Israel-Hamas war live: UN warns of ‘immediate possibility of starvation’ in Gaza; IDF raid Jenin refugee camp in West Bank | Israel-Hamas war

The Israeli military said on Friday it retrieved the body of a soldier, Noa Marciano, who had been held captive by Palestinian militant group Hamas in a building near Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital.

The Israeli military on Tuesday confirmed the death of the soldier after Hamas issued a video of her alive followed by images of what the Palestinian faction said was her body after she was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 9 November.

After the Israeli military dropped leaflets Wednesday afternoon telling Palestinians in areas east of the southern town of Khan Younis to evacuate to a “safe zone” in Mawasi, a town of just 14 sq km, the heads of 18 UN agencies and international charities on Thursday rejected the creation of a safe zone, saying that concentrating civilians in one area while hostilities continue was too dangerous.

Similar leaflets were dropped over northern Gaza for weeks ahead of Israel’s ground invasion.

The aid agencies called for a cease-fire and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid and fuel for Gaza’s population.

Despite the IDF having told Palestinians to leave northern Gaza for the south, strikes continued in the south Thursday. In the city of Deir al-Balah, a funeral was held for 28 people killed in an overnight bomb that leveled several buildings.

Most of Gaza’s population is crowded into southern Gaza, including hundreds of thousands who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate the north. Some 1.5 million people driven from their homes have packed into UN shelters or houses with other families.

If the assault moves into the south, it is not clear where they would go. Egypt has refused to open its borders to Palestinians forced to leave their homes by Israeli forces., though Egypt has received limited numbers of medical evacuees from Gaza through the Rafah crossing this month, most of whom have been taken to Egyptian hospitals for treatment.

“We have to concentrate on getting medical facilities established inside of Gaza so it can be more accessible to Palestinians who are in need for medical assistance,” Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said at a briefing for foreign media in Cairo on Thursday.

Three Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli drone strike in the city Jenin in the West Bank, the head of the Palestinian ambulance service told Reuters on Friday.

It is unclear whether the deaths were in the refugee camp raided by the IDF overnight, or in another part of Jenin.

Since 7 October, at least 190 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry.

The figure is almost as high as the ministry’s toll of 208 dead for the first nine months of the year up to the start of the war.

Raids by Israeli forces on Palestinian communities have multiplied in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Seven Palestinians were killed this week during an Israeli raid in Tulkarem, in the north of the West Bank, while a ninth was shot dead near Hebron on Tuesday morning.

A large deployment of Israeli troops raided the Jenin refugee camp overnight, AFP reporters there said. Israel’s military did not immediately comment.

Al JAzeera reports that IDF troops are raiding Ibn Sina Hospital near Jenin, with “dozens of Israeli armoured vehicles … seen surrounding the hospital complex.”

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the Gaza Strip now faces a “massive” food gap and widespread hunger while nearly the entire population of the Palestinian enclave is in “desperate” need of food assistance.

In a statement on Thursday, WFP executive director Cindy McCain said food and water supplies are “practically non-existent” in Gaza that “civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation.”

This is the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war with me, Helen Sullivan.

The top development this morning: The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the Gaza Strip now faces a “massive” food gap and widespread hunger while nearly the entire population of the Palestinian enclave is in “desperate” need of food assistance.

In a statement on Thursday, WFP executive director Cindy McCain said food and water supplies are “practically non-existent” in Gaza that “civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation.”

Meanwhile a large deployment of Israeli troops raided the Jenin refugee camp overnight, AFP reporters there said. Israel’s military did not immediately comment.

Al JAzeera reports that IDF troops are raiding Ibn Sina Hospital near Jenin, with “dozens of Israeli armoured vehicles … seen surrounding the hospital complex.”

We’ll have more shortly.

Other developments include:

• At least 11,470 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the Israel-Hamas war broke out six weeks ago, according to figures by the Palestinian health authorities. The ministry said 4,707 of the dead were children and minors and that 3,155 were women. The vast majority have been killed in Israeli airstrikes. In recent days, the Palestinian health ministry in the West Bank has started updating the Gaza death toll, AP reported. Until last week, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza was the main official source for the death toll in the Palestinian enclave, but it stopped publishing updates after key ministry officials based in Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital lost electricity and connectivity.

• All communications are down in Gaza on Thursday night. The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Gaza was in a “total communication blackout” and that he feared the blackout could heighten panic in the Gaza Strip and erode civil order. The main telecommunications companies confirmed no telecom services were working because of the lack of fuel.

• The Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza has been completely shut down and about 45 patients who urgently need surgery have been left in the reception area, the hospital chief Atef al-Kahlout has said. Al-Ahli hospital is currently under siege by Israeli tanks and a “violent attack is underway” at the hospital, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Thursday.

• The Israeli operation in al-Shifa hospital continued on Thursday after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) entered the sprawling compound in the early hours of Wednesday morning. There were reports of shooting at the hospital. The IDF said it had uncovered a Hamas tunnel shaft and a vehicle with weapons at the Dar al-Shifa hospital complex. It made videos and photographs of the tunnel shaft and weapons public, but no independent verification was possible. The IDF accused Hamas earlier in the day of hiding evidence that would confirm that the organisation had used the hospital as a command and control centre – a charge Israel has made frequently in recent weeks as troops have advanced further into the territory and global anger has mounted.

• Hamas and medical administrators have strenuously denied the allegation al-Shifa hospital was a command centre and the health ministry in Gaza said the Israeli military did not find any weapons in the hospital. Human Rights Watch said that images released by Israel on Wednesday of weapons it says its soldiers found inside al-Shifa were not sufficient to justify revoking the hospital’s status as protected by the laws of war. The White House’s national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said the US is still “convinced by the soundness” of its intelligence “that convinces us that Hamas was using al-Shifa as a command and control node”.

• The UN is looking for ways to evacuate al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, but options are limited by security and logistical constraints, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said on Thursday. One obstacle is that the Palestinian Red Crescent lacks sufficient fuel for its ambulances within Gaza to evacuate patients, according to the WHO regional emergency director, Rick Brennan. The WHO understood that there were still about 600 patients, including 27 in critical condition, at Shifa, he said.

• Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has announced a “next stage” of the offensive in Gaza during a situational assessment on Thursday. “I arrived today at the headquarters of the division whose special forces also operate inside the Shifa hospital,” i24NEWS reported Gallant saying alongside the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deputy chief of staff and other senior officers. “There are significant findings. We are working with precision and determination.” His comments came as the Israeli military said it uncovered a Hamas tunnel shaft and a vehicle with weapons at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital complex. It made videos and photographs of the tunnel shaft and weapons public, but no independent verification was possible.

• The Israeli military said it has recovered the body of an Israeli hostage from a building near al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Yehudit Weiss, a 65-year-old woman, was abducted from the Be’eri kibbutz by Hamas during their attack on southern Israel on 7 October. The IDF said the body had been identified by forensic scientific examiners and the family had been informed.

• The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has said there will be no aid deliveries into Gaza from the Rafah crossing from Friday. All communications are down in Gaza because of a lack of fuel, UNRWA said in a statement on Thursday. “This makes it impossible to manage or coordinate humanitarian aid convoys,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications, said. The UNRWA commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini said he believed there was a deliberate attempt to “strangle” its humanitarian work in Gaza.

• The Israeli air force dropped leaflets overnight on Thursday in eastern areas of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip, telling people to evacuate to shelters for their own safety – suggesting imminent military operations in the area. The flyers told civilians in Bani Shuhaila, Khuza’a, Abassan and al-Qarara that anyone in the vicinity of militants or their positions was “putting his life in danger”, local people told Reuters. Tens of thousands of people displaced from the north have sought refuge in Khan Younis, causing severe overcrowding amid shortages of food and water.

• The heads of several United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organisations have said they will not take part in the establishment of any “safe zones” in Gaza that are declared by only one side of the conflict. The joint statement on Thursday said proposals to unilaterally create “safe zones” in Gaza “risk creating harm for civilians, including large-scale loss of life, and must be rejected”.

• Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said there were “strong indications” that some hostages were held in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, and that it was “one of the reasons” Israeli forces entered the hospital. In an interview with CBS, Netanyahu added that “if they were, they were taken out.”

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also spoken with Israeli war cabinet Minister Benny Gantz and discussed efforts to boost and accelerate the transit of critical humanitarian assistance into Gaza, the State Department said on Thursday.
  linken also stressed the urgent need for affirmative steps to de-escalate tensions in the West Bank, including by confronting rising levels of settler extremist violence, the department said in a statement.

• The UN high commissioner for human rights has said the killing of civilians in Gaza cannot be dismissed as “collateral damage”, while calling for a ceasefire based on humanitarian and human rights grounds. Volker Türk said that five weeks into the war, “massive outbreaks of infectious disease, and hunger” seemed inevitable in the densely populated Gaza.

• Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam brigades, has claimed responsibility for a shooting at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem. Six Israeli security force members were wounded after three gunmen opened fire at the checkpoint on Wednesday, Israeli police said.

• Shelling intensified across Lebanon’s frontier with Israel on Thursday, with the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah saying it had fired missiles at eight positions across the border, and Israel saying it had retaliated with artillery.

• Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, on Thursday repeated his call for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 on Wednesday, Lapid said “we can’t run an extended [military] operation with a prime minister we do not have faith in.”

• Joe Biden has presented an unapologetic defence of his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, arguing on Wednesday night that Hamas presented a continuing threat to Israel. The US president also argued that Israeli forces had switched from aerial bombardment, which he seemed to acknowledge had been indiscriminate in parts, to more targeted ground operations. Biden’s remarks come amid escalating tensions between US and Israeli officials over Israel’s future strategy.

• Israel’s UN ambassador has denounced a UN security council resolution calling for a “humanitarian pauses” as “disconnected from reality” and “meaningless”. The UNSC voted on Wednesday to back a resolution calling for “urgent extended humanitarian pauses for [a] sufficient number of days to allow aid access” to the embattled territory. The US and the UK abstained.

• Norway’s parliament has adopted a resolution calling on the government to be ready to recognise an “independent” Palestinian state. Iceland, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic and Romania are among countries to have already given legal recognition to a Palestinian state.