Israel-Hamas war live: patients and staff leave main Gaza hospital after conflicting reports of evacuation order

Jordan’s foreign minister has said Arab troops will not go to Gaza as he made a blistering criticism of Israel’s war on Hamas.

Ayman Safadi clashed with Joe Biden’s senior Middle East adviser on Saturday, saying a humanitarian pause should not be conditional on the release of hostages held by Hamas. The US envoy, Brett McGurk, said the onus was on Hamas to release hostages as a pathway to humanitarian aid increasing and a pause in the fighting.

The pair were addressing the IISS Manama Dialogue security summit in Bahrain, where Arab anger towards Israel’s refusal to negotiate a two-state solution was repeatedly voiced.

Speaker after speaker advised Israel that it would not find security through force.

At the same event, the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, indicated he believed Israel could face charges at the international criminal court, adding: “One horror does not justify another.”

Health officials say many patients, medical staff and those displaced by the ongoing war have left Gaza’s largest hospital, which was taken over by Israeli forces earlier in the week.

Palestinian officials and the Israeli military offered conflicting versions about what prompted the mass exodus from al-Shifa hospital, AP reported.

Health officials say they received an evacuation order from the military on Saturday morning, while the military said it had offered safe passage to those hoping to leave.

Before the departure, several thousand people, including medical patients in serious condition, were trapped in al-Shifa in dire conditions.

Geneva Abdul

Organisers of the pro-Palestine marches that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people to London’s streets have planned smaller action in villages, towns and cities rather than holding a national march in the capital today.

More than 100 pro-Palestine events demanding a ceasefire in Gaza are due to take place across the UK.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend vigils, protests, petitions, fundraisers and marches across London boroughs and cities including Birmingham, Cambridge, Liverpool and elsewhere on Saturday, according to organisers.

Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said the rallies were organised to show that “ordinary people” support a ceasefire.

Julian Borger

Prior to their capture of Dar al-Shifa hospital, the Israel Defence Forces went to great lengths to depict the medical complex as a headquarters for Hamas, from where its attacks on Israel were planned.

The evidence produced so far falls well short of that. IDF videos have shown only modest collections of small arms, mostly assault rifles, recovered from the extensive medical complex.

That suggests an armed presence, but not the sort of elaborate nerve centre depicted in animated graphics presented to the media before al-Shifa was seized, portraying a network of well-equipped subterranean chambers.

Even the videos produced so far have raised questions under scrutiny. A BBC analysis found the footage of an IDF spokesperson showing the apparent discovery of a bag containing a gun behind an MRI scanning machine, had been taped hours before the arrival of the journalists to whom he was supposedly showing it.

In a video shown later, the number of guns in the bag had doubled. The IDF claimed its video of what it found at the hospital was unedited, filmed in a single take, but the BBC analysis found it had been edited.

Israeli forces say they are still carefully exploring the site. The video presentation of al-Shifa did show the main facilities lay deep underground, and it is quite possible the Israeli soldiers have not reached them yet, so there could be much more to come. But the attempt to present what has been found so far as significant is bound to fuel scepticism about whatever is presented later.

There are questions over how much of its graphic presentation of the network under al-Shifa was based on what Israel knew already; its own architect had built an extensive basement area there the last time Israel directly occupied Gaza, up to 2005.

Israeli troops ordered the evacuation of al-Shifa hospital “in the next hour” over loudspeakers on Saturday, an AFP journalist at the scene reported, as troops combed the facility for Hamas hideouts.

Al-Shifa hospital – Gaza’s biggest – has become the focus of the Israel-Hamas war, now entering its seventh week after the October 7 attacks on southern Israel.

Israel claims Hamas operates a base underneath al-Shifa, a charge the militants deny. The United Nations estimated 2,300 patients, staff and displaced Palestinians were sheltering at Al-Shifa before Israeli troops moved in on Wednesday.

The Hamas health ministry in Gaza has announced dozens of deaths there as a result of power cuts caused by fuel shortages amid intense combat. Israel has made repeated calls for the hospital to be evacuated to the south, however medical professionals say the patients cannot be moved.

The hospital director, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, told AFP Israeli troops instructed him to ensure “the evacuation of patients, wounded, the displaced and medical staff, and that they should move on foot towards the seafront”.

Jordan’s foreign minister has said he does not understand how Israel’s goal of obliterating the Palestinian militant group Hamas could be achieved, Reuters reports.

Ayman Safadi said on Saturday:

Israel says it wants to wipe out Hamas. There’s a lot of military people here, I just don’t understand how this objective can be realised.

He warned that Jordan would do “whatever it takes to stop” the displacement of Palestinians, amid heavy Israeli bombardment of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October.

“We will never allow that to happen,” Safadi told at the IISS Manama Dialogue security summit in Bahrain.

In addition to it being a war crime, it would be a direct threat to our national security. We’ll do whatever it takes to stop it.

The Israel-Hamas war has reawakened longstanding fears in Jordan, home to a large population of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. They fear that Israel could expel Palestinians en masse from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians have surged since 7 October attack.

Safadi said:

This war is not taking us anywhere but towards more conflict, more suffering and the threat of expanding into regional wars.

Six Palestinians were killed on Saturday in an Israeli air strike on a house in Deir al-Balah in the southern Gaza Strip, Reuters has just quoted health officials as saying.

Twenty-six people were killed in a strike in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, a hospital director said on Saturday.

Agence France-Presse quotes the director of the Nasser hospital as saying on Saturday it had received the bodies of 26 people, as well as 23 people with serious injuries, after an airstrike on a residential building in the region’s Hamad Town.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Israel issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to move out of the line of fire and closer to humanitarian aid, in the latest indication that it plans to attack Hamas in south Gaza after subduing the north, Reuters reports.

“We’re asking people to relocate. I know it’s not easy for many of them, but we don’t want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire,” Mark Regev, an aide to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC on Friday.

Such a move could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to relocate again, along with residents of Khan Younis, a city of more than 400,000, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.

Israel dropped leaflets over Khan Younis telling people to evacuate to shelters, suggesting military operations there were imminent.

Regev said Israeli troops would have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters from underground tunnels and bunkers but that no such “enormous infrastructure” exists in less built-up areas to the west.

“I’m pretty sure that they won’t have to move again” if they moved west, he said, referring to people in the area.

We’re asking them to move to an area where hopefully there will be tents and a field hospital.

Because the western areas are closer to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, humanitarian aid could be brought in “as quickly as possible”, Regev said.

Welcome to our rolling live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. I’m Adam Fulton and here’s a look at the latest to bring you up to speed.

Israel has issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate west to avoid crossfire and be closer to humanitarian aid amid indications that Israeli military operations there could be imminent.

The warning, from an aide to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to relocate again, worsening a humanitarian crisis.

Meanwhile, a hospital director said 26 people had been killed in a strike on a residential building in Hamad, a neighbourhood in the Khan Younis area.

More on those stories shorty. In other news as it turns 8.15am in Gaza City and Tel Aviv:

• A first consignment of fuel has entered Gaza after Israel bowed to US pressure for limited deliveries to allow wastewater treatment and the resumption of communications after a two-day blackout. Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said on Friday the country’s war cabinet had agreed to allow two tanker trucks of fuel to enter the Gaza Strip each day, a quantity he described as “very minimal”.

• The White House said fuel should be allowed into the Gaza Strip “on a regular basis and in larger quantities”, while welcoming the Israeli move.

• A top UN official has renewed calls for a “humanitarian ceasefire” to allow aid to reach the 2.2 million people trapped in the Israel-Hamas war, saying: “We are not asking for the moon.”

• Israeli troops will advance to anywhere Hamas exists, including the southern part of the Gaza Strip, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari has said. It comes amid mounting concerns about Israeli plans to expand military operations in parts of the south where people have sought refuge from fighting. Civilians in parts of south-east Gaza were told in leaflets dropped by Israeli aircraft to move into a smaller “safe zone” in the coastal town of Mawasi, which covers just 14 sq km (5.4 sq miles), prompting warnings from the heads of 18 UN agencies and international aid groups.

• At least 12,000 Palestinians, including 5,000 children, have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, according to Hamas officials on Friday.

• Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said it has been trying to evacuate some of its staff and their families currently trapped inside the organisation’s facilities near al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Since last Saturday, MSF staff and families – 137 people, 65 of them children – have not been able to go outside because of ongoing fighting, it said.

• Gaza’s main telecommunications companies, Paltel and Jawwal, have confirmed the “partial restoration” of telecom services in various parts of Gaza.

• At least five Palestinians were killed and two others injured in a blast at a building in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said early on Saturday.

• A UN human rights official has urged Israel to stop using water as a “weapon of war” and allow clean water and fuel into Gaza to restart the water supply network. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on water and sanitation, said consciously preventing supplies of safe water from entering Gaza “violates both international humanitarian and human rights law”. The UN says Gaza’s civilians face the “immediate possibility” of starvation.

• An Israeli police investigation into the Hamas attacks at a music festival on 7 October has updated the death toll to 364, according to Israeli media reports. Earlier counts had placed the death count from the attack at Supernova music festival in Kibbutz Re’im at 270.

• The Israeli military has said it has retrieved the body of a soldier, Noa Marciano, who had been held captive by Hamas in a building near Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. It comes after the Israel Defence Forces said on Thursday they had found the body of Yehudit Weiss, one of about 240 hostages taken on 7 October, in a building near the hospital.

• Bahrain’s crown prince says a “hostage trade” between Hamas and Israel could achieve a break in hostilities he believes might end the conflict in Gaza. Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa also said security in the region would not realised without a two-state solution, in which he described the US as “indispensable” in achieving.

• The deputy head of Israel’s legislature has criticised the decision to allow a limited amount of fuel into Gaza for humanitarian needs. Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Knesset and a member of the ruling Likud party, said Israel was being “too humane” and that it should “burn Gaza now”.

• Five countries have submitted a referral to the international criminal court (ICC) for an investigation of “the situation in the state of Palestine”, ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan said. Khan confirmed his office was already conducting an investigation into the situation in the state of Palestine which began in March 2021.

• The Vatican has confirmed that Pope Francis will meet next week with relatives of hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza. The pope will separately meet with a delegation of Palestinians with family members in Gaza, Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said.