Israel-Palestine live: US and Israel air differences over Gaza strategy

Deputy Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouri told the pan-Arab Al Jazeera TV on Saturday that there would be no more prisoners exchanged with Israel until there was a ceasefire and all Palestinian detainees were released.

Arouri also said that the remaining captives being held by Hamas were Israeli soldiers and civilian men who had served in the Israeli army, according to Reuters.

"Let the war take its course. This decision is final. We will not compromise on it," Arouri said.

The Israeli army acknowledged that the body of a senior commander in the "Gaza Division", missing since 7 October, is held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The army said Colonel Issaf Hamami, commander of the Southern Brigade of the Gaza Division, was killed in the initial assault and his body taken to Gaza.

No further details or evidence were provided and Middle East Eye couldn't independently verify the claim.

Hamami is one of the highest-ranking commanders to have been either killed or captured by Palestinian fighters.

An estimated 300 people were killed in a single Israeli attack on a residential block in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, according to the Palestinian civil defence.

Hundreds more are feared wounded, the spokesperson for the civil defence in Gaza, Mahmoud Basal, told Al Ghad TV, after 50 residential buildings were levelled by Israeli fighter jets.

Residents say up to 1,000 people lived in the targeted area in Shujaiya, a densely populated neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City.  

"The numbers are huge," Basal said. "At least 300 are dead and many more are missing under the rubble."

Basal added the civil defence teams do not have the means nor the equipment to handle the "massacre". 

Translation: A massacre in the Al-Shuja'iya neighbourhood, with Israeli bombing targeting more than 50 residential buildings and houses

An Israeli air strike has killed prominent Palestinian scientist Sufyan Tayeh and his family, the Palestinian higher education ministry announced on Saturday.

Tayeh, who was president of the Islamic University of Gaza, was a leading researcher in physics and applied mathematics.

He was one of at least 100 Palestinian killed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp.

Up to 30 alerts were sounded in northern Israel in the areas of Nazareth and Upper Galilee on Saturday evening, according to an alert service monitoring rocket fire in Israel and Palestine.

It was not immediately clear what set off the alarms.

The Israeli army said no rockets were fired from Lebanon. It added the sirens were activated after an army drone malfunctioned and subsequently by a combat helicopter.

The London Metropolitan Police has asked witnesses and victims to report "war crimes" committed in Palestinian territories, according to a British legal centre.

The police force had been previously criticised for making a similar appeal to travellers arriving from Israel who may have been exposed to acts of "terrorism" but not those coming from the Gaza Strip. 

The updated notice has been expanded to include those who have been in Palestinian territories and may have "witnessed or been a victim of terrorism, war crimes or crimes against humanity". 

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), which is collecting evidence as part of its efforts to prepare a war crimes case against Israel, offered to help the public deliver such evidence to the police. 

UK police said any evidence gathered regarding war crimes in the region from June 2014 onward would be shared with the International Criminal Court, which is investigating such claims.

Read more: London police tell victims to report 'terrorism, war crimes' committed in Palestine

Hundreds are feared dead after Israeli warplanes levelled 50 residential buildings and houses in the Shujaiya neighbourhood east of Gaza City on Saturday, Palestinian officials have said.

The raids are believed to have resulted in hundreds of deaths, according to the government press office in Gaza.

More than 100 Palestinians are believed to have been killed earlier on Saturday in Israeli air strikes on Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp.

Israeli air strikes on Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp killed at least 100 people on Saturday, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

A missile struck a residential building in the crowded camp, according to a Wafa correspondent.

The attack would have caused the largest single loss of Palestinian life since a temporary truce broke down on Friday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed one of his closest aides to explore ways to "thin out" Gaza's population, the Israel Hayom newspaper reported on Friday.

According to the Israeli daily, Netanyhu instructed Ron Dermer, his minister of strategic planning and a close aide, to have a plan for the "day after" in Gaza and, if necessary, one that "enables a mass escape [of Palestinians] to European and African countries" by opening sea routes out of the strip.

The secret plan, seen by Israel Hayom, is being tightly circulated "due to its obvious explosiveness", said the report, adding that "Netanyahu sees this as a strategic goal".

The plan will aim to bypass expected US and Egyptian opposition. Unless Egypt starts shooting Palestinians crossing into the country, Cairo's "determined resistance" can be overcome, it added.

The report also foresees global outrage without outlining the repercussions for Israel.

The report also suggests that pushing Palestinians out of Gaza isn't about a "transfer" but about freeing Palestinians from the "stranglehold" of Gaza's borders.

Israel has placed Gaza under a blockade since 2007, tightly controlling how much food, water and electricity the territory receives and whether any residents can leave the strip.

Israel's Mossad intelligence services asked its negotiating team to return from Qatar, saying talks over a new prisoner swap and truce deal have reached a "dead end".

"Due to the dead end in negotiations, and following instructions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad head David Barnea ordered the negotiating team in Doha to return home," a statement from Netanyahu's office, issued on behalf of the spy agency, said.

The statement added that Hamas had not "fulfilled its obligations under the agreement".

The negotiating team arrived in Qatar only a few hours earlier on Saturday.

The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) said two officers were killed in Syria following suspected Israeli air strikes, Iran's Tasnim news agency reported on Saturday.

The IRGC said the two servicemen were killed "against a backdrop of the relentless and barbaric crimes the fake Zionist regime has been committing against Gaza with the blatant support provided by the US and a number of European governments".

Syrian state news agency Sana, citing an unnamed military official, said earlier the strikes came from the direction of the Golan Heights and that Syrian air defences shot most of the missiles down.

Israel has conducted hundreds of air strikes in Syria in the last few years which it has never confirmed.

Israel's Mossad intelligence services sent a team to Doha on Saturday for talks with Qatari mediators in a bid to broker another truce deal, a source briefed on the visit told Reuters.

The talks would focus on a formula for releasing other categories of Israelis in Gaza beyond women and children.

Israel and Hamas have been considering new parameters for the exchange of prisoners since before the truce collapsed.

The truce, which began on 24 November, saw Hamas release Israeli women and children in exchange for the release of Palestinians women and children held in Israeli prisons.

Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed 193 Palestinians in the past 24 hours, the local health ministry said on Saturday afternoon.

This takes the death toll to 15,207 people killed in 56 days since the start of the Israeli assault on Gaza, with an additional 40,652 wounded. 

The vast majority of those killed are civilians, including at least 6,150 children, 4,000 women, 206 medical staff and 70 journalists. 

More than 6,500 people are still missing across the besieged strip, the vast majority of whom are believed to be dead and buried under rubble.

"The Israeli occupation continues to expand its targeting of civilians after the end of the truce, and has not left an inch in the Gaza Strip without bombing," the ministry's spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qudra, said in a press conference on Saturday.

Evidence from a deadly attack on a medical convoy in the Gaza Strip points to Israeli responsibility, Doctors Without Borders has said.

The charity medical group, known by its French name Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), called on Friday for an independent investigation to "establish the facts and the responsibilities" for the attack on the medical convoy, which killed two people and destroyed five MSF emergency vehicles at the organisation's Gaza City clinic in late November.

According to MSF, an evacuation convoy on 18 November came under fire in Gaza city in what appeared to be a deliberate attack against clearly identified MSF cars.

Both of those killed in the attack were family members of MSF staff. One of them was also a volunteer supporting MSF medical teams at al-Shifa hospital.

Following an internal fact-finding mission, MSF said that it "considers that all elements point to the responsibility of the Israeli army for this attack".

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rebuffed US efforts to ostracise Hamas in the country.

On his way back from the United Arab Emirates after attending the Cop28 summit, Erdogan said: "I stand by my position. No matter what anybody says, I cannot accept Hamas as a terror group."

The comments came days after Brian Nelson, the US Treasury's top terrorism financing official, expressed "profound" concern over alleged Hamas "ability to continue to fund raise and find financial support" from within Turkey.

Regarding Israel's ongoing assault in Gaza, Erdogan added: "This is state terrorism. We cannot stay silent against this state terrorism," as reported by the Turkish media outlet Anadolu Agency.

"The Netanyahu administration's massacre in Gaza is etched in history as a black stain. Countries supporting this unconditionally are stained as well," said Erdogan.