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At least 500 people have been killed in a strike on Al Ahli Arab Hospital in the middle of Gaza City, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The hospital served as a shelter for thousands of residents who fled their homes in northern Gaza, seeking safety from Israeli airstrikes. Residents stranded in Gaza are running out of medicine, food, water and power.
A top Ukrainian commander has claimed that Russia’s biggest offensive in months – involving tanks, thousands of soldiers and armoured vehicles in an attack on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka – is failing, as he admitted Kyiv’s own attempts to advance in the south were proving “difficult”.
Russian forces have pummelled the town over the past week, a key bulge surrounded by Russian-held territory on the eastern Donbas front.
Israel’s military is telling 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate their homes immediately, as it appears to prepare to ramp up retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks.
Israeli warplanes continued on Friday to bombard the cramped coastal enclave, which Hamas controls. Civilians in Gaza crammed possessions into cars, taxis and pickup trucks in a mass rush toward the south. Those without other options walked, carrying what they could.
Egyptian intelligence repeatedly told Israel that the situation in the Gaza Strip could “explode”, warnings that went unheeded before the deadly Hamas assault on the Jewish state, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
The warnings were not hard intelligence about a specific attack, they said. Egypt instead relayed concerns that “matters could explode because of the political and humanitarian situation in Gaza”, one of the people said. The other called it a “general warning”.
Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas Movement, launched hundreds of rockets towards the city of Ashkelon on Tuesday evening in response to the Israeli mass displacement of Palestinian citizens from their homes in the Gaza Strip.
In a press statement on Tuesday, al-Qassam Brigades said that it will continue to target Ashkelon until all its inhabitants are displaced if Israel does not stop its policy of forcibly displacing Palestinian citizens in Gaza.
