Live: Six more Palestinians die of famine as Israel blocks Gaza aid

Hamas's armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, on Thursday claimed an attack on what it described as an Israeli "command and control site" and a gathering of Israeli soldiers west of the city of Rafah.

The Al-Qassam Brigades said it used short-range Rajum rockets in the attack. 

Hamas's armed wing earlier this week launched a sophisticated attack on Israeli troops that included face-to-face fighting. The attacks demonstrate how after 22 months of Israeli attacks, Hamas is still able to operate militarily inside Gaza. 

The number of Palestinians killed while seeking food aid in Gaza rose to 13 according to Al Jazeera Arabic. 

Thursday has been a particularly deadly day for starving Palestinians trying to obtain food amid Israel's genocide. 

According to Gaza's Hamad Hospital at least 91 Palestinians were also wounded while seeking aid.

Palestinians face Israeli and US mercenary fire as they walk to retreive food from the widely discredited Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he had ordered the beginning of immediate negotiations to release the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza. 

"I have instructed to immediately begin negotiations for the release of all our hostages and the end of the war under conditions acceptable to Israel," the prime minister said in a video statement during a visit with the Gaza division, adding that he was approving the military's plan to take over Gaza City. 

Hamas earlier this week accepted a ceasefire proposal by Egypt and Qatar that would see the release of half the Israeli captives, all military-aged men, as part of a 60 day ceasefire.

Israel did not respond to the proposal. 

Lebanon on Thursday said it had started disarming Palestinian resistance groups. 

Reporters said they saw Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) convoys going into the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut ahead of the handover of weapons. 

The move underscores how Beirut is trying to reassert the authority of the LAF across Lebanon, including in 12 Palestinian refugee camps where Lebanese police and soldiers refrained from entering.

"Today marks the beginning of the first phase of the process of handing over weapons from inside the Palestinian camps," Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee chairman Ramez Dimashkieh said in a statement.

Beirut is under pressure from the US and Gulf states to disarm Hezbollah also. 

In May,  Lebanese President Joseph Aoun met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Beirut, where the two agreed on a plan to disarm groups linked to Fatah.

It is unclear whether the disarmement will apply to Hamas, which also operates in Lebanon, but is at odds with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah.

At least five Palestinian boys between are missing after seeking humanitarian aid in Gaza, the Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) said on Thursday. 

The missing boys are between the ages of 12 and 16, the group said, adding that they were likely taken by the Israeli military.

"Israeli forces are shooting, detaining, and disappearing Palestinian children seeking aid in Gaza,” Ayed Abu Eqtaish, DCIP’s accountability programme director, said. 

At least 48 Palestinians were killed on Thursday by Israeli strikes in Gaza, including several killed in an air strike in Gaza City ahead of a major Israeli assault there. 

Gaza civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said that at least eight people alone were killed by an air strike in the Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza City.

Sabra and the nearby Zeitoun district, have been hit hard repeatedly pummelled by Israeli strikes in recent days. 

Amnesty International has condemned Israel's plan to build a sprawling new settlement in the occupied West Bank as a flagrant violation of international law. 

"The Israeli civil administration’s approval of the E1 settlement plan to build some 3400 housing units between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the occupied West Bank is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and a dangerous step towards formal annexation," Amnesty said in a statement on Thursday. 

The statement added that the settlement would deepen occupied East Jerusalem's isolation from the West Bank and effectively divide the West Bank in two, "further entrenching Israel’s unlawful occupation and apartheid system."

At least 11 Palestinians were killed since dawn on Thursday seeking aid in the Gaza Strip, according to Al Jazeera. 

Nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel trying to take meagre aid rations from distribution sites run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation this year. 

The UK summoned Israel's ambassador in London on Thursday in response to Israel's approval of a large-scale settlement expansion plan that experts say would crush aspirations for a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank. 

The UK on Wednesday called the plan a "flagrant" breach of international law that would undermine the two-state solution.

More than two dozen countries, including Britain, France and Germany, called on Israel on Thursday to allow "immediate independent foreign media access" into the Gaza Strip. 

"Journalists and media workers play an essential role in putting the spotlight on the devastating reality of war," the members of the 27 countries belonging to the Media Freedom Coalition said in a joint statement.

Israel has killed at least 239 Palestinian journalists inside Gaza and has blocked access to foreign reporters. 

Of all the high-profile, pro-Palestine, non-US citizen arrests linked to campus protests made by the Trump administration's immigration authorities earlier this year, Leqaa Kordia is the only one still languishing in a detention centre in Alvaredo, Texas. 

On Monday, the 32-year-old's lawyers filed an updated petition in her federal lawsuit seeking her immediate release from the Prairieland Detention Facility based on new evidence unearthed last month in a separate case.

The case in question is American Association of University Professors (AAUP) v. Rubio, which sought to challenge Secretary of State Marco Rubio's policy of what the plaintiffs describe as a "policy of ideological deportation". 

READ MORE: Targeted for Gaza protests: The Palestinian still in US custody

Figures from a classified Israeli military database have confirmed Gaza's staggeringly high civilian death toll, despite years of Israeli scepticism over Palestinian health ministry figures.

A joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found that as of May 2025 Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead."

At that time the Palestinian health ministry said at least 53,000 people had been killed in Gaza, meaning that the figures acquired by the investigation suggest an 83 percent civilian death toll.

Israel's ground assault in Gaza has killed 9,073 since May, according to the Government Media Office.

The statement, published on its Telegram page, said 2,358 children, 1,088 women, and 455 elderly people were among those killed, as well as 36,900 injured.

“We demand that the international community take serious and effective action to stop these massacres committed by the occupation and hold it accountable, in accordance with the provisions of international humanitarian law,” the office added.

Palestinian armed groups in Lebanese will start handing over their weapons to the authorities on Thursday, a joint committee said.

"Today marks the beginning of the first phase of the process of handing over weapons from inside the Palestinian camps," Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee chairman Ramez Dimashkieh said in a statement.

He said the process would begin with the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut, where an initial batch of weapons would be delivered and placed in the custody of the Lebanese army.

In recent weeks, the depressing European political discourse on Gaza - and more generally, on the right of Palestinians to self-determination - has cast a few rays of light onto a dismal situation.

France, followed by the UK and Canada, formally announced its intentions to fully recognise a Palestinian state next month. 

The first two countries share the biggest historical responsibility for the mayhem endured by the Middle East and its people after the tragic decisions they took a century ago: from the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and its fallout.

If legal rights had real value, and had the countries of the region been braver and savvier, these two top colonial powers would have been buried under a long overdue class-action lawsuit worth billions of dollars for the immense damage they have inflicted on the Middle East.

READ MORE: France and UK's recognition ploy on Palestine is too little, too late