Israel-Hamas war live: Israel claims to have struck 200 ‘terror targets’ within Gaza Strip with hundreds of Palestinians killed | Israel-Hamas war

Hoda Abdel-Hamid reports from Hebron for Al Jazeera, saying that it was raided overnight by Israeli forces, adding that two Palestinians were killed in Qalqilya.

She writes for the network:

There are questions about the whereabouts of those Palestinians’ bodies, which authorities in Qalqilya said they could not recover. It is assumed that Israel is withholding the bodies. Israeli authorities are holding the bodies of 25 Palestinians killed in raids since 7 October.

During these raids, Israeli authorities have detained more than 3,500 people, bringing the total Palestinians in Israeli jails to more than 7,000. Bear in mind that majority of these people are held without charges.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society has posted to social media a tribute to one of its workers killed by Israel inside Gaza overnight.

It writes:

Martyr Osama Tayeh, 37 years old, was a First Responder with the PRCS in Jabalya, Gaza. He insisted to stay in the northern part, and on providing emergency medical assistance to those who suffered the war’s calamity.

Osama lost his life due to Israeli bombardment in the dawn hours, in front of his home at Al-Falouja. Our colleague Mohammad Abu Rukba who was with him at the house was also injured.

Here are some of the latest pictures sent to us from Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip, showing the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike.

Israel’s military has denied that it is attempting to permanently remove Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. In its latest estimate, the UN’s OCHA said about 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 percent of the population, had been displaced, many to overcrowded and unsanitary shelters.

AFP reports that, speaking to the media on Monday, spokesperson Jonathan Conricus said:

We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently. We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip. We are perfectly aware that there is limited space and limited access and that is why it is so important to have the buy-in and support of international humanitarian organisations to help with the infrastructure.

Conricus also specifically said that Israel was not trying to force residents of Gaza to flee into Egypt, saying “We have not tried to have any people evacuate there. Egypt has been very clear about where they stand: they do not want that.”

Israel has been effectively blockading aid agencies from bringing in as much humanitarian aid as they require, with only a limited number of trucks being permitted to pass through Egypt’s Rafah border crossing.

The Israeli military has been attempting to designate small “safe zones” within the Gaza Strip, and instruct people to move there.

However, some members of Israel’s government have suggested in public that Gaza’s population should leave the region. Earlier in November finance minister Bezalel Smotrich backed a call by two members of the Israeli parliament who wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that western countries should accept Gazan families who expressed a desire to relocate.

“I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world,” Smotrich said in a statement. “This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region.”

Israel’s Arabic-language military spokesperson Avichay Adraee has posted to social media to say that Israel’s forces have been returning fire again over the UN-drawn blue line that divides Israel from Lebanon.

In a post, Adraee said:

During last night, several mortar shells were monitored from Lebanon towards a military site in the area of Shtula, where the attack resulted in three soldiers being slightly injured. Several mortar shells were also monitored a short while ago from Lebanon towards an IDF position in the area of Yiftah, where IDF forces responded by targeting the sources of fire.

Israel and anti-Israeli forces have regularly exchanged fire across the blue line since the Hamas attack in southern Israel on 7 October, although there was also an informal lull in the fighting in Israel’s north while the temporary truce was in place in Gaza.

Here are some of the latest images sent to us over the news wires from Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip.

Israel claims to have struck 200 ‘terror targets’ within Gaza Strip

Hani Mahmoud has been reporting from Khan Younis in southern Gaza for Al Jazeera. In his latest dispatch, he describes last night as “a very deadly and bloody night for the Palestinians”.

He reports that at least 35 people have been killed and that “the worst of the attacks happened here in central Khan Younis”.

Reporting that a commercial centre was hit, he said:

The centre is located in an area that is supposed to be safe and where hundreds of people have sought refuge in the last two days since the end of the ceasefire. The centre was completely destroyed, burned beyond recognition.

In the eastern side of Khan Younis, the Israeli military has started to advance with tanks and armoured vehicles. A family stranded there was trying to evacuate when their three-story building was shelled by tanks and completely destroyed.

Israel has been declaring some of the missing as dead in captivity, a measure designed to grant anxious relatives some closure, Reuters reports. The news agency writes:

A three-person medical committee has been poring over videos from the 7 October rampage by Hamas-led Palestinian gunmen in southern Israel for signs of lethal injuries among those abducted, and cross-referencing with the testimony of hostages freed during a week-long Gaza truce that ended on Friday.

That can suffice to determine that a hostage has died, even if no doctor has formally pronounced this over his or her body, said Hagar Mizrahi, a health ministry official who heads the panel created in response to a crisis now in its third month.

“Designation of death is never an easy matter, and certainly not in the situation embroiling us,” she told Israel’s Kan radio. Her committee, she said, addresses “the desire of the families of loved ones abducted to Gaza to know as much as possible”.

Of 240 people kidnapped, 108 were freed by Hamas in return for the release by Israel of scores of Palestinian detainees as well as boosted humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza.

Since the truce, Israeli authorities have declared seven civilians and an army colonel as dead in captivity. Israel says 137 hostages remain in Gaza, their condition not always known.

This has not been confirmed by Hamas. It has previously said dozens of hostages were killed in Israeli airstrikes, has threatened to execute hostages itself and suggested that some hostages were in the hands of other armed Palestinian factions.

Hostages have been kept incommunicado despite Israel’s calls on the Red Cross to arrange visits and verify their wellbeing.

Mizrahi said she and her fellow panelists – a forensic pathologist and a physical trauma clinician – have been watching clips shot by the Hamas attackers themselves, cellphone video by Palestinian spectators and CCTV footage of the hostage-taking “again and again, frame by frame”.

That has allowed them to map out life-threatening wounds and spot any cessation of breathing or other essential reflexes.

Additional considerations have been hostages’ rough handling by captors, the reduced chances of them getting adequate medical care in Gaza and accounts of deaths by former fellow hostages.

Six Thai hostages kidnapped and held for weeks in the Gaza Strip by Hamas will arrive back in the kingdom on Monday, officials have said according to Agence France-Presse. The news agency reports:

Tens of thousands of Thais were working in Israel, mostly in the agricultural sector, when Palestinian militants poured over the border on 7 October, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping roughly 240, according to Israeli authorities.

At least 32 Thais were abducted by Hamas, with Bangkok’s foreign ministry and Thai Muslim groups working to negotiate their release.

On Monday, at about 2pm (0700 GMT), six are expected to land at the capital’s Suvarnabhumi airport following weeks in captivity.

Since their release, the group have been recuperating at a hospital in Israel as authorities made preparations to fly them home.

It follows the return of 17 citizens from Thailand at the end of November, during a temporary truce in which scores of people were released before it expired on 1 December.

A further nine Thais are still among the hostages taken by Palestinian militants during October’s cross-border raid into Israel, according to Bangkok’s foreign ministry.

Thirty-nine Thais have been killed and 19 wounded in the war, with the kingdom evacuating more than 8,500 of its people, according to Thailand’s foreign ministry.

Unicef spokesperson James Elder, in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, has described a “night of utterly relentless bombardments” in a voice note posted to X.

“I cannot stop thinking about the 1.8 million people here in the south,” he said. “I don’t think there was more than a five- or 10-minute period throughout the course of the night, and I really didn’t sleep, where something wasn’t flying overhead or the sky being lit up”.

A 21-year-old Israeli believed to have been kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza on 7 October is dead, Israeli media have reported.

Yonatan Samarno was at the Nova music festival that was attacked in Hamas’s assault and was believed to have been shot, the Jerusalem Post reported. However, though the bodies of two of his friends were found afterwards, his was not with them.

Haaretz reported that he had fled to the nearby kibbutz Be’eri where he was shot and kidnapped.

It was not clear from either report whether his body had since been identified in Israel – many people were not immediately found or identified after the 7 October attack due to severe burns among other things – or whether he had died in Gaza while being held hostage.