Qaaqaaiyet el-Jisr. It was not immediately clear who the target was.

Israel has killed several Hezbollah members over the past weeks in drones strike on south Lebanon

Israeli settlers beat up one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning film “ No Other Land ” in the occupied West Bank on Monday, and he was then detained by the Israeli military, activists on the scene said.

Dozens of settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta area, destroying property, said the activist group Center for Jewish Nonviolence.

They attacked Hamdan Ballal, one of the documentary’s co-directors, leaving his head bleeding, the activists said. As he was being treated in an ambulance, soldiers detained him and a second Palestinian man, the group said. It said his whereabouts were now unknown.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the episode but did not immediately comment.

“No Other Land,” which won the Oscar this year for best documentary, chronicles the struggle by residents of Masafer Yatta to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages. It has two Palestinian co-directors, Ballal and Basel Adra, both residents of Masafar Yatta, and two Israeli directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

Air raid sirens and explosions were heard over Jerusalem on Monday evening after the Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have fired a handful of long-range missiles at Israel in the days since Israeli forces resumed the war in Gaza. There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the Houthis.

The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council, referred to “baseless accusations” and threats by senior U.S. administration officials and President Donald Trump against Iran while trying to justify what he said were unlawful attacks against Yemen.

Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani warned that “any act of aggression will have severe consequences, for which the United States will bear full responsibility.”

He said Iran will “resolutely defend its sovereignty, territorial integrity and national interests under international law against any hostile action.”

The U.S. has launched a series of airstrikes against strongholds of Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have disrupted international maritime trade by targeting ships in the Red Sea.

He urged the Security Council to speak out against the U.S. “blatant provocations.” But since the U.S. has veto power in the council, there is no chance of that happening.

Two rockets were intercepted after crossing into Israeli territory next to the Gaza Strip, setting off air raid sirens on Monday evening, the Israeli military said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Al-Quds Brigades, the military arm of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, claimed responsibility for firing a barrage of rockets toward the area of southern Israel bordering Gaza.

Militants in Gaza have fired a handful of rockets at Israel in the days since it broke the ceasefire, which have been intercepted or fell in open areas. Islamic Jihad is the smaller of Gaza's two main Palestinian militant groups.

An Israeli strike killed at least five people including two women in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the Health Ministry’s emergency service said. The strike Monday afternoon hit a house in the Qisan al-Najjar area, south of Khan Younis, it said.

The United Nations said Monday it will “reduce its footprint” in the Gaza Strip after an Israeli tank strike hit one of its compounds, killing one staffer and wounding five others last week.

Israel has denied it was behind the March 19 explosion at the U.N. guesthouse in central Gaza. In a statement Monday, U.N. Secretary-General spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said that “based on the information currently available,” the strikes on the site “were caused by an Israeli tank.”

The Israeli military did not immediately comment.

Dujarric also said the U.N. would be cutting back about a third of its approximately 100 international staffers in Gaza. He said the U.N. “is not leaving Gaza,” pointing out that it still has about 13,000 national staff in Gaza, mainly working for UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

The U.N. “has made taken the difficult decision to reduce the Organization’s footprint in Gaza, even as humanitarian needs soar,” he said. The move comes as Israel has cut off all food, fuel, medicine and other supplies to Gaza’s around 2 million people for more than three weeks.

“Violence feeds more violence,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Monday at a briefing in Jerusalem, where she met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, less than a week after Israel broke the ceasefire in Gaza.

“What we are witnessing now is a dangerous escalation. It is causing unbearable uncertainty for the hostages and their families and is likewise causing horror and death for the Palestinian people,” she added.

Saar said the “war can end tomorrow with releasing our hostages, the demilitarization of Gaza and the withdrawal of the armed Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces.”

The building was hit “by an explosive projectile despite being clearly marked and notified to all parties,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement decrying the attack Monday.

No staff members were hurt, but damage to the office in Rafah “has a direct impact on the ICRC’s ability to operate” at a time when the Red Cross field hospital in Rafah is treating casualties from the war, the statement said.

The ICRC statement did not say who might’ve been responsible for attacking their office. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the strike. Israeli forces have been advancing into Rafah in recent days.

Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite news network says one of its Palestinian freelance reporters, Hossam Shabat, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his car in northern Gaza.

Shabat was killed Monday while covering the war for the broadcaster’s Arabic-language TV channel, the network said. He had been wounded by an Israeli strike last November, the network reported at the time.

Another Palestinian journalist was killed in a separate Israeli airstrike earlier Monday in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, according to Nasser Hospital. Mohammed Mansour was a correspondent for the news website Palestine Today.

Al Jazeera is one of the few international media outlets to remain in Gaza throughout the war. The channel is owned by Qatar, which alongside Egypt and the U.S. has been a key negotiator for the ceasefire.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike that killed Shabat.

Israel has accused other Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza of being Palestinian militants. The channel denies the accusations and says Israel is trying to silence journalists covering the war.

An Israeli anti-settlement group says there has been an “unprecedented surge” in approvals for new settler homes in the occupied West Bank since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office.

During his first term, Trump strongly backed Israel’s claims to territories seized in war, at times upending decades of American foreign policy. Previous administrations have admonished Israel over settlement expansion while taking little action to curb it.

The Peace Now group, which closely tracks settlement growth, said Monday that plans for 10,503 housing units in the West Bank have been advanced since the start of the year, compared to just 9,971 in all of 2024. It says another 1,344 homes are set to be approved on Wednesday.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want all three for their future state and view settlement growth as a major obstacle to a two-state solution.

Israel has built well over 100 settlements that are now home to over 500,000 settlers with Israeli citizenship. The 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering population centers.

The Israeli military says a senior Hamas leader killed in a strike on a hospital in the Gaza Strip was in charge of the group’s finances.

Ismail Barhoum was killed in an Israeli strike late Sunday on Nasser Hospital, where Hamas said he was receiving treatment. The strike also killed a teenage boy recovering from surgery.

The military said Monday that Barhoum oversaw Hamas’ finances in Gaza and transferred funds to its military wing. It said he was also serving as the head of Hamas’ government in Gaza after replacing another senior official killed in a strike last week.

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani denied that Barhoum was receiving medical treatment in the hospital, saying he had been there for weeks meeting with other senior militants.

Israel has killed most of Hamas’ top leaders and scores of mid-level commanders during the 17-month war. The group was still able to quickly reassert control over the territory during a ceasefire that took hold in January.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Monday the bodies of 61 people killed by Israeli strikes have been brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours.

Hospitals also received 143 wounded, it said in its daily report.

The overall Palestinian death toll from the Israel-Hamas war rose to at least 50,082, the ministry said. Another 113,408 have been wounded, it said. Its figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The Palestinian Civil Defense agency says it has lost contact with six of its members who went on a rescue mission in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

The emergency workers group said its members along with others from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society went to Rafah on Sunday morning after receiving calls that Israeli troops entered the area of Hashasheen in western Rafah. It added in a statement Monday that since then, there has been no word from the paramedics.

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that on Sunday, contact was lost with emergency medical technicians from its sister organization, the Palestine Red Crescent Society, and their whereabouts remain unknown.

Palestinian medics say an Israeli strike hit a school where displaced people were sheltering in the Gaza Strip, killing at least four people, including a child.

Another 18 people were wounded in Monday’s strike in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp, according to Al-Awda Hospital, which received the casualties. Three other hospitals had earlier reported 25 deaths from Israeli strikes overnight and into Monday.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which says it only targets militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. Israel blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it operates in densely populated areas.

Israeli officials say an attacker in a vehicle ran over several people at a bus stop in northern Israel before opening fire, killing a man in his 70s.

Police said officers shot and killed the attacker, whose identity was not immediately disclosed. Police referred to it as a terrorist attack, indicating they believe the assailant was a Palestinian militant.

Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency service said a man in his 70s was killed and another man, around 20 years old, was taken to a hospital in serious condition.

There has been a surge in Palestinian attacks since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack into southern Israel ignited the war in the Gaza Strip.

At the same time, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank during wide-scale military operations, and there has also been a rise in attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians.

Thousands of people are trapped in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip after Israeli forces encircled part of it on Sunday, Palestinian officials said.

Israel ordered the evacuation of the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, telling people to leave by a single route on foot to Muwasi, a sprawling cluster of tent camps along the coast.

Thousands fled, but residents said many were trapped by Israeli forces.

The Rafah municipality said Monday that thousands were still trapped, including first responders from the Civil Defense, which operates under the Hamas-run government, and the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Israel’s defense minister says it is trying to avoid harming civilians as it strikes Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

Israel Katz’s statement came nearly a week after Israel ended its ceasefire with Hamas by launching a surprise wave of strikes that killed hundreds of Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to local health officials.

Katz said Monday that “Israel is not fighting the civilians in Gaza and is doing everything that international law requires to mitigate harm to civilians.”

He went on to blame Hamas for any civilian deaths, saying the militant group “fights in civilian dress, from civilian homes, and from behind civilians,” putting them in danger.

He said Israel would not halt its offensive until Hamas releases all its hostages and is no longer in control of Gaza or a threat to Israel.

Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 25 Palestinians, including several women and children, according to three hospitals. The strikes come nearly a week after Israel ended its ceasefire with Hamas with a surprise bombardment that killed hundreds.

Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City received 11 bodies from strikes overnight into Monday, including three women and four children. One of the strikes killed two children, their parents, their grandmother and their uncle.

Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis received seven bodies from strikes overnight and four from strikes the previous day. The European Hospital received three bodies from a strike near Khan Younis.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Sunday that the Palestinian death toll from the 17-month war has passed 50,000. It has said that women and children make up more than half the dead but does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.

Israel says it has killed some 20,000 militants, without providing evidence. Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducted 251 people in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war.

An American trauma surgeon working in Gaza says most of the patients injured in an Israeli attack on the largest hospital in southern Gaza had been previously wounded when Israel resumed airstrikes last week.

Californian surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, who is working with the medical charity MedGlobal, said Monday he had been in the intensive care unit at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis when an airstrike hit surgical wards on Sunday.

Most of the injured had been recovering from wounds suffered in airstrikes last week when Israel resumed the war, he said.

“They were already trauma patients and now they’ve been traumatized for a second time,” Sidhwa, who was raised in Flint, Mich., told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Sidhwa said he had operated on a man and boy days before who died in the attack.