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As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.

The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.

The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion.

After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email.

Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote

Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel’s counterattack. Israel’s likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.

As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.

The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.

The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion.

After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email.

Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote

Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel's counterattack. Israel's likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.

The new customs rule applies to truck convoys chartered by the United Nations to take aid from Jordan to Gaza via Israel, seven people familiar with the matter said. Under the rule, individuals from relief organizations sending aid must complete a form providing passport details, and accept liability for any false information on a shipment, the people said.

They said relief agencies are disputing that requirement, which was announced mid-August, because they fear signing the form could expose staff to legal problems if aid fell into the hands of Hamas or other enemies of Israel.

In a parallel move, Israeli authorities have restricted commercial food shipments to Gaza amid concerns that Hamas was benefiting from that trade, the people familiar with the matter and industry sources said.

U.N. and Israeli government data show that in September, deliveries of food and aid sank to their lowest in seven months. Israeli's military humanitarian unit, Cogat, which oversees aid and commercial shipments to Gaza, confirmed that no U.N.-chartered convoy has moved from Jordan to Gaza since Sept. 19, but a spokesperson said Israel was not blocking goods.

New analysis by Oxfam reveals that more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military in the past year than in any recent conflict over a single year.

Oxfam’s study looked at conflict deaths data over nearly two decades from the UN and Small Arms Survey, with data from AOAV, which shows that Israeli explosive weapons struck civilian infrastructure in Gaza once every three hours on average since the war began.

Conservative data shows that over the past year, more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military. By comparison, the Small Arms Survey estimates that previously the highest number of women killed in a single year was over 2,600 in Iraq in 2016.

A report from Every Casualty Counts revealed that over the first 2.5 years of the Syrian conflict, an average of 4,700 children were killed annually.

UN reports on Children and Armed Conflict over the last 18 years indicate that no other conflict has resulted in a higher number of child deaths in a single year.

• Homes were hit every four hours, on avergae
• Temporary shelters every 17 hours, on average
• Schools and hospitals every four days, on average
• Aid distribution points and warehouses every 15 days, on average.

The Palestinian soccer federation has consistently asked FIFA for more than a decade to take action against the Israeli soccer body for incorporating teams from West Bank settlements in its leagues.

The Palestinians have also recently accused the Israel Football Association of what it said was complicity in violations of international law by the Israeli government, discrimination against Arab players.

The request to FIFA’s congress in May also cited “international law violations” in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas conflict and directed the soccer body to its statutory commitments on human rights and against discrimination.

The PFA has said dozens of Palestinian players have been killed in the war, football infrastructure has been destroyed, its leagues suspended and its national team required to play World Cup qualifiers abroad. Israel has also been playing international fixtures abroad.

FIFA delayed making a decision in May until after a legal review scheduled for July, then pushed back the issue two more times until the meeting Thursday.

WASHINGTON/BEIRUT/JERUSALEM, Oct 4 (Reuters) - An Israeli strike on Friday near Lebanon's Masnaa border crossing with Syria cut off a road used by hundreds of thousands of people to flee Israeli bombardments in recent days, Lebanon Transport Minister Ali Hamieh told Reuters.

Hamieh said the strike hit inside Lebanese territory near the border crossing, creating a four-metre (12 feet) wide crater. An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) military spokesman had accused Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah on Thursday of using the crossing to transport military equipment into Lebanon.

"The IDF will not allow the smuggling of these weapons and will not hesitate to act if forced to do so, as it has done throughout this war," IDF spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X.

According to Lebanese government statistics, more than 300,000 people - a vast majority of them Syrian - had crossed from Lebanon into Syria over the last 10 days to escape escalating Israeli bombardment.

Experts have asserted that this tactic is a gross violation of international law and that targeting civilian infrastructure, no matter the justification offered, is a war crime. Yet, Israeli authorities insist that it’s a legitimate tactic of war and helps deter future attacks on Israel by its enemies.rms and mosques.

Two years after the devastating 2006 campaign on Lebanon, the head of Israel’s northern command, Gadi Eisenkot, asserted that Israel will continue to use the strategy in future conflicts.

“What happened in [Dahiyeh]… will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” he said. “We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

Of course, the most severe display of the Dahiyeh Doctrine has been during Israeli’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza. Since October 7, Israel’s apparent strategy of targeting Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure with the full force of the military to try and deter Hamas has brought a catastrophe comparable only to the Nakba of 1948. In just a year, Israel’s military completely devastated all infrastructural and institutional bases of Palestinian civilian life in Gaza.

The global majority is of course deeply critical of Israel’s assaults on civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon. Yet, Israel’s partners in the West continue to support these efforts both materially and ideologically. Even when Israeli authorities outrageously claim that they are “escalating” their war efforts – meaning killing and maiming civilians and making their environments inhabitable – to “de-escalate”, they nod in approval.