Israel-Hamas war live: IDF says it carried out airstrike on Gaza ambulance; Netanyahu rejects ceasefire calls | Israel-Hamas war

Israeli citizens urged to reconsider foreign travel

Here are some of the latest images we have received over the newswires from Gaza City and the occupied West Bank.

Thirty-four French citizens were evacuated from the Gaza Strip on Friday, according to the French foreign ministry.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, speaking to reporters during a visit to Brittany, reiterated his calls for a humanitarian truce, Reuters reported.

Two people have been arrested during a pro-Palestinian sit-in at King’s Cross station in London after the demonstration was banned.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, said he had given an order to allow police to stop the demonstration on Friday evening under section 14a of the Public Order Act 1986.

However social media still showed scores of protesters at the station. One video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, appears to show a man draped in a Palestinian flag shouting “Free, free Palestine” while being carried away from the station by three officers.

Others appear to show theslogan “From the river to the sea” being shouted with demonstrators replying “Palestine will be free.”

In videos, protesters can be seen sitting on the station concourse chanting “ceasefire now”, “Free, free Palestine” and “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.”

A banner accusing Israel of genocide can also be seen in some clips.

Summary of the day so far

Hezbollah’s chief warned that the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas could become a regional conflict.

In a televised speech on Friday, Hassan Nasrallah said, “America is entirely responsible for the ongoing war on Gaza and its people, and Israel is simply a tool of execution.”

He added, “Whoever wants to prevent a regional war – and this is addressed to the Americans – must quickly stop the aggression on Gaza … You Americans know well that if there is war in the region, your fleet will be of no use, nor will air combat help. Your interests and your soldiers and your fleet will be the first to pay the price.”

Nasrallah’s address on Friday is his first public remarks since the war broke out on 7 October between Israel and Hamas.

Agence France-Presse reports that thousands of supporters gathered to hear Nasrallah’s speech in the Hezbollah stronghold of Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Others gathered elsewhere in Lebanon and the region, including Tehran and Baghdad, Agence France-Presse added.

Reuters has verified a video showing bodies on a road south of Gaza City which is currently under a deadly siege by Israel.

Reuters’ report, which is below, follows Israel’s warning to civilians in north Gaza to evacuate to the southern part of the strip. Despite Israel’s evacuation orders, which the Human Rights Watch has called “alarming”, 70 people – mostly women and children – were killed last month on supposed “safe routes” designated by Israel. Following the bombing of “safe routes”, Palestinians have said they are afraid to leave their homes.

Reuters reports:

A video in Gaza being shared on social media and verified by Reuters on Friday showed the bodies of at least seven people lying apparently dead on a road running south of Gaza City, which is currently under siege by Israeli forces.

Reuters located the video as being made on the al-Rashid coast road between Gaza City and Wadi Gaza. Reuters could not immediately verify the date it was filmed but verified that it had not been circulating on social media before Friday. Reuters could not verify the identity of the person who recorded the video, nor the identity of the people shown.

Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the video.

The video showed some debris and many personal possessions scattered around the people, who included at least one child. Blood stains marked the road.

It was taken by a man or boy cycling along the road and past the scene, speaking as he passed by and starting to cry. At one point another person cycling behind him was visible.

“God, a child. God, women. God, the girl. Please God protect our people. Please look,” the cyclist is heard saying in Arabic. Israel said late on Thursday its forces had encircled Gaza City after earlier this week cutting off the northern Gaza Strip from the south of the enclave near to Gaza Wadi.

France has reacted with “astonishment” and “incomprehension” following Israel’s strike on the French Cultural Institute in Gaza.

“We made public today that the French Cultural Institute in Gaza was hit a few days ago in a way that caused astonishment, incomprehension and which led France to call for explanations from the Israeli authorities,” France’s foreign minister Catherine Colonna said on Friday, Agence France-Presse reports.

“[We seek] to understand how a French cultural institute can be the target of an Israeli strike. We are therefore in dialogue with our Israeli partners at different levels,” she added.

She went on to say that Israel has a right to defend itself but must also adhere to international humanitarian law.

“That is, protect civilian populations and take concrete measures to protect civilian populations,” she said, adding that UN and media workers must also be protected.

The World Health Organization, UN Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the UN Populations Fund and Unicef have put out a joint statement on the plight women and newborns in Gaza are facing amid Israel’s deadly siege.

The organizations said:

As of 3 November, according to Ministry of Health data, 2,326 women and 3,760 children have been killed in the Gaza strip, representing 67% of all casualties, while thousands more have been injured. This means that 420 children are killed or injured every day, some of them only a few months old …

There are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day. Fifteen percent of them are likely to experience pregnancy or birth-related complications and need additional medical care …

With 14 hospitals and 45 primary health care centres closed, some women are having to give birth in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise …

The lives of newborns also hang by a thread. If hospitals run out of fuel, the lives of an estimated 130 premature babies who rely on neonatal and intensive care services will be threatened, as incubators and other medical equipment will no longer function.

Here’s more on the strike on an ambulance in the northern Gaza Strip, which the Israeli military has claimed responsibility for.

A statement from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reads:

A Hamas terrorist cell was identified using an ambulance. In response, an IDF aircraft struck and neutralized the Hamas terrorists, who were operating within the ambulance.

We emphasize that this area in Gaza is a war zone. Civilians are repeatedly called upon to evacuate southward for their own safety.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) had earlier claimed Israeli forces launched an airstrike on a group of ambulance vehicles, one of which belonged to the PRCS.

A PRCS spokesperson, Mohamed Abu Musbah, told Al Jazeera that the entrance of al-Shifa hospital is “extremely crowded”. The front yard near the entrance of the hospital is “filled with civilians”, he said.

He told the news outlet that the ambulance driver and a PRCS staff member who was escorting the wounded have both “survived”, but that one of them suffered from shrapnel wounds in his leg.

With them inside the vehicle was a female patient who is now in “serious condition and has been taken back inside al-Shifa hospital”, he added.

On Thursday, Israel’s security cabinet said in a statement that the country was “severing all contact with Gaza”.

It said:

There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza.

Before this month, 18,500 married men over the age of 25 had permission from the Israeli authorities to enter the country, mostly to work in agriculture and construction, as part of an Israeli policy designed to alleviate Gaza’s crushing poverty and create an economic lifeline that it was believed Hamas would be loth to jeopardise.

An unknown number of these workers were swept up in raids across Israel in the days after 7 October and imprisoned under the principle of administrative detention, which allows the arrest of suspects without charge or access to the evidence against them on the grounds that they may break the law in future.

Many have alleged they were tortured or otherwise mistreated in military prison facilities over the last few weeks. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was repeatedly denied access to the arrested workers, who were held as “enemy non-combatants”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not immediately reply to the Guardian’s request for comment on the arrests or ill-treatment allegations.

Thousands of Palestinian workers from Gaza who were stranded in Israel when war broke out last month have been deported back to the war-torn strip after being expelled by the Israeli government.

A Guardian reporter in Rafah, on the southern edge of the strip, saw a steady stream of men of all ages with no phones, money or identity cards enter the territory on Friday morning via the Kerem Shalom crossing for commercial goods, having walked about 2km from the Israeli side of the border. Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian news outlet, said about 3,200 people had been sent back through the checkpoint, which is controlled by Israel and Egypt.

The UN Human Rights Office said it was “deeply concerned” about the expulsions. “They are being sent back, we don’t know exactly to where, [and whether they] even have a home to go to,” its spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell told a news conference in Geneva. She said it was an incredibly dangerous situation.

The Israeli government has been contacted for comment on the transfer.