Gaza live: Several dead including Hezbollah commander after Israeli strike on southern Beirut

Palestine's ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, slammed Israel's  wide scale offensive on the northern occupied West Bank.

“Israel wants you to believe its military aggression is about security, but it knows by experience that it is actually creating the conditions of insecurity. No one is naive enough to ignore what this is about. It is about the land,” he said.

“Israel is advancing its settler colonial agenda with more and more settlers”.

Israel is conducting air strikes across swaths of southern Lebanon near the city of Tyre, according to Lebanon’s state-run national news agency.

The strikes are hitting the outskirts of the villages of Majdal Zoun, al-Jebbayn, Wadi Hassan, Wadi Zebqin and al-Aziyah.

The intensity of fire between Hezbollah and Israel has increased in the last 24 hours.

A senior US official told reporters on Wednesday that Hamas is “threatening to execute more hostages” as the official outlined the White House's efforts to secure a ceasefire and hostage exchange.

A senior US official briefing reporters said phase one of the proposed deal would see all women hostages released “that includes a number of women soldiers, all men over 50, and all ill and wounded hostages".

The US official said in return a "subset of the total number" of Palestinians facing life sentences in Israeli prisons would be released. 

The Al-Quds Brigades’ Tulkarm Battalion said they detonated an explosive device by an Israeli military vehicle in the Nur Shams camp in the occupied West Bank, killing and injuring Israeli forces.

“Our fighters were able to lure an infantry force into a pre-prepared compound ambush in the axis of Nablus Street,” the group said in a statement.

“After the force reached the point of death, our heroes, the engineering unit, were able to detonate [an] anti-personnel device, causing deaths and injuries among the force’s ranks.”

The announcement comes amid reports of fierce fighting between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters in the area.

The White House said Hamas’s resources are depleted and its forces “decimated,” in response to a question whether the group was under enough pressure to move towards a ceasefire deal.

White House spokesperson John Kirby’s assessment was in response to a question whether the US putting to much "heat" on Netanyahu to reach a deal, but his remarks offer a glimpse into the US's view of Hamas’s status at 11 months of war

“I’ll tell ya, if you’re Mr. Sinwar, he’s buried in a tunnel somewhere. He ain’t coming up for air too much. His forces have been decimated, his resources have been dried up. People he claimed to be protecting and defending are living in deplorable conditions because of a war that he started on the 7 of October,” Kirby said referring to Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar.

“I don’t buy this notion that there’s no pressure being put on Hamas or Hamas leaders” he said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brushed off answering why his map presentation of the Gaza Strip and region did not include a depiction of the occupied West Bank, the envisioned future home of a Palestinian state.

“I didn’t include the Dead Sea. It’s not shown on the map. I didn’t show the Jordan River. It’s not on this map. I didn’t show the Sea of Galilee,” Netanyahu told a reporter when asked about the omission.

“Those are geographical features. This is a population of [Palestinians] who live there,” the reporter responded.

Netanyahu said he didn’t “intend to drive these people away”, adding “they want to drive us away”.

 “I didn’t get into that. I was talking about Gaza. There is a whole issue of how to achieve peace between us and the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. I didn’t get into that. That’s another press conference”.

The US and Israel held a virtual meeting to discuss fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, Axios reported.

During the one hour meeting, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan and senior Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk exchanged ideas with the Israeli team, led by the Minister for Strategic Affairs and Netanyahu advisor Ron Dermer.

The two sides discussed how to end the fighting with Hezbollah if a ceasefire in Gaza is reached, but also how to reduce the border conflict if the war in Gaza continues.

Crossing border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has displaced roughly 90,000 Israelis from the north and a similar number of Lebanese.

A slim majority of Israelis would support leaving the Philadelphi Corridor if it means reaching a deal with Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza, according to a new poll.

53 percent of Israelis would support a pullout if it comes with a hostage deal, Israeli public broadcaster Kan found in a new poll.

The poll comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubles down on his position that Israel must remain on the border for the foreseeable future.

Hezbollah says it fired a volley of Katyusha rockets at Israeli positions near the occupied Golan Heights in retaliation for Israel’s strikes on villages in southern Lebanon.

The attack was carried out “in support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and in support of their valiant and honorable resistance”, according to a Hezbollah statement”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely claimed that Israel’s invasion of Rafah sparked Hamas to release the hostages, in a press conference on Wednesday.

“You know when they started giving us hostages, when we went into Philadelphia, when we went into Rafah, when we controlled the Rafah crossing. That’s when they felt the pressure,” he said.

Israel and Hamas exchanged hostages during a November truce, months before Israel invaded Rafah. Israel has freed some hostages in bloody rescue operations since the Rafah invasion.

Netanyahu also defended his position of Israel remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor.

A Lebanese woman was killed and five others wounded, including a 12 year old child, by Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon.

“Israeli enemy artillery fire targeting the locality of Qabrikha killed a woman and wounded two other people, including a 12-year-old,” Lebanon’s Health ministry said in a statement.

Meta Platforms’ oversight board has said that Facebook should not automatically remove the phrase “From the river to the sea,” which is used to display support for Palestinians.

The phrase has become a lightning rod issue, with critics saying it alludes to the destruction of the state of Israel, and many supporters saying it is being taken out of context.

The phrase refers to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea,

“Simply removing political speech is not a solution. There needs to be room for debate, especially during times of crisis and conflict,” the board said.

Israeli, US and Egyptian officials discussed plans to build an underground high-tech barrier on the Philadelphi Corridor and deploy elite Egyptian troops to police above, in a bid to sway Israel’s leader on peace talks.

The discussions, reported by the Financial Times, have not been finalised.

During a press conference on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Egypt of failing to stem arms smuggling to Gaza, which has inflamed ties with Egypt, a historic peace partner.

At least two people have been killed and eleven injured by an Israeli strike in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, the Palestinian civil defence is reporting. 

Earlier in the day, Israeli air strikes hit a home in Nuseirat camp in central Gaza killing at least one person, according to the Palestinian civil defence.

The UAE has accused Israel of threatening regional stability after a top Netanyahu advisor said arms and weapons have been smuggled into Gaza through Egypt despite President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s vow to prevent it.

“We have cut off the supply lines of weapons, we aren’t going to open that supply line without having a solution on the ground that works,” Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer told Bloomberg, when asked about Israel's military presence on the Egyptian-Gaza border. 

He said he wasn’t “questioning the intentions” of Egypt but was “questioning the results”.

The allegations mark an escalation in Israel’s criticism of Egypt.

The UAE’s statement expressed “its full solidarity with the Arab Republic of Egypt in the face of Israeli allegations and claims regarding the Philadelphi crossing, and strongly condemns and denounces the offensive Israeli statements in this regard, which threaten stability and exacerbate the situation in the region".