The Times of Israel liveblogged Thursday’s events as they happened.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid urges Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pick to head the Shin Ben domestic security agency to turn down the appointment, saying the process was tainted by conflict of interest.

Lapid in a statement calls on David Zini “to announce that he cannot accept his appointment until the Supreme Court rules on the matter,” adding that “Netanyahu has a serious conflict of interest in the matter of appointing a Shin Bet chief due to the Qatargate scandal in which the people closest to him received money from an Arab country that supports terrorism.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that Gaza’s health system is at a breaking point as Israel’s intensified military operations continue, amidst worsening mass population displacement and acute shortages of basic necessities.

Four major hospitals in Gaza have had to suspend medical services in the past week due to their proximity to incidents. WHO missions attempting to reach Al-Awda Hospital and the Indonesian Hospital were impeded, it says.

Only 19 of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals remain operational while at least 94% of all hospitals are damaged or destroyed, the WHO said, adding that only 12 are in a condition to provide a variety of health services.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas’s propaganda campaigns and false reports of atrocities being committed by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza helped contribute to the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington last night, in an English-language video shared by his office.

He says that the shooting attack on Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim was not a “random crime” but perpetrated by an anti-Zionist and antisemitic “terrorist…who wanted to kill Jews” and chanted “Free Palestine!” as he was arrested.

He says the international community has “bought into Hamas’s propaganda that says Israel is starving Palestinian children,” explaining that, “Since October 7, Israel has sent 92,000 aid trucks into Gaza…That includes 1.8 million tons of aid,” and that much of this aid was stolen by Hamas to resupply its terrorist members.

He says, “Many international institutions are complicit in spreading this lie,” and that “a few days ago, a top United Nations official said that 14,000 Palestinian babies would die in 48 hours,”

“The press repeats it. The mob believed it. And a young couple is then brutally gunned down in Washington,” says Netanyahu.

He rejects initiatives by other nations to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state, saying Hamas terrorists “don’t want a Palestinian state. They want to destroy the Jewish state.”

The premier says he “could never understand how this simple truth evades the leaders of France, Britain, Canada,” who issued a joint statement earlier this week calling on Israel to end its war in Gaza, lift aid restrictions, halt West Bank settlement expansions and begin working toward a two-state solution.

“As for the hostages,” adds the premier, “we’ll do our effort to secure them. I’m ready for a temporary ceasefire to get more out but we demand, and you should demand, that all of our hostages be released and released immediately… We’re in an intense seven front war that was launched against us by Iran and its proxies. Sometimes in war, accidents happen.”

“One such incident happened the other day in Jenin,” says Netanyahu, referencing the warning shots fired by IDF troops near a delegation of Arab and European diplomats touring the West Bank, which sparked outrage from many of the participating countries, leading several to summon their Israeli envoys for a dressing-down.

“Thankfully, no one was hurt. Our military has expressed its regret over the event because we don’t target civilians or diplomats. We target terrorists. Exactly the opposite of Hamas… But I don’t hear that coming from any of those countries that criticize Israel,” says Netanyahu.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responds to media criticism over remarks he made last night regarding elections and the role of Qatar in financing the October 7 massacre in a Hebrew-language video posted on his X account.

He denies that he neglected to confirm during a Jerusalem press conference yesterday that elections will be held on time next year, saying, “I hope they will be held on time – I’m doing everything so that they do not happen ahead of time.”

“But I can tell you one thing — [elections] won’t happen after the deadline. It won’t happen. Do you know why? Because we are democrats. We believe that the public has the right to choose,” he says, contrasting this with political opponents and others who, in his words, believe “so what if you were elected — we will decide,” and who try to impose “all sorts of things contrary to the existing law.” He cites his legal disputes with the Attorney General over his authority to appoint the Shin Bet chief and the Civil Service Commissioner as examples.

Netanyahu also clarifies statements that seemed to downplay the lethal capabilities of Hamas during the October 7, 2023, attack.

Denying that money transferred by Qatar to Hamas-ruled Gaza at his request enabled the terror group’s unprecedented onslaught, Netanyahu said yesterday that invading Hamas members “attacked us in flip-flops and with AK-47s and pickup trucks, which cost scraps.”

He now clarifies that he “asked: what weapons did they even use? What did they use that required money? Pickup trucks. Kalashnikovs. RPGs. That doesn’t cost anything. And really, it wasn’t some huge rocket stockpile. You know what they do — they take metal barrels, put explosives inside, and that’s it. A small unit can do it. It doesn’t cost money,” he says.

“The Qatari financial aid was a small part of a much larger stream of funding that reached Hamas. It came from the United Nations, from international agencies, from European countries, from Iran — it came from everywhere. The Qatari money was just a small part of it,” he says.

“That aid was intended for 100,000 Gazans living below the poverty line. It was meant to deal with sewage, to prevent disease… to provide minimal electricity, etc. That’s what it was. So no, that money didn’t really build weapons or anything like that,” he continues.

“So this wasn’t a financial issue, and it wasn’t about the Qatari money. It was a matter of failures, and we still need to ask what happened there. Why? Why didn’t [the IDF] deploy the standby squads? Why didn’t they activate the Air Force in time? Why didn’t they inform the Prime Minister — me? Who made that call?” says Netanyahu.

“There are many questions — and those are the ones that must truly be investigated. And I want to investigate them. Everything. Let them ask everything — about Qatar, about whatever they want. Everything. And there are answers,” he says, referring to the need to establish a commission of inquiry into the attack.

The government has not formed any commission of inquiry into the events surrounding October 7 for 19 months, and opposes a state commission of inquiry, which successive polls show is the preferred option for most Israelis.

Netanyahu adds that the questions about the IDF’s directives are the most pressing, “these are the most important questions: How did this disaster happen? And we will find out.”

The IDF was reportedly surprised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement to appoint Maj. Gen. David Zini as the next Shin Bet head.

According to reports from Army Radio and the Kan public broadcaster, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir was not consulted before the appointment was made, and was notified of the move just minutes before the PMO issued a statement on the matter.

Zini, the head of the IDF Training Command and General Staff Corps, was reportedly being considered to head the Northern Command before being poached by Netanyahu for the role of Shin Bet chief.

FBI and police investigators are poring over apparent writings and political affiliations of a man arrested as the lone suspect in the fatal shooting of a pair of Israeli embassy aides outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.

The Chicago-born suspect, Elias Rodriguez, 30, is accused of opening fire on a group of people on Wednesday night as they left an event for young diplomats hosted by the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group that supports Israel and confronts antisemitism.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino posts on social media that investigators were “aware of certain writings allegedly authored by the suspect” and hoped to soon have updates regarding their authenticity.

Bongino’s statement appears to refer to a manifesto signed with Rodriguez’s name that was posted to an anonymous X account on Wednesday night shortly before the shooting.

Posted with the title “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home,” it condemned Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians since the October 2023 Hamas attacks, and discussed the morality of “armed” action.

FBI Director Kash Patel called the bloodshed an “act of terror,” although US Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that authorities believe the suspect acted alone.

Investigators are also delving into the apparent political affiliations of the suspect, who worked for a healthcare nonprofit and was believed to have had past ties to far-left groups.

FBI agents are seen at his apartment in Chicago on Thursday, where law enforcement blocked off the street.

Rodriguez was once affiliated with a far-left group in Chicago, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, according to a post from the group on X. The group said that Rodriguez had a brief association with a PSL branch that ended in 2017 and that they knew of no contact with him in more than seven years.

Rodriguez was also identified in a 2018 local news report as a member of the Chicago branch of a national group called ANSWER, an acronym for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, which has organized demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians.

Rodriguez worked at the healthcare nonprofit American Osteopathic Information Association, the organization confirmed in a statement expressing sympathy for the victims.

He had also worked as an oral history researcher at The HistoryMakers, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving African American stories, according to a now-deleted biography on the group’s website.

Rodriguez was born and raised in Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois Chicago with an English degree, the deleted page said. He previously worked as a content writer for commercial and noncommercial technology firms, the page said.

Mossad chief David Barnea and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer will travel to Rome tomorrow in order to meet with US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the fifth round of Iran nuclear talks, Axios reports.

Barnea and Dermer are seeking to coordinate positions with Witkoff and be briefed immediately after the talks wrap up, Axios says.

If the United States wants to end Iranian uranium enrichment, then there will be no nuclear deal, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says, as the two nations headed for a fifth round of talks slated for Friday in Italy.

Qatar, a key mediator in the Israel-Hamas war, condemns the killing of two Israeli embassy staff in Washington — which was carried out by a gunman who shouted “free Palestine” when arrested.

“The state of Qatar condemns and denounces the shooting incident in front of the Jewish museum in Washington that led to the killing of two Israeli embassy employees,” the Qatari foreign ministry says in a statement, offering the country’s “condolences” to the families of the victims.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acted “in contravention of legal instructions,” in announcing this evening that he is appointing a new Shin Bet chief, and that there is a “heavy concern that he acted while having a conflict of interest, and that the appointments process is flawed.”

The High Court on Wednesday ruled Netanyahu had a conflict of interest when he fired the outgoing Shin Bet head, Ronen Bar. Baharav-Miara then immediately told Netanyahu he could not appoint a new Shin Bet chief under the current circumstances.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin welcomes Netanyahu’s decision to defy the attorney general, describing it as a “courageous, necessary, and crucial decision,” which he says “finally restores proper democratic order.”

The Movement for Quality Government in Israel says however that Netanyahu’s announcement is “brazen and defiant,” and accuses him of showing contempt for the High Court of Justice and the attorney general.

“This is unprecedented contempt for the High Court’s rulings and the attorney general’s instructions, and the continuation of the dangerous trend of harming the rule of law for the sake of narrow, personal interests,” says the organization.

The Movement for Quality Government, which was one of the primary petitioners against the government’s decision to fire Bar, vows to submit a new petition to the High Court in the coming days “against this invalid appointment.”

Last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to appoint IDF Maj. Gen. David Zini to become his military secretary, telling confidants after interviewing him that he was “too messianic,” Haaretz reports.

Zini is a member of the national religious community.

Netanyahu’s wife Sara was pushing for Zini to be appointed the next IDF chief of staff, Haaretz says.

Earlier this evening, Netanyahu announced that he had appointed Zini to become the next head of the Shin Bet.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has appointed Maj. Gen. David Zini as the next Shin Bet chief.

Zini currently serves as the head of the IDF Training Command and General Staff Corps. He has also been responsible for advancing the draft of Haredi soldiers to the military.

A statement from the Prime Minister’s Office notes that Zini, in March 2023, wrote a report for the then-commander of the Gaza Division “to examine how the division is prepared for a complex surprise event, with an emphasis on a surprise raid, and to identify weaknesses.”

“As part of the report’s conclusions, Zini wrote that in almost any sector, a surprise raid on our forces could be carried out,” the PMO says.

Current Shin Bet head Ronen Bar has said he will step down on June 15.

Just yesterday, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara informed Netanyahu that he is barred from appointing a new Shin Bet chief while she works out the implications of a High Court ruling which stated that a cabinet decision to fire Bar was made “improperly” and that the premier has a conflict of interest due to the ongoing Shin Bet investigations into his close aides.

An Israeli woman who was held hostage in Gaza with her two young daughters says she has launched a fundraiser to help rebuild her life, collecting more than $600,000 in a single day.

Doron Katz-Asher, 36, was among 251 people abducted during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in the Gaza Strip.

She was released in November of that year during a series of prisoner-hostage exchanges that accompanied a brief truce.

“Today, I’m putting shame aside. I refuse to let my captivity define me. I choose to heal and to rebuild. But now, at my most vulnerable point, I realise I can’t do this alone,” she says in an Instagram post with a link to the fundraiser.

“The emotional burden is heavy, and the financial fears are real. I never thought I would ask for help,” Katz-Asher writes.

By Thursday afternoon, the donation counter showed she had raised more than 2.3 million shekels (about $640,000), close to her target of 2.5 million shekels.

Katz-Asher was abducted along with her two daughters, aged four and six, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where she had been visiting her mother.

Her mother, Efrat Katz, was killed during the attack, as was her brother, Ravid.

Her mother’s partner, Gadi Moses, 80, was also taken hostage and freed during a second ceasefire in January this year.

During her captivity, which Katz-Asher described in her Instagram post as “the heart of hell,” she was treated for a gunshot wound without anesthesia.

“I didn’t know if we would survive,” she says in the post.

She also describes how, after her release, she separated from her husband Yoni while pregnant with their third child.

“I separated from my partner and realized that I would be giving birth alone — without the mother who had always stood beside me,” she writes. “I may have been freed from captivity, but have not regained my previous life.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration says it has revoked Harvard’s right to enroll foreign students amid an escalating fight between the president and the prestigious university.

“Effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor (SEVIS) Program certification is revoked,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem writes in a letter to the Ivy League institution, referring to the main system by which foreign students are permitted to study in the United States.

Flour and other aid started reaching some of Gaza’s most vulnerable areas on Thursday after Israel let some trucks through, but nowhere near enough to make up for shortages caused by an 11-week blockade, Palestinian officials say.

Many other trucks were still at the border, and people were still waiting to receive food, amid fears that desperate crowds would try to loot the vehicles when they arrived, the Palestinian Red Crescent warns.

Israel said it allowed 100 trucks carrying baby food and medical equipment into the enclave on Wednesday, two days after announcing its first relaxation of the restrictions under mounting international pressure.

“Flour arrived from the [UN] World Food Program, and we immediately started working,” baker Ahmed Al-Banna says as flatbreads passed by on a conveyor belt behind him at his base in Deir al-Balah on Thursday.

Bakeries across the south of the enclave started ovens that had been shut for two months, he adds. “God willing, bakeries in northern Gaza will soon resume work.”

Bread distribution would start later on Thursday, Amjad al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network in Gaza, tells Reuters.

He says just 90 trucks had gotten through. “During the ceasefire, 600 trucks used to enter every day, which means that the current quantity is a drop in the ocean, nothing.”

Bakeries backed by the WFP would produce the bread and the agency’s staff would hand it out – a more controlled system than previously when bakers sold it directly to the public at a low cost, he adds.

On Wednesday night, boys and young men gathered after one vehicle arrived in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, but kept back as men, some holding guns, watched over the unloading of sacks.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had got one truck of medical supplies through to replenish its field hospital in Rafah, but more was needed.

“A trickle of trucks is woefully inadequate. Only the rapid, unimpeded, and sustained flow of aid can begin to address the full scope of needs on the ground,” the organization says in a statement.

The head of the Palestinian Red Crescent says that a paramedic who survived an attack that killed 15 aid workers was spared because he asked Israeli soldiers for mercy in Hebrew, adding that he hoped the man’s testimony would help win justice.

Assad Al-Nassasrah, a Red Crescent paramedic, survived shootings that killed 15 emergency and aid workers on March 23 in southern Gaza in an incident that drew international condemnation. Their bodies were found buried in a shallow grave a week later by Red Crescent and UN officials who accused Israeli forces of killing them.

Al-Nassasrah went missing and then was freed from Israeli detention on April 29 and has not yet publicly commented. One other paramedic survived.

Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, tells reporters in Geneva that Al-Nassasrah was spared after he pleaded in Hebrew and said his mother was a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

“What does Assad say in Hebrew? ‘Don’t shoot. I am Israeli.’ And the soldier got a bit confused,” he tells reporters. “That confusion … made him survive.”

“Assad will be a witness that can put all the Israeli stories in shambles,” he adds.

Asked how Al-Nassasrah was treated in custody, Al-Khatib says: “like a Palestinian”. He says Al-Nassasrah had been interrogated and that he had mental health issues, but did not elaborate further.

Social media footage shared by the Palestinian Red Crescent, dated the day after his release, showed Al-Nassasrah crying as he hugged medics and looking dazed while being examined in a Gaza hospital. Eight of those killed were from the PRCS, which provides medical aid in Gaza and is part of the world’s largest humanitarian network.

Al-Khatib says the organization was working with lawyers and considering formal submissions to international courts and the UN Security Council.

“We think the international community is responsible for providing justice to those killed,” he says. “We don’t train our people to go and die.”

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, says the attacker who killed two embassy workers in Washington, DC, last night was inside the event before the attack.

“He milled around inside the event. We still don’t know exactly what he said, but he said enough that they removed him,” Leiter says from the scene of the attack. “He went outside, waited for embassy workers to come out, and shot them.”

Three others escaped the shooting unharmed, Leiter says.

“The person who shot these two young people dead last night shouted ‘Free, free Palestine.’ This was done in the name of a political agenda to eradicate the State of Israel,” he says. “The State of Israel is now fighting a war on seven fronts. This is the eighth front in the war to demonize, to delegitimize, to eradicate the right of the State of Israel.”

US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed a potential deal with Iran in a call earlier today, the White House says, adding Trump believes the talks are “moving in the right direction.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking to reporters in a briefing, says the two leaders also discussed the killing of the two Israeli embassy aides in Washington.

Channel 12 reports what it says are quotes from a meeting outgoing Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar held earlier today with former American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander.

Bar apologized to Alexander for failing to prevent his kidnapping on October 7.

“I want to apologize to you that you were taken captive, also because of us… and that you were released thanks to [US special envoy to the Mideast Steve] Witkoff and not thanks to us,” Channel 12 quotes Bar as having........

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