Israel-Hamas – live: IDF claims over 2,500 targets hit in Gaza since ground invasion started

Drone footage shows devastation in the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip amid a search for survivors in rubble on Friday, 3 November following an attack by Israeli forces.

You can watch the video below.

More than two dozen aid trucks arrived in Gaza today through the Egyptian Rafah crossing.

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the convoy contained “4 trucks of medical supplies and medicines, while the remaining trucks contain food, water, and relief items”.

Labour has warned that the “siege conditions” in place in Gaza are unacceptable in the party’s strongest intervention yet in the Israel-Hamas war, Kate Devlin reports.

David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary who visited the region last week, said the “number of dead Palestinian civilians and children is shocking” as he called on Israel to steps to stop a “humanitarian catastrophe”.

But he again defended his party’s refusal to call for a formal ceasefire.

Israel has attacked more than 2,500 targets in Gaza since ground operations began in Gaza, an IDF spokesman has said.

“IDF forces continue to eliminate terrorists in face-to-face battles and direct aircraft to destroy terrorist infrastructures, weapons warehouses, observation posts and operational headquarters of the terrorist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip,” Daniel Hagari wrote on X.

Overnight on Saturday, Hagari said the army attacked a Hamas military complex, which included operational headquarters.

A British woman was denied passage through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt again yesterday as her mother in the UK spoke of how foreign nationals in Gaza are “being used as bargaining chips”.

Zaynab Wandawi, 29, from Salford in Greater Manchester, travelled to Gaza at the beginning of October with her husband, who is British Palestinian, and his relatives for a family member’s wedding before the Israel-Hamas war erupted.

Ms Wandawi, an English language teacher, and a group of 12 family members – 10 of whom are British nationals, attempted to cross the border into Egypt on Wednesday, but were told their names were not on the list.

Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Mr Blinken’s Qatari counterpart, told the top US diplomat at a meeting in Amman, the capital of Jordan, on Saturday that mediation to get Hamas to release hostages is jeopardised by the Israeli bombing, the foreign ministry of Qatar said.

Mr Blinken met with the foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, in addition to the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

It comes as an ambulance is struck outside Gaza’s largest hospital, which Palestinians say was evacuating the wounded but Israel says was being used by Hamas.

The Foreign Office is pressing for a key border point in Gaza to be reopened to allow British nationals to leave the bombarded territory.

Almost 90 people with a British passport or UK travel documents had formally requested to pass through the Rafah crossing yesterday into Egypt, according to a list produced by the authorities running the border post.

But UK nationals found themselves turned away, with the crossing shut to foreign nationals over a reported row over evacuating injured patients.

The Rafah crossing is the only route out of the territory for foreign nationals and the sole entry point for incoming aid.

Hamas has prepared for a long, drawn-out war in the Gaza Strip and believes it can hold up Israel’s advance long enough to force its arch enemy to agree to a ceasefire, two sources close to the organization’s leadership said.

Hamas, which rules Gaza, has stockpiled weapons, missiles, food and medical supplies, according to the people, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the situation.

The group is confident its thousands of fighters can survive for months in a city of tunnels carved deep beneath the Palestinian enclave and frustrate Israeli forces with urban guerrilla tactics, the people told Reuters.

Ultimately, Hamas believes international pressure for Israel to end the siege, as civilian casualties mount, could force a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement that would see the militant group emerge with a tangible concession such as the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages, the sources said.

Longer term, Hamas has said it wants to end Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza, as well as to halt Israeli settlement expansion and what Palestinians see as heavy-handed actions by Israeli security forces at the al-Aqsa mosque, the most sacred Muslim shrine in Jerusalem.

On Thursday, UN experts called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, saying Palestinians there were at “grave risk of genocide“. Many experts see a spiraling crisis, with no clear endgame in sight for either side.

“The mission to destroy Hamas is not easily achieved,” said Marwan Al-Muasher, Jordan’s former foreign minister and deputy prime minister who now works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“There is no military solution to this conflict. We are in some dark times. This war is not going to be short.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is warning Israel that it risks destroying an eventual possibility for peace unless it acts swiftly to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza for Palestinian civilians as it intensifies its war against Hamas.

You can read the full report below.