Region

RAFAH, Palestinian Territories — Heavy clashes and bombardment rocked the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Saturday, as the United Nations said 800,000 people had been "forced to flee" an Israeli assault on Hamas fighters.

Israel's military said its air forces hit more than 70 targets across Gaza while ground troops conducted "targeted raids" in eastern Rafah, killing 50 fighters and locating dozens of tunnel shafts.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, said that since Israel's Rafah operation began, there had been a massive movement of people.

"Nearly half of the population of Rafah or 800,000 people are on the road having been forced to flee since the Israeli forces started the military operation in the area on 6 May," he said in a post on X.

He said people were fleeing to areas without water supplies or adequate sanitation.

Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, said it fired a barrage of rockets towards Israel's port of Ashkelon and targeted an Israeli command centre at the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

An AFP reporter said air strikes and artillery pounded eastern Rafah as warplanes overflew the city on Gaza's border with Egypt.

More than 10 days into what the army called a "limited" operation in Rafah that sparked an exodus of Palestinians, fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters has also flared again in northern Gaza.

Israel said in early January it had dismantled Hamas's command structure in the north, but the army said Hamas — whose October 7 surprise attack sparked the war — had been "in complete control here in Jabalia until we arrived a few days ago".

Hamas slammed what it called Israel's "escalating crimes of the occupation" and "intensified brutal raids" on Jabalia, saying they had killed dozens of civilians and wounded hundreds more.

Aid groups say Israel’s Rafah incursion, launched despite overwhelming international opposition and as mediators were hoping for a breakthrough in stalled truce talks, has worsened an already dire humanitarian crisis.

With key land crossings closed or operating at limited capacity because of the fighting, some aid began entering Gaza via a temporary US-built floating pier.

The Israeli army said 310 pallets began moving ashore in “the first entry of humanitarian aid through the floating pier”.

Satellite pictures showed more than a dozen trucks lining up Saturday on the pier’s approach road.

In the coming days, around 500 tonnes of aid are expected to be delivered to Gaza via the pier, according to US Central Command.

But UN agencies and humanitarian aid groups have warned sea or air deliveries cannot replace far more efficient truck convoys into Gaza, where the UN has repeatedly warned of looming famine.

The European Union welcomed the first shipment from Cyprus to the pier, but called on Israel to “expand deliveries by land and to immediately open additional crossings”.

The Rafah crossing, a vital conduit for humanitarian aid, has been closed since Israel launched its operation in the city.

The war began after Hamas unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 35,386 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

The toll includes at least 83 deaths over the past 24 hours, said a ministry statement on Saturday.

Out of 252 people taken hostage from Israel during the October 7 attack, 125 remain held in Gaza including 37 the army says are dead.

‘Advancing and retreating’ 

The army said Saturday that troops had recovered the body of hostage Ron Benjamin in the same Gaza operation that saw the bodies of three other hostages killed on October 7 retrieved late Thursday.

Israel has vowed to defeat remaining Hamas forces in Rafah, which it says is the last bastion of the Iran-backed group.

Palestinian sources in Rafah said Israeli forces were operating in the Al Salam and Jenina neighbourhoods as well as on the Philadelphi route along the Egyptian border.

“Troops are advancing and retreating around these areas,” a security source said.

Cairo, which has been involved in mediation efforts, says a potential Israeli takeover of Philadelphi could violate the two countries’ landmark 1979 peace deal.

In northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia, witnesses reported air strikes near Kamal Adwan hospital on Saturday.

Its director Hussam Abu Safiya said Friday the facility had received “large numbers” of casualties from nearby Jabalia and was running low on supplies.

The fuel aid that had reached the hospital was “barely enough for a few days”, he told AFP.

The World Health Organisation has received no medical supplies in Gaza since the Rafah operation began, spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said Friday.

Biden aide visits 

On the diplomatic front, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was heading to the region.

Sullivan will meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman on Saturday and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

Meanwhile, Israel said it killed two senior Islamic Jihad militants in separate air strikes in the northern West Bank and in Rafah.

The armed wing of Islamic Jihad confirmed a local commander was killed in an overnight strike on the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp.

PORT SUDAN, Sudan — Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have announced their willingness to open "safe passages" out of the former haven city of El Fasher in Darfur, which has been gripped by fighting for weeks.

The RSF, battling the regular army for more than a year, affirmed in a post on X late Friday "the readiness of its forces to help citizens by opening safe passages to voluntarily leave to other areas of their choosing and to provide protection for them".

El Fasher, the state capital of North Darfur and once a key hub for humanitarian aid where many had gathered for shelter, has been in the grips of fighting as the RSF seeks to control it.

The paramilitaries called on residents of El-Fasher to "avoid conflict areas and areas likely to be targeted by air forces and not to respond to malicious calls to mobilise residents and drag them into the fires of war".

Sudan has been in the throes of conflict for over a year between the regular army led by de facto ruler Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and the RSF led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The conflict has killed as many as 15,000 people in the West Darfur state capital of El Geneina alone, according to United Nations experts.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders on Wednesday said its hospital in North Darfur had received more than 450 people killed in the fighting since May 10, but noted that the actual death toll was likely much higher.

Also on Wednesday, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator said residents of Sudan were “trapped in an inferno of brutal violence” and increasingly at risk of famine due to the rainy season and blocked aid.

Tens of thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced since the war broke out in April 2023.

The UN on Friday warned it only had 12 percent of the $2.7 billion it sought in funding for Sudan, warning that “famine is closing in”.

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Israeli forces shot and killed three men during clashes in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian officials said early Thursday.

Several others were injured during the confrontation between Israeli forces and Palestinian activists in the town of Tulkarm in the northwest of the territory, the Palestinian Authority's health ministry told AFP.

"3 martyrs shot by the occupation forces in Tulkarm," the ministry said.

It identified those killed as Ayman Ahmad Mubarak, 26, Husam Imad Daabas, 22 and Mohammed Yusif Nasrallah, 27.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the three men were killed during an Israeli raid on the town shortly after midnight.

Earlier in the day, the health ministry said Israeli forces killed a young man at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Ramallah shortly after the annual march marking what Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe" of 1948.

Thousands marched across the West Bank to commemorate the 76th anniversary of when around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the war that led to Israel's creation.

This week's anniversary comes against the backdrop of the war raging in Gaza, which has displaced most of the strip's population.

Violence has surged in the West Bank after Hamas's unprecedented October 7 surprise attack on Israel. Israel's retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed at least 35,233 people, mostly civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Including the three deaths announced on Thursday, at least 502 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since October 7, according to the Palestinian health ministry's count.

At least 20 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks over the same period, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — US troops on Thursday anchored a long-awaited temporary pier, aimed to boost aid deliveries into war-ravaged Gaza, to a beach in the besieged Palestinian territory, the US military and Israel said.

The US Central Command said the pier was "successfully affixed to the beach in Gaza" at around 7:40am (04:40 GMT), with around 500 tonnes of aid expected to enter the Palestinian territory in the coming days.

"It's a pretty substantial amount, and it's spread out over multiple ships right now," Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy CENTCOM commander, told reporters in Washington.

"The connection of the floating pier in the Gaza Strip was successfully completed," Israel's military said in a statement later on Thursday.

President Joe Biden announced the emergency pier in March to address the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, where the United Nations has warned of famine with virtually the entire population displaced by the Israeli military action in response to the October 7 Hamas attack.

Built at a cost of at least $320 million, the project is extraordinary in that such massive humanitarian efforts by the United States are usually in response to actions by hostile countries, not a US ally.

The humanitarian assistance is being screened in Cyprus and loaded by truck. Once on land, it will “move quickly”, being offloaded from the coast into Gaza within hours, Cooper said, adding that “thousands of tonnes of aid are in the pipeline”.

He said that around 1,000 US soldiers and sailors were involved in the operation but that they were only involved in the pier and not in delivery — which will be handled through the UN.

“There will be no US military boots on the ground in Gaza,” he said.

‘Land routes most effective’ 

The United Nations has warned of a looming famine in Gaza, where it says the vast majority of the coastal territory’s 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, now in its eighth month.

The bloodiest-ever Gaza war began after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s military retaliation has killed at least 35,272 people, also mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

The UN has argued that opening up land crossing points and allowing more aid trucks into Gaza is the only way to stem the spiralling humanitarian crisis.

But the primary crossing into Gaza, on the territory’s border with Egypt, has been closed for days after Israel seized it from Hamas last week.

Israeli troops took over the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing as the military threatened a wider assault on the southern city, defying warnings from the United States and others over the fate of some 1.4 million civilians who had been sheltering there.

More required 

Cyprus, the Mediterranean island nation that is the departure point for aid on the planned maritime corridor, said US ship James A. Loux left on Wednesday, carrying relief supplies and “technical equipment for the unloading and transportation of the aid to the jetty”.

Government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said that “new departures are expected, transporting humanitarian aid including food items, medical supplies, hygiene and temporary shelter”.

Britain, meanwhile, said its contribution of an initial nearly 100 tonnes of “shelter coverage kits” figured in the first shipment.

The pier will begin with facilitating the delivery of around 90 truckloads of international aid into Gaza each day, before volumes are scaled up to 150 truckloads daily, a British statement said late Wednesday, without providing a clear timeline.

The maritime corridor was “not a replacement for aid being delivered through land routes, which remain the quickest and most effective way of getting much-needed aid into Gaza”, the statement said.

“We know that more is required, particularly via land,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the statement.

RAFAH, Palestinian Territories — Tens of thousands of civilians fled the southern Gaza city of Rafah ahead of a threatened Israeli ground offensive, as Palestinians on Wednesday mark the anniversary of their "Nakba" or "catastrophe" of 1948.

During the war that accompanied Israel's creation, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes and many took refuge in what would later become the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Wednesday's commemoration of the "Nakba" comes as multiple battles between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters across the Gaza Strip force waves of Palestinian mass displacement.

Nearly 450,000 Palestinians have been displaced from Rafah since May 6, and around 100,000 from northern Gaza, UN agencies said.

That means around a quarter of Gaza's population of 2.4 million people have been displaced again in about one week.

UN chief Antonio Guterres repeated his call for a humanitarian ceasefire to allow more aid into the besieged territory.

“I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and for the release of all hostages. I call for the Rafah crossing to be re-opened immediately and for the unimpeded humanitarian access throughout Gaza,” he posted Tuesday on social media site X.

The war and siege have triggered a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with the UN repeatedly lamenting aid restrictions as famine stalks the north.

Since Israeli troops moved into eastern Rafah, the aid crossing point from Egypt has remained closed and the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing lacks “safe and logistically viable access”, a UN report said late Monday.

Qatar, which has been mediating peace talks, said Gazans “have not received any aid” since May 9.

Attack on aid convoy 

Israeli police on Tuesday said they had opened an investigation after right-wing activists stopped and ransacked at least seven Gaza-bound aid trucks coming from Jordan, leaving food spilt on the road.

One of the activists, Hana Giat, said that with hostages still held by Hamas militants, “no humanitarian aid should go in before our hostages are out, safe in their homes”.

Both the United States, which called it “a total outrage”, and Britain, said they would raise concerns about the incident with Israel’s government.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called on Israeli authorities to stop the attacks and hold those responsible to account.

“I’m outraged by the repeated & still unchecked attacks perpetrated by Israeli extremists on aid convoys on their way to Gaza, including from Jordan. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are starving,” Borrell posted on X late Tuesday.

The bloodiest-ever Gaza war erupted after Hamas October 7 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,170 people, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s relentless bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza have since killed at least 35,173 people, mostly civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Clashes have rocked densely crowded Rafah but also flared again in northern and central Gaza months after troops and tanks first entered those areas.

At least five people were killed, including a woman and her child, and several others wounded, in two Israeli air strikes on Gaza City on Tuesday night, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency.

Israel last week defied a chorus of warnings — including from top ally Washington which paused a shipment of bombs — and sent troops and tanks into the east of Rafah to pursue militants.

 ‘No clarity on how to stop war’ 

Battles and heavy Israeli bombardments have been reported around Rafah as well as in Gaza City and Jabalia refugee camp in the north, and Nuseirat camp in the centre.

At Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital, the wounded and the dead arrived.

A shirtless man, his chest smeared with blood, lay on a hard cot hooked up to a monitor. Outside, several men carried a shrouded corpse and placed it in the shade of a tree blooming red flowers.

Despite threatening to withhold some arms over concerns of a Rafah assault, US President Joe Biden’s administration informed Congress on Tuesday of a $1 billion weapons package for Israel, official sources told AFP.

US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel earlier Tuesday said that while Washington backed military pressure on Hamas, it was not the only way to “fully defeat” the militants.

Patel reiterated Washington’s position that, without a political plan for Gaza’s future, militants “will keep coming back and Israel will continue to remain under threat”, leading to “this continued cycle of violence”.

Momentum had been building in truce negotiations, mediator Qatar’s prime minister said on Tuesday, but “what happened with Rafah has set us backward”.

Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said that “right now we are on a status of almost a stalemate”.

Egypt and the United States have also been mediating.

“There is no clarity how to stop the war from the Israeli side. I don’t think that they are considering this as an option,” Sheikh Mohammed said.

On the eve of the “Nakba” commemoration, thousands of people took part in an annual march that took them through the ruins of villages that Palestinians were expelled from during the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation.

Eyes glistening with tears, Abdul Rahman Al Sabah, 88, recalled how members of the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary group, forced his family from Al Kassayer and “blew up our village”.

RAFAH, Palestinian Territories — Israeli forces persisted with its offensive against the Gaza Strip, forcing new waves of Palestinian mass displacement.

Clashes have rocked the densely crowded far-southern city of Rafah but also flared again in northern and central Gaza, months after troops and tanks first entered those areas.

The United States has urged Hamas to accept a Gaza truce plan and called on Israel to devise "a strategic endgame" and post-war plan, said White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

This would help Israel avoid "getting mired in a counterinsurgency campaign that never ends and ultimately saps Israel's strength and vitality", Sullivan said on Monday.

Israel last week defied a chorus of warnings — including from top ally Washington which paused a shipment of bombs — and sent tanks and troops into the east of Rafah to pursue fighters.

At the same time, fighting has flared in north Gaza four months after the army said Hamas' command structure there had been dismantled, and six months after defence minister Yoav Gallant said Hamas had "lost control" of Gaza.

Recent battles and heavy Israeli bombardments have been reported around Rafah as well as in Gaza City and Jabalia refugee camp in the north and Nuseirat camp in the centre.

More than seven months into the war, Israeli strikes and ground combat claimed another 82 lives in Gaza over the past 24 hours, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said.

That is the highest daily toll reported by the ministry in more than two weeks.

Nearly 450,000 Palestinians have been newly displaced from Rafah in recent days, and around 100,000 from northern Gaza, UN agencies said.

That means around a quarter of Gaza’s population of 2.4 million people have been freshly displaced in the past week.

Palestinian mother Hadeel Radwan, 32, who is displaced in western Rafah, told AFP the constant shelling left her terrified while enduring shortages including of drinking water.

Many people had fled her Tal Al Sultan district, but she said joining them would be hard because, “I had a C-section and moving quickly, under threat, would be difficult for me.”

Aid trucks ransacked 

Talks towards a truce and hostage release deal have stalled after months of efforts involving US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators.

Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said that “unfortunately things didn’t move in the right direction and right now we are on a status of almost a stalemate”.

“Of course, what happened with Rafah has set us backward,” he added of Israel’s insistence on launching a ground attack in the city.

“There is no clarity how to stop the war from the Israeli side. I don’t think that they are considering this as an option... even when we are talking about the deal and leading to a potential ceasefire,” Sheikh Mohammed said.

Since Israeli troops moved into eastern Rafah, the aid crossing point from Egypt remains closed and nearby Kerem Abu Salem crossing lacks “safe and logistically viable access”, a UN report said late on Monday.

It said fuel shortages threaten health services, and acute child malnutrition is rising.

A convoy of trucks delivering humanitarian aid from Jordan was attacked and vandalised by Israeli far-right activists on Monday, its cargo spilt onto a road near a crossing with the occupied West Bank.

The United Nations said an Indian member of its security services was killed and another wounded when their UN vehicle was struck on the way to a hospital in Rafah.

Israel’s military said the strike was “under review” and that “an initial inquiry conducted indicates that the vehicle was hit in an area declared an active combat zone”.

The UN said it had informed the Israeli authorities of the movements of the vehicle.

Human Rights Watch said it had identified at least eight occasions since the war began when Israel had targeted known aid worker locations in Gaza, after their coordinates were shared to ensure their protection.

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — Israel continued with its attack on Gaza on Monday, including in far-southern Rafah, despite US warnings against a full-scale invasion of the crowded city and of the threat of post-war "anarchy" across the Palestinian territory.

AFP correspondents in Gaza reported helicopter strikes and heavy artillery shelling in the east of Rafah, as well as battles in northern Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City's Zeitun neighbourhood.

Israel last week defied a chorus of warnings, including from top ally Washington, and sent tanks and troops into the east of Rafah, the city on the Egyptian border where some 1.4 million Palestinians had sought shelter.

This has sparked an exodus of nearly 360,000 people from Rafah so far, said the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, which warned that "no place is safe" in the largely devastated territory.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday that Washington had not seen any credible Israeli plan to protect civilians in Rafah, and that “we also haven’t seen a plan for what happens the day after this war in Gaza ends”.

“Israel’s on the trajectory, potentially, to inherit an insurgency with many armed Hamas left or, if it leaves, a vacuum filled by chaos, filled by anarchy and probably refilled by Hamas,” he told NBC.

Fighting has raged in northern Gaza where — months after Israel declared Hamas’s command structure had been dismantled — an Israeli army spokesman said there were “attempts by Hamas to rebuild its military capabilities”.

“The army threw leaflets and sent a message on mobile phones warning everyone to leave Jabalia” refugee camp, said one displaced Palestinian, Umm Adi Nassar, after arriving in Gaza City.

“This is not the first time we have been displaced,” she said. “Every time we try to return and settle, there is an invasion operation, and the army with its airplanes and tanks bombards the houses and kills people.”

Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, also said that its fighters were engaged in ground battles in Rafah and Jabalia.

A strike overnight on a house in Rafah killed at least four people, said the city’s Kuwaiti hospital.

Rafah residents on Monday received more evacuation orders through phone calls and text messages, prompting yet more people to leave their homes, witnesses said.

While Israel has vowed to destroy remaining Hamas forces in Rafah, the New York Times cited unnamed US officials as saying that both US and Israeli intelligence suggested the group’s leader Yahya Sinwar was not hiding there.

Sinwar — who has not been seen since the October 7 attack which Israel says he orchestrated — “most likely never left the tunnel network” under southern Gaza’s main city of Khan Yunis, the newspaper said.

Amid the fighting, Egyptian, Qatari and US mediation efforts towards a truce appeared to have stalled.

UN chief Antonio Guterres urged “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the unconditional release of all hostages and an immediate surge in humanitarian aid” into Gaza.

Israel’s bombardment and offensive in Gaza have killed at least 35,091 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Israel’s military says 272 soldiers have been killed since the start of the ground offensive in Gaza on October 27.

The war has displaced most Gazans, many multiple times.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said on Sunday that Israel’s latest evacuation orders were “forcing people in Rafah to flee anywhere and everywhere”.

Umm Mohammed Al Mughayyir, who has had to move her family seven times to escape the fighting, said: “We have reached a point where we wish for death.”

Residents were told to head to the Al Mawasi “humanitarian zone” on the coast northwest of Rafah, though aid groups have warned it is not ready for an influx of people.

Hisham Adwan, spokesman for the Gaza crossings authority, told AFP on Sunday the Rafah border point with Egypt has remained closed since Israeli troops seized its Palestinian side last Tuesday, “preventing the entry of humanitarian aid”.

The health ministry said on Monday that Gaza’s health system was “hours away” from collapse after fighting has blocked fuel shipments.

Israel’s military said on Sunday it had opened a new border crossing into northern Gaza as “part of the effort to increase aid routes”.