Closing summary
Houthi attacks on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza will continue and not be deterred by Israeli airstrikes near Yemen’s Hodeidah port, the Iran-backed group’s leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi said in a televised speech on Thursday. “The response is inevitable,” Abdulmalik al-Houthi said.
Russian president Vladimir Putin met Bashar al-Assad in the Kremlin as Moscow nudges the Syrian leader towards a meeting with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan and Damascus seeks the Kremlin’s help in restraining Israel. Russia backed Assad in Syria’s civil war, launching a military campaign that helped turn the tide of the 12-year conflict in his favour even though the West had called for the Syrian leader to go.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, one day before meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, called for a quick end to its war with Hamas and a return of the hostages, adding that Israel has to better manage its “public relations”. The former president, in an interview with Fox News on Thursday, also criticized those who protested the Israeli prime minister’s speech to the US Congress, calling for a one-year jail sentence for desecrating the US flag.
At least 39,175 Palestinians have been killed and 90,403 have been wounded in the Israeli military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
Israeli forces advanced deeper into some towns on the eastern side of Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Thursday, hours after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told US lawmakers he was actively engaged in bringing hostages home. Fighting in recent days has centred around the eastern towns of Bani Suaila, Al-Zanna, and Al-Karara, where the army said on Wednesday it had found the bodies of five Israelis who were killed in Hamas’ attack on Israel and held in Gaza since, Reuters reported.
Israeli forces recovered on Wednesday the bodies of five hostages killed in Hamas’ 7 October attack and held in Gaza since, the Israeli military said. Maya Goren, a 56-year-old kindergarden teacher, was killed during the attack on her kibbutz, Nir Oz, according to Israeli Army Radio, one of the communities worst hit in the deadly attack in southern Israel that triggered the devastating war.
Thousands of protesters demonstrated around Capitol Hill voicing opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. Officers on streets surrounding the Capitol sprayed teargas on demonstrators who chanted anti-war slogans including “Netanyahu, you can’t hide. You’re committing genocide”.
In his speech, which was boycotted by dozens of Democratic lawmakers, Netanyahu called for “total victory” in the nine-month-old war, dashing hopes among some that he would announce progress toward a ceasefire and the return of Israeli hostages. He brushed aside humanitarian concerns for the civilian population of Gaza, denying that Israel was blocking shipments of food aid to Palestinians and issuing an appeal for the US to fast-track military aid to Israel: “Give us the tools and we’ll get the job done faster.”
That’s all from me, Tom Ambrose, and indeed the Israel-Gaza war live blog for today. Thanks for following along.
A Palestinian diplomat dismissed Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday as “utter nonsense” and “filled with big lies”.
Netanyahu made a fiery speech to US lawmakers in which he made several inaccurate claims, including that ICC allegations that Israel was blocking food aid to Gaza were a “complete fabrication”.
Omar Awadallah, an assistant foreign minister said: “We believe that the Netanyahu speech was utter nonsense, filled with big lies, and supported by a theatrical absurd comedy of the Congress members who are generally ideological enemies of the Palestinian cause”.
Awadallah added:
Those who said there was a famine in Gaza and that Netanyahu is a war criminal was the International Criminal Court, it was the International Court of Justice that said that Israel should stop the genocide, it was the international human rights organisations that stated that Israel is an apartheid state, therefore what he came with refutes all the basis of international law by a weak political speech addressing a group of supporters and donors of his crimes in the Middle East.
