New evacuation orders in Gaza as 15 reported killed in Israeli strike
Israel’s military spokesperson in Arabic posted instructions on X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.
He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.
Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of the Gaza town of Zawayda – where at least 15 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike – were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military’s instructions.
Key events
An SNP MSP has had the whip removed following “utterly abhorrent” comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The party confirmed it has taken action following social media comments from Glasgow Shettleston MSP John Mason.
The whip has been removed with “immediate effect”, officials said.
It comes after Mr Mason reacted to criticism over Scottish External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson’s meeting with Israel’s deputy ambassador Daniela Grudsky.
Mr Mason had also met with the Israeli ambassador and attracted fury from members of his own party after he posted on social media: “If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed ten times as many.”
A senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed optimistic talk by US President Joe Biden that a Gaza truce is nearer after negotiations in the Gulf emirate of Qatar.
“To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP. “We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”
He was responding to Biden’s comment on Friday that, “We are closer than we have ever been.”
Biden spoke after two days of talks in Qatar where Washington tried to bridge differences between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants. The two sides have been at war for more than 10 months in the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that at least 40,074 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.
Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 Hamas militants, without providing evidence.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 250 to Gaza. More than 100 were released in a November cease-fire, and around 110 are believed to still be inside Gaza, though Israeli authorities believe around a third are dead.
In the central part of the enclave, residents said that Israeli tanks advanced further on Saturday into the eastern area of Deir Al-Balah, an area they had not invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.
It comes after two sections of the southern city of Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military on Friday, which ordered people to evacuate them saying that militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.
The Israeli military said that since Friday its forces had killed dozens of militants, including some who had fired rockets from central and southern Gaza.
At least 40,074 Palestinians have been killed and 92,537 injured in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the enclave’s health ministry has now said.
Here are some of the latest images from photographers on the ground in Gaza:
Hezbollah later announced it had fired a volley of rockets at the community of Ayelet HaShahar, near Safad in northern Israel in retaliation for the Nabatieh strike. The statement said that all 10 victims in Lebanon were civilians. Hezbollah typically issues death notices when its members are killed.
Two soldiers were wounded in a rocket attack from Lebanon, the Israeli military said, adding that a total of 55 rockets had been fired in latest strikes from Lebanon.
Also on Saturday, an Israeli drone targeted a motorcycle in the Qadmous area east of Tyre in south Lebanon, state news agency NNA reported, adding that one person was injured. A security source said one person was killed in the motorcycle attack.
The number of people from the same family who died in an Israeli strike in Gaza has now been put at 18 by the Associated Press. The airstrike in Gaza early Saturday morning hit a house and an adjacent warehouse sheltering displaced people at the entrance of the town of Zawaida, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where the casualties were taken.
The threat of polio is rising fast in the Gaza Strip, prompting aid groups to call for an urgent pause in the war so they can ramp up vaccinations and head off a full-blown outbreak. One case has been confirmed, others are suspected and the virus was detected in wastewater in six different locations in July.
The death toll following an Israeli strike in the city of Nabatieh city in south Lebanon has risen to 10, according to the country’s state news agency. Around 10 people were killed, including two children, and five were wounded by the strike on a residential building, state news agency NNA said on Saturday.
New evacuation orders have been issued by Israel’s military spokesperson, who in Arabic posted instructions on X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.
Rarely has a head of state received a more hostile welcome than that which met the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when he arrived in Washington DC to speak before a joint session of Congress last month. While no senior US officials turned up to greet him on the tarmac, thousands of demonstrators marched in protest of his speech, including 200 from the group Jewish Voice for Peace who were arrested during an occupation on Capitol Hill, and others who burned him in effigy and replaced the American flag flying in front of Union Station with a Palestinian flag.
Perhaps more telling was the decision of roughly half of congressional Democrats to boycott the address altogether. “A dozen years ago, that would have been unthinkable,” noted Peter Frey, board chair of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that supports Israeli security as well as a Palestinian state. One lawmaker who did attend, the representative Rashida Tlaib, wore a keffiyeh and held a sign calling Netanyahu a “war criminal” who was “guilty of genocide”. Meanwhile, a number of labor unions, including the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and United Auto Workers sent a letter to Joe Biden calling for an end to US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
The disconnect between what US voters want and what the Biden administration does seems to widen daily, as Aaron Gell explains:
The number of people from the same family who died in an Israeli strike in Gaza has now been put at 18 by the Associated Press.
The airstrike in Gaza early Saturday morning hit a house and an adjacent warehouse sheltering displaced people at the entrance of the town of Zawaida, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where the casualties were taken. An Associated Press reporter at the hospital counted the fatalities as they were brought in.
Among those killed was a wholesaler identified as Sami Jawad al-Ejlah, who coordinated with the Israeli military to bring meat and fish to Gaza. The dead also included his two wives, 11 of their children ages 2 to 22, the children’s grandmother, and three other relatives, according to a fatality list provided by the hospital.
“He was a peaceful man,” said Abu Ahmed, a neighbor who was slightly wounded in the attack.
Hamas official dismisses “illusion” that Gaze truce nearer
Here is a summary of today’s events so far:
