Israel-Gaza war live: US state department accused of falsifying Gaza aid report

The Israeli military says its troops have ended operations in eastern Jabaliya in the northern section of the Gaza Strip, having destroyed 10 kilometres of tunnels and several weapons production sites in days of fighting that included more than 200 airstrikes.

During the operation in the heavily built up area, the troops also located the bodies of seven hostages, Reuters reports.

The state department falsified a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, overruling the advice of its own experts, according to a former senior US official who resigned this week.

Stacy Gilbert left her post as senior civil military adviser in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration, on Tuesday. She had been one of the department’s subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.

The NSM-20 report found that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used US weapons in a way that was “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, but that there was not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations.

Even more controversially, the report said the state department did not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance” in Gaza.

It was a high-stakes judgment because under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act, the US would be obliged to cut arms sales and security assistance to any country found to have blocked delivery of US aid.

Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the state department who has worked in several war zones, said that report’s conclusion went against the overwhelming view of state department experts who were consulted on the report.

We are restarting the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.

The US and UK struck 13 Houthi targets in several locations in Yemen on Thursday evening, in response to a recent surge in attacks by the Iran-backed militia group on ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, US officials said.

According to the officials, American and British fighter jets and US ships hit a wide range of underground facilities, missile launchers, command and control sites, a Houthi vessel and other facilities.

The Houthis’ Al Masirah satellite news said at least two people were killed and 10 others were wounded in one of the strikes. It’s the fifth time that the US and British militaries have conducted a combined operation against the Houthis since 12 January.

Elsewhere, a former US officials has accused the state department of falsifying a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza.

Stacy Gilbert left her post as senior civil military adviser in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration, on Tuesday. She had been one of the department’s subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.

More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.

• Israeli forces have killed about 300 Palestinian gunmen since an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was launched on 6 May, Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said on Thursday.

• Rafah residents reported intense artillery shelling and gunfire on Thursday. On the ground in the Gaza Strip, witnesses reported fighting in central and western Rafah, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). According to the news agency, witnesses also said Israeli forces had demolished several buildings in the city’s eastern areas.

• A car ramming attack killed two Israeli soldiers near the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli army said early on Thursday. According to Israeli media, the army has launched a manhunt for the perpetrator of the attack. Hamas welcomed the attack near Nablus, saying in a statement it was a “natural response” against the “crimes of the enemy”.

• An investigative reporter with Israel’s leading leftwing newspaper, Haaretz, has said unnamed senior security officials threatened actions against him if he reported on attempts by the former head of the Mossad to intimidate the ex-prosecutor of the international criminal court. In an article published on Thursday, the investigative reporter Gur Megiddo described how two years ago security officials blocked an attempt by the paper to report efforts by the then Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, to threaten the then ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. Details of the operation to influence Bensouda were revealed this week by the Guardian.

• EU workers staged a silent protest over the continuing attacks on Rafah outside the main institutional buildings in Brussels on Thursday. Some held banners declaring “civil servants demand ceasefire in Gaza” while others called for the end to “EU Israel agreements that don’t respect EU values”. It comes less than a week after 200 staffers wrote to protest against what they believe is an insufficient response by the EU to the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

• The charity, ActionAid described Israeli military pressing on with its ground invasion of Rafah as a “flagrant disregard of the binding ICJ ruling issued on 24 May”. Riham Jafari, communications and advocacy coordinator at ActionAid Palestine, said: “The last few days have been utterly harrowing. Our colleagues and partners in Gaza are at a total loss as to what they can do and where they can go, when death surrounds them everywhere they turn and nowhere is safe.”