What is the International Court of Justice and why is it weighing in on humanitarian aid in Gaza?

DEIR AL BALAH: With flies buzzing all around them, the woman and her daughter picked through the pile of garbage bags for scraps of food at the foot of a destroyed building in Gaza City. She found a small pile of cooked rice, a few scraps of bread, a box with some smears of white cheese still inside.
Islam Abu Taeima picked soggy bits from a piece of bread and put the dry part in her sack. She will take what she found back to the school where she and hundreds of other families live, boil it and serve it to her five children, she said.
“We’re dying of hunger,” she said. “If we don’t eat, we’ll die.”
Her rummaging for food is a new sign of the depths of desperation being reached in Gaza, where the population of some 2.3 million has been pushed toward famine by Israel’s nearly three-month blockade. The entry of a small amount of aid in the past week has done almost nothing to ease the situation.
Before the war, it was rare to see anyone searching through garbage for anything, despite the widespread poverty in the Gaza Strip.
Since Israel launched its military campaign decimating the strip after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, it has been common to see children searching through growing, stinking piles of uncollected garbage for wood or plastic to burn in their family’s cooking fire or for anything worth selling — but not for food. For food, they might search through the rubble of damaged buildings, hoping for abandoned canned goods.
But Abu Taeima says she has no options left. She and her 9-year-old daughter Waed wander around Gaza City, looking for leftovers discarded in the trash.
“This is our life day to day,” she said. “If we don’t gather anything, then we don’t eat.”
It’s still not common, but now people picking food from trash are occasionally seen. Some come out after dark because of the shame.
“I feel sorry for myself because I’m educated and despite that I’m eating from the trash,” said Abu Taeima, who has a bachelor’s degree in English from Al-Quds Open University in Gaza.
Her family struggled to get by even before the war, she said. Abu Taeima has worked for a short time in the past as a secretary for UNRWA, the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees and the biggest employer in Gaza. She also worked as a reader for blind people. Her husband worked briefly as a security guard for UNRWA. He was wounded in the 2021 war between Hamas and Israel and has been unable to work since.
Israel cut off all food, medicine and other supplies to Gaza on March 2. It said the blockade and its subsequent resumption of the war aimed to pressure Hamas to release the hostages it still holds. But warnings of famine have stoked international criticism of Israel.
It allowed several hundred trucks into Gaza last week. But much of it hasn’t reached the population, either aid trucks were looted or because of Israeli military restrictions on aid workers’ movements, especially in northern Gaza, according to the UN Aid groups say the amount of supplies allowed in is nowhere near enough to meet mounting needs.
Abu Taeima and her family fled their home in the Shati refugee camp on the northern side of Gaza City in November 2023. At the time she and one of her children were wounded in a tank shelling, she said.
They first headed to the strip’s southernmost city of Rafah where they sheltered in a tent for five months. They then moved to the central town of Deir Al-Balah a year ago when Israel first invaded Rafah.
During a two-month ceasefire that began in January, they went back to Shati, but their landlord refused to let them back into their apartment because they couldn’t pay rent, she said.
Several schools-turned-shelters in Gaza City at first refused to receive them because they were designated for people who fled towns in northern Gaza. Only when she threatened to set herself and her family on fire did one school give them a space, she said.
Abu Taeima said her family can’t afford anything in the market, where prices have skyrocketed for the little food that remains on sale. She said she has tried going to charity kitchens, but every time they run out of food before she gets any. Such kitchens, producing free meals, have become the last source of food for many in Gaza, and giant crowds flood them every day, pushing and shoving to get a meal.
“People are struggling, and no one is going to be generous with you,” she said. “So collecting from the trash is better.”
The risk of catching disease isn’t at the top of her list of worries.
“Starvation is the biggest disease,” she said.

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday vowed to bring back all hostages, “living and dead,” as rescuers in Gaza said Israeli strikes killed at least 52 people.

Netanyahu’s remarks came after a Palestinian source said that mediators proposed a 70-day ceasefire and the release of 10 Israeli hostages alongside some Palestinian prisoners, though US envoy Steve Witkoff later said Hamas had not agreed to a proposed deal.

“If we don’t achieve it today, we will achieve it tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. We are not giving up,” Netanyahu said of the duty to free the captives.

“We intend to bring them all back, the living and the dead,” he added, but made no mention of a proposed deal.

His remarks came after a Hamas source said on Monday that the group had accepted a ceasefire proposal that would see 10 captives released.

A spokesman for Witkoff nonetheless told AFP that he disputed Hamas’s claim that the group had agreed to his proposed deal and quoted the envoy as saying “What I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable.”

Fighting meanwhile raged in Gaza, where civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said that an early-morning Israeli strike on the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school, where displaced people were sheltering, killed “at least 33, with dozens injured, mostly children.”

The Israeli military said it had “struck key terrorists who were operating within a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center embedded” in the area, adding that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.”

Another strike killed at least 19 people in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, Bassal said.

Israel has stepped up a renewed offensive to destroy Hamas, drawing international condemnation as aid trickles in following a blockade since early March that has sparked severe food and medical shortages.

It has also triggered international criticism, with European and Arab leaders meeting in Spain calling for an end to the “inhumane” and “senseless” war, while humanitarian groups said the trickle of aid was not nearly enough.

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares called for an arms embargo on Israel.

He also called for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza “massively, without conditions and without limits, and not controlled by Israel,” describing the territory as humanity’s “open wound.”

In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz voiced unusually strong criticism of Israel, saying: “I no longer understand what the Israeli army is now doing in the Gaza Strip, with what goal.”

The impact on Gazan civilians “can no longer be justified,” he added.

Nevertheless, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Berlin would continue selling weapons to Israel.

The Israeli military said on Monday that over “the past 48 hours, the (air force) struck over 200 targets throughout the Gaza Strip.”

It also said it had detected three projectiles launched from Gaza toward communities in Israel Monday, as the country prepared to celebrate Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking its capture of the city’s eastern sector in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

“Two projectiles fell in the Gaza Strip and one additional projectile was intercepted,” it said.

Later on Monday, it issued an evacuation order for areas of Khan Yunis, saying they had been the site of rocket launches.

Israel last week partially eased an aid blockade on Gaza that had exacerbated widespread shortages of food and medicine.

COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry body that coordinates civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, said that “170 trucks... carrying humanitarian aid including food, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical drugs were transferred” into Gaza on Monday.

While Israel has restricted aid into Gaza, the war has made growing food next to impossible, with the UN saying on Monday just five percent of Gaza’s farmland was now useable.

A top World Health Organization official deplored Monday that none of the agency’s trucks with medical aid had been allowed to enter the Gaza Strip since Israel ended its blockade.

For more than 11 weeks, “there has been no WHO trucks entering into Gaza for medical care support,” the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean regional director Hanan Balkhy said, adding that “the situation is devastating.”

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Monday that at least 3,822 people had been killed in the territory since a ceasefire collapsed on March 18, taking the war’s overall toll to 53,977, mostly civilians.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Militants also took 251 hostages, 57 of whom remain in Gaza, including 34 who the Israeli military says are dead.