Israel president Isaac Herzog hosts Muslim clerics

Jerusalem: Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he met with a delegation of European Muslim clerics in Jerusalem on Monday to discuss reconciliation and religious co-existence, as war rages in Gaza.

“This morning at the President’s Residence, I hosted important Muslim leaders from across Europe”, Herzog said in a post on X.

Herzog praised the delegation led by French Imam Hassen Chalghoumi for choosing a path of “bridge-building, dialogue and belief” at a time of “tension between Jews and Muslims”.

Clerics from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and Italy took part in the visit, according to Israeli media.

Chalghoumi, imam for the Paris suburb of Drancy, took part in several protests denouncing Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. He also participated in rallies against antisemitism.

Monday’s visit was organised by the European Leadership Network (ELNET), a group that defines itself as “dedicated to strengthening relations between Europe and Israel”.

“You represent the world of brotherhood, humanity, and liberty”. The words of Imam Hassen Chalghoumi from France to me today.

I was moved and inspired to meet him and a delegation led by @elnet_global of Imams and Muslim community leaders from across Europe. They stand bravely… pic.twitter.com/gpJja2tQne

— יצחק הרצוג Isaac Herzog (@Isaac_Herzog) July 7, 2025

ELNET organised a rally in Paris in March “against Islamism”, drawing a crowd of 2,000 people including right-wing and far-right public figures.

Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 12 people on Monday, including six in a clinic housing Palestinians displaced after 21 months of war.

Israel has recently expanded its military operations in the Gaza Strip, where the war has created dire humanitarian conditions for the Palestinian territory’s population of more than two million.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that six people were killed and 15 injured in an Israeli air strike that hit the Al-Rimal clinic, “which houses hundreds of displaced people, in the Al-Rimal neighborhood west of Gaza City.”

AFP footage showed Palestinians, including groups of young children, combing through the bombed-out interior of the clinic, where mattresses lay alongside wood, metal and concrete broken apart in the blast.

“We were surprised by missiles and explosions inside the building,” eyewitness Salman Qudum told AFP.

“We did not know where to go because of the dust and destruction.”

In the south of the territory, Bassal said two people were killed and 20 others injured by Israeli forces’ gunfire while waiting for aid near a distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

A US- and Israel-backed group, the GHF took the lead in food distribution in the territory in late May, but its operations have had a chaotic rollout with repeated reports of aid seekers killed near its facilities.

– Hundreds reported killed –

The UN human rights office said last week that more than 500 people have been killed waiting to access food from GHF distribution points.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza on Sunday placed that toll higher, at 751 killed.

In Khan Yunis in the south, Bassal reported two people killed in an air strike on a house and another killed by Israeli gunfire.

An air strike on a house in Gaza City killed one and injured several others, he added.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.

Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency.

Israel’s campaign has killed more than 57,418 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations considers its figures reliable.