Israel-Hamas LIVE: Israel confirms death of female IDF soldier seen in Hamas hostage video as Shifa hospital says it has buried 179 people in mass grave

Further to our earlier update about the US and Britain imposing fresh sanctions on Hamas (14:11), we now have some more details about the UK’s actions.

In one of Lord David Cameron’s first moves as Foreign Secretary, the British government announced sanctions against four senior Hamas leaders (including the group’s political leader in Gaza and the leader of its al-Qassam Brigades (IQB) military wing) – as well as two of the militant group’s financiers.

After taking the co-ordinated action with the US, the former prime minister said:

We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to disrupt the abhorrent activity of this terrorist organisation, working with the United States and our other allies, making it harder for them to operate and isolating them on the world stage. The Palestinian people are victims of Hamas too. We stand in solidarity with them and will continue to support humanitarian pauses to allow significantly more lifesaving aid to reach Gaza.

The four senior Hamas leaders sanctioned are:

• Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s political leader in Gaza
• Muhammed Deif, commander of the terror group’s IQB military wing
• Marwan Issa, deputy commander of the IQB military wing
• Musa Dudin, a weapons procurer for the terror group based in the West Bank

Two financiers have also been sanctioned:

• Abdelbasit Hamza, who owned a network of companies that laundered money and traded in currency to finance Hamas
• Nabil Chouman, who has channelled funds to Hamas through Lebanon

‘The sanctions show that the terror group’s leaders cannot escape the consequences of their actions, even if they are pulling the strings from outside of Gaza,’ the Foreign Office said in a statement on the government website.

Islamic Jihad chief Ziad al-Nakhala has said in a statement that the method of negotiations on Israeli hostages may push the Jihad movement out of any deal.

The group added it may keep the hostages it holds ‘for better circumstances’.

The families of Israelis being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip kicked off a five-day march today from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

They are demanding the government does much more to secure their release.

Hamas fighters took around 240 people hostage during their October 7 attack on southern Israel. The captives ranged in age from nine months to 85 and are believed to be being held in tunnels deep under the Gaza Strip.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is coming under fierce criticism from some relatives for not doing more to secure their release as the Israeli military pushes deep into Gaza with an order to destroy Hamas.

‘I demand from Benjamin Netanyahu and the cabinet to give us answers and actions,’ said Shelly Shem Tov, whose 21-year-old son Omer was dragged into Gaza.

‘Where are you? Where are you?’ she said, addressing the government in an impassioned plea at the start of the march.

Israeli authorities have identified the remains of 859 civilians killed by Hamas terrorists in the October 7 attack, the Times of Israel reports.

Police say work is still on-going to identify more.

According to the Israeli publication, the number is 16 more than the last announcement on November 8, six days ago – demonstrating the slow process that is involved in identifying the victims.

A spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry said on Friday that the death toll from the attack on southern Israel had been revised to around 1,200 from a previous government estimate of 1,400, suggesting around 350 victims remain unidentified.

The leader of Yemen’s Houthi rebel group has said it will continue to attack Israel, and that it is actively looking for vessels in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait.

Earlier today, there were reports that an alert had sounded in Eilat, an Israeli port city at the southern point of the country.

The Houthis – who are backed by Iran – have previously targeted the city.

The US and Britain have imposed a fresh round of sanctions today targeting Hamas as they seek to cut off funding for the Palestinian terror group.

The United States announced its third round of sanctions since the attack, targeting key Hamas officials and the mechanisms through which Iran provides support to Hamas and its ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), another terror group.

Britain added six new designations to its counter-terrorism sanctions list, including four individuals linked to Hamas, an update to the UK government website showed.

The UK government is considering using ‘air and maritime options’ to get more aid into Gaza, including through its bases in Cyprus, Andrew Mitchell has said.

Updating the Commons on the Government’s response to the conflict, the Foreign Office minister said: ‘We also are urging the Israeli government to increase humanitarian access including by Rafah and by opening up the Kerem Shalom crossing. At this point we assess that land presently offers the most viable and safe way to get humanitarian aid into Gaza in the quantities needed, but we are also considering air and maritime options, including through our bases in Cyprus.’

Mr Mitchell also told MPs more British nationals had escaped Gaza via the Rafah crossing into Egypt, but did not give exact numbers.

He said: ‘Since I spoke to the House last week more British nationals and their families have left, and we will continue to offer all the support we can to those British nationals still in Gaza so that they too can cross into Egypt.’

Another victim of the October 7 Hamas terror attack has been identified, according to Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Writing on social media, Bennet said 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni had been identified as one of the victims of the Kibbutz Beeri massacre.

‘Her brother and grandfather were also murdered,’ he added.

Qatar on Tuesday urged Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement on releasing hostages seized in the October 7 attack, cautioning the situation in Gaza was worsening on a daily basis.

• Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Majed bin Mohammed Al-Ansari told a news conference in Doha that the ‘deteriorating’ situation in Gaza was hampering mediation efforts.
• ‘We believe that there is no other chance for both sides other than for this mediation to take place and to reach a situation where we can see a glimmer of hope in this terrible crisis’, he added.
• The Gulf state has been leading negotiations for the release of hostages and to secure a temporary ceasefire, following the Hamas attack on southern Israel over one month ago which killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Bezalel Smotrich – a senior far-right member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – has said Gaza cannot survive as an independent entity and that it would be better for Palestinians there to leave.

Smotrich said he supported 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.

The comments underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians out of land where they want to build a future state, repeating the mass dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948.

‘I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world,’ Smotrich said.

‘This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger.’

He said an area as small as the Gaza Strip without natural resources could not survive alone, and added: ‘The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza’.

• Palestinians and leaders of Arab countries have accused Israel of seeking a new ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe), the name given to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in the wake of the 1948 war that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel.
• Most ended up in neighbouring Arab states, and Arab leaders have said any latter-day move to displace Palestinians would be unacceptable.
• Smotrich heads one of the religious nationalist parties in Netanyahu’s coalition.

A UK-based charity boss has said that Al Shifa hospital – Gaza’a largest – needs fuel, not incubators, as has been reported.

The Israeli military said it was in the process of ‘coordinating the transfer of incubators from a hospital in Israel to Gaza’ amid reports of 36 newborn babies being at risk of dying at Al Shifa. Three have already passed away.

Melanie Ward, the CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians, told the BBC that the situation was ‘beyond horrific’.

‘The reason the babies are dying is not because they don’t have incubators … What is killing them is the lack of fuel that is being provided to the hospital because Israel is preventing it from getting fuel,’ she told the broadcaster.

She added that the hospital already has incubators and staff with the medical skills to treat the babies, but until fuel was delivered, the situation would no improve. With fuel, its existing incubators could be switched back on, she said.

• Israel has blocked fuel from entering Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack, saying it would only end up in the hands of the terror group.
• As a result, hospitals have been unable to carry out life-saving work and – in some cases – shut down entirely.

Israeli police have said they are investigating ‘several cases’ of sexual violence Hamas militants allegedly committed against women during the October 7 attacks.

There were ‘multiple witnesses’ to incidents of rape, police added.

‘We have multiple witnesses for several cases,’ said David Katz, head of the Lahav 443 criminal investigation unit.

He showed reporters footage of testimony from a survivor of the attack on a rave party who described seeing a woman gang-raped then shot during the assault.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has praised staff at Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital for doing ‘everything they can’ to care for patients despite being surrounded by Israeli forces trying to wipe out Hamas.

The hospital has ceased functioning normally since Israel began its offensive in Gaza following the deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel in Oct. 7, and has insufficient electricity, water and basic equipment.

Israel says the hospital sits on top of an underground headquarters for Hamas fighters. The terror group denies this.

China, many Arab nations and Iran condemned an Israeli minister’s statement that an option in Israel’s war against Hamas could be to drop a nuclear bomb.

At Monday’s opening of a UN conference whose goal is to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, speaker after speaker said the Israeli statement posed a threat to the region and the wider international community.

• The condemnations and criticisms were in response to comments by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu on the possible use of nuclear weapons in Gaza in a radio interview earlier this month.
• His remarks were quickly disavowed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who suspended Eliyahu from cabinet meetings.
• Eliyahu later called his remarks ‘metaphorical’.
• China’s deputy UN ambassador Geng Shuang said Beijing was ‘shocked’ at what ‘Israeli officials said about the use of nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip’.
• He called the statements ‘extremely irresponsible and disturbing’, adding they should be universally condemned.
• He stressed the statements run ‘counter to the international consensus that a nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought.’
• And he urged Israeli officials to retract the statement and become a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, considered the cornerstone of nuclear disarmament, as a non-nuclear weapon state ‘as soon as possible.’
• Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its nuclear capability.
• It is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, and a former employee at its nuclear reactor served 18 years in prison for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s alleged nuclear weapons program to a British newspaper in 1986.

About 200,000 Palestinians have streamed out of northern Gaza toward worsening conditions in the south in recent days, a UN agency said today

Israel has urged civilians to evacuate Gaza City and surrounding areas in the north, but the southern part of the besieged territory is not much safer.

In all, some 1.5 million Palestinians, more than two thirds of Gaza’s population, have fled their homes, with most crowding into the southern region.

Here’s a look at the deterioating conditions in south Gaza:

• Israel carries out frequent airstrikes throughout Gaza, including the south, hitting what it says are Hamas targets but often killing women and children.
• UN-run shelters in the south are severely overcrowded, with an average of one toilet for 160 people.
• People stand in line for hours for scarce bread and brackish water.
• Trash is piling up, sewage is flooding the streets and taps run dry. There is no fuel, which is needed to produce electricity that powers water systems.
• Israel has barred fuel imports since the start of the war, saying Hamas would use it for military purposes.
• The onset of rainy, cold weather has only added to the misery, with rain causing tens to collapse and turning the ground to mud.

‘All of these tents collapsed because of the rain,’ said Iqbal Abu Saud, who had fled Gaza City with 30 of her relatives. ‘How many days will we have to deal with this?’

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which is struggling to provide basic services to over 600,000 people sheltering in schools and other facilities in the south, said it may run out of fuel by Wednesday, forcing it to halt most aid operations.

It said it was unable to continue importing limited supplies of food and medicine through Egypt’s Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only link to the outside world.

Human Rights Watch has said an Israeli strike that killed a Lebanese reporter’s sister and her three young granddaughters should be investigated as an ‘apparent war crime’.

On November 5, an Israeli strike on a car in south Lebanon killed the sister of radio correspondent Samir Ayoub and her three granddaughters, aged 10, 12 and 14, Lebanese state media said.

‘This attack by Israeli military forces that struck a car carrying a family fleeing violence shows a reckless disregard for civilian life,’ said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.

‘Their killing is a violation of the laws of war, and Israel’s allies, like the United States, should respond to this apparent war crime by demanding accountability for this unlawful strike,’ Kaiss said.

Human Rights Watch said it found no evidence of a military target in the vicinity of the strike. ‘But if there were one, targeting a car carrying civilians… makes the strike unlawful,’ Kaiss said.

• The border area between the two countries has seen daily exchanges of fire, in particular between Iran-backed group Hezbollah and Israel, since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last month.

Turkey’s foreign minister told his Australian counterpart in a call today that Israel’s targeting of hospitals and schools in Gaza amounted to an ‘open violation of international law’, a Turkish diplomatic source said.

Hakan Fidan also emphasised the urgency of achieving a full ceasefire as soon as possible and the need for unhindered access of humanitarian aid into the enclave, the source said.

People trapped inside Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital plan to start burying bodies within the hospital compound today without Israeli approval because the situation has become untenable, two sources at the hospital told Retuers.

Dr. Ahmed Al Mokhallalati, a surgeon, and Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said in separate telephone interviews from within the compound that more than 100 bodies had accumulated there, creating an acute sanitary crisis.

‘We are planning to bury them today in a mass grave inside the Al Shifa medical complex. It is going to be very dangerous as we don’t have any cover or protection from the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), but we have no other options, the corpses of the martyrs began to decompose,’ said Qidra.

‘The men are digging right now as we speak.’

Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) has removed a member of its council from his position after he said Adolf Hitler would have been proud of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, PA reports.

Wasim Haq, who was appointed to the LTA Council in March 21 to help promote diversity and inclusion within the sport, has been axed after claiming in a social media post – since deleted – over the weekend that ‘Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu’ amid Israel’s ongoing military action in Gaza.

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Another victim of the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas terrorists has been named as Vivian Silver.

The US Embassy in Jerusalem said in a post on social media that Silver partnered with them ‘on various initiatives bringing Jews & Arabs together and tirelessly advocated for the improvement in quality of life for Palestinians.’

It is understood she was killed at her home in kibbutz Be’eri. On social media, people saying they knew her described her as a peace activist.

Even five weeks on, victims of the attack are still being identified.

Late on Friday, Israel revised the death toll of the terror attack to ‘around 1,200’ – down from an initial figure of 1,400.

Off-duty members of the IDF have been pictured joining Jewish worshippers at Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

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In one photo from the holy site, a young child is seen grabbing hold of a military-grade rifle slung over the back of one of the soldiers.

The pictures were taken on Monday after Israel’s Chief Rabbinate Council called for a special day of prayer and mourning, to be held on Monday evening – the first day of the Jewish month of Kislev.

More than 1,500 anti-Semitic acts and comments have been recorded in France since the outbreak of the war, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has said.

There have been growing tensions in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities, as the war rages in the Gaza Strip.

‘There have been 1,518 anti-Semitic acts or remarks’, Darmanin told broadcaster Europe 1 in an interview.

This was a more than three-fold increase compared to the whole of 2022, when 436 anti-Semitic acts or remarks were recorded.

‘These are mainly tags and insults, but there are also assaults and injuries’, Darmanin added.

Those acts resulted in 571 arrests, the ministry told AFP news agency.

The Israeli military has claimed its forces have uncovered a Hamas terror base in and beneath a children’s hospital with guns, rockets and grenades found along with babies’ bottles and nappies.

The military released footage of what it said was a Hamas weapons cache, including explosive vests and rocket-propelled grenades, inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital.

Israel’s chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari showed rooms in the hospital’s basement where the IDF believe Hamas terrorists were holding some of the around 240 hostages they abducted during their initial attack on October 7.

‘Hamas uses hospitals as an instrument of war,’ said Hagari in a room decorated with a colourful children’s drawing of a tree on the wall. On the floor lay explosive vests, bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles.

‘Underneath the hospital, in the basement, we found a Hamas command and control centre, suicide-bomb vests, grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, explosive devices, RPGs, and other weapons, computers, money, etc,’ Hagari said.

Read the full report by clicking the link below.

The Israeli army has confirmed the death of Noa Marciano, a woman soldier held captive in Gaza by Palestinian terror group Hamas.

A statement from the army called Marciano ‘a fallen IDF soldier abducted by a terror organisation,’ a day after the army confirmed her identity following the release by Hamas of a video showing the young woman in captivity.

On Monday, Hamas’s military wing issued a video of Marciano identifying herself and calling on Israel to stop its bombing campaign.

This was juxtaposed with a picture of her apparently dead.

Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, said Marciano was killed in an Israeli strike. The Israeli army did not say how she was killed.

France’s Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu is being dispatched as of Tuesday to the Middle East to discuss the Gaza situation and regional security issues at the request of French President Emmanuel Macron, Lecornu said on X.

‘This trip will start in Egypt and will continue in the Gulf region. It will end Friday in Israel, the first time a French Defence minister visits the country since 2000,’ he said.

Eight Palestinians have been killed in clashes with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said today.

Seven Palestinians were killed during an Israeli military raid on the northern city of Tulkarem, the health ministry and a local hospital said.

Witnesses reported clashes in the area and a large deployment of Israeli soldiers seeking to make arrests.

The Israeli army said its forces conducted ‘counterterrorism activities’ in the city, during which ‘engineering vehicles uncovered explosive devices planted on routes to attack the forces’.

In a separate incident near the southern West Bank city Hebron, a 20-year-old Palestinian was killed by ‘occupation bullets’, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the Hebron incident.

Brazil’s president sparked a row on Monday by accusing Israel of ‘killing innocent people without any criteria’ in the Gaza Strip, deeming its actions there ‘as grave’ as the October 7 attacks by the Hamas terror group.

‘After the act of terrorism provoked by Hamas, the consequences, the solution of the state of Israel, is as grave as that of Hamas,’ said Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at a ceremony in Brasilia welcoming Brazilians who had been evacuated from Gaza.

‘They are killing innocent people without any criteria,’ said Lula. He also accused Israel of ‘dropping bombs where there are children, hospitals, on the pretext that a terrorist is there.’

‘They are not killing soldiers, they are killing children,’ he told journalists at the Brasilia Air Base, claiming the number of women and children killed or missing was unheard of.

Lula, 78, who hugged and kissed the returnees on the tarmac, said he had ‘never’ seen ‘such brutal and inhuman violence against innocent people’.

‘This is inexplicable. First you have to save the women and children, then you fight with whomever you want,’ Lula said.

But representatives of Brazil’s Jewish community denounced his remarks as ‘erroneous’, ‘unfair’ and ‘dangerous’.

They said the comments ‘put Israel and Hamas on the same level’, and defended the ‘visible and proven’ efforts of the Israeli authorities ‘to save Palestinian civilians’.

‘Our community expects balance from our authorities,’ added the Israeli Confederation of Brazil, which claims to represent some 120,000 Brazilian Jews, the second largest community in the region, in a statement.

The director of Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital has said 179 people, including babies and patients who died in the medical centre’s intensive care unit, have been buried in a ‘mass grave’ at the complex.

‘We were forced to bury them in a mass grave,’ said director Mohammad Abu Salmiyah, adding that seven babies and 29 intensive care patients were among those buried after hospital fuel supplies ran out.

‘There are bodies littered in the hospital complex and there is no longer electricity at the morgues,’ he said, as no fuel has entered the Gaza Strip since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7.

On Tuesday, a man and a woman died in the ICU bringing the number of people who had died in the unit to 29, Salmiyah said.

A journalist inside the hospital who is collaborating with AFP news agency said the stench of decomposing bodies was everywhere in the facility.

Time is running out for 36 newborn babies at Gaza’s biggest hospital.

Israeli tanks have taken up positions outside Al Shifa Hospital, which Israel says sits atop tunnels housing a headquarters for Hamas who are using patients as shields.

US President Joe Biden said hospitals in the Gaza Strip must be protected and he hoped for ‘less intrusive’ action by Israel as tanks advanced on the main gates, while Britain’s Rishi Sunak said ‘too many civilians’ are dying in the coastal strip.

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Last night, Rishi Sunak said ‘too many civilians’ are dying in Gaza and that there needs to be ‘unhindered humanitarian access and urgent and substantive humanitarian pauses’.

The PM told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London: ‘There are things that Israel must do as part of this response.

‘We’ve been clear that they must act within international law, they must take all measures to protect innocent civilians, including at hospitals, stop extremist violence in the West Bank and allow more aid into Gaza… too many civilians are losing their lives.

‘That’s why I’ve doubled our aid to Gaza and why we continue to press both at the United Nations and directly with Israel for unhindered humanitarian access and urgent and substantive humanitarian pauses.

‘We want aid coming in by air, land and sea, and we’re ready to use our bases in Cyprus as a staging post.’

Israeli tanks were massed near the gates of Gaza’s main hospital where Palestinians were trapped in dire conditions on Tuesday as US President Joe Biden pressed Israel to protect the complex.

After days of heavy air strikes around Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, witnesses said tanks and armoured vehicles were metres from the besieged facility, which has become a focal point of the five-week-old war.

Israel accuses Hamas fighters of using tunnels under the hospital as a command ‘node’, effectively engaging the sick and injured as human shields. It is a charge that Hamas denies.

Biden called on Israel to use ‘less intrusive action relative to the hospital’, some of his most pointed comments on Israeli operations to date. ‘The hospital must be protected,’ he told reporters.

Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner insisted Al-Shifa was ‘central in Hamas’s command and control capabilities’, but said troops were currently ‘stand-offish’.

‘The idea is to try to evacuate the people, evacuate as many as possible,’ he said.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said Gaza’s largest hospital is turning into a ‘cemetery’ where dead bodies are lying on the ground.

After days of heavy air strikes around Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, witnesses said tanks and armoured vehicles were metres (yards) from the besieged facility, which has become a focal point of the five-week-old war.

‘Around the hospital there are dead bodies which cannot be taken care of or not even be buried or taken away to any sort of morgue,’ WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said.

‘The hospital is not working at all any more as it should. It’s nearly a cemetery,’ Lindemeier added.