Gaza’s health ministry has said 14 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since the truce expired this morning.
Reuters reports the figure provided by the Hamas-run ministry. Al Jazeera journalist Hind Khoudary had earlier said that at least six had been killed in an attack on a house in Rafah and in Khan Younis.
Another seven were also killed in the Maghazi area.
Israel has also been asking residents in certain neighbourhoods of Khan Younis to leave before an expected attack in the area.
“The Israeli forces are dropping leaflets for people in Khan Younis asking them to evacuate to Rafah but they are also targeting Rafah,” Khoudary said.
At least four international activists were detained, their whereabouts unknown, after protesting in front of the Egyptian foreign ministry building in Cairo to demand entry to Gaza.
A group calling themselves International Activists for Free Palestine gathered for the rare demonstration, in an environment where public protest is all but banned. Four members of the group, who reportedly hold
Argentinian, Australian, French and American citizenship, were taken inside the foreign ministry building around midday Thursday, and have not been located since.
“They intended to deliver a letter of demands addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sameh Shoukry, requesting the necessary security clearance for a convoy of medics, journalists, lawyers and relief workers to travel to the Rafah border crossing in order to deliver essential humanitarian aid and to relieve exhausted Palestinian workers in their disaster relief efforts,” the group later said in a statement.
The protestors previously came to Cairo as part of a larger gathering calling itself the Global Conscience Convoy, who assembled there several weeks ago intending to travel to the Rafah border crossing in North Sinai which leads into Gaza.
The group said it has repeatedly tried to obtain security clearance for the convoy to enter Sinai and the route to the Rafah crossing, but has been stonewalled by the Egyptian authorities.
Egypt maintains the regular closure of the crossing, allowing only small groups of dual nationals to leave Gaza and the entry of some humanitarian relief, and also bans NGO workers and journalists from entering northern Sinai.
Resumption of fighting a 'nightmarish situation' for Palestinians - Red Cross
Renewed fighting in Gaza has brought back a “nightmarish situation” for the Palestinian territory, the head of the Red Cross told Agency France Presse on Friday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the UN’s COP28 climate talks in Dubai, Robert Mardini said “people are at a breaking point, hospitals are at a breaking point, the whole Gaza Strip is in a very precarious state”.
Resumption of fighting brings the people of Gaza “back to the nightmarish situation they were in before the truce took place”, said Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
He noted their “suffering, destruction, fear, anxiety and precarious living conditions”.
Israel’s military said fighter jets were striking Hamas targets in Gaza on Friday, as AFP journalists reported air attacks in the north and south of the territory.
Combat resumed shortly after Israel’s army said it had intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza, the first from the territory since a missile launched minutes into the start of the truce on 24 November.
“There is nowhere safe to go for civilians,” Mardini said, stressing the challenges hospitals and humanitarian organisations are facing.
“We have seen in the hospitals where our teams have been working, that over the past days, hundreds of severely injured people have arrived,” he said.
“The influx of severely wounded outpaced the real capacity of hospitals to absorb and treat the wounded, so there is a massive challenge.”
Harry Davies and Bethan McKernan are in Jerusalem, and report here on the AI-driven “factory” that increases the number of targets for strikes in Palestine.
Israel’s military has made no secret of the intensity of its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. In the early days of the offensive, the head of its air force spoke of relentless, “around the clock” airstrikes. His forces, he said, were only striking military targets, but he added: “We are not being surgical.”
There has, however, been relatively little attention paid to the methods used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to select targets in Gaza, and to the role artificial intelligence has played in their bombing campaign.
As Israel resumes its offensive after a seven-day ceasefire, there are mounting concerns about the IDF’s targeting approach in a war against Hamas that has so far killed more than 15,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The IDF has long burnished its reputation for technical prowess and has previously made bold but unverifiable claims about harnessing new technology. After the 11-day war in Gaza in May 2021, officials said Israel had fought its “first AI war” using machine learning and advanced computing.
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