Israel-Hamas war live: Gaza aid system at ‘severe risk of collapse’, says UN secretary-general

Israel has accused Palestinian militants of having launched rockets from within a zone in the southern Gaza Strip where it has said civilians fleeing the now eight-week-old war can find safety.

Twelve rockets were launched from the al-Mawasi zone on Wednesday and at least one more from close to a humanitarian area in Rafah, the Israeli military said on social media, accusing Hamas of “using the civilians as a human shield”.

The Israeli military onslaught in southern Gaza is causing destruction, danger, and civilian terror and suffering at such a scale that makes any humanitarian response impossible across the entire enclave, Oxfam has warned.

Marta Valdes Garcia, Oxfam humanitarian director said:

Our political leaders are failing – in abject weakness – to forge a ceasefire, which is the only possible humanitarian action that now really matters.

The systemic, militarised chaos has overwhelmed the international humanitarian system. Our governments don’t even have the smokescreen of humanitarianism to hide behind now as Israel carries out its campaign of collective punishment.

Israel’s so-called safe zones within Gaza are a mirage: unprotected, not agreed or trusted, not provisioned, and not accessible. We fear that masses of terrified people will be forced beyond Gaza itself under the guise of ‘safety’. This would force the humanitarian system into an impossible choice between helping civilians and being complicit in their forced deportation.

The terrible irony is that this militarised destruction of Gaza is literally blowing away any chance of real security for both Palestinians and Israelis alike. Gaza needs a ceasefire now and humanitarian agencies need the guarantee of safe access in order to help its people and save lives.

Oxfam staff in Gaza have seen young children asking their parents to pack their clothes into separate bags for when they are next forced to flee under fire, in case their parents are killed. People are reduced to fighting over basic necessities like food, water and fuel.

One Oxfam partner said on Thursday:

This is one of the most difficult days and wars that we have experienced. If you look anywhere around, you will find displaced people, injured people, people sleeping in the streets, and even we face many difficulties in distributing aid because there is no safe place in Gaza. Every area can be dangerous, each and every place can be bombed at any moment.

Virtually no aid is now going into Gaza. Whatever Israel might allow to trickle in is insufficient and cannot be safely distributed to civilians being forced to run for their lives, Oxfam said.

Four arms factories in the UK producing Israeli fighter jets have been shut down by 1,000 trade unionists operating under the banner Workers for a Free Palestine.

The four factories are Eaton Mission Systems in Bournemouth, BAE Systems at Samlesbury Aerodrome in Lancashire, L3Harris factory in Brighton and Hove, and BAE Govan in Glasgow. All produce parts for F-35 stealth combat aircraft currently being used by Israel to bombard Gaza.

The trade unionists, who include health workers, teachers, hospitality workers, academics, artists, are calling for an end to arms sales to Israel and for the UK government to support a permanent ceasefire.

The blockades have been organised in coordination with workers in France, Denmark and the Netherlands, who are also blockading arms factories on Thursday.

Trade unions represented including Unite, Unison, GMB, the NEU, the BMA, UCU, Bectu and BFAWU.

Workers for Free Palestine said:

We salute all those in the trade union movement taking a stand to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel. Shutting down four factories across the UK today, along with several simultaneous blockades in Europe, are critical acts of solidarity – refusing to conduct business as usual in the face of Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza and ongoing genocide. As the British government refuses to call for a ceasefire and directly supports Israel’s military attack, a rapidly growing movement of workers are clearly saying “not in our name”.

Israel’s leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, has criticised the Israeli government’s response to a planned far-right march in Israel in a post on X.

His post reads [translated by Google Translate]:

The march in Jerusalem tonight is a blatant Kahanist attempt to set fire to more arenas and cause more destruction and death. As prime minister I approved marches in Jerusalem, but not violent provocations. If there really was a cabinet in Israel, he would not allow it.

The march is organised by two ultranationalist groups and scheduled to take place on Thursday evening through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Amnesty International calls for investigation into strike that killed journalist

Reuters has an exclusive interview with a former hostage of Hamas, a Thai farm labourer, Anucha Angkaew.

Angkaew was seized by 10 armed militants, whom he identified as Hamas by the Palestinian flags on their sleeves, on 7 October.

Angkaew said:

We shouted ‘Thailand, Thailand’, but they didn’t care.

I thought I would die.

Two of the six Thais he was with were killed soon after, including a friend who Angkaew said was shot in front of him in a random act of violence. The rest were forced on to a truck for a roughly 30 minute ride into Gaza.

Angkaew’s account offers a glimpse into what many hostages endured – and some continue to endure. He described sleeping on a sandy floor and being beaten by Hamas captors, who he said singled out Israelis for especially brutal treatment. Almost all his time was spent inside two small underground rooms, secured by armed guards and accessed by dark narrow tunnels.

Hamas officials did not immediately respond to a written request for comment on Angkaew’s account, Reuters reported.

Angkaew was speaking from his family home in rural north-eastern Thailand, where he returned this month after 50 days in captivity.

About 130 people, including eight Thais, remain captive. Before the war, around 30,000 Thai labourers worked in the agriculture sector, making them one of Israel’s largest migrant worker groups.

Displacement, hunger, lack of medical care and clean water, and the onset of winter are having a devastating impact on women and children in Gaza, the Care International charity has said.

The charity, which has worked in Gaza since 1948, made its comments to coincide with the two-month mark of the armed conflict in Gaza. It said the war was disproportionately affecting women and children, who make up almost 70% of those killed in Gaza since 7 October.

Hiba Tibi, Care’s acting deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said:

One month ago, I thought the suffering could not get any deeper, but the downward spiral keeps worsening.

We are seeing women and children across the Gaza Strip under immense stress, confronted with unthinkable horrors. Child mortality, hunger and psychological trauma are all reaching unprecedented highs. The current situation is bringing them to breaking point, making anything beyond focusing on survival impossible.

Mothers eat once per day in favour of their children’s health. Lack of medical care, hygiene, and high levels of malnutrition while living in overcrowded shelters are a poisonous mix, and we fear the numbers of women and children dying of otherwise preventable and treatable diseases will rise.

Mothers are telling us their children have stopped speaking or eating because of what they have seen and lived through. Others are crying and screaming with every loud sound they hear. Two months of war have traumatised an entire generation of children.

Our team has spoken to doctors who must perform C-sections without anaesthesia and see mothers who lose their babies right after giving birth because there is no power to run incubators that could keep them alive.

Aaron Brent, Care’s West Bank and Gaza acting country director, said:

In Gaza, women are the last to eat and children are the first to die. The tragic reality for children is that they are hiding to survive the bombing, mourning dead parents and siblings, fleeing with their families, or collecting firewood to keep warm instead of playing or going to school. Education is a forgotten dream for children terrified this day might be their last.

Care is calling for civilian lives to be protected, for the immediate release of hostages, thorough and prompt investigations of rape and gender-based violence, a full flow – rather than a trickle – of humanitarian aid through all border crossings in Gaza, and an immediate lasting ceasefire.

Israelis are marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah in a more solemn fashion than usual this year. Here are some photos.

It’s past 9am in Gaza and Tel Aviv. Here’s a summary of the latest developments:

• The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has backed the UN secretary general in his decision to invoke article 99 of the UN charter. Borrell says: “The #UNSC [UN security council] must act immediately to prevent a full collapse of the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

• The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has invoked a rarely used clause in the UN charter to warn that the conflict “may aggravate existing threats to international peace and security”. Guterres, in a letter to the security council, said he expects “public order to completely break down soon due to the desperate conditions” in Gaza as the territory comes under constant bombardment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In response, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said Guterres “reached a new moral low” and once again called for the UN chief to resign.

• Associated Press has published a poll which shows Democratic views on how President Joe Biden is handling the conflict have rebounded slightly. The poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 59% of Democrats approve of Biden’s approach to the conflict, a rise from 50% in November.

• Israeli forces have surrounded the Gaza house of top Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, Benjamin Netanyahu has said. “It’s only a matter of time before we get him,” the Israeli prime minister said on Wednesday. The IDF said Sinwar, who Israeli officials have described as the architect of the 7 October attacks, is hiding underground. A senior Netanyahu adviser described the operation as a “symbolic victory”.

• Israeli forces and Hamas are fighting house-to-house battles along the length of the Gaza Strip. As the IDF have been fighting their way through badly bomb-damaged urban areas in northern and southern Gaza, Hamas has increasingly relied on improvised bombs to inflict casualties and slow down the assault. The focal points of the fighting over the past two days have been the Jabalia refugee camp and the Shuja’iyya district in northern Gaza, and Khan Younis and Bani Suheila in the south.

• Israeli forces have surrounded Khan Younis are now operating “in the heart” of the southern Gaza city, the IDF said on Wednesday. The IDF called on residents of Khan Younis to flee for safer areas on Wednesday morning, noting that there would be a pause until 2pm in the bombardment of Rafah, immediately to the south on the Egyptian border. Residents reported that the IDF dropped leaflets quoting a verse in the Qur’an on the area. The UN and aid agencies say nowhere in Gaza is safe any more.

• The United States has discussed with Israel its timeline for military operations in Gaza and “how this falls into a longer-term strategy for addressing this issue that goes beyond just military means”, the White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan has told Reuters in a telephone interview. “We have talked to them about timetables. I don’t want to share that because Israel has already kind of telegraphed precisely the location of its ground operation and I don’t want to be the one telegraphing timetables.”

Here are some of the latest images coming from inside Israel on the first day of Hanukkah and two months into the war. It’s the first Jewish festival since the 7 October Hamas attacks.

It’s approaching mid-morning in Gaza and Tel Aviv. Reuters is reporting on the mood in Israel at the start of the Jewish festival, Hanukkah – here’s some of what they’ve had to say on the atmosphere inside the country:

Two months into a war with Hamas, the faces of Israelis taken hostage to Gaza still appear on individual posters plastered across Jerusalem bus stops and flashed across buildings. The sombre mood was all-consuming on Thursday at the start of Hanukkah, the first Jewish festival since 7 October when Israel says Hamas massacred 1,200 people.
It was a solemn moment for all of Israel and not only for families of the 138 Israelis still held hostage.

For some Israelis, the feeling is of a country shrinking. Some 200,000 Israelis have been uprooted from both the south of Israel where Hamas infiltrated and the north of Israel where Hezbollah attacked from Lebanon. Absent tourists because of the war, hotels have accommodated many of the evacuees.

“Oct. 7 was a day that changed the course of history in Israel,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat said, calling it “the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” Aghast at the Hamas killings, Israelis have bought up guns with the government’s blessing. The nation is largely self-absorbed. Israeli television channels, dominated by war news, rarely broadcast scenes from Gaza except to show soldiers in action.

Associated Press has published a new poll, which shows Democratic views on how President Joe Biden is handling the conflict has rebounded slightly.

The new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 59% of Democrats approve of Biden’s approach to the conflict, a tick up from 50% in November.

The shift occurred during a time in which Biden and top US officials expressed increased concern about civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, emphasised the need for a future independent Palestinian state and helped secure the release of hostages held by Hamas during a temporary truce, Associated Press reports.

Eva Corlett

The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has backed the UN secretary-general in his decision to invoke article 99 of the UN charter. Borrell says “The #UNSC must act immediately to prevent a full collapse of the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

Let’s just recap what the Israeli military have said about Yehya Sinwar.

The Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari says Hamas’ top leader in Gaza is “not above ground, he is underground,” but would not elaborate on where Israel believes him to be. ”Our job is to find Sinwar and kill him.”, he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces had encircled the Khan Younis house of the Hamas leader. Netanyahu said in a video statement:

His house may not be his fortress and he can escape but it’s only a matter of time before we get him

The Israeli military said its special forces at Khan Younis had broken through defence lines of Hamas fighters and were assaulting their positions in the city center. It said warplanes destroyed tunnel shafts and troops seized a Hamas outpost as well as several weapons caches. The Israeli accounts of the battle could not be independently confirmed.

Hamas posted video it said showed its fighters in Shujaiya moving through narrow alleys and wrecked buildings and opening fire with rocket-propelled grenades on Israel armored vehicles. Several of the vehicles are shown bursting into flames, according to Associated Press.

Gaza facing a ‘severe risk of collapse of the humanitarian system’, says UN secretary-general

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