Israel-Hamas war live: Gaza civilians ‘face immediate possibility of starvation’ amid looming end to aid deliveries

Crowds gathered outside the constituency office of Labour’s MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, Rushanara Ali, on Thursday, chanting “vote her out” and “Labour party shame on you” after she did not back a Gaza ceasefire vote in parliament.

There were protests elsewhere against Labour MPs who backed Keir Starmer in the vote on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Some constituents were angry that Ali, a shadow business minister, did not back an amendment to the king’s speech brought by the SNP calling for a ceasefire.

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.

Robert Tait

Protesters against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza were locked in a battle of words with Washington police on Thursday after accusing officers of violently breaking up a demonstration on Capitol Hill that organisers insist was peaceful.

Leaders of the Ceasefire Now Coalition said 90 of their activists were injured in confrontations that took place after they staged a candlelit vigil outside the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters on Wednesday evening.

The coalition said volunteers were pepper-sprayed, kicked, pulled by the hair and dragged down flights of stairs by officers in riot gear, who they accused of ignoring long-standing protocols for non-violent protest by failing to issue dispersal notices or engage with the rally’s specially designated police liaison representative.

But in a rebuttal, police said the group was “not peaceful” and said six officers had to be treated for injuries after being pepper-sprayed and punched. One 24-year-old protester was arrested for allegedly slamming a female officer into a garage door and punching her in the face, police said in a statement.

Organisers said the event – jointly staged by three leftist groups, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now and the Democratic Socialists of America – followed the traditions of non-violence pioneered by the US civil rights movement.

But Wednesday’s clashes was one of the most graphic signs yet of the dissension arising from Israel’s military response to last month’s attack by Hamas.

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.

Gallant continued:

We have completed taking over and clearing the western part of Gaza City and are now advancing to the next stage of the offensive.

He said Israeli forces are working “precisely, determinedly, decisively” and coordinating air, sea and land forces, accompanied by “very strong and encompassing intelligence”.

Earlier on Thursday, Israel dropped leaflets into southern Gaza telling Palestinian civilians to leave four towns on the eastern edge of Khan Younis, raising fears that its war against Hamas could spread to areas it previously said were safe.

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, and “only a fraction” of aid that is needed is reaching the territory through the borders. She said:

With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters, and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation.

There is no way to meet current hunger needs with one operational border crossing. The only hope is opening another, safe passage for humanitarian access to bring life-saving food into Gaza.

Earlier this week, WFP confirmed the closure of the final bakery operating in partnership with the agency due to lack of fuel. Bread, a staple food for people in Gaza, is scarce or non-existent, it said.

The shortage of fuel is also crippling humanitarian distribution and operations, including the delivery of food assistance, it said. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has said there will be no aid deliveries into Gaza from the Rafah crossing from tomorrow because of fuel shortages.

It’s nearly midnight in Gaza City and Tel Aviv. Here’s a recap of the latest developments:

• 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.

• 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”.

• 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.

• The EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, has urged Israel not to be “consumed by rage” in its response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October. Speaking from kibbutz Be’eri on Friday, Borrell said “Israel must be defended” but that “one horror does not justify another: innocent civilians, including thousands of children, have died in recent weeks.

• 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.