Israel-Hamas war live: fighting traps patients and medics in Gaza’s largest hospital | Israel-Hamas war

There are conflicting reports still about events overnight in Tulkarm, where Israeli forces have killed several Palestinians. [See 6.09 GMT]

The Israeli army and police said their forces, sent in to detain suspected militants, came under fire and killed several Palestinian gunmen in the skirmish that followed.

An Israeli airstrike hit a group of Palestinians who shot and threw a bomb at the group, an army and police statement claimed. The Palestinian news agency Wafa said the airstrike was carried out by a drone and killed three people.

Reuters reports that there was no word of any Israeli casualties and no Palestinian armed faction said it had lost members in the incident. Medics and local media put the death toll at seven.

AFP is reporting that a journalist inside al-Shifa hospital who has been working with them has said that the stench of decomposing bodies was everywhere in the facility, but night-time fighting and airstrikes from Monday into Tuesday had been less intense than previous nights.

Rushdi Abualouf reports for the BBC from inside Gaza that he has spoken to someone inside al-Shifa hospital this morning. He writes:

He said the tense situation around the hospital remains the same, and that he heard a few explosions and exchanges of fire overnight.

He also told me tanks are surrounding the hospital from all directions and that access in and out of the hospital is impossible.

Even moving from one building to another inside the hospital compound itself is a big risk, as he described it to me.

He said people have died in the hospital because there is no electricity, no water and not enough medicine.

My colleague Patrick Wintour has flagged up a comment piece in the Wall Street Journal, in which two senior Israeli figures suggest that third-party countries should be taking Palestinians out of Gaza as refugees.

Al Jazeera reports that al-Shifa hospital director Mohammad Abu Salmiya has said the hospital has been forced to bury 179 people, including babies and patients who died in the intensive care unit, “in a mass grave” in the complex.

The claim has not been independently verified.

Israel’s military claims in a message posted to its Telegram channel that “the IDF Aerial Defense Array intercepted a suspicious target that was identified off the coast of the city of Acre”, which is located in north-west Israel.

Another 200,000 people have fled northern Gaza since 5 November, the UN humanitarian office said on Tuesday.

AP reports that the humanitarian office, known as OCHA, says only one hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip is capable of receiving patients. All the others are no longer able to function and mostly serve as shelters from the fighting.

In all, about 1.5 million Palestinians, more than two-thirds of Gaza’s population, have fled their homes. UN-run shelters in the south are severely overcrowded, with an average of one toilet for 160 people.

Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, has said overnight that 346 Canadians and their immediate families have so far been able to leave the Gaza Strip via the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The Rafah border crossing is the only place Palestinians can exit the Gaza Strip that is not controlled by Israel.

In a statement Joly added that it was “not acceptable” that the UN was warning that work supporting Palestinians would end in 48 hours due to a fuel shortage. “Civilians must be protected,” she said, adding that “enough food, fuel and water must get into Gaza so that their life-saving work can continue”.

She reiterated Canada’s call for Hamas to release all the hostages it seized during its 7 October attack inside Israel’s borders.

Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in the UK, has used an appearance on Sky News to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, accusing Israel of causing a “humanitarian catastrophe”.

He told viewers:

We need an immediate ceasefire. If we are going to stop the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is causing, then we need to stop the bombing. There is an imminent threat to the hospitals. More than a third of the hospitals in Gaza are already out of commission because of attacks.

Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas uses hospitals as control and command centres, which the group has denied.

Israel’s military has said that it again will open a corridor for people to move south within the Gaza Strip from 9am (7am GMT) to 4pm, and will also pause hostilities for a limited period of time between 10am and 2pm “in the neighbourhoods of al-Daraj and al-Tuffah”.

The message implores residents of Gaza “Please, for your safety, join the hundreds of thousands of residents who have moved south in recent days,” adding: “Residents of Gaza, do not surrender to Hamas, which has lost control over the northern Gaza Strip area and is trying to do everything it can to prevent you from moving south and protect yourselves.”

It specifically warns Palestinians that there is heavy fighting near the beach in the south of the strip.

Israel has continued to launch airstrikes on the south of the Gaza Strip, with a reported 13 people killed this morning in the city of Khan Younis.

Al Jazeera is reporting that 13 people have been killed by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, which is located in the south of the Gaza Strip, and is one of the areas that Palestinians have been ordered to evacuate to by the Israeli military.

In its latest operational update on the Telegram messaging service, the Israel Defense Forces claims to have struck 200 targets in the past 24 hours. It wrote:

During ground operations, IDF troops uncovered a terror tunnel shaft located in a mosque in the Gaza Strip. Following the guidance of ground troops, IDF fighter jets and helicopters struck a terrorist cell that launched anti-tank missiles at the soldiers.

Over the past day, the Israeli air force struck 200 terror targets, including terrorist operatives, weapon production sites, anti-tank missile launchers and operational command centers.

Overnight, Israeli naval soldiers struck a military camp used by Hamas’ naval forces for training and weapons storage.

The claims have not been independently verified.

It has become increasingly difficult to contact people in Gaza, particularly in the north where Gaza City and al-Shifa hospital are located. On Monday morning, the aid group Doctors Without Borders (MDF) said they had managed to contact one doctor, an MSF surgeon, at al-Shifa by phone. He told them:

We don’t have electricity. There’s no water in the hospital.

There’s no food. People will die in a few hours without functioning ventilators. In front of the main gate, there are many bodies, there are also injured patients, we can’t bring them inside.

When we sent the ambulance to bring the patients, a few metres away, they attacked the ambulance. There are injured people around the hospital, they are looking for medical care, we can’t bring them inside.

There’s also a sniper who attacked patients, they have gunshot wounds, we operated on three of them. The situation is very bad, it is inhuman. It’s a closed area, no one knows about us.

We don’t have an internet connection, you managed to call me now, maybe you’ll try 10 times before you can reach me again. The medical team agreed to leave the hospital only if patients are evacuated first: we don’t want to leave our patients.

There are 600 inpatients, 37 babies, someone who needs an ICU, we can’t leave them. We need a guarantee that there is a safe corridor because we saw some people trying to leave Al-Shifa, they killed them, they bombed them, the sniper killed them.

Israel and Hamas, and their supporters, have increasingly been waging their war online and misinformation is circulating widely. The Associated Press news agency has been looking at some of the claims and delving in to the facts behind them – here’s one such example.

CLAIM: A video shows a makeup artist applying dirt and fake blood to a young girl on a stretcher, proving that people in Gaza are faking injuries in the latest Israel-Hamas war.

THE FACTS: The video is behind-the-scenes footage from a short film made in Lebanon, and was not made to mislead people, the director confirmed to the Associated Press.

In recent weeks, social media users have repeatedly misrepresented videos to falsely accuse Palestinians of being “crisis actors” in the war, as part of a conspiracy theory dubbed “Pallywood”.

In the latest example, people are sharing a clip that begins with a child who appears to be wounded being treated on a stretcher as protesters wave Palestinian flags. As the video goes on, however, a makeup artist can be seen applying makeup to the girl to depict blood and wounds, and the child smiles at the camera.

The video was shared on multiple social media platforms including X, formerly known as Twitter, claiming it shows how Palestinians “fake injuries”.

“The Palestinians are fooling the international media and public opinion. DON’T FALL FOR IT,” reads one post on X, which garnered more than 10,000 likes. “Pallywood gets busted again.”

However, the video is actually behind-the-scenes footage of a short film. The director, Mahmoud Ramzi, first uploaded the actual film, “The Reality,” to his Instagram account on 28 October. The movie is clearly not intended to look like real footage of the conflict.

Ramzi confirmed to the Associated Press that the short film was shot in Lebanon and said it was to show the “pain that Gaza’s people endured”.

“It was not filmed to mislead people or to fabricate any truth, because what’s happening in Gaza don’t need any form of fabrication, the videos are all over the media,” Ramzi wrote in an Instagram message.

A photographer in Gaza, Belal Khaled, has taken these images of relatives mourning for those killed in an Israeli attack on the al-Sharafi family’s apartment in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Monday.

Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist believed to have been among the hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza on 7 October, was in fact killed in the initial attack, her family has told Canada’s CBC News.

Silver’s son Yonatan Zeigen confirmed to the broadcaster that his mother’s remains had been among those found at kibbutz Be’eri, where she lived, but had only now been identified.

At least 120 other men, women and children were killed in the community of about 1,100 people located just kilometres from the Israel-Gaza border.

Many of the bodies found after the Hamas attack were badly burned or damaged and experts including forensic anthropologists have faced the difficult and lengthy process of trying to identify them. Some of them may never be identified, they have warned.

Five Palestinians killed in West Bank clashes, Israeli drone strike

Fighting traps patients and medics in Gaza’s largest hospital

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