Updates: Israel kills dozens in Gaza; Hezbollah chief declares ‘victory’

For a feature on Lebanon’s displaced families who are wrestling with grief and despair, read this.

Check out this story on how Muslim charities are facing discrimination as they attempt to raise aid for Gaza.

For more on the Hezbollah leader’s comments on the ceasefire with Israel, see this.

We will be closing this live page soon. Here is a recap of today’s developments:

• Two separate Israeli attacks on residential buildings in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya has killed at least 75 people, Gaza’s civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said.
• Since the start of the Israeli military incursion in northern Gaza on October 5, at least 2,700 Palestinians have been killed.
• Israeli forces started pulling out of central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp after a daylong incursion that killed dozens of people.
• Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem declared “divine victory” after months of cross-border attacks and fighting with Israeli forces, saying it is bigger than the one in 2006 when Hezbollah went to war with Israel for 34 days.
• Israeli Brigadier-General Yisrael Shomer, who heads the military’s operations division, warned “victory” over Hezbollah is a long way off, and the military should be ready to “strike back anywhere” to stop the group from rebuilding.

Our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic report Israeli forces targeted residential buildings in the centre of Rafah city.

Fighting broke out between Palestinian armed groups and Israeli troops in the as-Saftawi area in the northern Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces raided the town of Idhna, west of Hebron, Wafa news agency reports.

Israeli troops stormed the town with military vehicles with “the firing of sound bombs and toxic gas”.

Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank have intensified since the war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023. More than 11,000 people have been arrested since the war broke out, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.

In a statement carried by the Palestinian Wafa news agency, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said among the “crimes” being committed against thousands of Palestinian detainees – including Palestinians in Gaza – are torture, starvation, medical negligence and sexual assault.

At least 45 prisoners have been killed while held in Israeli detention since the war on Gaza began in October last year, it said.

According to Addameer, a rights group based in the West Bank city of Ramallah that supports Palestinian prisoners, Israel is currently detaining some 10,200 Palestinians, including 3,443 held under administrative detention, a widely criticised practice that involves holding Palestinians without charge or trial for renewable six-month periods.

Hezbollah held a public funeral in a southern village for five of its fighters killed during the fighting with Israel. It was the first time the Lebanese group held a public funeral since the war intensified in late September.

“My son is in heaven,” said Zeinab al-Haj holding a bag of roses to toss them on the coffin of her son Ali Hijazi during the ceremony in the village of Maarakeh. Hijazi died of wounds suffered in an air strike last week.

Hezbollah’s last public funeral was held on September 27, the same day the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike on a southern Beirut suburb.

“We are people who are proud of their martyrs,” said Hezbollah’s media chief in south Lebanon, Salman Harb. “Our martyrs are the symbol of our victory by all means.”

Earlier, we reported eight people had been killed in an Israeli attack on the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood.

Our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are now reporting that 10 people have been killed in the attack on a house in the Abu Iskandar area.

The request by the Palestinian presidency came after the Israeli army killed nearly 100 Palestinians in northern Gaza over the past 24 hours, including 75 killed in air strikes on two homes in Beit Lahiya.

A Palestinian presidency statement, cited by the official Wafa news agency, called on the Arab League “to hold an emergency meeting at the level of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs given the ongoing Israeli genocidal aggression, forced displacement, and starvation of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”.

It cited Israel’s “aggressive policies” aimed at separating the north from the rest of the Strip as it deploys “starvation as a method of warfare against Palestinians to displace them from their lands and houses”.

In early October, Israel launched a large-scale ground operation in northern Gaza. Residents have accused the army of depopulating the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoon as well as the Jabalia refugee camp.

The chief of the World Health Organization says 90 percent of people in the coastal enclave are now living in tents, leaving them “vulnerable to respiratory and other diseases, food insecurity and malnutrition as winter approaches”.

“The ultimate solution to this suffering is not aid but peace,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Two Palestinians have sustained gunshot wounds after Israeli forces fired towards residents during a raid in the town of Iraq Burin, near Jenin, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reports.

One of those wounded was a 23-year-old man, who was injured in the foot, Wafa cited the Palestine Red Crescent Society as saying.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are living in dire sanitary conditions in central Gaza. The Israeli military’s “safe zones” are getting filled with rubbish and raw sewage.

Watch our video report below:

Our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic report eight people have been killed and several were wounded in an Israeli attack on the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood.

Earlier, our reporters on the ground said Israel’s army was firing artillery in central Gaza City’s as-Saftawi area.

Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, expressed concern about the levels of hunger even in areas of central Gaza where aid agencies have teams on the ground.

“I was particularly alarmed by the prevalence of hunger,” Sunghay told a Geneva press briefing. “Acquiring basic necessities has become a daily, dreadful struggle for survival.”

Sunghay said the UN has been unable to take any aid to northern Gaza, where he said an estimated 70,000 people remain following “repeated impediments or rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities”.

Sunghay visited camps for people recently displaced from parts of northern Gaza. They were living in horrendous conditions with severe food shortages and poor sanitation, he said.

“It is so obvious that massive humanitarian aid needs to come in – and it is not. It is so important the Israeli authorities make this happen,” he said.

Hamas condemned Israel’s “brutal crime” after Israeli forces launched attacks on two residential homes in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya, killing at least 75 people and wounding dozens more.

The group said the attacks killed mostly women and children and said medical teams are unable to operate and reach the affected sites as they are still barred from entering the besieged and battered north.

The homes targeted earlier belonged to the Ahmed and al-Baba families, Hamas said. It called on the international community to intervene to break the siege and allow the entry of much-needed humanitarian aid to the north, where famine looms.

Israeli forces have besieged the area for more than 50 days as they step up a deadly ground and aerial assault. Israeli soldiers have been “targeting civilians, medical workers, hospitals, and civilian infrastructures”, Hamas said.

As the people of Gaza face famine and the continued bombing of their homes by Israel, numerous Muslim charities and organisations are desperately trying to help keep Palestinians alive.

However, many of these groups have found over the past year that the banks they rely on to help get this aid to the people of Gaza do not want to work with charities run by Muslims – especially if they are focused on Gaza. This has become referred to as “Muslim while banking”.

“We used to joke when we started our company that we had 99 problems and payments wasn’t one of them, and that quickly changed,” says Amany Killawi, co-founder of LaunchGood, a crowdfunding platform for Muslims. “I do feel there’s additional scrutiny on Muslim organisations.”

Read the full story here.

Two children and a woman were crushed to death as a crowd of Palestinians pushed to get bread at a bakery in the Gaza Strip during a worsening food crisis in the war-ravaged territory.

The bodies of two girls aged 13 and 17 and the 50-year-old woman were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, where a doctor confirmed they died from suffocation because of crowding at the al-Banna bakery.

Osama Abu Laban, the father of one of the girls, wailed over the loss of her life outside the hospital.

“She went to buy bread and she barely managed to get a loaf of bread before being swept away by the crowd of women. They brought her out a lifeless body,” he said.

The flow of food allowed into Gaza by Israel has fallen to nearly its lowest level of almost 14-month-old war for the past two months. UN and aid officials say hunger and desperation are growing among Gaza’s population, almost all of which relies on humanitarian aid to survive.

Gaza’s Government Media Office says hunger and suffering among Palestinians in the besieged enclave have reached “catastrophic” levels, and called on the World Food Programme (WFP) to “uphold its duty” and resume the distribution of much-needed flour.

For 420 days, it said, the Israeli army has relied on hunger as a tool against people in Gaza, particularly women and children. It has maintained its crippling siege on the Strip and prevented the entry of humanitarian aid by sealing shut vital border crossings.

Earlier, the WFP warned all bakeries in central Gaza shut down because of severe supply shortages.

In its statement, the media office decried the “utter failure” of humanitarian agencies and NGOs in Gaza, saying organisations such as the WFP have “refused” to supply flour to families who lined up at bakeries across Gaza.

It called on the international community to facilitate the distribution of flour and aid.

A Hamas delegation will arrive in Cairo on Saturday for talks with Egyptian officials, the group’s senior official Basem Naim says.

The visit comes days after the United States said it would begin new efforts with mediators Qatar, Egypt and Turkey to revive Gaza ceasefire talks.

The chief prosecutor of the Dutch Supreme Court requested approval of a Court of Appeals decision to stop exporting F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel.

The Netherlands’s Supreme Court said the decision by the Court of Appeals on February 12, which halted the export of F-35 parts over concerns Israel is using them to violate international law, must now be approved.

Citing international agreements to which the Netherlands is a party, Attorney-General Paul Vlas argued the export of military materials should be banned if there is a clear risk of misuse. The Supreme Court’s decision is expected soon.

An Israeli drone killed Dr Ahmed al-Kahlout, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, as he was reportedly passing through the gate of the besieged hospital in northern Gaza.

Watch below: