Closing summary
It has just gone 4.30pm in Gaza and Israel. This blog will be closing shortly but you can access all the Guardian’s Middle East coverage here.
Here is a summary of today’s main developments:
US secretary of state Marco Rubio has said that Hamas “cannot be involved in governing Gaza in the future”. Speaking during a press conference while on a visit to Israel, Rubio also said that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) “cannot play a role in Gaza”, describing it as a “subsidiary of Hamas”.
Rubio said on Friday that Israel had to be at ease with the nations contributing to a future international security force in Gaza, after reports that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed Turkish involvement. “We haven’t formed that force yet, so there’s still work going on,” Rubio told reporters at a military coordination centre in southwestern Israel.
Rubio also added that more countries are ready to normalise relations with Israel but the decision would await a broader regional agreement. The US secretary of state said that a sustained end to the war would encourage more countries to join the Abraham accords, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalised ties with Israel in 2020.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the US and others must do more to push Israel to stop violating the Gaza ceasefire agreement, including the possible use of sanctions or halting arms sales. According to an official readout of his remarks to reporters on board a return flight from Oman, Erdoğan said Hamas was abiding by the agreement. In comments made before Rubio’s press conference, Erdoğan said that Turkey remains ready to support the planned Gaza taskforce in any way needed.
Netanyahu has ordered a halt to the advancement of parliamentary bills linked to the annexation of the West Bank after the US vice-president, JD Vance, described a vote on two bills in the Knesset as an “insult”. The bills applying Israeli law to the occupied West Bank, which would be tantamount to the annexation of land Palestinians want for a state, won preliminary approval from Israel’s parliament on Wednesday, barely a week after Donald Trump pushed through a deal aimed at ending a two-year Israeli offensive in Gaza.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that there has been little improvement in the amount of aid going into Gaza since the ceasefire took hold – and no observable reduction in hunger. Speaking on Thursday, WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that the aid situation in Gaza “remains catastrophic” and “there is not enough food” for those in the territory.
Adhanom Ghebreyesus also said that an estimated one million people in Gaza need access to mental health care. He said that the “destruction has been physical but also psychological”. While he welcomed the Gaza ceasefire, he warned that “the crisis is far from over and the needs are immense”.
Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories, called for all crossings out of Gaza into Israel and Egypt to be opened up during the ceasefire – not only for the entry of aid but for medical evacuations too. “All medical corridors need to be opened,” he said, particularly to hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as happened routinely before the war. He said opening the route would be a “gamechanger”.
West Bank residents fear they may be Israel’s next target after Gaza. Eager to avoid incurring the same wrath that Gaza suffered, voices of resistance have kept silent, even as the number of daily settler attacks and restrictions in the West Bank rises sharply.
Israeli settler violence targeting the Palestinian olive harvest in the occupied West Bank has continued unabated, according to Palestinian and UN officials. Since the harvest began in the first week of October, there have been at least 158 attacks across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to figures made public by the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC). Villagers told Reuters that a combination of military orders and settler violence had left them unable to access most of their olive crops.
After two years of war, Gaza is buried under more than 61m tonnes of debris and three-quarters of buildings have been destroyed, according to UN data analysed by Agence France-Presse (AFP). A preliminary analysis published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in August warned the debris poses a serious health risk to the exposed population.
A human rights group has launched an attempt to mount a private prosecution alleging British citizens unlawfully went to fight for Israel. An application to a magistrates court for a summons against a named individual was lodged on Monday.
Delegations from Hamas and its rival Fatah met in Egypt to discuss postwar arrangements for Gaza, Egypt’s state-linked Al-Qahera News reported on Thursday. Under Trump’s 20-point plan, an international security force drawn from Arab and Muslim allies would oversee Gaza’s transition as Israeli troops withdraw.
The wife of high profile Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti, Fadwa Barghouti, called on Donald Trump to help secure her husband’s release from his Israeli jail, her son Arab told AFP. Marwan Barghouti, from Hamas’s historic rivals Fatah, was among the Palestinian prisoners Hamas had wanted to see released as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal, according to Egyptian state-linked media.
At least 14 migrants died when their inflatable dinghy capsized in the Aegean Sea off the Turkish resort of Bodrum, the governor’s office said on Friday, raising an earlier toll of seven dead. “The lifeless bodies of 14 irregular migrants were recovered,” the office of the Mugla governorate said on X, quoting one of the two survivors as saying that 18 people had been on board when the dinghy went down. The fate of the other two remained unclear.
Updated
WHO pleads for thousands of Palestinians in need of medical care to be allowed to leave Gaza
The UN’s health agency pleaded on Friday for thousands of people in desperate need of medical care to be allowed to leave Gaza, in what it said would be a “gamechanger”, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The World Health Organization (WHO) has supported the medical evacuation of nearly 7,800 patients out of the Gaza Strip since the war with Israel began two years ago – and estimates there are 15,000 people currently needing treatment outside the Palestinian territory. But a US-brokered ceasefire that came into effect on 10 October has not sped up the process – the WHO has been able to evacuate only 41 critical patients since then.
Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories, called for all crossings out of Gaza into Israel and Egypt to be opened up during the ceasefire – not only for the entry of aid but for medical evacuations too.
“All medical corridors need to be opened,” he said, particularly to hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as happened routinely before the war. He added:
It is vital and is the most cost-effective route. If that route opened, it would really be a … gamechanger.
Speaking via video link from Jerusalem, he told journalists in Geneva that two evacuations were planned for next week, but he wanted them every day and said the WHO was ready to take “a minimum of 50 patients per day”.
At the current rate, he said evacuating the 15,000 people needing treatment – including 4,000 children – would drag on for a decade or so.
The WHO says more than 700 people have died waiting for medical evacuation since the war began. The UN health agency has called for more countries to step up and accept Palestinian patients from Gaza. While more than 20 countries have taken patients, only a handful have done so in large numbers.
Peeperkorn said only a fraction of Gaza’s health system remained in service – just 14 of 36 hospitals are even partially functional for a population topping two million.
Updated
