The strikes came a day after Pope Francis condemned the bombing of children in Gaza as ‘cruelty’
Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and developments in the Middle East more widely.
Israeli military airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 17 Palestinian people, 8 of them at a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, medics said.
Several people have been injured by Israeli attacks on northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, according to Al Jazeera, with Israeli forces reportedly firing directly on the facility’s ICU and maternity ward, as well as at the nearby al-Awda hospital. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital, said the army ordered staff to evacuate the hospital and move patients and injured people toward another hospital in the area. Abu Safiya said the mission was “next to impossible” because staff did not have ambulances to move the patients. “Tonight’s reports of bombardment near Kamal Adwan hospital and order to evacuate the hospital are deeply worrisome. The hospital has been in the midst of fighting for too long and the lives of patients are at risk,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in a post on X late last night.
The US military said it mistakenly shot down one of its own fighter aircraft over the Red Sea on Sunday morning, forcing both pilots to eject. Both were rescued, one with minor injuries, after the “apparent case of friendly fire,” which is being investigated, US Central Command said in a statement. The fighter was an F/A-18 Hornet flying off the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. One of the carrier’s escort ships, the missile cruiser Gettysburg, “mistakenly fired on and hit” the plane, the statement said.
The US military carried out airstrikes against a missile storage facility and a command-and-control facility operated by Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, on Saturday. The US military’s Central Command said the strikes aimed to “disrupt and degrade” Houthi operations, including attacks against US navy warships and merchant vessels in the southern Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden. The strike followed a similar attack last week by US aircraft against a command and control facility operated by the Houthis, who control much of Yemen. The US attack on Sana’a came the same day that a Houthi missile struck Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv, injuring 16 people in the second such airstrike in days.
Turkey has vowed to “do whatever it takes” to ensure its security if the new Syrian administration cannot address Ankara’s concerns about US-allied Kurdish groups it views as terrorist groups, the country’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said on Saturday. Turkey regards the YPG, the militant group spearheading the US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants who have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for 40 years and are deemed terrorists by Ankara, Washington, and the EU.
The UN has warned that people living in makeshift shelters might not survive the winter. Nearly 2 million Palestinians have been displaced by Israel’s war on the territory and are struggling to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.
