Israeli strikes kill 13 in Gaza school housing displaced families, medics say
Israeli strikes on a school housing displaced families in northern Gaza killed 13 Palestinians on Wednesday, local health authorities said, as Israeli forces continued to demolish homes and buildings in Rafah in the south of the territory.
According to Reuters, medics said two strikes targeted the Karama school in Tuffah, a suburb of Gaza City. Among those killed was a local journalist, Nour Abdu, Palestinian media said. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said the death of Abdu on Wednesday raised to 213 the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli fire since the war began.
Two Israeli airstrikes on another school, housing displaced people in central Gaza, killed at least 29 people, including women and children, on Tuesday, local health authorities said. The Israeli military said it struck “terrorists” operating from a command centre in the compound, reports Reuters.
Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, said on Wednesday their fighters had detonated a pre-planted minefield targeting an Israeli armoured force east of Khan Younis. They said they inflicted casualties, followed by mortar shelling of the area.
In the nearby area of Rafah, near the border with Egypt, residents and Hamas sources said Israeli forces, who have taken control of the city, continued to blow up and demolish houses and buildings.
Israeli troops have already taken over an area amounting to around a third of Gaza, displacing the population and building watchtowers and surveillance posts on cleared ground the military has described as security zones.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday an expanded offensive against Hamas would be “intensive” after his security cabinet approved plans that may include seizing the entire Gaza Strip and controlling aid. Israeli officials have said Rafah could be used as a potential new humanitarian zone.
Key events
UK sent Israel thousands of military items despite export ban, study finds
Patrick Wintour
UK firms have exported thousands of military items including munitions to Israel despite the government suspending key arms export licences to the country in September, new analysis of trade data shows.
The research also raises questions over whether the UK continued to sell F-35 parts directly to Israel in breach of an undertaking only to sell them to the US manufacturers Lockheed Martin as a way of ensuring the fighter jet’s global supply chain was not disrupted, something the government said was essential for national security and Nato.
The findings have led the former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell to call for a full investigation, adding it was a resigning matter if the foreign secretary, David Lammy, was shown to have misled parliament in breach of the ministerial code when he told MPs in September that much of what the UK sends to Israel was “defensive in nature”.
McDonnell said:
The government has shrouded its arms supplies to Israel in secrecy. They must finally come clean in response to this extremely concerning evidence and halt all British arms exports to Israel to ensure no British-made weapons are used in Netanyahu’s new and terrifying plans to annex the Gaza Strip and ethnically cleanse the land.
The research – conducted jointly by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Progressive International and Workers for a Free Palestine – uses Israeli tax authority import data to try to uncover what the continuance of the 200 arms export licences has allowed Israel to import. It covers the first seven months of the Labour ban to March.
Israeli military on Wednesday reported that it had intercepted an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) launched from the east.
Sirens were sounded as part of standard protocol, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, reports Reuters.
US-Houthi ceasefire deal does not include Israel, says Houthi spokesperson
A ceasefire deal between Yemen’s Houthis and the United States does not include operations against Israel “in any way, shape or form,” the group’s chief negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam told Reuters on Wednesday.
Israel attack on Sana’a airport caused $500m in damage, says its director
Israel’s attack on the airport in Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital Sana’a destroyed terminal buildings and caused $500m in damage, its director told Houthi media on Wednesday, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
He said earlier in a statement on X that the airport was suspending all flights until further notice after sustaining “severe damage” in the Israeli strikes.
The strikes came after a Houthi missile gouged a crater near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on Sunday.
“Around $500m in losses were caused by the Israeli aggression on Sana’a airport,” its general director Khaled alShaief told the rebels’ al-Masirah television.
“The enemy destroyed the terminals at Sana’a airport, including all equipment and devices,” he said, adding that a warehouse was also “completely levelled”. Yemenia Airways lost three planes, he said, adding that six planes in total had been destroyed.
“There are alternatives to temporarily reopen the airport, and we need a long time to rehabilitate it and restore operations,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Houthi rebels and the United States agreed a ceasefire that would ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, mediator Oman said. But the deal that was announced does not mention Israel, with the rebels vowing to respond to Tuesday’s strikes.
Houthi rebels have been attacking Israel and merchant shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since late 2023, saying they are acting in solidarity with the Palestinians as the Gaza war rages.
The Yemeni rebels had paused their attacks during a recent two-month ceasefire in the Gaza war. In March, they threatened to resume attacks on shipping over Israel’s aid blockade on the Gaza Strip, triggering a response from the US military, which began attacking the rebels with near-daily airstrikes.
Medical officials in Gaza report rising cases of acute malnutrition
Jason Burke
Medical officials in Gaza report rising cases of acute malnutrition, and community kitchens that served 1m meals a day are shutting down for lack of basic essentials. Aid agencies say they have distributed all remaining stocks of food. Dozens of bakeries that supplied vital free bread closed last month.
“By the time a famine is declared, it will be too late. The crime wave is because you have 2 million or more desperate, traumatised people packed together with virtually no policing,” said one humanitarian official in Gaza.
Gaza City has been worst hit by the crime wave, though some incidents have been reported elsewhere in the territory.
One group of armed men broke into two or three bakeries in Gaza City last week, hoping to find flour, then targeted a soup kitchen when they found nothing. In another incident, thieves took a community kitchen’s last stocks as well as all its pots and pans.
In a third theft, staff at a distribution site run by an NGO were held at knifepoint as it was looted, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) said it had to evacuate staff on Wednesday after thousands of Palestinians breached its Gaza City field office and took medications. Louise Wateridge, a senior emergency officer at Unrwa, called the looting “the direct result of unbearable and prolonged deprivation”.
Witnesses described clashes between armed thieves and security guards in recent days.
Anas Raafat, a 25-year-old lawyer in Gaza City, said he and his family had been woken when armed gangs attacked a warehouse of a humanitarian aid organisation nearby. “By a miracle, none of my family members were injured. We lay flat on the ground for over two hours during the gunfire,” he said.
You can read more of the reporting by Jason Burke in Tel Aviv and Malak A Tantesh in Gaza here:
Israel’s aid plan, combined with plans for moving much of the Gaza Strip’s population to the south, has reinforced fears that the overall intention is full occupation, reports Reuters.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday the plan was “the opposite of what is needed” and other agencies also questioned the plan, which they have only been briefed on verbally, according to two aid officials.
“It is totally wrong that a party to the conflict – in this case Israel – should be in control of lifesaving aid for civilians,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council said on the social media platform X.
“This new Israeli aid plan is both totally insufficient to meet the needs in Gaza, and a complete breach of all humanitarian principles,” he said.
Aid agencies criticise Israeli plans for Gaza aid distribution as territory faces wave of looting, theft and violence
Aid agencies have criticised Israeli plans to take over distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza and use private companies to get food to Palestinians after two months in which the military has prevented supplies from entering the territory.
It comes as Gaza has been hit by a wave of looting and theft as increasingly desperate Palestinians struggle to get food while criminal gangs exploit a breakdown in law and order.
Aid officials and witnesses in the devastated territory describe armed men attacking humanitarian warehouses, firefights over remaining food stores and a spate of stealing of supplies vital for survival, such as solar chargers, batteries, phones and cooking pots.
Gaza is on the brink of catastrophe after two months of a total blockade by Israel, aid workers say, with many families down to one meal a day. Spoiled flour is being sold for 30 or 40 times its usual price and no fuel is available other than wood or discarded plastic.
Israel has provided few details about its Gaza aid distribution plans, announced on Monday as part of an expanded operation that it says could include seizing the entire Gaza Strip.
For the moment, the blockade will continue until a large-scale evacuation of the population from northern and central areas to the south, where there will be a specially designated area cleared near the southern city of Rafah, Israeli officials have said.
More on this story in a moment, but first, here are some other key developments:
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Medical officials in Gaza report rising cases of acute malnutrition, and community kitchens that served 1m meals a day are shutting down for lack of basic essentials. Aid agencies say they have distributed all remaining stocks of food. Dozens of bakeries that supplied vital free bread closed last month.
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An Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries”, raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory. The declaration on Tuesday by the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, came a day after Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan for Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which an Israeli official said would entail “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories”.
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The US will halt its bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthis after the Iran-aligned group agreed to stop targeting shipping in the Red Sea. The halt – announced by the US president, Donald Trump, during an Oval Office meeting with Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, came on a day in which Israel claimed its jets had fully disabled Yemen’s main airport, including three civilian aircraft on the ground, in retaliation for a missile strike on Sunday that hit within the perimeter of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.
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Israel’s attack on the airport in Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital Sana’a destroyed terminal buildings and caused $500m in damage, its director told Houthi media on Wednesday. He said earlier in a statement on X that the airport was suspending all flights until further notice after sustaining “severe damage” in the Israeli strikes.
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UK firms have exported thousands of military items including munitions to Israel despite the government suspending key arms export licences to the country in September, new analysis of trade data shows. The research also raises questions over whether the UK continued to sell F-35 parts directly to Israel in breach of an undertaking only to sell them to the US manufacturers Lockheed Martin as a way of ensuring the fighter jet’s global supply chain was not disrupted, something the government said was essential for national security and Nato.
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More than a dozen senior Conservative MPs and peers have written to the prime minister calling for the UK to immediately recognise Palestine as a state, breaking ranks with their own party to do so. Seven MPs and six members of the House of Lords have signed the letter to Keir Starmer urging him to defy the Israeli government and give formal recognition to Palestine in advance of key UN talks next month.
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Sudan’s security and defence council has declared that it will break diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates over its alleged backing of the paramilitary Sudanese Rapid Support Forces. During a televised speech on Tuesday, Sudan’s defence minister, Yassin Ibrahim, said Sudan was “severing diplomatic relations with the UAE” and recalling its ambassador, claiming the Gulf nation had breached Sudan’s sovereignty through its RSF “proxy”, which has been fighting the army in a bloody civil war since April 2023.
