Israel-Hamas war updates: Hamas claims release of woman and children

Thank you for following along with all of today’s updates on the Israel-Hamas war.

We’ll be closing this blog, but you can get all the latest updates on our new blog, which has just been launched here.

For some perspective on the continued human toll of the conflict, read our reporter’s notebook from Maram Humaid in Gaza City.

“As I write this, I no longer believe we will get out of this alive,” she writes.

Read her account here.

• The bombardment of Gaza has continued for a fifth day. The enclave has now been plunged into darkness as its sole power plant ran out of fuel.
• Gazan hospital officials have issued an international SOS, with generator capacity on course to soon run out.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition party leader Benny Gantz agreed to form an emergency government and issued a joint address to the Israeli people where they stressed unity in the fight against Hamas.
• Hamas has released a video appearing to show a captive and two young children being released.
• At least five Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
• Eleven UN Palestinian refugee agency workers and five members of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) have been killed since Saturday.

Palestinians expelled from their workplaces in Israel have begun showing up in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah where a temporary shelter was set up to house them.

The sudden influx of about 600 workers created an “overwhelming situation” that is bound to get worse as more arrive, Ramallah Governor Laila Ghannam said.

At the shelter where men sat on mattresses, some workers said they were abused by Israeli soldiers.

“We were working and everything was fine, and suddenly they came to us and detained us,” said Raed al-Moghribi. “When we told them we are from Gaza, they started beating us.”

Israel’s increasingly destructive air strikes in Gaza have flattened entire city blocks and left an unknown number of bodies beneath the debris.

A widely expected Israeli ground offensive in Gaza – whose 2.3 million residents are densely packed into a tiny coastal strip – would likely result in a surge of casualties for fighters on both sides.

The UN says 260,000 people have fled their homes in Gaza, most crowding into UN schools. Others sought the shrinking number of safe neighbourhoods in the strip of land only 40km (25 miles) long, wedged between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

After nightfall, Palestinians were plunged into pitch blackness in large parts of Gaza City and elsewhere after the territory’s only power station ran out of fuel and shut down.

The Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, has only enough fuel to keep power on for three days, said Matthias Kannes, a Gaza-based official for Doctors Without Borders. The group said the two hospitals it runs in Gaza were running out of surgical equipment, antibiotics, fuel and other supplies.

More than 100 far-right demonstrators rioted outside one of the main hospitals in Tel Aviv after hearing reports doctors were treating a Hamas member.

Protesters from La Familia – a group of notoriously racist Jerusalem fans of the Beitar football team – blocked the main entrance to the emergency room for three hours, according to videos circulated by doctors on X. The ultranationalist football fans clashed violently with police and disrupted the passage of emergency crews into the hospital.

At the time of the riot, Sheba Hospital was not treating any Hamas members, said Hagai Levine, chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians.

Biden has spoken with United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed, according to the White House.

“The two leaders also discussed the importance of ensuring humanitarian assistance reaches those in need,” a statement said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised: “Every member of Hamas is a dead man.”

In a statement, Netanyahu for the first time clearly expressed Israel’s intention to “destroy” Hamas following its surprise attack on Saturday.

“Hamas is Daesh [ISIL/ISIS] and we will crush them and destroy them as the world has destroyed Daesh,” he said in a televised statement, the first delivered jointly with his war cabinet.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant added, “We will wipe Hamas off the face of the Earth.”

Hamas initiated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – a multi-pronged surprise attack into Israel via land, sea and air. Hamas said it was in response to the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem and Israeli settlers’ growing violence against Palestinians.

Al Jazeera senior political analyst Marwan Bishara has said he hopes a clip that appears to show Hamas fighters releasing captives would lead to more releases, saying Hamas taking so many civilians captive was a “failure”.

“I don’t think Hamas had dreamt that its operation would succeed the way it did in the sense that its fighters went in there and just killed so many people and captured so many, and clearly there was no coordination among the fighters about whom to capture and how,” he said.

“Clearly this was not only a mistake, it was a major failure to bring in children as captives into Gaza because this is not tenable,” he said.

“I’m glad that they are able to – I’m not sure ‘correct’ is the right word – but certainly release these captives, because holding them will simply compound the failure,” he said.

Former Israeli Defence Minister Gantz’s apparent motivation for joining a unity government with Netanyahu is so that he can have a hand in decisions related to war, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara has said.

He noted that Gantz once boasted of sending parts of Gaza “back to the Stone Age” following a 2019 bombing campaign under his military leadership.

“Clearly he’s a warmonger in general, who – regardless of the makeup of the government as it is, with fanatics and so on –  just wanted to come in and and be part of it,” Bishara said. “And the only condition with which he wanted to join this emergency so-called unity government is by making sure that he is one of three in the war cabinet that will be making the decisions on the war.”

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Iranian state media reported.

The news report said it was the first telephone call between the two leaders since a China-brokered deal between Tehran and Riyadh to resume ties.

Raisi and the Saudi crown prince discussed the “need to end war crimes against Palestine”, it added. There was no comment yet from Riyadh on the call.

Raisi has reacted to the escalating violence by saying Iran “supports the legitimate defence of the Palestinian nation”.

Israeli police rejected accusations by Israeli media that they were too slow to respond to Hamas’s deadly assault.

“I can tell you the Israeli police and border police ran to the sites from the second there was an infiltration. We’re talking about heroes,” police spokesperson Dean Elsdunne told Anadolu news agency near the southern city of Sderot.

“It’s very easy to make decisions and opinions retrospectively under fluorescent lights. But what I can tell you is that there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered and they will be answered.”

The UN chief tweeted shortly after Al Jazeera aired footage of what was claimed to be an Israeli woman and two children being released by Hamas fighters.

It was not immediately clear when the video was taken or the identity of those released. The video was released by the military wing of Hamas.

Hamas’s Qassam Brigades has released a video appearing to show the release of a female captive and two children.

The footage aired on Al Jazeera on Wednesday night was shot from a distance, showing the unidentified woman and the children from behind.

Follow our breaking news story here.

US President Joe Biden told Jewish community leaders the deployment of military ships and aircraft closer to Israel should be seen as a signal to Iran to “be careful”.

Biden called Hamas’s attack on Israel “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” and a campaign of “pure cruelty”.

Biden highlighted the American military deployment in response to the Hamas attacks on Israel and said: “We made it clear to the Iranians: Be careful.”

By Hoda Abdel-Hamid in West Jerusalem

We’ve been monitoring Israeli media. One reporter said that Hamas was in damage control, and that it was a media stunt. Other Israeli channels are saying that this release happened earlier. Some are saying it happened on Saturday and that Hamas is trying to improve its international image at this point in time.

The footage is taken from a distance showing the released woman and the children from behind, as well as men who are presumably Hamas fighters walking away. The woman and the children are in an open area near a fence, which may be the frontier between Israel and Gaza. There has been no comment from the Israeli side.

Footage has emerged of what Hamas’s Qassam Brigades says is the release of a woman and two children. We’ll have more details as we get them.

By Tareq Abu Azzoum in Gaza

The number of strikes is surging in the northern area of the Gaza Strip. Beit Lahia town was hit with more than dozens of air strikes during the past hour.

Also the southern areas of the Gaza Strip have witnessed severe air strikes in the last couple of minutes.

Since the early beginning of the fighting, five neighborhoods have been completely leveled to the ground in the central Gaza Strip. About 535 residential houses were also wiped out.

The number of United States citizens confirmed killed in the Israel-Hamas war has risen to at least 22, with at least 17 more Americans unaccounted for, says the US Department of State.

Read our story here.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says Saudi Arabia is making “unremitting efforts regionally and internationally” to stop the ongoing Israeli-Hamas war, the Saudi state news agency reports.

The crown prince asserted the need to stop the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, it said, adding that he also stressed “the kingdom’s firm position towards supporting the Palestinian cause and efforts aimed at achieving a comprehensive and just peace”.

The news report said he made the comments in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

For the past few years, Netanyahu’s bitter enemies have arguably not been Hamas – but the Israeli political opposition. In fact, the major fault lines within Israeli politics have arguably not been so much over policy, but instead over whether Netanyahu, facing corruption charges, should be prime minister.

Netanyahu has divided Israel, so much so that five elections have been needed in the past few years, with weak coalitions forming, only to fall apart again.

Gantz has been one of the leaders of the movement against Netanyahu, an opposition that has spent the whole year protesting against the prime minister and his far-right government, calling for it to stop its attempts to weaken the power of the Israeli judiciary.

But with the outbreak of war with Hamas, Gantz is now speaking alongside Netanyahu, ready to serve in his emergency government.

Gantz has long been a political enemy of Netanyahu, but he now says that standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the prime minister is a message to Israel’s enemies. “At this time, we are all Israel’s soldiers … this is the time for unity,” he says.

“There’s a time for peace and a time for war. Now is a time for war,” Gantz adds.

He also calls for other opposition forces to join the government – the most notable absentee is Yair Lapid, the leader of the biggest opposition party in parliament.

Gantz – the leader of the Blue and White party – starts by saying that Israel is living through its most difficult hours, and says that Israel’s attack on Gaza is a “clear message sent to our enemy”. He says that Hamas must be defeated.

• Gaza’s only power plant is out of service due to a lack of fuel amid the continuing Israeli bombardment and siege.
• Medical workers in the enclave have issued an SOS, with doctors warning limited generator capacity will soon run out. Beyond those injured in Israeli attacks, at least 100 newborns and 1,100 dialysis patients currently rely on medical machines in Gaza.
• At least five Palestinians have been killed and nine wounded by Israeli soldiers and settler violence in the occupied West Bank today.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition party leader Benny Gantz have agreed to form an emergency government.
• Claims that paragliders had entered northern Israel via Lebanon, and widespread sheltering alerts, were false, according to the Israeli army.
• Eleven UN Palestinian refugee agency workers and five members of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) have been killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has put aside his differences with the opposition to form a national emergency government in light of the war Israel is currently fighting against Hamas.