Live: Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 26,000

Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or Turkey - fully backed, armed and diplomatically protected by Russia and China - had the will and the wherewithal to bomb Tel Aviv for three months, day and night, murder tens of thousands of Israelis, maim countless more and make millions homeless, and turn the city into a heap of uninhabitable rubble, like Gaza today.

Just imagine it for a few seconds: Iran and its allies deliberately targeting populated parts of Tel Aviv, hospitals, synagogues, schools, universities, libraries - or indeed any populated place - to ensure maximum civilian casualties. They would tell the world they were just looking for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet.  

Ask yourself what the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Germany in particular would do within 24 hours of the onslaught of this fictional scenario. 

Now come back to reality, and consider the fact that since 7 October (and for decades before that date), Tel Aviv’s western allies have not only witnessed what Israel has done to the Palestinian people, but have also provided it with military equipment, bombs, munitions and diplomatic coverage, while American media outlets have offered ideological justifications for the slaughter and genocide of Palestinians.  

The aforementioned fictional scenario would not be tolerated for a day by the existing world order. With the military thuggery of the US, Europe, Australia and Canada fully behind Israel, we helpless people of the world, just like Palestinians, do not count. This is not just a political reality; it is also pertinent to the moral imaginary and philosophical universe of the thing that calls itself “the West”.  

Those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; or people in Asia, Africa and Latin America - we do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers, except as a metaphysical menace that must be conquered and quieted. 

Beginning with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek, we are oddities, things, knowable objects that Orientalists were tasked with deciphering. As such, the murder of tens of thousands of us by Israel, or the US and its European allies, does not cause the slightest pause in the minds of European philosophers.  

Read more Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt

Israeli air strikes in the central Gaza Strip killed another Palestinian journalist on Thursday, the government media office in Gaza said. 

Wael Fanounah, the manager of Al Quds Today TV, became the 119th Palestinian journalist killed by Israel since 7 October. 

A Palestinian university denounced the blowing up of its main buildings by Israeli forces in Gaza City.

In a statement on Thursday, Israa University said the "barbaric aggression" was part of an Israeli policy against Palestinian education. 

It added that soldiers occupied the university buildings for 70 days, turning it into a military base to detain and interrogate civilians, as well as using it as a station for snipers to shoot at unarmed people in the area. 

Before the building was blown up, valuable contents, including rare artefacts, were stolen by soldiers, it added.

Birzeit University, a leading Palestinian university in the occupied West Bank, also issued a statement condemning the "brutal assault" which it said was part of a plan to make Gaza uninhabitable. 

"The attack wasn't only on the campus, but it was also against the national museum established by the university, containing more than 3,000 rare artefacts which the Israeli occupation stole, and then bombed the museum to cover up for the crime," Birzeit said. 

"Birzeit University reaffirms the fact that this crime is part of the Israeli occupation's onslaught against the Palestinians. It's all a part of the Israeli occupation's goal to make Gaza uninhabitable; a continuation of the genocide being carried out in Gaza Strip."

Turkey's foreign ministry called on Thursday for Iran, Iraq and Pakistan to show restraint and common sense after an escalation of tensions in the region, most recently with Pakistan conducting strikes inside Iran.

"We believe the problems should be resolved with an understanding of friendship and brotherhood, based on mutual respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries," the ministry said in a statement.

Reporting by Reuters

On 21 December, Mohammed al-Kilani was inside his apartment in the Sheikh Radwan area of Gaza City, performing dawn prayers with his father and brother. 

The three men had barely begun when the relative quiet of the early morning was shattered by the sound of heavy weaponry targeting the building. 

“The walls started collapsing on us,” Kilani, 45, told Middle East Eye. “We did not know what to do. We all hid in one room.”

Israeli forces then stormed the apartment, executing Kilani's father, wife and 12-year-old son.

"My wife was holding the Quran as they led us out of the room. A soldier told her to throw it away. She refused. He shot her in the back and the bullet came through her abdomen."

Read more: Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian's family. Then they tortured him 

After two consecutive nights of heavy Israeli bombardment in Khan Younis, residents are increasingly worried about a potential raid by Israeli ground forces into Nasser hospital, the biggest hospital in the Gaza Strip still functional. 

"The situation in Khan Younis city is deteriorating rapidly as the bombardment intensifies, particularly during the night hours," Wejdan, a 24-year-old Palestinian displaced in Khan Younis, told Middle East Eye.

"People are afraid Israel will invade the hospital, as they did in the north of Gaza. Therefore, they are fleeing the hospital compound towards the Rafah and Al-Mawasi areas. We are unable to go to the local market any more, as it is too close to the hospital."

Mohammed al-Agha, who is displaced with his family in Al-Mawasi, said there has been a massive influx of people coming to the area from Nasser hospital. 

But he warned that with a lack of space, food and medicine, the humanitarian situation is worsening. 

"We are experiencing starvation and disease is spreading," Agha said.

"A humanitarian crisis, similar to the one in Rafah, is reaching extreme levels in Al-Mawasi."

Reporting by Walaa Sabah

Russia on Thursday said the United States should stop strikes against the Houthis in Yemen to aid a diplomatic resolution to a standoff over the group's attacks in the Red Sea.

"The most important thing now is to stop the aggression against Yemen, because the more the Americans and the British bomb, the less willing the Houthis are to talk," Lavrov told reporters in Moscow.

Reporting by AFP

Turkey's foreign ministry called on Thursday for Iran, Iraq and Pakistan to show restraint and common sense after an escalation of tensions in the region, most recently with Pakistan conducting strikes inside Iran.

"We believe the problems should be resolved with an understanding of friendship and brotherhood, based on mutual respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries," the ministry said in a statement.

Reporting by Reuters

Israel "must fight terror with no mercy," President Isaac Herzog said on Thursday.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Herzog said he is not shying away from the human tragedy in Gaza, but added that Israel "needs to defend itself from terror". 

Once Hamas is out of the question, he said, then Israel will have to go "and negotiate with those who could be a potential partner". 

Normalising relations with Saudi Arabia is "key to exit from war into a new horizon," he added. 

Regarding the genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, Herzog accused Cape Town of supporting Hamas and urged the world to reject the claim.

After months of a targeted Israeli assault on al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza City medical complex has been turned into nothing more than a first aid station.

Most services have been shuttered, including surgery and x-ray departments, as well as operation rooms. 

With many specialists and nurses either arrested or forced to flee, only a few volunteers remain to provide basic medical care. 

Wounded people continue to be brought to the hospital, though complex operations are impossible to perform. 

In recent days, Israeli forces increased attacks in Gaza City after two weeks of relative camp in northern Gaza, raising fear for those in the city who have little to no access to medical care. 

Reporting by Mohammed al-Hajjar in Gaza City 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday he would address the United Nations Security Council next week about proposals for "collective efforts" to solve the Middle East crisis.

Lavrov said the solution needed to involve direct talks between the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships and would have to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Reporting by Reuters

Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Two refugee camps in the northern West Bank city, the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps, have been under an Israeli assault for over 24 hours. 

Five Palestinians were killed on Wednesday and many more were detained, as military bulldozers destroyed public infrastructure. 

India's navy said on Thursday that it responded to a drone attack distress call from a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel in the Gulf of Aden and that the ship's crew were safe, with a fire on board under control.

The distress call from MV Genco Picardy was issued late on Wednesday and the navy diverted a warship deployed in the region to the rescue of 22 crew on board, including nine Indians, the Indian Navy said in a statement.

The incident is the latest in a series of attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea and nearby region, which have disrupted shipping on a key trade route, and Indian military authorities have responded to at least two such attacks and hijacking attempts previously.

Reporting by Reuters 

Palestinian women and children killed in Israeli air strikes overnight have been prepared for burial in Rafah. 

Local media said at least 16 people were killed in the attack that targeted a family home. 

Hezbollah has rebuffed Washington's initial ideas for cooling tit-for-tat fighting with Israel but remains open to US diplomacy to avoid a ruinous war, Lebanese officials have told Reuters.

One suggestion, passed on by Lebanese mediators, floated last week was that border hostilities be scaled back in tandem with Israeli moves towards lower intensity operations in Gaza, the three Lebanese sources and a US official said.

A proposal was also communicated to Hezbollah that its fighters move 7 km (4 miles) from the border, two of the three Lebanese officials said. That would leave fighters much closer than Israel's public demand of a 30 km (19 mile) withdrawal to the Litani River stipulated in a 2006 UN resolution.

Hezbollah has dismissed both ideas as unrealistic, the Lebanese officials and the diplomat said. 

However, the group was "ready to listen," a senior Lebanese official familiar with the group's thinking said.

Reporting by Reuters