Israel-Hamas war LIVE: Kidnapped Shani Louk is confirmed dead by family as IDF rescues female Israeli soldier in Gaza military operation

A female Israeli soldier has been released from captivity in the Gaza Strip, the army has said, following an operation in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.

‘Last night, soldier Ori Megidish was released during a ground operation after being kidnapped by Hamas on October 7,’ the army said in a statement.

‘The soldier was medically checked, is doing well, and has met with her family.’

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a photograph of Megidish in which she is seen surrounded with her family members. The photo was also shared by the Israel Defence Forces.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told his war cabinet that Israel is making ‘systematic progress’ in its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Netanyahu said the Israeli army ‘has expanded its ground entry into the Gaza Strip, it is doing it in measured, very powerful steps, making systematic progress one step at a time’, according to an official video statement of the start of the meeting.

The PM has faced increasing pressure over the fate of the Israeli hostages.

He said that alongside the army strikes, ‘we are continuing our efforts to free the abducted people, even during the (land) operation. ‘The operation even creates opportunities to obtain (their) liberation and we will not miss them.’

WARNING: The following video contains images that some viewers may find upsetting

Funerals have been held for four men who were killed in an Israeli raid in Jenin, a city in the West Bank.

Israeli media reported that there was heavy exchange of fire between Israeli forces and Palestinians in the city, in a battle that included drone strikes – a once rare, but now increasingly common attack mode used in the West Bank.

Pictures showed the bodies of the four men killed being carried through the streets, as grieving women embraced.

Others showed gun-toting men marching down the streets.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that the death of German-Israeli woman Shani Louk showed what he called the barbarism of Hamas and the need to hold the Palestinian militant group to account.

The Israeli government had earlier on Monday confirmed the death of Louk, who was taken by Hamas at a music festival on October 7 during the deadly assault.

‘For me, this news is terrible,’ Scholz said during an official visit to Africa. ‘This shows all the barbarism that lies behind Hamas.’

Rishi Sunak has asked police and security agencies at the Cobra meeting to conduct tabletop exercises to simulate a response to potential counter-terror or public order scenarios, a Downing Street source said, according to PA.

Meanwhile, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) will keep the threat level from international terrorism at ‘substantial’, the Home Secretary said.

Speaking to broadcasters, Suella Braverman said: ‘The Prime Minister chaired a Cobra meeting today, and I briefed him alongside operational leads from policing, counterterrorism and security agencies on the domestic security picture because, of course, keeping the British people safe is my top priority.

‘As Sir Mark Rowley himself said, there is an accelerated terrorism threat because of what’s happening and it’s vital that we keep a close eye on the developing situation.’

Asked about the threat level, Ms Braverman said: ‘JTAC, the Joint Threat Assessment Centre, has maintained its assessment to date.’

Earlier, Braverman described supporters taking to the streets in support of Palestine as ‘hate marches’.

Israel moved troops and tanks into Gaza at the weekend as its ground invasion of the strip got underway. Here are five key updates from the war so-far…

The Hamas terror group has released a video purporting to show three women captured during its October 7 attack on Israel.

Sitting on plastic chairs against a white tile wall, one of the women shouted as she criticised Israel’s response to the hostage crisis and for not ‘guarding them’ from the terrorists.

Hamas gunmen captured around 240 people during the deadly raid and have said they will release them in return for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Israel has dismissed the offer.

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The Lebanese army says its troops discovered 21 launchers, one of them equipped with a rocket ready to be fired, in several locations near the border with Israel.

Troops then dismantled them, it added, in the statement reported by AP.

The army’s statement came as the militant Hezbollah group said its gunmen attacked two Israeli posts along the border on Monday, including one on the edge of the Israeli border town of Metula, destroying ‘technical equipment.’

Israeli forces fired shells toward the Lebanese side of the border, causing some fires around their posts, in an apparent attempt to prevent Hezbollah fighters from hiding in orchards.

It has emerged that Hamas terrorists beheaded Shani Louk after the gunmen kidnapped the German tattoo artist from the Nova electronic festival and paraded her on the back of a truck.

Ms Louk, 22, was abducted from Israel to Gaza by the Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the festival near Kibbutz Reim. Hamas gunmen took at least 239 hostages and killed about 1,400 people during the dawn raid.

For more than three weeks, Ms Louk’s family prayed that the German-Israeli could be saved from the terrorists.

But Israeli President Yitzchak Herzog revealed today that the young festivalgoer was murdered by the ‘sadistic animals’ and decapitated.

Read our full story by clicking the link below:

Two US senior defense officials briefing reporters at the Pentagon have said from October 17 to October 30, US and coalition forces were attacked at least 23 times.

They said forces were attacked 14 times in Iraq and nine times in Syria by a mix of drones and rockets.

The officials said many of the drones and rockets were intercepted and failed to reach their targets.

Bases housing US troops in Syria and Iraq have come under rocket and drone attacks over the past weeks as tensions rise in the region over the Israel-Hamas war.

Hamas has released a video purporting to show three women captured during its October 7 attack inside Israel. One of the women delivers a brief statement, likely under duress, criticizing Israel’s response to the hostage crisis.

It was not immediately possible to verify the identity of the women in the 76-second video in which one calls for Israel to make a deal for the release of all captives. Hamas said the women were ‘Zionist detainees’.

Palestinian terrorists captured around 240 people during the deadly raid and have said they will release them in return for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Israeli tanks briefly advanced Monday into the fringes of Gaza City, witnesses said, as the army ramped up its war on Hamas saying it had killed dozens of militants in hundreds of strikes.

• ‘Dozens’ of tanks entered the Zaytun district in south of the Palestinian territory’s main city, cutting a key road from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip for more than an hour, witnesses told AFP journalists in southern Gaza by phone.
• ‘They have cut the Salahedin road and are firing at any vehicle that tries to go along it,’ said one resident who did not want to be identified.
• Israeli jets bombed a section of the road leaving large craters, another resident said.
• Video circulating on social media showed an Israeli tank and bulldozer in central Gaza blocking the territory’s main north-south highway, which the Israeli military earlier told Palestinians to use to escape the expanding ground offensive.
• Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remain in the north would no longer be able to escape if the road is blocked since it’s the only useable route south.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called a meeting of top security and law enforcement officials today, the day after a mob stormed the airport in the region of Dagestan after a plane from the Israeli city of Tel Aviv landed there.

• Hundreds of angry men rushed onto the tarmac of the airport in Makhachkala, the capital of the predominantly Muslim region, late on Sunday, looking for Israeli passengers.
• Dagestan’s Ministry of Health said more than 20 people were injured, with two in critical condition.
• It said the injured included police officers and civilians.
• The local Interior Ministry said 60 people were detained in the unrest.
• It was not clear if charges had been filed against any of them, but Russia’s Investigative Committee said it opened a criminal probe on charges of organizing mass unrest.

Pictures, taken from the nearby Israeli city of Sderot, have shown Israeli tanks advancing across fields in the north of the Gaza Strip.

Battles are on-going between the IDF and Hamas in the region.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister said Monday he was working to ensure his country does not enter the Hamas-Israel war, even as Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging cross-border fire.

Speaking to AFP news gency, Najib Mikati said he feared an escalation as border skirmishes continue to stoke concern that Hezbollah could enter the conflict.

Read Related Also: Israel blows up home of senior Hamas leader in West Bank as the IDF continues to target the Islamist group’s top men

• ‘I am doing my duty to prevent Lebanon from entering the war raging further south’
• ‘Lebanon is in the eye of the storm’
• ‘I cannot rule out an escalation because there is a race to reach a ceasefire before escalation spreads in the entire region’

Cash-strapped Lebanon is facing the possibility of war essentially leaderless, as political divisions have left the country without a president for almost a year, while Mikati has headed a caretaker cabinet for about a year and a half.

The terror threat level will not be raised at Rishi Sunak’s emergency Cobra meeting, Downing Street has suggested.

The Prime Minister’s spokesman told journalists: ‘I wouldn’t get in speculating on the terror threat. You’re right that it’s done by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre rather than set through a Cobra meeting.’

The official said he ‘can’t be definitive’ on whether a change is being discussed at the meeting.

He said it is not ‘helpful to speculate’ on whether there is a possibility of a heightened terror threat as a result of developments in Israel and Gaza.

The spokesman said: ‘We have expert security services and police forces working around the clock to try and keep the public safe. Clearly we recognise the potential for increased challenges due to the ongoing situation in Israel and Gaza. We’re very mindful of that.

‘It is why there have been continuous discussions including with security services and the police about how we can keep the public safe.’

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry has claimed three people were killed when a car was blasted by an Israeli tank along the enclave’s main highway.

The incident – which appeared to be caught on video – came as Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) pushed into Gaza City in the ‘second stage’ of its war on Hamas.

Footage shows a car approaching an earth barrier built across the highway, where a tank is parked behind a small building, according to the Associated Press.

The car stops and begins to turn around in the middle of the road. As it heads away, the tank appears to open fire, and an explosion engulfs the car, the AP reported.

A journalist who was filming the scene from another car further down the road races away in terror, screaming, ‘Go back! Go back!’ at an approaching ambulance and other vehicles on the highway.

Read MailOnline’s full coverage of the incident HERE.

Four Palestinians were killed early Monday in Jenin in the occupied West Bank amid clashes with Israeli forces, the Palestinian health ministry said.

• The ministry said five other Palestinians were wounded, including two with critical injuries.
• Israeli media reported that there was heavy exchange of fire between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Jenin in a battle that included drone strikes.
• Violence has surged in the West Bank since the war between Israel and Gaza broke out on October 7. Since then, Israeli forces and settlers killed 115 Palestinians, including 33 minors, as of Sunday, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of humanitarian affairs.
• OCHA said half of the fatalities were during clashes that followed Israeli search-and-arrest operations.

Kidnapped Shani Louk’s family have announced that she is dead after a bone from the base of her skull was found three weeks after she was abducted by Hamas terrorists at the Nova electronic festival and paraded on the back of a truck.

Ms Louk, 22, was kidnapped from Israel to Gaza by Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the festival near Kibbutz Reim. Hamas gunmen took at least 239 hostages and killed about 1,400 people during the dawn raid.

For more than three weeks, Ms Louk’s family prayed that the German-Israeli could be saved from the terrorists.

But Ms Louk’s mother and sister today announced that she was dead.

Ms Louk’s cousin told the Jerusalem Post that the family were told by the Israeli Defence Forces that a bone from the base of the 22-year-old’s skull had been found.

The IDF and volunteers from the Zaka emergency response team said the bone from the base of a skull, without which a person can’t survive, matched with Ms Louk’s DNA.

The number of people killed in Gaza has risen to 8,306 as Israel continues its withering aerial bombardment, the Hamas-run health ministry in the enclave said today.

The health ministry said 3,457 children have been killed in the strikes since October 7.

A knife-wielding Palestinian stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli police officer before being shot dead in annexed east Jerusalem on Monday, police said.

• ‘A terrorist from east Jerusalem armed with a knife arrived at the Mandelbaum gas station in Jerusalem,’ police said in a statement. ‘The terrorist stabbed a border police officer, and after grabbing his gun and trying to shoot it, fled the scene.’
• ‘Border police officers at the scene neutralised the terrorist with gunfire,’ it said, without giving the attacker’s identity. Police were pictured at the scene covering the alleged attacker’s body.
• Shaare Zedek hospital said it received a man in his 30s who had sustained ‘stab wounds to the torso’, describing his condition as ‘serious but stable’.
• Israeli forces have stepped up their ground offensive in Gaza as part of the military response to the October 7 Hamas attacks that officials say killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, with another 239 people taken hostage.
• The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says more than 8,000 people, mainly civilians, mostly civilians and more than half of them children, have since been killed in Israeli air and ground strikes.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is to chair an emergency Cobra meeting today amid fears that the conflict between Hamas and Israel could have increased the domestic terror threat in Britain.

The PM will assemble police and national security officials and Home Secretary Suella Braverman in Downing Street on Monday morning, Whitehall sources said.

Education minister Robert Halfon stressed before the meeting that the Government has to ensure British citizens are ‘safe and secure from the threat of terrorism’.

He declined to say whether the terror threat level might be raised. It currently stands at ‘substantial’ in England, Wales and Scotland, meaning an attack is likely.

Screaming parents and their crying children were forced to run the gauntlet through an angry anti-Semitic mob that had stormed a runway in Russia last night to hunt down Jews after their flight from Israel landed in a Muslim-majority region.

Terrifying footage shows hundreds of thugs descending onto the runway of Makhachlaka airport in the Dagestan region in a sea of black as they screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ while waving Palestinian flags last night.

As families started to disembark the flight from Tel Aviv, an aviation official screamed at them to get back onto the aircraft as he saw the angry mob running towards them.

The captain of the plane warned his passengers to remain on the aircraft or they would ‘be crushed’ by the angry crowd, with some attempting to board the plane by climbing on its wings and roof.

Read the full story by clicking the link below.

Britain is trying to arrange a temporary cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip so that more humanitarian aid can be delivered to the besieged Palestinians, foreign minister James Cleverly said on Monday.

• Aid supplies to Gaza have been choked since Israel began bombarding the densely populated Palestinian enclave in response to a deadly attack by the militant group Hamas on October 7.
• Cleverly said that humanitarian aid was trickling into Gaza but the volume needed to be increased significantly.
• ‘We’re working extensively with the Egyptians, with the Israelis, and others to try and have a humanitarian pause, temporary pause so that we can get that humanitarian aid to the people that need it,’ Cleverly said.
• However, he stopped short of calling for a full ceasefire in the conflict.
• Israel has so far rejected international calls, including by the United Nations, for a humanitarian pause to its bombardment of Gaza that has displaced one million people and killed more than 8,000, according to Palestinian health authorities.

The UN Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting Monday afternoon on Israel’s ground incursion in Gaza and the dire humanitarian plight of Palestinians at the request of the United Arab Emirates.

• The UAE, the Arab representative on the council, is one of 10 elected council members working on a new Security Council resolution on the Israel-Hamas war which is still in discussion.
• The council has rejected four draft resolutions – one vetoed by the United States, one vetoed by Russia and China, and two that failed to get the minimum nine ‘yes’ votes.
• The Gaza meeting will take place after the council meets first on Western Sahara and then on Colombia.
• The General Assembly, where there are no vetoes, adopted a resolution Friday by a vote of 120-14 with 45 abstentions calling for humanitarian truces leading to a cessation of hostilities.
• Security Council resolutions are legally binding. General Assembly resolutions are not but they are an important barometer of world opinion.

Israel was ‘gradually moving ahead according to plan’ in the Gaza Strip, chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said during a regular press briefing on Monday.

Hagari said the forces killed dozens of Gaza militants overnight but refused to confirm the location of the ground forces after images on social media appeared to show Israeli tanks advancing on a main road in Gaza.

Israeli tanks have entered the edge of Gaza City and cut a key road from the north to the south of the war-torn Palestinian territory, witnesses told AFP news agency.

The witnesses said tanks were seen in the Zaytun district.

‘They have cut the Salahedin road and are firing at any vehicle that tries to go along it,’ said one resident.

Israeli forces have stepped up a ground offensive in recent days as part of its military response to the October 7 Hamas attacks.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said ‘thousands of people’ broke into several of its warehouses and distribution centres in Gaza, grabbing basic items like flour and hygiene supplies yesterday.

‘This is a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down,’ it said.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society on Sunday said Israel was repeatedly bombing around Al-Quds hospital in central Gaza, putting civilians at risk.

• Aside from the patients, some 14,000 people displaced by the war are sheltering there, the aid group said.
• The UN said there had also been weekend shelling near Gaza City’s Shifa hospital and the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza, and that all 10 hospitals operating there had been told to evacuate by Israel in recent days.
• The World Health Organization chief said calls to evacuate Al-Quds hospital were ‘deeply concerning’.
• ‘It’s impossible to evacuate hospitals full of patients without endangering their lives,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X.

Israel expanded its military assault deeper into the northern Gaza Strip as the UN and medical staff expressed fears over airstrikes hitting closer to hospitals where tens of thousands of Palestinians have sought shelter alongside thousands of wounded.

• Israeli forces killed ‘dozens’ of militants in overnight clashes in Gaza, the military said on Monday.
• Hamas terrorists also reported ‘heavy fighting in Gaza on the third night of Israel’s expanded ground raids into the war-torn territory with tanks and troops.

The Israeli Air Force said it had attacked 600 targets in Gaza, including weapons warehouses, hiding places and gatherings of Hamas operatives and anti-tank positions.

In one incident, a fighter jet targeted a building ‘with over 20 Hamas terrorist operatives inside,’ the military said. In another, a fighter jet was guided to an anti-tank missile launching post in the area of Al-Azhar University.