Region

GAZA STRIP, Palestine — Gaza's health ministry said on Monday Israeli forces had struck the Indonesian Hospital and killed at least 12 people, including patients, in the north of the war-torn Palestinian territory.

Dozens more were wounded and around 700 people remained trapped inside the "besieged" medical centre, said Ashraf Al Qudra, a spokesman of the ministry which has reported a death toll of more than 13,000 in Gaza.

The latest reported blow to Gaza's devastated health sector came as hopes rose that 31 premature babies evacuated from another hospital, Al Shifa, would be taken from a Gaza clinic to safety in Egypt through the Rafah crossing.

Frantic diplomatic efforts were meanwhile underway to seal a deal for the release of some of the hostages. Mediator Qatar voiced hope on Sunday that an agreement was near, but Israel and Hamas have not yet reported that a deal is imminent.

The bloodiest ever Gaza war has reduced much of the coastal strip to rubble and seen Israeli troops raid, occupy and evacuate the biggest hospital, Al Shifa, in recent days, which saw hundreds flee the area on foot toward southern Gaza.

After another Gaza building was hit, in Deir Al Balah south of Gaza City on Sunday, rescuers searched through the debris for survivors and bodies, using the lights of their mobile phones in the rain.

“There are only children and women in the house and no one else,” exclaimed one resident. “How can that give them [the Israeli army] an excuse to hit it?... We don’t have any equipment to pull people out from under the rubble.”

Bodies on the road 

Alarm has surged over the dire humanitarian situation as the war rages into a seventh week.

The Israeli offensive has killed more than 13,000 people, including thousands of children, according to the Hamas-run government, fuelling mounting global pressure for a ceasefire.

The UN humanitarian agency OCHA has described a “collapse of services” at hospitals across northern Gaza, amid shortages of electricity, fuel and medical supplies.

The hospital has been a focal point of global concern after Israeli forces launched a raid on it last week, with the World Health Organisation calling it “a death zone”.

Over the weekend, hundreds fled the Al Shifa hospital on foot as loud explosions were heard around the complex. At least 15 bodies, some decomposing, were strewn along the route, an AFP journalist said.

The Indonesia Hospital is located near the Jabalia refugee camp, where on Saturday a health official said more than 80 people were killed in twin strikes, including on a UN school sheltering displaced people.

The Gaza war has sparked fears of a wider conflagration in the Middle East where Israel has long faced arch enemy Iran and its allies.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani on Monday refused to accept the resignation of three Cabinet ministers who stepped down over the dismissal of the parliament speaker.

The supreme court last week said it was dismissing speaker Mohamed Al Halbussi, an influential Sunni Muslim politician, after a lawmaker accused him of forging a document.

Halbussi's Taqadom Party hit back by announcing that the government ministers of culture, industry and planning — all three members of the party — were stepping down in protest.

But on Monday Sudani's office released a statement saying the prime minister "has rejected the resignations of the ministers of planning, industry, and culture".

"Consequently, they will resume their duties in service of our beloved people," the statement read.

It said that Sudani's government was committed to a comprehensive political representation "in line with the commitment to support political stability" across the multi-ethnic country.

Under a power-sharing system adopted in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, political positions are divided between Iraq's ethnic and confessional communities.

The president is chosen from the Kurdish community, while the prime minister is a Shiite Muslim — who represent the majority of the population — and the speaker of parliament represents the Sunni Muslim community.

Iraq's 329-member parliament is dominated by a coalition of pro-Iran Shiite parties.

Halbussi led a sizeable Sunni bloc, with his Taqadom Party's 37 members in parliament, until he faced growing unease within Iraq's Sunni political sphere in recent months

Laith Al Duleimi, who was an MP for Taqadom, had accused Halbussi of forging a resignation letter, saying the speaker had changed the date on an older document to force him out of parliament.

Halbussi had rejected the court's decision to dismiss him, calling it a "strange verdict" and said "some seek to destabilise the country".

GENEVA — The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Sunday it had led an assessment mission to Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City and determined it was a "death zone", urging a full evacuation.

"WHO and partners are urgently developing plans for the immediate evacuation of the remaining patients, staff and their families," the United Nations health agency said in a statement, adding that 291 patients and 25 health workers remained inside the hospital.

A top health official in Gaza Strip all 31 premature babies at Al Shifa hospital had been evacuated on Sunday from the facility.

Mohammed Zaqut, director general of hospitals in Gaza, told AFP "all 31 premature babies in Al Shifa hospital... have been evacuated" along with three doctors and two nurses. 

"Preparations are under way" for them to enter Egypt, he added. 

WHO said it had headed a joint UN team, including public health experts, logistics officers and security staff from a range of agencies on a short and "very high-risk" mission into the hospital on Saturday.

The assessment team had gone into Al Shifa after the Israeli military had earlier ordered the evacuation of some 2,500 displaced people sheltering on the hospital grounds, WHO said.

"They, along with a number of mobile patients and hospital staff, had already vacated the facility by the time of the team's arrival," the statement said.

Columns of sick and injured, some of them amputees, were seen making their way out of Al Shifa hospital Saturday towards the seafront without ambulances along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, as loud explosions were heard around the complex.

The UN assessment team was meanwhile only able to spend an hour inside the hospital due to the security situation.

The team, WHO said, described the hospital as a “death zone” and the situation as “desperate”.

‘Mass grave’ 

“Signs of shelling and gunfire were evident. The team saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and were told more than 80 people were buried there,” the statement said.

A lack of clean water, fuel, medicines, food and other essential aid over six weeks had caused the largest and most advanced hospital in Gaza to basically stop functioning as a medical facility, WHO said.

“Corridors and the hospital grounds were filled with medical and solid waste, increasing the risk of infection.”

Among the patients remaining in the hospital were 32 babies “in extremely critical condition”, WHO said.

There were also two people in intensive care without ventilation, 22 dialysis patients whose access to life-saving treatment was severely compromised, and many trauma victims.

Several patients had died in the past two to three days “due to the shutting down of medical services”, WHO said.

The UN health agency said that given the state of the hospital, the team was asked to evacuate health workers and patients to other facilities.

 ‘Unbearable’ 

“We are working with partners to develop an urgent evacuation plan and ask for full facilitation of this plan,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X, former Twitter.

“We continue to call for protection of health and of civilians,” he said, lamenting that “the current situation is unbearable and unjustifiable. Ceasefire. NOW”.

WHO said additional missions would go in “over the next 24-72 hours, pending guarantees of safe passage” to help transport patients to the Nasser Medical Complex and European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza. 

It stressed though that those hospitals were already working beyond capacity and the new referrals would “further strain overburdened health staff and resources”. 

Israeli army’s relentless air and ground campaign on Gaza has killed 12,300 people, most of them civilians, including more than 5,000 children, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

KHAN YUNIS, Palestine — One of the last grain warehouses in the Gaza Strip has been damaged by Israeli strikes and a key flour mill in Khan Yunis, where hundreds of thousands have fled, has stopped working for lack of fuel.

The store, also in Khan Yunis in the south of the territory and with room for 3,000 tonnes of wheat, was hit by an air strike overnight Wednesday-Thursday. AFP was unable to ascertain what happened to its reserves.

"If the Red Cross does not get the authorisation from the Israelis so we can do the repairs needed, we will have to stop working," the head of the Gazan bakers' association, Abdulnasser Al Ajami, told AFP.

Further north in the centre of the Gaza Strip, another mill, Al Salam, at Deir Al Balah, was destroyed the day before, according to the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA.

Of the five flour mills in the densely populated Palestinian territory, at least two have been hit since the war began on October 7, triggered by an unprecedented Hamas attack over the border into Israel, which left around 1,200 people dead, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials.

'Possibility of starvation' 

The few big bags of flour to be found in Gaza now sell at astronomical prices of up to the equivalent of $200.

Civilians in Gaza faced “the immediate possibility of starvation” as food and water have become scarce, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Thursday.

UNRWA told AFP it works with 80 bakeries across the territory. In the north, where the fighting has been most intense, all of them are closed.

Just 63 bakeries in central and southern Gaza are still making bread, but with difficulty because fuel is so scarce.

The largest bakery, in Gaza City, shut on Tuesday after the solar panels which powered it were hit in an Israeli strike. Afterwards, hungry residents looted the remaining flour.

‘No more bread’ 

Since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza, residents have queued outside bakeries at dawn in the faint hope of getting enough to feed a family.

But anyone waiting their turn, which takes five hours on average, is exposed to the threat of new air strikes.

US aid agency Mercy Corps said its staff on the ground in Gaza have sometimes had to pay $30 for five pieces of bread.

In Gaza’s shops, the shelves are usually empty and signs in the windows say “No more bread” or “No more yeast”.

Together with the WFP, UNRWA distributes bread produced at its 154 shelters, which now host 813,000 people. But the trucks that deliver the bread are often short of fuel.

Many Gazans have resorted to making their own bread.

In the south, where most of the around 1.6 million people who have been displaced by the war stay, the glow of makeshift ovens outside houses or tents pays testament to their efforts.

But the flour, water and salt needed to make the bread are almost impossible to find in large parts of the Gaza Strip, according to OCHA.

Hungry Gazans were “skipping or reducing meals”, it said, and sometimes eating “raw onion and uncooked eggplant”.

NABLUS, Palestinian Territories — Five fighters in the armed wing of the Fateh Party were killed early on Saturday in a rare Israeli air strike on the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent and Fateh sources said.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said the Israeli occupation forces killed five people in Balata refugee camp in Nablus, home to some 24,000 according to the United Nations which manages it.

Witnesses told AFP the strike appeared to have come from a drone, and Fateh sources confirmed the dead were members of the movement founded by Yasser Arafat.

Witnesses said Israeli forces entered the camp on foot after the air strike and destroyed an empty house without causing further casualties.

The air strike came a day after Israel's army said it had killed at least seven people in two separate confrontations in the West Bank.

Until now Jenin, considered the main militant hotspot in the West Bank,  was the only location in the occupied territory to witness air strikes since the Hamas-Israel war started.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah says since the war started more than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, with a spike in army raids and Israeli settler violence.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week urged Israel to act to confront "rising levels of settler extremist violence".

BEIRUT — Israel on Saturday struck an aluminium factory deep in Lebanon, state media said, a week after its furthest strike since border skirmishes began last month.

"An enemy [Israeli] drone fired two missiles at an aluminium factory on the road between Toul and Kfour, setting it on fire," Lebanon's official National News Agency (NNA) said, without specifying whether there were casualties.

But Kfour Mayor Khodr Saad told AFP two wounded civilians were transported to a hospital in the village.

The factory is about 15 kilometres from the northern borders.

NNA said it was the first strike in the Nabatiyeh region of Lebanon's south since the 2006 war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hizbollah movement.

It also reported Israeli artillery strikes and air raids against several areas in Lebanon's south.

The factory bombardment comes after Israel on November 11 struck a pickup truck on a farm in the Zahrani area on Lebanon's coast, about 45 kilometres  from the Israeli border, NNA said at the time, without reporting casualties.

Hizbollah on Saturday said its fighters shot down an Israeli Hermes 450 drone “using a surface-to-air missile”, in addition to launching five other attacks on Israel’s northern border.

While war continues in Gaza, “all resistance forces... will continue to put pressure on Israel”, senior Hizbollah official Hashem Safieddine said during a speech.

“There is no question today of talking about a ceasefire on one front and not the other,” he added.

At least 90 people have been killed on the Lebanese side in cross-border skirmishes since last month, according to an AFP tally.