Key events
President Donald Trump has attended a business forum in Qatar, reports the Associated Press (AP).
Trump sat with GE Aerospace’s Larry Culp and Boeing Co’s Kelly Ortberg on either side of him on Thursday. According to the AP, both praised Trump for his support for the Qatar Airways order for Boeing aircraft, with Ortberg calling it one of the largest orders Boeing has ever had.
On Thursday, Trump plans to address troops at Qatar’s al-Udeid airbase, which was a major staging ground during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supported the recent US air campaign against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis.
The US president has held up Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar as models for economic development in a region plagued by conflict as he works to entice Iran to come to terms with his administration on a deal to curb its nuclear programme.
Trump will then head to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Trump visits Middle East as airstrikes kill more than 50 people in Gaza
Multiple airstrikes have hit Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis overnight, killing more than 50 people in a second consecutive night of heavy bombing.
The Associated Press (AP) said its cameraman in Khan Younis counted 10 airstrikes on the city overnight into Thursday, and saw numerous bodies taken to the morgue in the city’s Nasser hospital. The hospital’s morgue confirmed 54 people had been killed.
The dead included a journalist working for Qatari television network Al Araby TV, the network announced on social media, saying Hasan Samour had been killed along with 11 members of his family in one of the strikes in Khan Younis.
It was the second night of heavy bombing, after airstrikes on Wednesday on northern and southern Gaza killed at least 70 people, including almost two dozen children.
The strikes come as US president Donald Trump is on a trip to the Middle East, visiting Gulf states but not Israel.
An Israeli blockade of Gaza is now in its third month. Nearly half a million Palestinians are facing possible starvation while 1 million others can barely get enough food, according to findings by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed earlier in the week to push ahead with a promised escalation of force in Israel’s war to pursue his aim of destroying the Hamas militant group.
In other developments:
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President Donald Trump on Thursday will visit a US base installation at the cente of American involvement in the Middle East as he uses his four-day visit to Gulf states to reject the “interventionism” of America’s past in the region. The US president will also meet business leaders in Qatar and head to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
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Human Rights Watch said that Israel’s plan to seize Gaza, remain in the territory and displace hundreds of thousands of people “inches closer to extermination”. The international rights group called on the international community to speak out against the plan.
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A pregnant Israeli woman has died after she was shot and critically injured in a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank, a hospital said Thursday. Beilinson hospital said that doctors succeeded in saving her unborn baby, who was in serious but stable condition after being delivered by caesarean section.
