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At least 17 Palestinians were killed and 50 were wounded in Israeli strikes on Gaza City in the early hours of Sunday morning, civil emergency and health officials said.

The fatalities resulted from at least four separate Israeli airstrikes on four houses in different areas of the city. Residents and Palestinian health officials said the Israeli military had stepped up aerial and ground shelling.

On Saturday an Israeli airstrike killed at least 90 Palestinians in a designated humanitarian zone in Gaza, the enclave's health ministry said. The attack was the deadliest in Gaza for weeks.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said any Gaza ceasefire deal must allow Israel to resume fighting until its objectives are met.

“Any deal will allow Israel to return and fight until all the goals of the war are achieved,” Mr Netanyahu said in a statement on Sunday.

Hamas has dropped a key demand that Israel first commit to a permanent ceasefire before it would sign an agreement. Instead, it said it would allow negotiations to achieve that throughout the six-week first phase, a Hamas source said on Saturday.

But Mr Netanyahu said he insisted the deal must not prevent Israel from resuming fighting until its war objectives are met.

United States President Joe Biden has renewed his commitment to see his struggling re-election campaign through, telling voters in the key battleground state of Michigan that he is the better choice, despite growing calls for him to quit the race.

“I’m the nominee,” he said on Friday. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“To put it in perspective, in the primary, Biden got about 600,000 votes in Michigan, easily winning over any other rivals, but about 100,000 voters voted ‘uncommitted’. Those were largely Arab and Muslim Americans and young Americans who are upset about his handling of the war in Gaza,” he said.

During a United Nations Security Council meeting this week, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield launched a full-throated condemnation of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital on Monday. The attack was a part of a Russian bombing campaign that killed more than 30 Ukrainian civilians.

“We’re here today because Russia … attacked a children’s hospital,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “Even uttering that phrase sends a chill down my spine.”

Thomas-Greenfield went on to list a string of Russian attacks on other Ukrainian hospitals throughout the war. She described Russia’s aggression as a “campaign of terror” and labeled its attacks on civilian infrastructure as violations of international law. Representatives of other countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, echoed Thomas-Greenfield’s denunciations. (Russia’s ambassador denied responsibility for the Monday bombing.)

“I’m very glad the U.S. is coming out and so vocally condemning all of those actions,” said Jessica Peake, an international law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, referring to Thomas-Greenfield’s comments toward Russia. “But at the same time, we don’t get any language anywhere near as strong as that when we’re talking about Palestinian hospitals, or Palestinian schools, or Palestinian children.”

A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.

Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.

United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. "I've had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I've filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times." Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, "We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online."

Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas

The federally appointed monitor tasked with overseeing the United Auto Workers, Neil Barofsky, is ratcheting up his conflict with UAW President Shawn Fain, announcing another investigation into the union leader who rose to national prominence amid the successful “Stand Up Strike” against the Big Three automakers.

Yet newly unveiled documents suggest Barofsky’s pursuit of Fain has less to do with concerns over union self-dealing and more to do with the politics of Israel-Palestine.

Fain told Barofsky, the source said, that the ceasefire resolution was in no way antisemitic or even pro-Palestinian, but simply an expression of the union’s desire for peace. Fain added that that it was impossible for the monitor to call the union president in a strictly personal capacity, given the power dynamic at play, but that the union intended to stand by its call for a ceasefire and he would be appearing at the press conference on Capitol Hill the next day. The event went off as planned.

That a federal court monitor would think it was appropriate to try to stop that event from happening is extraordinary. That authority is nowhere within his court-appointed power, which derives from U.S. District Judge David M. Lawson, who appointed Barofsky as monitor. Lawson wasn’t available for comment. Barofsky did not respond to a request for comment. “The US Attorney’s Office must decline comment at this time,” said Gina Balaya, a spokesperson the Department of Justice’s Eastern District of Detroit.

Several civilians in Gaza City say people were shot dead by snipers after the Israeli military issued a new evacuation order and told Palestinians to head south as it steps up its offensive across the enclave.

The attacks reportedly took place as civilians evacuated a number of neighbourhoods in Gaza City, having been ordered to leave on Wednesday, even as mediators from Qatar, the United States and Egypt were meeting with Israeli officials in Doha for talks seeking a ceasefire.

Multiple people said they saw a man walking in the street being shot in the head by a sniper taking aim from a tower. Several people later managed to retrieve his body. “This person was walking peacefully, and then a bullet was shot into his head. We went down and brought him here,” one man said.

The scene shows a moment of respite and relative calm in Gaza: a crowd of people watching a football match in a school playground. A player fails to control a long pass from a teammate. The opposing goalkeeper gathers the ball and looks to launch it back up the pitch.

But just after he throws the ball, a deafening boom sends everyone present running for cover, including the person filming. “A strike! A strike!” someone screams.

The footage, broadcast by Al Jazeera, showed the moment of an Israeli airstrike next to the gate of al-Awda school in Abasan al-Kabira, east of the city of Khan Younis in Gaza, on Tuesday. As the person who was filming the match flees, they pass dead bodies and severely injured people among the debris.

The Biden administration has released about half of the shipment of heavy bombs it has withheld from Israel since May over concerns the IDF would use them in densely populated areas of Gaza, a US official tells The Times of Israel.

In May, the White House announced a decision to withhold a shipment of 1,800 2,000-lb bombs and 1,700 500-lb bombs, with US President Joe Biden threatening to freeze additional offensive weaponry if Israel launched a major military offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah where over one million Palestinians were sheltering at the time.

In a conversation held a few days before the elections, Macron warned Netanyahu that Chikli's actions, which were openly and blatantly aimed at assisting Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party, constituted "unacceptable" interference in France's internal affairs.

An Israeli official who is involved in contacts between the two countries described Chikli's behavior as "a diplomatic bomb" and a number of other diplomats who spoke with Haaretz said Chikli hurt relations with France.