UN Security Council votes in favour of US resolution on Gaza peace plan

Hamas said that Monday's UN resolution which allows for an international force to be deployed in the territory failed to respect Palestinians' "demands and rights".

"This resolution does not meet the level of our Palestinian people's political and humanitarian demands and rights," the group said in a statement.

The UN Security Council voted Monday in favor of a US resolution bolstering Donald Trump's Gaza peace plan that includes the deployment of an international force and a path to a future Palestinian state.

There were 13 votes in favor of the text, which Washington heralded after the vote as "historic and constructive," with Russia and China abstaining and no vetoes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed he would deal with the violent "handful of extremists" among Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, following clashes and another attack on Monday.

Homes and vehicles in a Palestinian village were torched and vandalised on Monday evening, hours after members of the so-called Hilltop Youth movement clashed with security forces dismantling an illegal settler outpost.

Violence in the West Bank has soared since the beginning of Israel's war on Gaza in October 2023.

In recent weeks, Israeli settler attacks have multiplied in the West Bank, targeting Palestinians.

Israeli forces earlier struck a school sheltering displaced civilians in Gaza City’s Daraj neighbourhood, according to local reports.

The Wafa news agency said an Israeli drone “dropped a bomb” on the site, injuring at least 13 people, including children. The wounded were taken to al-Ahli Arab Hospital, where one was described as being in critical condition.

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has reportedly said that Palestinian Authority (PA) officials should be assassinated if the UN moves to recognise a Palestinian state.

Several Israeli media outlets published the far-right minister’s remarks, delivered during an Otzma Yehudit party meeting on Monday.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Ben-Gvir said: “If they accelerate the recognition of the Palestinian terrorist state, and the UN recognises a Palestinian state, targeted assassinations of senior Palestinian Authority officials, who are terrorists for all intents and purposes, should be ordered.”

He also claimed that PA President Mahmoud Abbas should be arrested if the UN supports Palestinian statehood, saying Israel already has a solitary confinement cell “ready for him”.

His comments were made shortly before the UN Security Council prepared to vote on a US-backed Gaza ceasefire plan, which includes the creation of an international stabilisation force.

The proposal also indicates that the UN would endorse a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”, a position strongly rejected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The PA announced on Friday that it supports the US-drafted resolution.

Gazans said they paid $2,000 per seat to fly their families to South Africa on a trip arranged by a group offering a way out of the devastated enclave, in what South Africa alleged on Monday appeared to be part of a bid to displace Palestinians.

Two Gazans interviewed by Reuters news agency said they were among 130 Palestinians granted entry by South Africa after being bussed from Gaza and flown out of an Israeli airport last week, arriving in Johannesburg on Thursday after a stop in Nairobi. 

In May, Reuters reported that Israel had eased restrictions on Palestinians leaving Gaza, and that around 1,000 of them had been bussed out of the enclave to board flights to Europe and elsewhere.

The departures required a request to Israel by a foreign government, Reuters reported at the time. The two Palestinians said they saw online adverts posted by an organisation called Al-Majd Europe offering the chance to leave Gaza, and applied some six months ago. The offer was only open to families and required that applicants must have a passport.

According to Reuters, both Palestinians eventually received messages from Al-Majd Europe via WhatsApp telling them security clearance had been granted. They left Gaza on buses and were taken through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing before being flown out of Ramon airport. They arrived in South Africa on November 13.

Israeli forces have evacuated and demolished an illegal settler outpost in the occupied West Bank, citing "severe incidents of violence" at the site.

Israeli media broadcast footage of a large security presence moving into the Tzour Misgavi outpost in the Gush Etzion area, south of Jerusalem.

Heavy machinery was deployed to dismantle the structures, including one video showing a bulldozer striking a building while several people stood on its roof.

Reports said that 25 families were removed from the outpost during the operation.

Violent attacks linked to Israeli settlers- particularly those based in outposts- have surged in recent weeks, targeting Palestinians, Israeli and international anti-settlement activists, and at times even Israeli soldiers.

"The evacuation is being carried out in accordance with the law and the applicable regulations," COGAT, the Israeli authority overseeing civil affairs in the occupied territories, said in a statement.

It added that "criminal activity and severe incidents of violence at the site affected the security of the area."

The operation marks an uncommon move by Israeli authorities to take action against settlers in the occupied West Bank, where over 500,000 Israelis live illegally on Palestinian land.

The UN Security Council was set to vote later on Monday on a US-drafted resolution endorsing President Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza and authorizing an international stabilization force for the Palestinian enclave.

Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas agreed last month to the first phase of Trump's 20-point plan for Gaza - a ceasefire in their two-year war and a hostage-release deal - but a UN resolution is seen as vital to legitimize a transitional governance body and to reassure countries considering sending troops to Gaza.

The 15-member council is scheduled to vote on the resolution at 5 pm ET (2200 GMT).

The latest draft of the resolution says member states can take part in the so-called Board of Peace envisioned as a transitional authority that would oversee reconstruction and economic recovery of Gaza.

It also authorizes the international stabilization force, which would ensure a process of demilitarizing Gaza, including by decommissioning weapons and destroying military infrastructure.

Trump's 20-point plan is included as an annex to the resolution.

The Israeli military says its forces fatally shot two Palestinians in separate incidents in northern Gaza, claiming both had crossed the Yellow Line, an area designated as under Israeli control.

Israel has been accused of carrying out 282 ceasefire violations in Gaza over the past month, according to local authorities, who say the so-called pause has been shattered by ongoing attacks that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

The Government Media Office in Gaza reported that between 10 October and 10 November, Israeli forces repeatedly breached the ceasefire through airstrikes, artillery fire, and direct shootings across the enclave.

Officials say Israeli troops opened fire on civilians 88 times, stormed neighbourhoods beyond the "yellow line" on 12 occasions, launched 124 separate bombings, and demolished residential buildings 52 times. They also reported that 23 Palestinians from Gaza were detained during this period.

Despite the declared halt in fighting, Israel is accused of continuing to block life-saving humanitarian aid while destroying homes and infrastructure, worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis.

Six people accused of breaking into an Israel-based defence firm's UK site last year and causing more than £1.0 million of damage with sledgehammers appeared in a UK court on Monday.

A group of around two dozen protesters, holding banners and Palestinian flags, gathered at the gates leading to Woolwich Crown Court, with their shouts of "Free Palestine" audible inside the courtroom ahead of the start of the trial.

The six are accused of being part of a group who committed aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder at the premises of the Israel-based firm Elbit Systems in the western English city of Bristol on August 6, 2024, court documents showed.

Samuel Corner, Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani and Zoe Rogers arrived shortly after 11:00am (1100 GMT) for the trial, which is expected to last 10 weeks.

Corner is also accused of a separate offence, causing grievous bodily harm to a police officer with intent during the incident.

The six sat in a line in the dock and exchanged glances, waves and smiles with relatives and friends in the public gallery, some of whom wore Palestinian keffiyeh scarves.

According to the court's indictment document, the accused entered the premises of Elbit Systems in August 2024 with intent to do unlawful damage, carrying "weapons of offence, namely sledgehammers", destroyed or damaged property and used or threatened unlawful violence when present together with others.

On Monday, the court went through some pre-trial administrative procedures, with jury selection due to take place in the afternoon.

Elbit Systems is a "global defense technology company" with around 20,000 staff and revenues of $2.0 billion, according to the firm's official website.

The Palestinian Resistance Committees (PRC), an allied faction of Hamas, said on Monday that one of its local armed leaders was killed by what it described as an Israeli undercover force near Deir Al-Balah city in the central Gaza Strip.

The group said Waseem Abdel-Hadi, a commander of its armed wing, was killed in what it called a “cowardly and treacherous assassination operation".

The PRC, whose fighters joined the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel at a later stage, said Abdel-Hadi had played a role in developing its armed wing. It did not issue any direct threat of retaliation.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on the reported killing.

An Israel Police officer has been charged with forging Israeli entry permits and selling them to three Palestinians, according to a report by Haaretz.

The indictment, issued by the Justice Ministry’s unit responsible for investigating police misconduct, states that the officer, Sulieman Matar, was not acting alone. He allegedly enlisted another individual, who was paid by Matar to produce the forged documents.

Israeli authorities have deported dozens of Palestinian patients from hospitals in Jerusalem back to the Gaza Strip, local media reported on Monday.

The patients and their relatives, all originally from Gaza, had travelled to Jerusalem for medical treatment before the war began in October 2023 and had remained there since.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, some had completed their treatment and wished to return home. However, Arab48 reported concerns that others were being compelled to go back.

Local outlets said two buses carrying several of the patients and their families reached the Kerem Abu Salem crossing between Gaza and Israel on Monday morning.

After repeated delays, Israel’s government has agreed to launch an investigation into the government failures that led to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that triggered the war in Gaza.

But questions about the investigation's independence drew accusations Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to evade personal responsibility in the worst attack in Israel’s history.

Israel has traditionally appointed an independent state commission of inquiry, led by a retired judge, following major governmental failures.

Netanyahu has resisted calls for such an investigation into the Oct. 7 failures, saying only that he would answer all questions when the war is over. In Sunday’s decision, he said the ceasefire that went into effect on Oct. 10 allows the government to start the investigation.

His Cabinet approved the formation of a watered-down “government committee.” Netanyahu will oversee the makeup of the team governing the inquiry, in effect putting him in charge of the probe. More details about the inquiry are to be announced in 45 days.

Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, called the decision insulting to the victims of Oct. 7 and to the hundreds of soldiers who have died in the war.

“The government is doing everything it can to run from the truth and evade responsibility,” Lapid said.

The government is “establishing a commission that will investigate itself,” noted the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, which is critical of Netanyahu. “This is not an investigative commission, this is a cover-up commission.”

Germany's decision to resume weapons sales to Israel that had been suspended is subject to the observance of the current ceasefire and the large-scale provision of humanitarian aid, a government spokesperson said on Monday.

The decision affected weapons and systems that could be used in Gaza but not others deemed necessary for Israel to defend itself from external attacks.

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas "is the basis for this decision, and we expect everyone to abide by the agreements that have been made - that includes maintaining the ceasefire," the spokesperson said.

"It also means that humanitarian aid is provided on a large scale and that the process continues in an orderly manner, as agreed," he added.

Once the order lifts, Germany will return to a case-by-case review of arms exports to Israel and will continue to review the developments on the ground, another spokesperson said earlier on Friday.

Germany remains committed to supporting a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of a two-state solution and would continue to engage in supporting reconstruction in Gaza, he added.

The arrival in South Africa of 153 Palestinians on a plane last week was "suspicious" and indicated "a clear agenda to cleanse Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank," the foreign minister said Monday.

The group landed in Johannesburg on a chartered flight on Thursday without departure stamps from Israel on their passports.

"We are suspicious as the South African government about the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the plane," Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola told reporters.

South Africa border police kept the group on the plane for 12 hours before President Cyril Ramaphosa allowed them entry on a standard 90-day visa exemption.

It emerged later that a first plane carrying 176 Palestinians had arrived on October 28, according to the Gift of the Givers charity which is assisting the Palestinians.

Reports said a shadowy organisation named Al-Majd was involved in the departure from Gaza of both groups.

"We do not want any further flights to come our way because this is a clear agenda to cleanse out Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank and those areas, which South Africa is against," Lamola said.

"It does look like it represents a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine into many different parts of the world, and is a clearly orchestrated operation," Lamola said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned testimony in his corruption trial, set for Wednesday, has been called off due to an undisclosed “security” issue.

According to Channel 12, Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman approved the cancellation after receiving a request from Netanyahu’s defence team.

Netanyahu has faced charges since 2019 across three separate cases, accused of accepting expensive gifts from wealthy allies and attempting to secure regulatory advantages for media owners in exchange for more favourable coverage.

An Israeli drone strike has killed a man in Beit Lahia, in north-west Gaza, in what appears to be another violation of the ceasefire, the Wafa news agency reported.

Wafa said several other Palestinians, including a child, were injured when an Israeli quadcopter dropped an explosive device on a group of civilians in the Shuja'iyya area, east of Gaza City.

The number of Palestinians dying in Israeli custody surged to nearly 100 people since the start of the war in Gaza, according to a report published Monday by a human rights group that says systematic violence and denial of medical care at prisons and detention centers contributed to many of the deaths it examined.

The report by Physicians for Human Rights documented 98 prisoner deaths since the Oct. 7, 2023- with 27 occurred in 2023, 50 in 2024 and 21 this year, the most recent on Nov. 2.

PHRI says the actual death toll over this timeframe is “likely significantly higher,” noting that Israel has refused to provide information about hundreds of Palestinians detained during the war.

Fewer than 30 Palestinians died in Israeli custody in the 10 years preceding the war, PHRI says. But since the war, the prison population more than doubled to 11,000 as people were rounded up, mainly from Gaza and the West Bank.

The number of prisoners dying grew at an even faster rate over that period, PHRI data shows.

PHRI documented deaths by interviewing former detainees and prison medical staff, examining reports prepared by doctors who observed autopsies at the behest of dead prisoners’ families, and confirming dozens of fatalities through freedom of information requests.

“The alarming rate at which people are killed in Israeli custody reveals a system that has lost all moral and professional restraint,” said Naji Abbas, a director at PHRI.

Last year, the head of Israel’s prison system, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, boasted that he had degraded prison conditions to the legal minimum. Under pressure from rights groups, conditions improved slightly.

More than 600,000 Palestinian children in Gaza have missed the past two years of school because of the war on the Palestinian enclave. Instead of studying and socializing, they have been repeatedly displaced, fled airstrikes and shelling and often spent their days scouring for water and food for their families.

With a ceasefire reached last month largely holding, humanitarian officials are now working frantically to reopen dozens of makeshift schools.

John Crickx, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, said it's critical for children to return to classes as soon as possible, not just because of basic education but also for their mental health.

“In the weeks to come, if we don’t offer education,” he said, there could be “terrible consequences for an entire generation.”

UNICEF estimates that over 630,000 Palestinian children missed out on school during the war. Crickx says that so far, only about 100,000 children have been able to return.

Separately, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, is providing some education through their contracted teachers — for about 40,000 students. Most of the UNRWA-run schools, which catered to half of the Gaza children before the war, have since turned into shelters for displaced people.

The German government will lift an order suspending some weapons sales to Israel from next week, following the ceasefire agreement reached last month, a government spokesperson said on Monday.

"The government will, as a general rule, revert to case-by-case reviews in decisions on arms exports and respond to further developments," the spokesperson said.

The decision will allow the resumption of exports suspended in August, from Nov. 24, the spokesperson said.

Germany, the second-largest exporter of arms to Israel after the United States, announced a suspension of some arms exports to Israel in August, amid mounting popular pressure over the war in Gaza.

The decision affected weapons and systems that could be used in Gaza but not others deemed necessary for Israel to defend itself from external attacks.

The spokesperson said Germany remained committed to supporting a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of a two state solution and would continue to engage in supporting reconstruction in Gaza.

Hamas has criticised the latest US draft resolution at the UN Security Council, saying it does not contribute to stability in the Gaza Strip.

Spokesman Hazem Qassem warned that the proposal would effectively replace Israeli occupation with a new form of international trusteeship.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Qassem said the amendments would give non-Palestinian bodies oversight of Gaza’s internal governance and security, allowing external interference without waiting for Palestinians to manage their own affairs.

He proposed a UN resolution that would strengthen the ceasefire and deploy an international peacekeeping force, rather than granting outside actors direct authority over Palestinian governance.

Hamas’s criticism comes as international efforts continue to secure a formal ceasefire and restore essential services in Gaza following weeks of Israeli attacks on the devastated territory.

An Israeli drone strike has killed one person in southern Lebanon, Lebanese media reported late on Sunday.

According to Al Mayadeen, Muhammad Ali Shuweikh- a local school principal- was taken to hospital after an Israeli drone targeted a car in the town of al-Mansouri near Tyre. He was later pronounced dead.

In a statement released on Monday morning, the Israeli military alleged that Shuweikh was an armed operative who "served as the local representative of Hezbollah in the Mansouri area in southern Lebanon."

The statement further claimed that Shuweikh was "responsible for communication between the organisation and local residents regarding financial and military matters, and had seized private assets for terror use."

Israeli forces have detained at least four Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
According to the Palestinian Information Centre, troops raided several homes in the Balata refugee camp, east of Nablus, arresting three residents: Muhammad Hamdallah Hashash, Ahmed Salah Sabah, and Iyad Kayed Hashash.

Separately, Quds News Agency reported that the military detained former prisoner Muhammad Naji Sabha after storming his home in Anabta, east of Tulkarm.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government underscored their opposition to a Palestinian state ahead of a UN Security Council vote Monday on a resolution endorsing a US-backed Gaza peace plan.

The draft resolution would follow up on the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas brokered by US President Donald Trump, giving the council's blessing for a transitional administration and a temporary international security force in the devastated territory.

Unlike previous drafts, the latest version of the resolution mentions a possible future Palestinian state, which the Israeli government is vehemently against.

"Our opposition to a Palestinian state on any territory has not changed," Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting on Sunday.

Netanyahu had come in for criticism from coalition members, including far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had accused him of failing to respond to a recent wave of recognition of Palestinian statehood by Western countries.

"Formulate immediately an appropriate and decisive response that will make it clear to the entire world -- no Palestinian state will ever arise on the lands of our homeland," Smotrich urged Netanyahu on X.

The premier replied Sunday that he did "not need affirmations, tweets, or lectures from anyone".

Other ministers likewise expressed their opposition to Palestinian statehood, though none explicitly referred to the resolution.

"Israel's policy is clear: no Palestinian state will be established," Defence Minister Israel Katz wrote on X Sunday.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar also said on X that the country would "not agree to the establishment of a Palestinian terror state in the heart of the Land of Israel".

Far-right firebrand and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir went even further, calling the Palestinian identity an "invention".