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PremiumIsrael-Hamas war: On the 42nd day of the war in Gaza, the Israeli Defense Forces have found weapons inside Al-Shifa hospital. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had encircled Gaza's largest hospital for days and claimed that Hamas militants were hiding inside it. Meanwhile, the United Nations has condemned the actions of Israeli troops for storming Gaza’s hospital. Whereas Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel “a terrorist state" in a speech addressing members of the ruling AK Party in Ankara.
However, Israel has said that entry into Gaza’s Shifa hospital compound will not mark an end to military operations against Hamas, with many difficult days still to come in the conflict.
The UN said 40 patients died in Shifa hospital on 14 November before Israel said it had entered the hospital compound. Only one hospital in northern Gaza is reportedly still operational at a minimum level, the UN said.
Israel unleashed its assault on Gaza in response to a cross-border Hamas raid on southern Israel on October 7 in which gunmen killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel says it has lost 33 soldiers in Gaza.
Palestinian officials said 10,812 Gaza residents had been killed as of Thursday, about 40% of them children, in air and artillery strikes.
Here are the latest updates on the Israel-Hamas war
The Red Crescent said Israeli tanks were laying siege to Gaza's Al-Ahli hospital in a "violent attack" on Thursday, as Israel accuses Hamas of using health facilities as bases. "Teams are unable to move and reach those who are injured," the organisation said on X, formerly Twitter.
Israeli forces dropped leaflets in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza overnight, warning people in four towns to evacuate their homes and head to shelters, Reuters and the Times of Israel report.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that out of 35 hospitals, only nine are partially functioning. Moreover, the Palestinian death toll as of November 15 stands at 11,470, of whom 4,407 are children. More than 29,000 people are injured, AlJazeera reported while citing data released by the Ministry of Health.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society posted a video on X purportedy showing thousands of internally displaced people, among them patients, making the difficult 11km (6.8-mile) trek from al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City to southern Gaza. The video clip shows people, with their bags and belongings, walking among the ruins of destroyed buildings as they try to reach south.
The United Nations (UN) human rights chief has decried serious allegations of violations of international law in the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting an international investigation was needed.
The Israel army said on Thursday it has gained 'operational control' of the Gaza port, news agency AFP reported.
Three gunmen opened fire on the West Bank checkpoint south of Jerusalem. Four people were wounded at the scene due to the gunshots and were taken to the hospital
Israeli forces killed all three terrorists.
Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said a total of 107 Russian nationals and their families crossed over from the Gaza Strip into Egypt Wednesday.
The Russian ministry said it would deliver 21 metric tons of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza.
The humanitarian cargo flew from Moscow to Egypt and will be handed over to the Egyptian Red Crescent Society, the ministry added.
Israel’s military must take “special care" in its operations around the Al Shifa hospital, US White House said on Thursday.
John Kirby said that the facility is "an active, legitimate hospital, serving the legitimate medical needs of the people of Gaza". But Israelis have the right to call for Hamas to “surrender themselves out of that hospital," he said. “It’s a deliberate decision on their own part to put innocent people between them and the Israeli Defense Forces."
Hamas has agreed in principle to free 50 women and children held hostage in Gaza in exchange for a three-to-five-day pause in fighting and the release of some women and children held in Israeli prisons, the Washington Post reported, citing an Arab diplomat it didn’t identify.
Only one of the 24 hospitals with in-patient capacity in the northern section of Gaza are still operational, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on the X platfrom. The reported number of dead Palestinians as of 10 November stood at 11,078, a number that hasn’t been independently verified.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said a "very strong force" may need to remain in Gaza for the near future to prevent the Hamas militant group re-emerging after the war.
"If we pull back, then who will take over? We can't leave a vacuum. We have to think about what will be the mechanism; there are many ideas that are thrown in the air," Herzog said in an interview with the FT published on Thursday.
"But no one will want to turn this place, Gaza, into a terror base again", he added.
Herzog told FT that Israel's government was discussing many ideas about how Gaza would be run once the war ends and added that he assumed that the United States and "our neighbours in the region" would have some involvement in the post-conflict order.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, but has not put forward a plan to determine who would govern Gaza after the war. Netanyahu has said that Israel would have to maintain overall security responsibility in Gaza for an indefinite period.
Israeli fighter jets have struck the house of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, the Israeli military said on Thursday.
Haniyeh's house was "used as terrorist infrastructure and often served as a meeting point for Hamas' senior leaders to direct terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers," the military said.
Turkey’s health minister says 26 patients from Gaza and 13 people accompanying them have passed through the Rafah crossing into Egypt on Wednesday.
Turkey has long offered to treat cancer patients in the country. Koca described the patients evacuated Wednesday as “Gazans" and did not specify if any have Turkish nationality.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said the horrors of the war have intensified and 'carnage' must stop.
"As the carnage in Gaza reaches new levels of horror every day, the world continues to watch in shock as hospitals come under fire, premature babies die, and an entire population is deprived of the basic means of survival," The UN relief chief said.
US President Joe Biden said he had made it clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a two-state solution was the only answer to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict and that occupying Gaza would be "a big mistake."
The US president said he is doing everything in his power to free hostages held by the Hamas militant group in Gaza, but that did not mean sending in the US military.
According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, two residential buildings in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp were hit by Israeli forces on Thursday morning.
The airstrike also occured near Gaza’s Central Petrol Station, the agency added.
Intense raids were also launched by Israeli aircraft in Beit Lahiya and the vicinity of the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip.
Director of UNRWA, Thomas White, has expressed fear and apprehension across the Gaza Strip as people struggle to find bread and water.
"Even queuing for bread, people are terrified they are going to be hit in a strike," the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said.
A car crashed into a barricade near the entrance of the Israeli embassy in Tokyo on Thursday. According to local media report, the man was detained on the spot and a police officer got injured. Around the same time, a staffer at the Israeli embassy in Beijing was assaulted on the street and hospitalised.
Israel renewed its operation at Gaza's largest hospital on Thursday. Gaza's health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, said Thursday that Israeli bulldozers had "destroyed parts of the southern entrance" of the hospital.
Both Israel and the US say Hamas have a command centre below the Al-Shifa complex. The Palestinian militant group and directors at the hospital have denied the charge.
US President Joe Biden accused Hamas of committing a “war crime". Biden added, “You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital. And that's a fact. That's what's happened".
Only a quarter of Gaza’s hospitals are still functioning, with about 26 out of 36 institutions now closed — either because they have been damaged or because they ran out of fuel, the World Health Organization said.
The UN health agency has lost contact with health workers at Shifa Hospital. Israeli military raided the hospital yesterday. The Israeli army claims the Hamas militant group uses hospitals as cover for its fighters and has set up its main command center in and beneath the hospital.
Approximately 82 bodies from Shifa were buried in a mass grave Wednesday, with another 80 bodies left unburied.
US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Wednesday that the United States did not sign off on Israel’s raid on Shifa hospital.
Kirby, responding to questions about the timing of the operation and his statement that the U.S. knows Hamas militants shelter in hospitals, said the United States doesn’t expect advance notice from Israel before its military operations.
“We did not give an OK to their military operations around the hospital," Kirby said, speaking to reporters from San Francisco, where President Joe Biden was preparing to meet with China’s leader on Wednesday. “We don’t expect the Israelis to inform us."
The Israeli military displayed what it says are Hamas weapons and military equipment it uncovered in Gaza’s Shifa Hospital.
The israeli army early Wednesday raided the hospital, Gaza’s largest. After a daylong search, the army released a video showing several AK-47 automatic rifles, ammunition, grenades, protective vests and other equipment used by Hamas. It said many of the items were in duffel bags in the hospital’s MRI department.
The UN Security Council approved a resolution Wednesday calling for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors" in Gaza after four failed attempts to respond to the Israel-Hamas war.
The vote was 12-0 with the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia abstaining.
The final draft watered down its language from a “demand" to a “call" for humanitarian pauses.
US President Joe Biden said that Israel war in Gaza to stop 'when Hamas no longer maintains the capacity' to murder. Biden added he made it clear to Israelis it would be a mistake to occupy Gaza.
In a video by the Israeli Air Force, the military launched a strike on a Hezbollah post in Lebanon. The Israeli troops targeted weapons depots, military infrastructure, observation posts, and launch positions.
"From one of the attacked positions, an anti-tank missile was fired last night at a peaceful area," the Israeli Air Force wrote on the X platform.
Qatar has condemned the Israeli military for raiding Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital, and called it "a war crime and a blatant violation of international laws".
Qatar has called for an international probe into Israeli raids on medical supplies.
On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers launched a "targeted" operation inside Gaza's largest hospital. Israel has accused Hamas of using Al-Shifa hospital as a command base. Hamas has denied the claim.
Notably, hospitals are protected in times of war under international humanitarian law but Israel has continuously said that Hamas' "continued military use of the Shifa hospital jeopardizes its protected status".
Entry into Gaza’s Shifa hospital compound by Israeli troops will not mark an end to military operations against Hamas, with many difficult days still to come in the conflict, an Israeli government spokesperson said.
Eylon Levy told Bloomberg Radio in an interview said, “It would be a very serious blow to Hamas…But it’s not the end and we know that the days ahead are going to be long and they are going to be difficult".
