LIVE | Day 38: Israeli forces-Hamas fight outside Al-Shifa hospital; civilians trapped inside
Fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants outside Gaza's largest hospital has prompted thousands of people to flee from the sprawling medical facility, but hundreds of patients and others displaced by the war remained inside, health officials said on Monday (November 13).
World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a day earlier that the UN agency was in contact with Al-Shifa hospital, which he said had been without electricity and water for three days, and noted that gunfire and bombings outside the compound “have exacerbated the already critical circumstances."
Patients inside the hospital include dozens of babies at risk of dying because of a lack of electricity, health officials at the facility said.
More than two-thirds of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have fled their homes since the war began.
Gaza City, the largest urban area in the territory, is the focus of Israel's campaign to crush Hamas following the militant group's deadly October 7 incursion into southern Israel that set off the war.
More than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. About 2,700 people have been reported missing. More than 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, most of them in the Hamas attack, and about 240 hostages were taken from Israel into Gaza by Palestinian militants.
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- 13 Nov 2023 9:32 AM IST
More than 180,000 march against soaring anti-Semitism in France
More than 180,000 people across France, including 100,000 in Paris, marched peacefully on Sunday to protest against rising anti-semitism in the wake of Israel's ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, representatives of several parties on the left, conservatives and centrists of President Emmanuel Macron's party as well as far-right leader Marine Le Pen attended Sunday's march in the French capital amid tight security. Macron did not attend, but expressed his support for the protest and called on citizens to rise up against “the unbearable resurgence of unbridled anti-semitism.” However, the leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, Jean-Luc Melenchon, stayed away from the march, saying last week on X, formerly Twitter, that the march would be a meeting of “friends of unconditional support for the massacre” in Gaza.
The interior ministry said at least 182,000 people marched in several in French cities in response to the call launched by the leaders of the parliament's upper and lower houses. No major incident has been reported, it said.
Paris authorities deployed 3,000 police troops along the route of the protest called by the leaders of the Senate and parliament's lower house, the National Assembly, amid an alarming increase in anti-Jewish acts in France since the start of Israel's war against Hamas after its Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel.
France has the largest Jewish population in Europe, but given its own World War II collaboration with the Nazis, anti-Semitic acts today open old scars. (AP)
