UN aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Friday due to shortages of fuel and a communications shutdown, deepening the misery of thousands of hungry and homeless Palestinians as Israeli troops battled Hamas militants in the enclave.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) said civilians faced the “immediate possibility of starvation” due to the lack of food supplies.
With the war about to enter its seventh week, there was no sign of any let-up despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least for humanitarian pauses.
Israeli commandos were searching through every building and every floor of Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital and new information was emerging all the time, an Israeli military official said on Thursday.
“The operation is shaped by our understanding that there is well-hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex,” the official said, declining to be named.
Here are the latest updates
- At least 11,470 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza since October 7, but the figure has not been updated for days due to the collapse of the health system amid Israel’s attacks. In Israel, the official death toll from Hamas’s attacks stands at more than 1,200.
- Israeli PM Netanyahu says attempts to minimise civilian casualties “not successful”as Israeli forces drop leaflets, and telephone civilians asking them to leave.
- Israeli strikes continue across Gaza, with the enclave under a communications blackout as the main telecommunications provider ran out of fuel for its generators.
- Ashraf al-Qudra, the spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza, says “thousands of women, children, sick and wounded are in danger of death” as Israel continues its raid on al-Shifa for a third night, in an attempt to find an elusive Hamas command and control centre it has long claimed is located there.
- Israeli forces arrested two paramedics and ordered the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin evacuated, as it launched the latest raid in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reports.
- In a social media post on X, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he discussed the current situation in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank with his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in San Francisco.
