Israel-Hamas war, Day 43 updates | WHO says Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital a ‘death zone’, urges full evacuation

The World Health Organization said on Sunday it had led an assessment mission to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and determined it was a “death zone”, urging a full evacuation.

“WHO and partners are urgently developing plans for the immediate evacuation of the remaining patients, staff and their families,” the United Nations health agency said in a statement, adding that 291 patients and 25 health workers remained inside the hospital. - AFP

More than 550 Russian nationals, including 230 children, have been evacuated from the Gaza Strip since the start of the process a week ago, Russia’s emergencies ministry said on Sunday.

Of those evacuated, 408 people have already been brought to Moscow, including 120 Russians that arrived late Saturday on a special flight from Egypt, the ministry said. - Reuters

A Palestinian prisoner has died, bringing to 6 the number of prisoners who died in Israeli prisons since October 7, the Palestinian news Agency WAFA said late on Saturday.

Thaer Samih Abu Assab, who has been detained in 2005 and sentenced to 25 years in jail, died in the Negev desert prison, the agency said, quoting the Palestinian Commission of Detainees Affairs. - Reuters

Thousands of protesters rallied across France and Britain calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, while hundreds of others turned out again in cities across Europe.

Several thousand people marched through central Paris in torrential rain behind a banner saying “Halt the massacre in Gaza and West Bank, immediate ceasefire”. -AFP

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday the Palestinian Authority should ultimately govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank following the Israel-Hamas war.

“As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution,” Biden said in an opinion article in the Washington Post. - Reuters

A Hamas health official said more than 80 people were killed on Saturday in twin strikes on a northern Gaza refugee camp, including a UN school used as a shelter for people displaced by the Israel-Hamas war. - AFP

Thousands of family members and supporters of some 240 hostages held in Gaza streamed into Jerusalem on Saturday, castigating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of the war with Hamas and pleading with the government to do more to bring their loved ones home.

The march capped a five-day trek from Tel Aviv and represented the largest protest on behalf of the hostages since they were dragged into Gaza by Hamas on October 7 as part of the militants’ deadly attack in southern Israel. - AP

U.S. President Joe Biden’s main adviser on the Middle East said there would be a “significant pause” in the Israel-Hamas war if hostages held by militants in Gaza are freed.

“The surge in humanitarian relief, the surge in fuel, the pause... will come when hostages are released,” Brett McGurk told a security conference in Bahrain.

Release of a large number of hostages would result in “a significant pause... and a massive surge of humanitarian relief,” he said. - AFP

Gaza’s Hamas government said Saturday the death toll from fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants in the Palestinian territory had reached 12,300 since hostilities started on October 7.

The Hamas government said more than 5,000 children were among the dead, alongside 3,300 women, with 30,000 more people wounded. Its health ministry has previously said it can no longer give exact tolls as intense fighting has prevented bodies from being recovered. - AFP

Turkey will make efforts to rebuild damaged infrastructure, hospitals and schools in Gaza if a ceasefire is achieved there, Turkish media on Saturday reported President Tayyip Erdogan as saying.

Speaking on his plane returning from a trip to Germany, Mr. Erdogan also said Turkey was making a call for nuclear weapons inspections to be carried out in Israel so no doubt is left on the issue, broadcaster A Haber said on its website. - Reuters

The head of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said on Saturday it had received “horrifying” images and footage of scores of people killed and injured in an attack on an UNRWA school in the north of Gaza.

“These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian ceasefire cannot wait any longer,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said on social media platform X.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment. - Reuters

Thousands of Iranians held rallies across the country Saturday against Israel’s unrelenting bombardment of the Gaza strip following the shock attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas last month.

The demonstrations in the capital Tehran and other cities were held in “support of the oppressed children of Gaza” under the slogan “Palestine is not alone”, according to local media. - AFP

U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief adviser for the Middle East said more fuel deliveries and a potential “significant pause” in the fighting both depend of the release of hostages.

“The surge in humanitarian relief, the surge in fuel, the pause... will come when hostages are released,” Brett McGurk told a security conference in Bahrain. - AFP

An official of the Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip said more than 80 people were killed on Saturday in double Israeli strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp.

“At least 50 people” were killed in an Israeli strike at dawn on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, the official told AFP.

Social media videos — which AFP was not able to verify — showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables.

A separate strike on another building in the camp on Saturday killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the health ministry official said. - AFP

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Saturday said she was opposed to the “forced displacement of Palestinians” during a meeting in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Ms. Von der Leyen “thanked Egypt for its key role in providing and facilitating humanitarian aid to vulnerable Palestinians”, during her meeting with Mr. Sisi, she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The two discussed “the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and a “political horizon based on a two-state solution”, she added, as Israel presses its military campaign in the Gaza Strip following the October 7 Hamas attacks. - AFP

Clutching a blown-up surgical glove as a makeshift toy, a Palestinian child is stretchered onto a plane to Abu Dhabi — one of the Gaza war’s first evacuees to the United Arab Emirates for urgent medical treatment.

In the dead of night at Egypt’s El Arish airport, near the Rafah border crossing from Gaza, the child is carried carefully from the back of one of six yellow ambulances waiting near the runway, blue lights flashing.

A hydraulic platform lifts the wheeled stretchers into the back of a plane until eight children in various stages of injury and distress, some accompanied by relatives, are aboard.

These are the lucky ones, spirited away from the dangers and trauma of the Israel-Hamas war to quiet, well-equipped hospitals in Abu Dhabi, capital of the oil-rich UAE. - AFP

Tanzania has announced the death of one of two nationals taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7 attacks on Israel.

The Israeli government had named two students from Tanzania — 22-year-old Clemence Felix Mtenga and 21-year-old Joshua Loitu Mollel — among some 240 taken to the Gaza Strip.

“It’s with great sadness we confirm the death of Clemence Felix Mtenga,” a foreign ministry statement said late Friday.

It did not say how Mtenga died.

“We would also like to inform the public that Joshua is still missing as we continue to follow his whereabouts,” the ministry said. - AFP

In a ramshackle Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hayat Shehadeh wrings her hands as she watches the Israel-Hamas war. Her daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week.

“I can’t sleep. I get up at 3:00 am... I go to watch the television,” said the 69-year-old from her dark flat in south Beirut’s Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian camp.

“Sometimes she writes to me, ‘I’m fine’. She doesn’t write more than that” because she has no way to recharge her phone battery, said the elderly woman, a baby grandchild playing with a Palestinian flag on the floor nearby.

With pain in her voice but trying to maintain her composure, Shehadeh said her daughter had separated her three children, sending them away with different relatives.

“She was crying, she said ‘I split up the kids’,” her mother said, so that “if someone dies, they don’t all die.” - AFP

Gaza health officials say many patients, medical staff and the displaced 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 Shifa Hospital.

Health officials 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 Shifa in dire conditions. - AP

(BEIRUT) Hezbollah and Israel traded rocket and missile fire in areas near the Lebanese-Israeli border on November 18, officials on both sides said, in the latest flare-up of violence which the United States worries will cause conflict to spiral in the Middle East.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah said it shot down an Israeli drone near the border in the early hours of Saturday. Israel’s military said it intercepted a missile fired at an Israeli drone.

Lebanese officials said an Israeli air strike hit a building in an industrial area near the town of Nabatieh, one of the deepest Israeli strikes inside Lebanese territory since fighting began last month. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the incident. - Reuters

(MANAMA) A top foreign policy advisor to the United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said on November 18 that statements from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a longer term presence in Gaza were worrying.

“We hear now from the Israeli Prime Minister and indeed the Israeli President about the sort of longer term Israeli connection to Gaza. They are very worrying,” Anwar Gargash said at the IISS Manama Security summit in Bahrain.

“This indicates that perhaps the lesson that we as the majority of people in region are taking away from the Gaza crisis which is the need to go back to the two state solution, we need to go back to an Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side. That lesson has perhaps not been the same.” - Reuters

(KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip) Internet and phone service were partially restored to the Gaza Strip on November 18, ending a telecommunications blackout that forced the United Nations to shut down critical humanitarian aid deliveries because it was unable to coordinate its convoys.

Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building on the outskirts of the town of Khan Younis, killing at least 26 Palestinians, according to a doctor at the hospital where the bodies were taken.

Early in the war, the Israeli military told civilians to flee northern Gaza, the target of its ground offensive, but also kept up its bombardment in the southern evacuation zone where Khan Younis is located. - AP

Five fighters in the armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party were killed early Saturday in a rare Israeli airstrike on the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent and Fatah sources said.

The camp is considered a militant hotspot and hosts fighters from Hamas, their ally Islamic Jihad, and the Fatah party which leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said overnight five people were killed and two hurt in a strike, which the camp administration said hit local Fatah headquarters.

Witnesses told AFP the strike appeared to have come from a drone, and Fatah sources confirmed the dead were members of the movement founded by Yasser Arafat.

- AFP

The conflict is expediting many changes in regional dynamics, with the growing presence of Russia and China offering regional players alternatives to an American vision.

Read more here...

(JERUSALEM) More than two days after Israeli soldiers stormed Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, doctors said they were amputating limbs to avoid infection and spoke of wounds festering with maggots, while Israel’s military said it was still searching for evidence to back up its allegations that Hamas used the hospital as a command center.

Hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia told Al Jazeera television that 52 patients have died since fuel ran out — up from 40 reported dead before Israeli troops entered the compound on Wednesday. More patients were on the verge of death as their wounds are “open with maggots coming out of them,” another doctor, Faisal Siyam, told the Qatar-run TV network. - AP

“Forty people were arrested on the night of November 17 and two police officers were injured after a group of pro-Palestinian protesters forced their way into a building on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor,” police said.

Video posted on social media showed protesters pushing past police into the Ruthven Administration Building, which houses offices for school President Santa Ono. An estimated 200 people then entered the building, university Deputy Police Chief Melissa Overton said.

Once inside, protesters chanted, called for the university to divest from Israel and waved Palestinian flags, as seen on the video. About 10 police agencies, including state police, assisted campus officers.

Around 7.30 p.m., officers began warning protesters to leave or be subject to arrest, Ms. Overton said, adding that those arrested were processed at the scene and then released. No details were given on the injuries to the two officers. - AP

A Canadian security forum will present an award to the people of Israel, following the Hamas incursion into the country that left some 1,200 dead and 240 abducted.

Following U.S. Sen. John McCain’s death in 2018, the Halifax International Security Forum presents the award annually in his honour to “individuals from any country who have demonstrated uncommon leadership in the pursuit of human justice.”

The forum, which attracts military officials, United States senators, diplomats and scholars, announced the decision in a statement on November 17.

“On the 75th anniversary of Israel’s creation, and in the aftermath of the October 7 attack that resulted in the greatest loss of life to the Jewish people since the Holocaust, it is fitting to present an award that bears Senator McCain’s name to: The People of Israel,” the statement read. - AP

Jordan’s Foreign Minister offered blistering criticism on November 18 of Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, describing it as “blatant aggression” against Palestinian civilians that threatens to engulf the wider Middle East.

Ayman Safadi’s harsh assessment, alleging Israel was committing “war crimes” by besieging the Gaza Strip and cutting off food, medicine and fuel shipments, shows how strained relations have become between Israel and Jordan — which reached a peace deal in 1994.

“All of us have to speak loud and clear about the catastrophe that the Israeli war is bringing, not just on Gaza, but on the region in general,” Mr. Safadi told the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Manama Dialogue summit in Bahrain. “This is not a time for mincing words. This is a time to state facts as they are.”

He added: “This is not self-defence. This is a blatant aggression, the victims of which are innocent Palestinians.”

Israel did not immediately respond to Mr. Safadi’s comments, which included a call for an immediate cease-fire and end to the fighting. - AP

Six Palestinians were killed on Saturday in an Israeli air strike on a house in Deir Al-Balah in southern Gaza Strip, health officials said.

- Reuters

Israeli troops ordered the evacuation of the Al-Shifa hospital “in the next hour” over loudspeakers on Sunday, an AFP journalist at the scene reported.

They called the hospital’s director, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, to instruct him to ensure “the evacuation of patients, wounded, the displaced and medical staff, and that they should move on foot towards the seafront”, he told AFP.

- AFP

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Israel cannot leave a vacuum in Gaza and would have to maintain a strong force there for the near future to prevent Hamas from re-emerging in the Palestinian enclave, the Financial Times (FT) reported on November 16.

“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,” Mr. Herzog said in an interview with the FT. “But no one will want to turn this place, Gaza, into a terror base again”, he added.

The Israeli police is using forensic evidence, video, witness testimony and interrogations of suspects to document cases of sexual violence committed by Hamas as part of the October 7 attack on Israel, CNN reported.

Witnesses say that women and girls caught in the rampage were brutalised sexually, as well as physically tortured and killed. Police Superintendent Dudi Katz said officers have collected more than 1,000 statements and more than 60,000 video clips related to the attacks that include accounts from people who reported seeing women raped. He added that investigators do not have firsthand testimony and it is not clear whether any rape victims survived.

- ANI

A U.S. State Department official said Friday that Israel has agreed to allow 140,000 litres (36,984 gallons) of fuel into Gaza every 48 hours through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

The fuel will be delivered to the fuel depot in the Gaza side of the border and distributed from there. The official said 120,000 liters (31,700 gallons) will be reserved for U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees trucks carrying humanitarian aid, as well as water desalinisation, well and sewage pumping, solid waste disposal, bakeries and hospitals. The other 20,000 litres will be for generators used by Palestinian telecoms provider Paltel in order to restore communications networks.

- AP

The funeral of 19-year-old Israeli soldier Noa Marciano, who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, was held Friday after Israeli forces in Gaza recovered her remains. Hundreds of mourners, many carrying Israeli flags, paid their respects to Marciano in her home town of Modi’in.

Her coffin, draped in the blue-and-white Israeli flag, was carried beside large photos of a smiling Marciano.

- AP

More than two days after Israeli soldiers stormed Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, doctors said they were amputating limbs to avoid infection and spoke of wounds festering with maggots, while Israel’s military said it was still searching for evidence to back up its allegations that Hamas used the hospital as a command centre.

Hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia told Al Jazeera television that 52 patients have died since fuel ran out — up from 40 reported dead before Israeli troops entered the compound on Wednesday. More patients were on the verge of death as their wounds are “open with maggots coming out of them,” another doctor, Faisal Siyam, told the Qatar-run TV network.

- AP

At least 26 people have been killed in a strike on a residential building in the southern Gaza Strip’s Khan Yunis region, the director of a local hospital said Saturday.

The director of the Nasser hospital told AFP the facility had received 26 dead bodies and 23 people with serious injuries after a strike on the residential building in the city of Hamad.

- AFP

The United States on November 17 said it had “deep concern” over a strike on a Jordanian military hospital in Gaza that wounded seven people, voicing opposition to hitting health facilities, but without directly blaming Israel.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke by telephone with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi “to share his deep concern for the Jordanian medical personnel injured outside the Jordanian Field Hospital while providing critical medical care in Gaza,” the State Department said.

About 26 Palestinians, mostly children, were killed in an Israeli bombardment of Khan Yunis city in south Gaza early on Saturday, the Palestinian news agency WAFA said.

- Reuters