Death toll in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes rises to 32 – Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry
Thirty-two Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza since the truce expired on Friday morning, Ashraf Al-Qidra, the spokesperson for Gaza’s health ministry said on Friday, according to the ministry’s Telegram account.
The latest figures, reported by Reuters, follow Israeli jets firing on the Gaza Strip minutes after the truce expired on Friday.
Key events
Hamas to ‘take a thumping’ according to Israeli government spokesperson
An Israeli government spokesperson has said that Hamas “will now take the mother of all thumpings” after a truce in the Gaza Strip expired and hostilities resumed.
“Unfortunately, Hamas decided to terminate the pause by failing to release all the kidnapped women,” government spokesperson Eylon Levy told a briefing.
“Having chosen to hold onto our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”
Levy said the week-long agreement could have been extended, with the Israeli government having already approved a list of Palestinian prisoners for release. It would have meant the prisoner and hostage exchanges would have continued for another two days.
Hamas said the blame for failure to agree a truce extension lies with Israel which had “persistently” rejected offers of hostage releases.
“Throughout the night, indirect negotiations unfolded to extend the truce, within which we proposed exchanges involving prisoners and elderly people, as well as the handover of bodies of Israeli detainees who lost their lives due to Zionist bombings,” the movement, which has an armed wing, said in a statement.
Levy said Hamas was still holding 137 hostages, 10 of them aged 75 or older.
That number included “117 males” and 20 females, while 126 were Israelis and 11 foreign nationals: eight Thais, one Nepalese citizen, one Tanzanian and one French-Mexican.
He added that seven people were still listed as missing in the wake of the 7 October attacks, when Hamas militants broke through Gaza’s militarised border into southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping about 240, according to an Israeli count.
Israel hit back with a relentless military campaign in Gaza that authorities in the Hamas-ruled territory say has killed nearly 15,000 people, also mostly civilians.
France has said it regrets the end of a truce between Israel and Hamas, and called for its restoration.
“Rupture of the truce is very bad news, regrettable, because it brings no solution and complicates the resolution of all questions that arise,” the French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, said on the sidelines of the UN’s Cop28 climate talks in Dubai.
She called a truce resumption “essential”.
The truce led to the release of 80 Israeli hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
It also saw more aid enter Gaza, where about 80% of the population is displaced and short of food, water and other essentials.
Another 25 hostages, mostly Thais, were freed outside the scope of the truce agreement.
“We ask that the truce be resumed. It’s necessary,” Colonna said. “It’s essential at the same to continue to free hostages who have now been for 55 days in extremely difficult conditions, to enable more humanitarian aid to arrive, and to be able to distribute it inside the Gaza Strip where the civilian population is suffering.”
Germany’s foreign ministry says the diplomatic efforts must be redoubled to try to restore the truce in Gaza.
In a statement posted on X it said: “We must do everything we can to ensure that the humanitarian ceasefire continues. Both for the remaining hostages, who have been hoping for release for weeks, and for the suffering people in Gaza who urgently need more humanitarian aid.”
It added that a peace effort can only work in the long term if “Hamas’s terror of destruction no longer has a chance to regroup”.
Death toll rises to 54 in Gaza – reports
The death toll in Gaza since Israel resumed their military operation on Friday morning has risen to 54, according to Palestinian broadcasters.
Palestinian official radio reported the latest figure, according to Reuters. This has not been independently verified by the Guardian.
At least 15 people have been killed in attacks on homes in the Shujayea, Al Jazeera reports.
Ruth Michaelson
At least four international activists were detained, their whereabouts unknown, after protesting in front of the Egyptian foreign ministry building in Cairo to demand entry to Gaza.
A group calling themselves International Activists for Free Palestine gathered for the rare demonstration, in an environment where public protest is all but banned. Four members of the group, who reportedly hold Argentinian, Australian, French and American citizenship, were taken inside the foreign ministry building around midday on Thursday, and have not been located since.
“They intended to deliver a letter of demands addressed to the minister of foreign affairs, Sameh Shoukry, requesting the necessary security clearance for a convoy of medics, journalists, lawyers and relief workers to travel to the Rafah border crossing in order to deliver essential humanitarian aid and to relieve exhausted Palestinian workers in their disaster relief efforts,” the group later said in a statement.
The protestors previously came to Cairo as part of a larger gathering calling itself the Global Conscience Convoy, who assembled there several weeks ago intending to travel to the Rafah border crossing in north Sinai which leads into Gaza.
The group said it has repeatedly tried to obtain security clearance for the convoy to enter Sinai and the route to the Rafah crossing, but has been stonewalled by the Egyptian authorities.
Egypt maintains the regular closure of the crossing, allowing only small groups of dual nationals to leave Gaza and the entry of some humanitarian relief, and also bans NGO workers and journalists from entering northern Sinai.
Resumption of fighting a ‘nightmarish situation’ for Palestinians – Red Cross
Renewed fighting in Gaza has brought back a “nightmarish situation” for the Palestinian territory, the head of the Red Cross told Agency France Presse on Friday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the UN’s Cop28 climate talks in Dubai, Robert Mardini said “people are at a breaking point, hospitals are at a breaking point, the whole Gaza Strip is in a very precarious state”.
Resumption of fighting brings the people of Gaza “back to the nightmarish situation they were in before the truce took place”, said Mardini.
He noted their “suffering, destruction, fear, anxiety and precarious living conditions”.
Israel’s military said fighter jets were striking Hamas targets in Gaza on Friday, as AFP journalists reported air attacks in the north and south of the territory.
Combat resumed shortly after Israel’s army said it had intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza, the first from the territory since a missile launched minutes into the start of the truce on 24 November.
“There is nowhere safe to go for civilians,” Mardini said, stressing the challenges hospitals and humanitarian organisations are facing.
“We have seen in the hospitals where our teams have been working, that over the past days, hundreds of severely injured people have arrived,” he said.
“The influx of severely wounded outpaced the real capacity of hospitals to absorb and treat the wounded, so there is a massive challenge.”
Harry Davies and Bethan McKernan are in Jerusalem, and report here on the AI-driven “factory” that increases the number of targets for strikes in Palestine.
Israel’s military has made no secret of the intensity of its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. In the early days of the offensive, the head of its air force spoke of relentless, “around the clock” airstrikes. His forces, he said, were only striking military targets, but he added: “We are not being surgical.”
There has, however, been relatively little attention paid to the methods used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to select targets in Gaza, and to the role artificial intelligence has played in their bombing campaign.
As Israel resumes its offensive after a seven-day ceasefire, there are mounting concerns about the IDF’s targeting approach in a war against Hamas that has so far killed more than 15,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The IDF has long burnished its reputation for technical prowess and has previously made bold but unverifiable claims about harnessing new technology. After the 11-day war in Gaza in May 2021, officials said Israel had fought its “first AI war” using machine learning and advanced computing.
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Dan Sabbagh
Here is a dispatch from the Guardian’s defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh in Jerusalem.
Israel’s military announced on Friday morning that it was dividing the entirety of Gaza into dozens of numbered blocks as a prelude, it said, to demanding targeted local evacuations in the crowded south of the strip ahead of planned bombing. It dropped leaflets over Gaza on Friday with a QR code to a website with a map of all the areas and geolocating people within them.
Earlier this week Israeli military sources said they anticipated the next phase of the operation in Gaza to involve an attack on the south, and in particular Khan Younis, where it believes Hamas’s leadership is based, and that Israel’s Defense Forces would call for the local civilian population to relocate on a district by district basis before likely targeting the area with airstrikes and artillery.
Humanitarian groups said on Friday that such a plan to divide and attack the south, where 2 million people are now sheltering, risked stretching Gaza to breaking point. “There is fundamentally nowhere for people to go,” said Danila Aizi, the Palestine country manager for charity Humanity and Inclusion.
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, Hamas’s armed wing, has said it launched a barrage of rocket on Ashkelon, Sderot and Beersheba in southern Israel on Friday.
On its Telegram channel, the group said the attack comes “in response to the targeting of civilians”.
The military arm of another Gaza-based armed group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also known as al-Quds, said it had targeted cities and towns close to the fence along the strip earlier in the day as a truce ended.
Air raid sirens have sounded in the southern Israeli settlements of Yad Mordechai and Netiv Hatara, close the Gaza Strip, according to a statement on Telegram by Israel’s Home Front Command responsible for civil defence.
Palestinian fighters had said earlier that they had launched a volley of rockets towards Israel.
Qatar has confirmed that talks are continuing between Israel and Palestine with the aim of the ceasefire resuming.
Its ministry of foreign affairs posted a statement on X, saying: “The state of Qatar expresses its deep regret at the resumption of the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip following the end of the humanitarian pause, without reaching an agreement to extend it.
“The state of Qatar is committed, along with its mediation partners, to continuing the efforts that led to the humanitarian pause, and will not hesitate to do everything necessary to return to calm.”
It added: “The ministry stresses that the continued bombing of the Gaza Strip in the first hours after the end of the pause complicates mediation efforts and exacerbates the humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip, and in this context calls on the international community to move quickly to stop the violence.”
It went on to condemn the targeting of civilians, collective punishment and “attempts to forcibly displace citizens of the besieged Gaza Strip”.
Qatar had successfully brokered the agreement a week ago for the ceasefire to come into effect, which saw the release of hostages and prisoners.
Hamas said on Friday morning that Israel refused an offer for the release more hostages and the bodies of an Israeli family killed in airstrikes. This has not been independently verified.
The al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said it had attacked Israeli cities and towns on Friday.
In a statement on Telegram, the militant group said it was in response to “crimes against our people”, according to Reuters.
Death toll in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes rises to 32 – Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry
Thirty-two Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza since the truce expired on Friday morning, Ashraf Al-Qidra, the spokesperson for Gaza’s health ministry said on Friday, according to the ministry’s Telegram account.
The latest figures, reported by Reuters, follow Israeli jets firing on the Gaza Strip minutes after the truce expired on Friday.
The Unicef spokesperson James Elder has reported that an airstrike landed about 50 metres away from the “biggest still functioning hospital in Gaza”.
“This hospital simply cannot take more children with the wounds of war,” he says in a video posted on X. He pans briefly to children asleep on the floor of a hospital room. Elder is the chief of communications for Unicef. His post was accompanied with the caption: “Has humanity given up on the children of Gaza?”
“I cannot overstate how the capacity has been reduced in hospitals over the last seven weeks. We cannot see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, the shrapnel littering their body, with their broken bones. Inaction from those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children.”
Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has said that the Israeli military must “return and crush Gaza with all our might”.
In a post on X this morning, he said: “For the sake of the children who have not yet returned, for the murdered who will no longer return, so that the horrors of 7/10 will never return, we must return and crush Gaza with all our might, destroy Hamas and return to the Strip, without compromises, without deals. at maximum power.”
למען הילדים שעוד לא חזרו, למען הנרצחים שכבר לא יחזרו, כדי שזוועות ה-7.10 לא יחזרו לעולם, חייבים לחזור ולכתוש בעזה בכל הכוח, להשמיד את החמאס ולחזור לרצועה, בלי פשרות, בלי עסקאות. במקסימום עוצמה.
— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) December 1, 2023