Israel Hamas war Day 39 Updates | Biden and Xi Jinping will talk Israeli conflict during meeting on Wednesday: White House

Gaza’s health ministry spokesperson warned on Wednesday of a potential Israeli raid on the enclave’s Al Shifa hospital complex, saying Israel informed Gaza health officials that its forces would raid the facility.

The Israeli military, asked for comment, said it was looking into the matter.

The Gaza health ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra, told Al Jazeera that Israel “informed us that it will raid Al Shifa hospital complex in the coming minutes.”

But he added: “The occupation did not specify whether (its forces) would enter the complex. But it said that within a few minutes it would raid the complex. We do not know how it will raid it or what mechanism will be used, nor do we know (Israel’s) intentions with the raid.”

Reuters was not able to independently confirm the situation at Al Shifa. - Reuters

Yemen’s Huthi rebels on Tuesday threatened to target Israeli ships in the Red Sea, as the group said they had launched another missile targeting the country over its war with Hamas.

Rebel leader Abdul-Malik al-Huthi said the Iran-backed group was monitoring for Israeli vessels in the commercially vital waters, even those that do not have Israeli flags.

“Our eyes are open to constant monitoring and searching for any Israeli ship,” he said in a speech broadcast by the rebels’ Al-Masirah TV station.

“The enemy relies on camouflage in its movement in the Red Sea, especially in Bab al-Mandab (strait), and did not dare to raise Israeli flags on its ships... and turned off identification devices.”

“We will search and verify the ships that belong to him, and we will not hesitate to target them, and let everyone know that he is afraid,” he added.

The Bab al-Mandab Strait is the narrow pass between Yemen and Djibouti at the foot of the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, which carries about a fifth of global oil consumption. - AFP

Israel has given approval for 24,000 litres of diesel fuel to be used by trucks for United Nations operations in the Gaza Strip, a humanitarian source said on Tuesday.

The fuel is only meant for U.N. trucks, and not for hospitals, the source said. The United States pressured the U.N. to accept the fuel, the source added.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment. There was no immediate comment from Hamas. - Reuters

The United States said on Tuesday that it has unspecified intelligence that Hamas and another Palestinian militant group use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip — including Shifa Hospital — and tunnels underneath them, to hide and support their military operations, and to hold hostages.

The White House’s national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said the US does not support strikes against hospitals.

“We do not support striking a hospital from the air,” Kirby told reporters accompanying President Joe Biden aboard Air Force One to San Francisco for a summit with Asia-Pacific leaders. “Hospitals and patients must be protected.” Kirby said the US also does not want to see “a firefight in a hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care that they deserve.” When asked about evidence to support the claim, Kirby said “it comes from a variety of intelligence sourcing.” He wouldn’t be more specific. - AP

The crisis in Israel will come up during bilateral talks between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping and the U.S. welcomes opportunities for China to support Israel and get humanitarian aid into the region, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday.

Mr. Biden will meet with his Chinese counterpart in person for the first time in a year on Wednesday during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. It will be only the second in-person meeting between the two leaders since Biden took office in January 2021.

Thousands streamed to a rally in Washington on Tuesday to support Israel and to condemn anti-Semitism in a riposte to weeks of largely pro-Palestinian demonstrations across a deeply divided United States.

With senior members of Congress due to address the event on the National Mall, near the Capitol, the crowd rapidly swelled with people wearing the white and blue colors of Israel and waving placards calling on Palestinian militant group Hamas to free hostages. - AFP

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he is engaged in daily discussions to secure a release of hostages being held by Hamas and he believes it is going to happen.

“Hang in there, we’re coming,” Biden said at the White House, when asked by reporters what his message to family members of hostages would be.

Biden said he speaks every day with the parties involved in negotiations over a possible hostage release, but did not want to share the details.

- Reuters

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Israel is committing the “equivalent of terrorism” in Gaza by killing innocent women and children in its war on Hamas.

The leader of Latin America’s biggest country said the Islamist group’s actions do not justify Israel’s military response in Gaza, where more than 11,200 people, also mostly civilians, have been killed, according to health officials in the Hamas-run territory.

“Israel’s attitude toward children, toward women, is the equivalent of terrorism. There’s no other way to put it,” Lula said in his weekly social media address.

“If I know a place is full of children, even if there’s a monster inside, I can’t kill the children just because I want to kill the monster.”

- AFP

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres does not deserve to lead the United Nations, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said.

“Guterres does not deserve to be the head of the United Nations. Guterres did not promote any peace process in the region... Guterres, like all the free nations, should say clearly and loudly: ‘Free Gaza from Hamas’,” Cohen told a press conference at the UN in Geneva.

- AFP

A Hamas official said on Tuesday that Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip had put 25 of the besieged territory’s 35 hospitals out of use.

“It has also destroyed 94 government buildings and 253 schools,” Osama Hamdan, a Beirut-based Hamas official, told a news conference in the Lebanese capital.

- Reuters

Relatives of hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel set out Tuesday on a five-day protest march to Jerusalem to demand action to bring their loved ones home.

Hundreds of demonstrators were to make the 63-kilometer (40-mile) march from Tel Aviv to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to demand “the immediate release of all the hostages,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

Formed in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which Hamas militants killed around 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 more, according to Israeli authorities, the group works to keep the spotlight on the captives’ fate.

Portraits of the hostages adorned black T-shirts and posters as more than 100 relatives and their supporters set out from the square outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the epicentre of the hostage protests.

- AFP

The United States has imposed a third round of sanctions aimed at Palestinian militant group Hamas following its attack last month on Israel, targeting leaders and financiers of the group.

The U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement the action, taken in coordination with Britain, targeted key Hamas officials and the mechanisms through which Iran provides support to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

“The United States will continue to work with our partners, including the U.K., to deny Hamas the ability to raise and use funds to carry out its atrocities,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in the statement.

“Hamas’s actions have caused immense suffering and shown that terrorism does not occur in isolation. Together with our partners we are decisively moving to degrade Hamas’s financial infrastructure, cut them off from outside funding, and block the new funding channels they seek to finance their heinous acts.”

- Reuters

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads one of the religious nationalist parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, said Gaza could not survive as an independent entity and it would be better for Palestinians there to leave for other countries.

he supported a call by two members of the Israeli parliament who wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Western countries should accept Gazan families who expressed a desire to relocate.

The comments underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians out of land where they want to build a future state, repeating the mass dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948.

“I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world,” Smotrich said in a statement. “This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger.”

He said an area as small as the Gaza Strip without natural resources could not survive alone, and added: “The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza”.

- Reuters

Indonesia President Joko Widodo has urged United States President Joe Biden to do more in Gaza to help bring a ceasefire and end the “atrocities”, Al Jazeera has reported.

The two leaders met on Monday (local time) Mr. Biden at the White House as the two leaders prepare for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco

A large part of the discussion at the Oval Office was on the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, which has been raging for over a month.

Violence has developed in Gaza since Israel’s imposed blockade on Gaza and subsequent bombing of the area, along with a ground invasion, which has resulted in the killing of an estimated at least 11,000 Palestinians.

Biden and his U.S. government were quick to provide their rigid support to Israel.The Indonesian President attended a joint summit of Arab and Muslim leaders in Riyadh over the weekend. The summit rejected the idea that Israel had acted in “self-defence” and demanded a “decisive and binding resolution” by the United Nations Security Council.

- ANI

The Israeli Army said it had captured parliament and other government institutions allegedly run by Hamas in Gaza City, as its forces deepened their offensive in the Palestinian territory.

Military units “took over the Hamas parliament, the government building, the Hamas police headquarters and an engineering faculty that served as an institute for the production and development of weapons,” the Army said in a statement.

- AFP

A spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry said on Tuesday there was no objection to having babies evacuated from Al Shifa Hospital but there was no mechanism for an evacuation to take place.

“We have no objection to have the babies moved to any hospital, in Egypt, the West Bank or even to the occupation hospitals. What we care most is about the wellbeing and the lives of those babies,” Ashraf Al-Qidra said, speaking by telephone from the hospital.

- Reuters

Israel’s army on October 14 confirmed the death of a woman soldier held in Gaza.

- AFP

An Indian woman from Kashmir who had sought immediate evacuation from the war-torn Hamas-ruled Gaza has safely reached Egypt with the help of Indian missions in the region, according to her husband.

Lubna Nazir Shaboo and her daughter Karima, crossed the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza on Monday evening.

“They are in al-Arish (a city in Egypt). Tomorrow morning (Tuesday) they will move to Cairo,” Ms. Lubna’s husband Nedal Toman said in a text message sent to PTI from Gaza.

The only exit route from Gaza, the Rafah crossing with Egypt, has been infrequently opened the past few weeks to let humanitarian supplies enter Gaza and also let some foreign nationals and wounded people cross over to the other side.

- PTI

The Israeli army on Tuesday announced the deaths of two more soldiers in Gaza, raising the number of troops killed in the Palestinian territory to 46 since the war began.

An army spokesman confirmed the new overall toll to AFP, after announcing two soldiers were killed in combat in northern Gaza on Monday.

- AFP

A 74-year-old Israeli-Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver who had been missing since Hamas’s October 7 attacks has been confirmed dead, an Israeli diplomat in Toronto said Monday.

“Tragic news: Vivian Silver, the Canadian-Israeli peace activist previously thought to be taken hostage, has been confirmed dead, murdered by Hamas in Kibbutz Beeri,” Idit Shamir the Israeli Consul General wrote on X.

“Canada mourns her loss,” Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly wrote on X, describing Silver as “a proud Israeli-Canadian and lifelong advocate for peace.”

- AFP

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Tuesday emphasised the government’s responsibility to protect the rights of children and called for concerted efforts to address the plight of Palestinian children affected in the ongoing conflict with Israel.

In a Facebook post in Malayalam on the occasion of Children’s Day, the CM underscored the dire situation faced by Palestinian children amid the war.

As of last Friday, more than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday it was coordinating the transfer of incubators into the Gaza Strip, in a possible measure to enable the evacuation of newborn babies from the Palestinian enclave’s biggest hospital.

The statement, posted on social media with an image of a soldier unloading incubators from a van, followed distress calls from Al Shifa Hospital regarding its neonatology patients as Israeli ground forces closed in and generator fuel ran out.

Reuters

China, many Arab nations and Iran condemned an Israeli minister’s statement that an option in Israel’s war against Hamas could be to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip.

At Monday’s opening of a U.N. conference whose goal is to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, speaker after speaker said the Israeli statement posed a threat to the region and the wider international community.

The condemnations and criticisms were in response to comments by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu on the possible use of nuclear weapons in Gaza in a radio interview on Sunday.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its nuclear capability. It is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, and a former employee at its nuclear reactor served 18 years in Israeli prison for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s alleged nuclear weapons program to a British newspaper in 1986.

AP

At least six Palestinians were killed early on Tuesday in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces, the Palestinian Health Ministry and Palestinian media said.

At least three of those were killed in an Israeli drone strike, the Palestinians’ official news agency WAFA reported.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas following the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel that set off the war.

In a statement released last month, the United Nations has said that “there is already clear evidence that war crimes may have been committed” by Hamas and the Israeli military since October 7 and that it is gathering evidence for potential prosecution.

Days later, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt after outlining that the ICC’s mandate applies to the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Cautioning that there should not be any impediment to humanitarian relief supplies going to civilians, Mr. Khan said that “these rights are part of the Geneva conventions, and they give rise to even criminal responsibility when these rights are curtailed under the Rome statute.” Highlighting that he was “very concerned also by the spike of the number of reported incidents of attack by settlers against Palestinian civilians,” he said that the ICC would investigate “current events in the West Bank.”

Read the whole explainer here.

Gaza’s Shifa Hospital has become the focus of a dayslong stalemate in Israel’s war against the Hamas militant group.

Shifa is Gaza’s largest and best-equipped hospital. Israel, without providing visual evidence, claims the facility also is used by Hamas for military purposes. It says Hamas has built a vast underground command complex center below the hospital, connected by tunnels, something Gaza health officials and Hamas deny.

Since Israel declared war against Hamas in response to a deadly cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, its forces have moved in on Shifa. While Israel says it is willing to allow staff and patients to evacuate, Palestinians say Israeli forces have fired at evacuees and that it is too dangerous to move the most vulnerable patients. Meanwhile, doctors say the facility has run out of fuel and that patients are beginning to die.

AP

Gaza’s Shifa Hospital has become the focus of a dayslong stalemate in Israel’s war against the Hamas militant group.

Shifa is Gaza’s largest and best-equipped hospital. But Israel claims the facility also is used by Hamas for military purposes. It says Hamas has built a vast underground command complex center below the hospital, connected by tunnels.

Israel has long accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields. The group often fires rockets toward Israel from crowded residential areas, and its fighters have battled Israeli troops inside densely populated neighbourhoods.

AP

With Israeli tanks now massed at the gates of Gaza’s largest hospital, U.S. President Joe Biden pressed his ally to protect scores of civilians trapped inside with dwindling supplies of fuel and water Monday.

After days of heavy air strikes around Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, witnesses said tanks and armoured vehicles were metres from the gate of the besieged facility, which has become a focal point of the five-week-old war.

The United Nations believes that thousands, and perhaps more than 10,000 people -- patients, staff, and displaced people desperately seeking shelter -- may be inside and unable to escape because of fierce fighting nearby.

AFP

Battles between Israel and Hamas around hospitals forced thousands of Palestinians to flee from some of the last perceived safe places in northern Gaza, stranding critically wounded patients, newborns and their caregivers with dwindling supplies and no electricity, health officials said Monday.

With Israeli forces fighting in the centre of Gaza City, the territory’s main city, both sides have seized on the plight of hospitals as a symbol of the larger war, now in its sixth week. The fighting was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel, whose response has led to thousands of deaths — and much destruction — across Gaza.

Israel accuses Hamas of using hospitals as cover for its fighters. On Monday, the military released footage of a children’s hospital that its forces moved into over the weekend, showing weapons it said it found inside, as well as rooms in the basement where it believes the militants were holding some of the around 240 hostages they abducted during the initial attack.

AP