LIVE | Israel-Hamas War Day 25: Soldier rescued; Netanyahu rejects ceasefire calls
Death toll among Palestinians crosses 8,300, mostly women and children, an unprecedented figure in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence
Israeli ground forces pushed deeper into Gaza on Monday (October 30), advancing in tanks and other armoured vehicles on the territory’s main city and freeing a soldier held captive by Hamas militants. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls for a ceasefire, even as airstrikes landed near hospitals where thousands of Palestinians are sheltering beside the wounded.
The military said a female soldier captured during Hamas’s brutal October 7 incursion was rescued in Gaza — the first since the weekslong war began. It provided few details, but said in a statement that Pvt Ori Megidish was “doing well” and had met with her family.
Netanyahu welcomed her home, saying the “achievement” by Israel's security forces “illustrates our commitment to free all the hostages”. He also rejected calls for a cease-fire to facilitate the release of captives or end the war, which he has said will be long and difficult.
“Calls for a cease-fire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas,” he told a press conference. “That will not happen.” He also said he has no plans to resign in the face of mounting anger over the failure of Israel’s vaunted security forces to prevent the worst surprise attack on the country in a half century.
Hamas and other militant groups are believed to be holding some 240 captives, including men, women and children. Netanyahu has faced mounting pressure to secure their release even as Israel wages a punishing war it says is aimed at crushing Hamas and ending its 16-year rule over the territory.
Hamas, which has released four hostages, has said it would let the others go in return for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, including many implicated in deadly attacks on Israelis. Israel has dismissed the offer, and Netanyahu said the ground invasion “creates the possibility” of getting the hostages out, adding that Hamas will “only do it under pressure”.
Hamas released a short video Monday purporting to show three other female captives. One of the women delivers a brief statement — likely under duress — criticizing Israel’s response to the hostage crisis. It was not clear when the Hamas video was made.
The military has been vague about its operations inside Gaza, including the location and number of troops. Israel has declared a new “phase” in the war but stopped short of declaring an all-out ground invasion, even as it has deployed tens of thousands of troops to the border.
(With agency inputs)
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Live Updates
- 31 Oct 2023 3:26 AM GMT
Israel ‘concept paper’ suggests shifting Gaza population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula
An Israeli government ministry has drafted a wartime proposal to transfer the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, drawing condemnation from the Palestinians and worsening tensions with Cairo.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office played down the report compiled by the Intelligence Ministry as a hypothetical exercise — a “concept paper”. But its conclusions deepened long-standing Egyptian fears that Israel wants to make Gaza into Egypt’s problem, and revived for Palestinians memories of their greatest trauma — the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were forced from their homes during the fighting surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.
“We are against transfer to any place, in any form, and we consider it a red line that we will not allow to be crossed,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said of the report. “What happened in 1948 will not be allowed to happen again.” A mass displacement, Rudeineh said, would be “tantamount to declaring a new war”.
The document is dated October 13, six days after Hamas militants killed more than 1,400 people in southern Israel and took over 240 hostage in an attack that provoked a devastating Israeli war in Gaza. It was first published by Sicha Mekomit, a local news site.
In its report, the Intelligence Ministry — a junior ministry that conducts research but does not set policy — offered three alternatives “to effect a significant change in the civilian reality in the Gaza Strip in light of the Hamas crimes that led to the Sword of Iron war”.
The document’s authors deem this alternative to be the most desirable for Israel’s security.
The document proposes moving Gaza’s civilian population to tent cities in northern Sinai, then building permanent cities and an undefined humanitarian corridor. A security zone would be established inside Israel to block the displaced Palestinians from entering. The report did not say what would become of Gaza once its population is cleared out. (AP)
- 31 Oct 2023 3:21 AM GMT
‘Immediate ceasefire matter of life and death for millions’
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees told a UN emergency meeting on Monday “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire has become a matter of life and death for millions,” accusing Israel of “collective punishment” of Palestinians and the forced displacement of civilians.
Philippe Lazzarini warned that a further breakdown of civil order following the looting of the agency’s warehouses by Palestinians searching for food and other aid “will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the largest UN agency in Gaza to continue operating.”
Briefings to the Security Council by Lazzarini, the head of the UN children’s agency UNICEF and a senior UN humanitarian official painted a dire picture of the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza 23 days after Hamas’s surprise October 7 attacks in Israel, and its ongoing retaliatory military action aimed at “obliterating” the militant group, which controls Gaza.
According to the latest figures from Gaza's Ministry of Health, more than 8,300 people have been killed — 66 per cent of them women and children — and tens of thousands injured, the UN humanitarian office said.
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell that toll includes over 3,400 children killed and more than 6,300 injured. “This means that more than 420 children are being killed or injured in Gaza each day – a number which should shake each of us to our core,” she said.
Lazzarini said: “This surpasses the number of children killed annually across the world's conflict zones since 2019.” And he stressed: “This cannot be ‘collateral damage’.”
Lazzarini said “the handful of convoys” allowed into Gaza through the Rafah crossing from Egypt in recent days “is nothing compared to the needs of over 2 million people trapped in Gaza.”
“The system in place to allow aid into Gaza is geared to fail,” he said, “unless there is political will to make the flow of supplies meaningful, matching the unprecedented humanitarian needs.” (AP) - 31 Oct 2023 3:17 AM GMT
Conditions deteriorate in Gaza
Conditions for civilians in Gaza continue to deteriorate as food, medicine, and fuel run dangerously low amid a weekslong Israeli siege.
With no central power for weeks and little fuel, hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment. UNRWA has been trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running.
Gaza’s Health Ministry shared video footage that appeared to show an explosion and a column of smoke near the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital for cancer patients. The hospital director, Dr Sobhi Skaik, said it had sustained damage in a strike that endangered patients.
All 10 hospitals operating in northern Gaza have received evacuation orders, the UN's office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs said. Staff have refused to leave, saying evacuation would mean death for patients on ventilators.
Strikes hit within 50 meters (yards) of Al Quds Hospital after it received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate, the Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said. Some windows were blown out, and rooms were covered in debris. It said 14,000 people are sheltering there.
Israel says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger. (AP)
