The Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) is fighting Moscows troops in the embattled city of Avdiivka, according to a post by the group on Telegram.
It said: "The assault squad of the Russian Volunteer Corps captured a Russian military serviceman during the attack on the enemy's fortified positions near the Avdiivka Coke and Chemical Plant."
The infighting and pinpoint attacks are occurring against the backdrop of Ukraine's laboured and gruelling counteroffensive in the east, which is focusing in part on the Donetsk region.
Speaking to Chinese media this month, Putin said: “Since June 4, it [Ukraine’s counteroffensive began] has been continuing. So far there are no results, there are only huge losses.”
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Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out a ceasefire in Gaza, declaring “this is a time for war”. In a press conference conducted in English on Monday, the Israeli prime minister said the army’s advance through Gaza opened opportunities to free hostages, which he said Hamas would do only under pressure.
Nearly 70% of those reported killed in Gaza are children and women, said the UNRWA chief. The head of the UN relief agency for Palestine refugees has warned that the level of destruction across Gaza “is unprecedented, the human tragedy unfolding under our watch is unbearable”. Philippe Lazzarini, addressing the UN security council on Monday, said nearly 3,200 children have been killed in Gaza in three weeks, citing figures by the territory’s health ministry.
The US does not believe a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is “the right answer” right now, the White House’s national security council spokesperson said. “We believe that a ceasefire right now benefits Hamas, and Hamas is the only one that would gain from that right now,” John Kirby said on Monday.
An Israeli soldier captured by Hamas has been rescued from Gazain an overnight operation, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said. Ori Megidish, an army private, was freed on Sunday night, three weeks after she was abducted with more than 220 other hostages. After a medical check declared her healthy she was reunited with her family.
Israeli forces appear to be advancing on Gaza City in two directions. In the north of the Gaza Strip, Israeli armour was operating close to the Mediterranean coast. Witness reports described Israeli tanks cutting the main north-south Salah al-Din road south of Gaza City and operating on the outskirts of the Zaytun district and Shejaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City. The cutting of the key road, if confirmed, would suggest that Israeli forces are attempting to cut off Gaza City from the south, effectively isolating and laying siege to the urban sprawl that extends north all the way to Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia.
A total of 26 trucks containing food supplies and medical equipment have passed through the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip, the Palestine Red Crescent said on Monday. Just 144 trucks have delivered supplies to the Palestinian humanitarian organisation since 7 October, it said.
Hundreds of patients are trapped inside al-Quds hospital in northern Gaza amid intense constant bombardment around the hospital, ActionAid warned. More than 12,000 displaced people are taking shelter in the hospital’s corridors and courtyards in addition to hundreds of patients who would not survive the journey south, it said.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza continued to worsen, with insufficient water, food, medicine and fuel, aid agencies said. The international criminal court’s top prosecutor, Karim Khan, said impeding aid could constitute a war crime and urged Israel to allow more trucks to enter.
The deepening IDF incursion into Gaza came amid dwindling Israeli public enthusiasm for a prolonged occupation. Support has fallen from 65% on 10 October to 46% now, according to a study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which has monitored the same sample of 1,774 people, with a 4.2% margin of error.
Israeli forces struck targets in Syria and Lebanon, in response to launches from those areas into Israel, the military said. In separate tweets, the IDF said an aircraft had attacked Hezbollah targets in Lebanese territory, including “infrastructures for directing terrorism and military infrastructures of the organisation”, and that a fighter jet had attacked launchers in Syrian territory.
Israel said it carried out an operation to “thwart terrorist infrastructure in the Jenin refugee camp” in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which it claimed led to 51 people being arrested, of which it claimed 38 were operatives of Hamas.
A Palestinian stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli police officer before being shot dead in annexed East Jerusalem, close to the green line. Guardian correspondents about 200 metres from where the shooting took place heard two bursts of gunfire in quick succession and saw armed police, horses and sharp shooters on motorbikes converging on a nearby petrol station.
The Kremlin has said amob that stormed a Dagestan airport in search of Jewish passengers from Israel on Sunday did so due to “outside influence”. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said “ill-wishers” had used widely seen images of suffering in Gaza to stir up feeling in the predominantly Muslim region in the north Caucasus. Local health authorities said 20 people were injured in the incident in Makhachkala.
A British Conservative MP, Paul Bristow, has been sacked from his government job after breaking ranks to publicly urge Rishi Sunak to back a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
A man accused of murder, attempted murder and a hate crime in an attack on a Palestinian American boy and his mother pleaded not guilty on Monday after his indictment by an Illinois grand jury. Joseph Czuba, 71, is charged in the fatal stabbing of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume and the wounding of his mother, Hanaan Shahin, on 14 October. Authorities said the victims were targeted because of their Muslim faith.
Civil rights groups in the US have warned of a “wave of McCarthyite backlash” against criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza after Americans expressing support for the Palestinians have been sacked, faced threats of violence and hounded by pro-Israel groups.
Israel has struck Hamas gunmen inside their vast tunnel network beneath Gaza, its military has said.
“Over the last day, combined IDF combat forces struck approximately 300 targets, including anti-tank missile and rocket launch posts below shafts, as well as military compounds inside underground tunnels belonging to the Hamas terrorist organisation,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.
Clearing the terrorists from the tunnels is a key objective for Israel as it expands its ground operation inside Gaza to wipe out Hamas.
It comes after Israeli special forces rescued a female soldier held hostage by Hamas during a raid in Gaza on Monday.
Follow the latest updates below and join the conversation in the comments section
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President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine and “agents of western special services” after a mob descended on Makhachkala airport in Russia’s North Caucasus on Sunday evening in search of Jewish passengers on a plane that arrived from Israel.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Monday the riot was the result of a “provocation” orchestrated from outside Russia, with Ukraine playing a “direct and key role”. Earlier in the day, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, claimed the unrest was “the result of external intervention, including external information influence”.
Neither Zakharova or Peskov provided evidence to support their claims of outside interference.
Asked about the accusations against the west at a White House briefing, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said: “Classic Russian rhetoric, when something goes bad in your country, you blame somebody else.”
“The west had nothing to do with this. This is just hate, bigotry and intimidation, pure and simple,” Kirby said.
“Some people will compare it to the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century and I think that’s probably an apt description, given that video that we’ve seen out there,” he said of anti-Jewish attacks.
Kirby criticised Putin for not doing more to condemn the violence, which he described as “a chilling demonstration of hate”.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller earlier called Russian allegations of Ukrainian involvement “absurd”.
“We call on Russian authorities to publicly condemn these violent protests, to hold anyone involved accountable and to ensure the safety of Israelis and Jews in Russia,” Miller said.
Ukraine – which Russia invaded last year – has also strongly rejected the allegations and pointed to Russia’s “deep-rooted antisemitism”.
The anti-Jewish demonstrations come against the backdrop of Putin taking a pro-Palestinian stance in Israel’s war in Gaza, a position that aligns the Kremlin with its ally Iran in what analysts have described as a growing global divide between east and west.
Last week, a senior Hamas delegation travelled to Moscow to meet Russian officials in the organisation’s first high-profile international visit since it launched a raid in southern Israel on 7 October. Israel criticised the visit, saying inviting Hamas “sends a message legitimising terrorism”.
By Olga Robinson, Maria Korenyuk and Grigor Atanesian
BBC Verify & BBC Global Disinformation Team
On Sunday morning, details of a flight arriving later that day from Tel Aviv were posted on a popular channel on Telegram in Dagestan, a diverse region in the most southerly point of Russia.
The channel on the social media platform was called Morning Dagestan (Utro Dagestan). It urged its followers to "meet the unexpected visitors" at Dagestan's main airport, in Makhachkala. The flight would arrive at 19:00 local time.
At the designated time, hundreds of young men arrived at the airport, overwhelming security guards. They made their way onto the runway; some even got on to the roof. The mob was looking for Jewish passengers.
Videos show Palestinian flags being waved and antisemitic chants are audible. Police took several hours to disperse the rioters. According to Russian news agencies, about 60 people were arrested.
The protest clearly surprised the security forces, so how did the rioters manage to organise and co-ordinate themselves so effectively? The BBC has tracked the messages shared on Morning Dagestan. We also found other local Telegram chats sharing similar antisemitic rhetoric and calling for violence.
The Morning Dagestan is an anti-Russian and Islamist channel which advocates for an end to what it calls "Moscow's occupation regime" in the Caucasus. It posts short updates about local events alongside messages on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It also posts messages about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with content supporting Hamas, designated a terrorist group by the UK and other countries, but not Russia.
It is a public channel that just a few days ago had 50,000 subscribers, but has since grown to more than 65,000.
On Sunday, its posts provided detailed instructions for those gathering at the airport, including forming a crowd to block the exit when passengers arriving from Israel left the plane.
"Allow them to exit one by one, curse the state of Israel, and then move on!", read one post. "If they refuse to curse Israel, we'll block the airport and won't let them leave!"
It also urged its followers to photograph passengers' faces and track their cars in order to compile a list of their addresses in Dagestan.
In the past few days, the same channel has called on people to join rallies in Makhachkala and other cities in the region to "support two million Muslims". It has also shared antisemitic messages and called for local people to refuse to rent out flats to Jewish people.
We also found calls for violence in other Telegram channels with tens of thousands of subscribers, including those with no apparent prior political interest.
Avito is a website primarily used for buying and selling items. In its channel, we found messages targeting a Jewish family from Dagestan whose members were allegedly fighting for Israel.
In the channel Gorets, which has almost 17,000 subscribers, there were posts encouraging the persecution of local Jewish people and Israeli newcomers to Dagestan.
On Monday evening, Telegram's owner, Pavel Durov, announced that "channels inciting violence will be blocked", attaching a screenshot of a Morning Dagestan post. Shortly after that, the channel became unavailable.
Who is behind Morning Dagestan?
The Morning Dagestan channel has been associated with Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian MP who defected to Ukraine in 2016 and was granted Ukrainian citizenship.
Ponomarev runs social media channels calling for protests in Russia and the overthrow of Vladimir Putin's regime.
On Monday, Ponomarev said that "some time ago", he was "contacted by a group of Islamists from Dagestan" whom he helped organise and finance rallies against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
While Ponomarev said that he had stopped supporting the channel in September 2022, his own statements contradict this claim. He called Utro Dagestan "our channel" in August 2023, and also referred to the channel as part of his operations in September.
Dagestan's governor Sergey Melikov and Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova used Ponomarev's connection to the channel to accuse Ukraine of orchestrating the riots at Makhachkala airport.
"Today we have received absolutely reliable information that the Morning Dagestan channel is administered and regulated from the territory of Ukraine by traitors," said Melikov.
The channel itself then posted a statement, stating that it has no connection to Ponomarev or Ukraine.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack.
And while Mr Zelensky expressed support for Israel in the wake of the Hamas attack on 7 October, Putin used it to criticise what he saw as "a failure of the US policy in the Middle East".
Instead of condemning Hamas's actions, Russia's foreign ministry called on both sides to de-escalate and tabled a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Last week, a Hamas delegation visited Moscow for talks, prompting a protest from Israel.
Outburst of antisemitic violence
Dagestan is the most diverse of Russia's regions, with dozens of indigenous ethnic groups - predominantly Muslim, but including an ancient Jewish community - living alongside each other for centuries.
Rasul Abdulkhalikov, a Dagestani sociologist, believes this burst of antisemitic violence can be attributed to the actions of regional authorities, who did not allow pro-Palestinian rallies in the country, despite widespread support for the Palestinian cause and anti-Israeli sentiment among Dagestan's young people.
"The governor Sergey Melikov is to blame that this sentiment came this far and wasn't channelled elsewhere," he says.
He believes Telegram channels, WhatsApp chats and Instagram pages spreading hate speech and misinformation only helped harden attitudes: "You look for information, find things that confirm your beliefs, and spread them further."
