Rafah attack latest: Four Gaza patients dead during Israel raid on Nasser hospital, doctors say

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday pushed back against the US vision for after the war – particularly its calls for the creation of a Palestinian state.

After speaking overnight with US president Joe Biden, Mr Netanyahu said that Israel will not accept “international dictates regarding a permanent settlement with the Palestinians”.

He said that if other countries unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state, it would give a “reward to terrorism”. Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected the creation of a Palestinian state.

Mr Netanyahu has vowed to continue the offensive and expand it to the Gaza city of Rafah, near Egypt, until Hamas is destroyed and scores of hostages taken during the militants’ 7 October attack are freed.

Four patients in intensive care died because their oxygen supply was cut off when Israeli troops stormed Gaza’s main hospital, doctors have said.

Troops were searching the facility, where the Israeli military said it believes the remains of hostages abducted by Hamas might be located.

The raid came after troops had besieged Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis for nearly a week, with staff, patients and others inside struggling under heavy fire and dwindling supplies, including food and water.

Hours before troops seized the hospital Thursday, Israeli fire killed a patient and wounded six others inside the complex, staff said.

If all the reverberations, large and small, from the Hamas massacres of 7 October last year, one took me by surprise; another did not.

The surprise was how quickly the near-universal sympathy for Israel was eclipsed by militant expressions of support for Palestinians. In the UK, or so it seemed to me, popular sentiment had turned against Israel within 24 hours – almost as soon as its prime minister vowed to destroy Hamas, but long before Israel mounted its first military assault on Gaza.

The Israeli flag, hoisted on UK government buildings just hours after the Hamas killings, was lowered within a day, in favour of the Ukraine flag it had displaced.

For years, the cause of Palestinian statehood seemed to have been forgotten internationally, along with the murderous spectaculars mounted by the PLO. Yet here it was, being espoused by whole new generations of demonstrators, not just in the occupied West Bank, but in many parts of Europe and the United States.

Condemnation of Israel solidified when it launched its military attack – but much sympathy had evaporated long before. That was the biggest surprise.

Israel has formally complained after a senior Vatican official spoke of “carnage” in Gaza and what he termed a disproportionate Israeli military operation following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

The Israeli Embassy to the Holy See called the comments by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, “deplorable.” In a statement Wednesday, the embassy said Parolin hadn’t considered what it called the relevant facts in judging the legitimacy of Israel’s actions.

A third Labour politician who attended a now notorious council meeting which sparked renewed antisemitism concerns within the party has been spoken to by party officials as they investigate what happened.

Sir Keir Starmer’s party has been pitched into a deepening row about the handling of antisemitism allegations, with parliamentary candidate Graham Jones suspended on Tuesday, only a day after Labour was forced to suspend and withdraw its backing for Rochdale by-election candidate Azhar Ali.

Reports of antisemitic incidents in the UK reached an all-time high last year with two-thirds of them happening after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel and the bombing of Gaza. But, says Ben Judah, this says little about Jewish people and more about the way we live now – and the golden age the Jewish diaspora has enjoyed since the Holocaust is coming to an end because of it.

Gaza will need a new “Marshall Plan” to recover from the conflict between Israel and Hamas, a United Nations trade body official said on Thursday, adding that the damage from the conflict so far amounted to around $20 billion.

Speaking on the sidelines of a UN meeting in Geneva, Richard Kozul-Wright, a director at trade body UNCTAD, said the damage was already four times that endured in Gaza during the seven-week war in 2014.

“We are talking about around $20 billion if it stops now,” he said.

Kozul-Wright said the estimate was based on satellite images and other information and that a more precise estimate would require researchers to enter Gaza.

The reconstruction will require a new “Marshall Plan”, he said, referring to the U.S. plan for Europe’s economic recovery after World War Two.

A surgeon inside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis tells The Independent the situation is getting ‘worse every minute’ and the facility is in ‘chaos’ – with about 40 to 50 staff and around 100 patients left inside.

Countries are lining up to tell the Israeli prime minister of the dire humanitarian consequences of going into the border city where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering, writes Bel Trew. And the political price will be heavy too

Hezbollah said it fired dozens of rockets at a northern Israeli town in a “preliminary response” to the killing of 10 civilians in southern Lebanon, the deadliest day for Lebanese civilians in four months of cross-border hostilities.

The United Nations urged a halt to what it called a “dangerous escalation” of the conflict, which has played out in parallel to the Gaza war and fuelled concerns of a wider confrontation between the Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel.

The Israeli military said it had killed a commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit, his commander and another operative in a “precise airstrike” in Nabatieh in Lebannon on Wednesday, without mentioning the civilian deaths.