Israel’s war on Gaza updates: Gaza toll rises; drone raid on Iran’s Isfahan

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We will be closing this live page soon. Here’s a quick recap from today:

• Iran fired air defence batteries to shoot down three drones over Isfahan, according to state media, as regional tensions rose following Iran’s retaliatory strike on Israel after an attack against its diplomatic premises in Syria.
• At least seven people were killed in an Israeli air raid on the Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah, according to Wafa.
• The head of Hamas’s political bureau arrived in Turkey for talks on the ongoing Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.
• An Israeli army raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank’s Tulkarem has left at least five people, including a teenager, dead.
• Relatives of captives held in Gaza blocked a major highway linking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
• The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on two entities that it says helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for two sanctioned settlers in the occupied West Bank.
• Foreign ministers of the Group of Seven (G7) issued a joint statement calling for the release of Israeli captives in Gaza and a sustainable ceasefire.

The focus is seemingly going back to Israel’s assaults on Gaza. That has been in the headlines primarily on Friday.

The Israeli army and Netanyahu have been saying repeatedly that until they go into Rafah on the ground, they cannot achieve an absolute victory, and that’s something that is critical for them in this war.

In fact, it is one of the main goals they set out to achieve back on October 7. However, the Israelis have still not presented the Americans with exactly what kind of plan they are looking to do when it comes to evacuating more than a million and a half people who are seeking refuge in Rafah.

Netanyahu is under immense pressure not just internationally, from his biggest ally, the Americans, but domestically from the families of Israeli captives, from the Bring Them Back movement, who say that Netanyahu has failed them.

Every week, there are protests, with thousands of Israelis taking to the streets and calling not only for Netanyahu to resign but for him to be ousted and removed from office so that there can be governance put into place to secure a deal to bring back the captives.

The Palestinian Authority presidency has condemned Israel’s ongoing raid of Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank’s Tulkarem in a statement carried by Wafa news agency.

In addition to killing “several people”, it said the raid caused “major destruction” to infrastructure and property.

Attacks by Israeli forces, as well as attacks by settlers across the West Bank, will “not break the will of our people and will only lead to more violence”, it added.

At least seven people have been killed in an Israeli air raid on the Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

The majority of those killed were “women and children”, it said, adding that a strike hit a residential home.

It said the death toll is likely to rise given the number of people who sustained injuries.

The head of Hamas’s political bureau has arrived in Turkey for talks on the ongoing Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.

Along with a delegation, Haniyeh is scheduled to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday, Hamas said in a statement.

Earlier this week, Erdogan said he would host the Hamas leader this weekend.

The Turkish president has been calling for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and has condemned Israel’s blockade and bombing of the besieged enclave.

The Israelis typically never comment on their activities throughout the wider Middle East except when it comes to the situation that has escalated on their northern border, striking what they say are Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

When it comes to their military activity in Syria and Iran, they typically never admit to it; they never acknowledge it.

Remember what started this all off on April 1 after an Israeli air strike targeted an Iranian consular building in Damascus has still never been claimed by the Israelis.

And now, on Friday evening, the Jewish Sabbath, Israeli officials haven’t really reacted.

We saw one picture from the Israeli prime minister, who posted on X, of him on the phone, but there was no sort of caption with that.

But we did hear from Israel’s national security minister who posted one word, and it translates essentially to ‘pathetic’ or ‘weak’, and according to reports within Israeli media based on anonymous sources, the prime minister himself had reached out to the national security minister and told him that his comments and his actions were a threat to national security.

So, there are a lot of different opinions and ideas internally within the Israeli political realm.

When asked to the US at a briefing at the White House, the press secretary said there was no comment on the strike.

So it is quite interesting that all of these events have taken place, but there has been no comment whatsoever on the record officially by either the Americans or the Israelis.

Iran has shot down Israeli drones in the latest confrontation, igniting global calls for restraint.

The East and the West fear what more conflict could mean for the region and the world. So, what are Iran and Israel thinking? And what’s next?

Listen to Al Jazeera’s Inside Story podcast:

In this episode:

• Mohammad Marandi – Dean of the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran
• Gideon Levy – Columnist for the Haaretz Newspaper
• Roxane Farmanfarmaian – Professor of Modern Middle East Politics at the University of Cambridge

The Pentagon says the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant and discussed efforts to maintain regional stability, among other issues.

Austin and Gallant also spoke on Thursday and discussed “the importance of increasing and sustaining” the flow of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, including via a new route from Ashdod Port in Israel, according to the Pentagon.

Videos verified by Al Jazeera show a lineup of Israeli military tanks and bulldozers heading towards the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank’s Tulkarem.

Video posted on Instagram and verified by Al Jazeera shows young men being arrested by Israeli troops.

As we’ve been reporting, the Israeli army raided the camp yesterday, and the raid is still ongoing. At least five people, including a teenager, have been killed.

Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from Tulkarem, said a short while ago the raid has caused some of the “worst destruction in decades”.

Earlier, we reported that air raid sirens sounded in areas of southern Israel surrounding the Gaza Strip, and that fragments of an air defence missile fell on a neighbourhood of Sderot, near the border.

The Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, has claimed responsibility for this attack, saying it “bombed” the Israeli localities of Sderot and Niram.

No damage or casualties were reported from the Israel side.

Gaza’s civil defence has called for the “urgent” entry of cooking gas, particularly to Gaza City and the northern parts of the Strip.

In a statement, it said families have resorted to cooking using plastic pots over charcoal and firewood for months, which have released “poisonous gas”.

This has caused a “new humanitarian and health crisis”, the civil defence said, adding that its teams have so far registered “hundreds” of cases of people suffering from respiratory illnesses.

Omar Ashour, a professor of security and military studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, has spoken to Al Jazeera about what we know so far about Israel’s reported strike on Iran and what it may have wanted to demonstrate.

Here is a short summary:

• There was a suppression of Syrian air defences in the south, mainly to allow space for the Israeli air force to launch what seems to be Sparrow air-launched ballistic missiles from Iraq.
• We know this because the Iraqis have shown part of a Blue Sparrow booster, which is an old missile designed to be a target for Israeli defence system training.
• The Blue Sparrow replicates the Shehab, a medium-range ballistic missile that the Israelis could practice shooting at.
• We see now that it was used as an attack weapon. So there’s a bit of a question mark about whether there was, in fact, a payload.
• According to some of the reports, there were three missiles launched, and they hit an air defence system near one of the nuclear facilities near Isfahan.
• This is part of Israel’s strategic signalling that it has sophisticated capabilities. Its military suppressed Syrian air defences, went through Iraqi air defences unscathed and managed to reach an air defence system very close to an Iranian nuclear establishment.

At least one person has been killed and several others wounded in an Israeli attack on a house in Rafah.

The woman who lost her life has been identified as Rana Walid al-Riyati.

The house is reportedly attached to a kindergarten in the al-Salam neighbourhood.

About 1.5 million people, most of them displaced from other parts of Gaza, are currently sheltering in the city. They have nowhere to flee in the face of Israel’s looming ground invasion of the city.

Marc Lamont Hill discusses US policy in the Middle East and the risks of escalation with scholar Jeffrey Sachs.

Six months into Israel’s war on Gaza, fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East are mounting. On April 13, Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles towards Israel in an unprecedented attack. This followed the April 1 bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, which killed two top generals and which Iran blamed on Israel.

Israel promised retaliation and, less than a week later, reportedly launched a drone strike on Isfahan in central Iran. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has “not been involved in any offensive operations”. But the US government has announced new sanctions on Iran, including on its drone production, and urged de-escalation.

Watch Al Jazeera’s UpFront to learn more: