“Decisive international action” – including sanctions and an arms embargo – must be imposed on Israel over its widely condemned assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, dozens of UN experts demand.

      Israel’s attack on Rafah is not a “major operation”, the US State Department says, even though thousands of troops are in the area, dozens of Palestinians have been killed, and one million people displaced.

      Israel’s military killed more than 60 people – including many women and children – in four days of attacks on “safe zones” in Rafah, Save the Children charity says.

      A UN agency says 18,500 pregnant Palestinian women are fleeing Rafah’s “unrelenting nightmare”.

      At least 36,224 Palestinians have been killed and 81,777 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s attack is at least 1,139 with dozens of people still held captive in Gaza.

      Palestinian girl, 11, tells of surviving two days under rubble following Israeli attack

      Palestinian child rights organisation Defense for Children has shared a video interview with 11-year-old Rimas, who speaks about surviving under the rubble of her house for two days following an Israeli attack.

      Rimas recounts how an Israeli tank drove over the ruins of her destroyed home after it was bombed by Israeli forces, leaving her trapped underground with her family.

      “We were sitting quietly in our house. Then the house was bombed. We found the wall above our heads. We stayed under the rubble for two days without food or water. We expected to die under the rubble,” Rimas said.

      “We didn’t expect the tanks to come,” said the injured 11-year-old, who is now among the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

      “After they bombed our house, the tanks approached us. The soldiers started shooting over our house. The tank drove over the house rubble. We made a small hole in the wall and we barely got out. Soldiers laughed at us and told us to move forward, neither to the right or the left,” she added.

      Israeli security agency resists stepping up surveillance on anti-Netanyahu protesters: Report

      The head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, has reportedly resisted pressure to increase surveillance on the growing protest movement against Netanyahu’s government in Israel.

      In a report in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, a government official is quoted as saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have expressed expectations that the Shin Bet will “use its tools against parts of the protest [movement]”.

      “They want to turn it into a thought police,” the unnamed official is quoted as saying.

      However, at a meeting some weeks ago with Ben-Gvir and other senior officials, the Shin Bet director Ronen Bar said his agency would “not become a secret police”, the newspaper reports.

      “The Shin Bet also does security vetting for senior public figures, meaning it has access to sensitive, intimate information about them that should be inaccessible to politicians. One can only imagine what would happen if the Shin Bet were headed by someone who is serving a government, fighting tooth and nail to survive,” Haaretz added.