Israel-Hamas war live: UN Security Council delays Gaza vote again

According to a new survey, 40 percent of the people in Israel want US President Joe Biden to be re-elected in 2024, compared to about 26 percent who prefer rival Donald Trump, the Times of Israel reported.

The poll showed a big swing among Israelis compared to 2020. Back then, more than 60 percent of them preferred Trump as US president, compared to 17 who backed Biden.

The steep decline in support for Trump may be linked to his criticism, among others, of the Israeli military and political leadership for its alleged failures in preventing the October 7.

This is the first time in at least two decades where the Israeli public appears to favor a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican, the Times reported.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says Israeli forces have released a number of their paramedics, volunteers and women who were arrested yesterday evening in the Jabalia Ambulance Center.

Some of them were “beaten and tortured”, it said on X, adding that Israeli forces continue to detain eight medical staff.

“The occupation soldiers destroyed the central radio communication device and destroyed all ambulances present in the branch,” PRCS said.

The northern part of Rafah was subjected to heavy, relentless bombardment where more residential homes have been targeted and destroyed. At least six people in these two residential homes were killed. There is fear people are still under the rubble, that’s why we are expecting the number to go higher within the coming hours.

Both eastern and central Khan Younis are becoming the site of major bombardment of artillery shelling. There was constant bombardment last night of all the refugee camps in central Gaza Strip – Bureij, Maghazi as well as Nuseirat.

The northern part of Gaza – Jabalia town and Jabalia refugee camp, along with the northern district of Gaza City – were targeted and destroyed.

Ministry of Health Director-General Munir al-Bursh was sheltering in his sister’s house, which was targeted. He was critically injured, family members were also injured, but his daughter was killed in the attack on the residential home.

A 10-country coalition led by the United States is unlikely to be able to stop Yemen’s Houthi rebels from attacking ships in the Red Sea, but both sides have an interest in avoiding an escalation that could spiral out of control, analysts have told Al Jazeera.

Their attacks on commercial and military ships potentially connected to Israel are, according to Houthi officials, aimed at pressuring Israel to end its war on Gaza. The Houthi attacks have been popular domestically in Yemen, allowing the group to recruit new fighters.

Read the full story here.

A visual investigation by The New York Times shows that during the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel used its “one of its biggest and most destructive bombs” in areas in the south of the Strip which the military had indicated as safe for civilians.

“The findings reveal that 2,000-pound bombs posed a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza,” read the report.

It added that bombs of that size are “almost never dropped by US forces in densely populated areas anymore,” according to ammunition experts.

Asked about the bombs’ use in southern Gaza, the Israeli army told The Times that Israel’s priority was to destroy Hamas and that “questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage,” the newspaper reported a spokesperson as saying.

Friday prayer will start in just a few hours and, as for every weekend since the start of the war, thousands of Palestinians will be prevented from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Al Jazeera’s Sara Khairat says.

“Every week there is tear gas, and the reason why is that they are preventing the majority of worshippers from attending the holy prayer – they [Israeli forces] say to reduce clashes as it’s under a state of emergency,” Khairat said, reporting from occupied East Jerusalem.

Since October 7, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of worshippers allowed inside the holy compound: from up to 70,000 to as low as 4,000, Khairat said.

“This is part of the restriction on the movement of Palestinians, not just for Friday prayers, but for the entire Old City,” she added.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza says 390 Palestinians have been killed and another 734 people have been injured in the past 48 hours while communications were suspended.

Civil defence workers and civilian volunteers worked through the night to recover bodies and search for survivors following an Israeli strike on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah.

According to a post on the Palestinian civil defence’s Facebook page, which was verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit Sanad, Israel bombed residential buildings northwest of Rafah and in the Yabna refugee camp.

Several injured people were rescued from the home that was attacked in Yabna, though the total number of casualties from the attacks has yet to be determined.

[Translation: Civil defence teams retrieve bodies and rescue the injured, after Israeli occupation forces targeted the house of the Dhair family northwest of Rafah. Several people were also rescued from the rubble of a Kurdish family residence in Yabna refugee camp.]

It’s 7am (05:00 GMT) on Friday in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.

Let’s bring you up to speed on all the latest developments.

• UN Security Council members delayed a vote on a new Gaza resolution as tension mounts over the wording.
• Israel hit several areas across Gaza including Khan Younis, Rafah and Nuseirat, with multiple casualties reported.
• A UN-backed report warns that more than half a million Palestinians in Gaza face “catastrophic hunger and starvation”.
• Experts on wartime mapping say two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza, and a quarter in southern Gaza, have been destroyed by Israeli strikes.
• Israel’s military said two more soldiers were killed in Gaza, pushing the death toll to close to 140 since the ground invasion began in late October.

Palestinian fighters in Gaza launched “a large salvo of rockets at Tel Aviv” on Thursday, a move that demonstrates that armed groups fighting Israeli forces in the Palestinian territory “have retained some rocket capabilities … despite Israeli clearing operations”, war monitors said.

The Washington, DC-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threat Project (CTP) also said that Israeli forces intercepted and destroyed a loaded missile launcher in Gaza’s southern Khan Younis that was ready to fire missiles at Israeli territory.

Six additional attacks by Palestinian armed groups were also carried out on targets in Israel on Thursday, including mortar shells fired at southern Israel’s Sufa area, the ISW/CTP said in its latest update on the war in Gaza.