Gaza Live: Israeli air strike takes out 25 members of same family

Good morning, Middle East Eye readers.

• The director of north Gaza's Kamal Adwan Hospital said that Israel conducted several strikes which hit the facility.
• At least 63 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza on Friday, medical sources told Al Jazeera.
• A Hamas official says international mediators have resumed negotiating with the Palestinian group and Israel over a ceasefire in Gaza
• The Israeli military is deploying forces in the occupied Golan Heights, near the de facto border with Syria.

Hello Middle East Eye readers. On Friday, Israel conducted several strikes that hit the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, killing at least 29 Palestinians.

The strikes were the latest in a string of attacks on the hospital grounds. A previous attack late last month killed the director of the hospital's intensive care unit.

Israeli strikes also hit central Gaza, where at least 20 Palestinians were killed in a bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp.

By the end of Friday, medical sources said 63 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks.

Meanwhile, Hamas officials have said ceasefire negotiations have restarted. One official, Bassem Naim, said that he was hopeful that both sides would be able to strike a deal to finally put an end to the war — a war that Amnesty International labelled a genocide perpetrated by Israel.

Here's what else you need to know about Friday's developments in Israel's war on Gaza:

• Israel's military said it conducted air strikes on Hezbollah "weapon-smuggling routes" on the Syria-Lebanon border.

• Israel's military said it was conducting a military exercise at two locations in the northern Jordan Valley and southern occupied Golan Heights.

• The German government rejected Amnesty International's accusation that Israel is committing "genocide" against Palestinians in its military campaign in Gaza.

• Israeli forces arrested three journalists in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. The reporters were later released.

• At least six Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombing on Friday in Gaza City and Rafah.

• Israel announced that it will seize 6,000 acres of land in the occupied West Bank and declare it as "state land", and the land will be used to expand Israeli settlements.

• A former Israeli reserve soldier who served in Gaza revealed that army commanders instruct troops to open fire on any Palestinian regardless of whether or not they pose a threat. 

• Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that he plans to shut down the Israeli and Palestinian civil affairs in the West Bank, Israeli media reported.

At least 63 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza on Friday, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

Thirty-five of those killed were in northern Gaza, where Israel has launched several attacks on the Kamal Adwan Hospital and also forcibly displaced thousands from the Beit Lahiya neighbourhood in recent days.

US Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill that seeks to eliminate the federal use of the term West Bank and instead implement the use of “Judea and Samaria”, claiming the terminology aligns with Israel’s historical and biblical claims to the territory. 

Judea and Samaria is the Israeli term for the occupied West Bank.

The proposed legislation mirrors a House bill introduced earlier this year by Representatives Claudia Tenney, Randy Weber, and Anthony D’Esposito.

If enacted, the measure would remove all references to “West Bank” from US government documents, replacing them with the biblical name.

“The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria go back thousands of years. The US should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel,” Cotton said in a statement.

To read the full story, click below.

US senator introduces bill to redefine occupied West Bank as 'Judea and Samaria'

Amnesty International established in its report on Thursday that Israel has the intent to destroy Palestinians, a necessary threshold that led the world’s leading human rights group to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide.

Proving a special intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group is what distinguishes genocide from other international crimes, such as crimes against humanity or war crimes.

The legal framework for the definition and interpretation of the crime of genocide is derived from the 1948 Genocide Convention, as well as the international criminal law jurisprudence that followed, particularly cases before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) and the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Determining the existence of genocidal intent is crucial for establishing the resulting individual criminal responsibility and state responsibility for the crime.

In order to come up with a conclusion that genocide has been committed, Amnesty’s methodology involved three steps.

To read the full story, click below.

How Amnesty International concluded that Israel has genocidal intent in Gaza

Earlier on Friday, MEE reported that an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza had killed at least 14 Palestinians, including children.

The death toll in that attack has risen again, with reports of the new death toll ranging from 17 to at least 20 Palestinians.

Israeli forces fired on a clearly marked ambulance near Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, Gaza Strip, endangering both medical workers and patients. The incident adds to a growing list of clear violations of international laws protecting healthcare workers. pic.twitter.com/KleiCrv1sm

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) December 6, 2024

An Israeli strike in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed 14 people on Friday, including three children and two women, according to the latest death toll.

A former Israeli reserve soldier who served in Gaza has revealed that army commanders instruct troops to open fire on any Palestinian regardless of whether or not they pose a threat.

In a Haaretz article published on Wednesday, Israeli journalist Chaim Har-Zahav, who served an 86-day reserve mission in the enclave, detailed what he witnessed during that time. 

"The lives of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip depend first and foremost on the private and personal scale of values ​​of the commanders in the Strip," Har-Zahav wrote, adding that any senior officer who orders the killing of Palestinians simply because of their identity will not face consequences.

"A human life in the Gaza Strip is worth less than the lives of the thousands of stray dogs that roam the area looking for food. While there is a clear order prohibiting shooting dogs unless a soldier is in real danger when the dog's jaws are locked on him, humans are permitted to be shot without any real restrictions."

In the piece, Har-Zahav relayed an incident that involved a senior commander ordering the shooting of an unarmed man waving a white flag. Though the general was told the man did not pose a threat and was clearly without weapons, he responded by saying: "I don't know what a white flag is, shoot him it's an order."

Read the full story by clicking below.

Israeli soldier was ordered to kill Palestinian holding white flag, says reservist

At least 10 Palestinians were killed, and dozens wounded, in an Israeli bombing in al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to several reports.

The Israeli military is denying that it targeted or stormed the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza.

The military said in a statement that it will "continue to operate against terror infrastructure and terrorists". Those operations includes areas "adjacent to" Kamal Adwan.

Gaza's civil defence said on Friday that Israeli strikes around Kamal Adwan hospital have killed 29 people. The Israeli military has launched several attacks on this hospital in the past week, including an attack that killed the director of the intensive care unit.

Israel has announced that it will seize 6,000 acres of land in the occupied West Bank and declare it as "state land", and the land will be used to expand Israeli settlements, according to a report by Israel's Channel 14 News on Friday.

The report described it as the largest land seizure in the West Bank since the Oslo Accords were implemented three decades ago.

Smotrich told Channel 14 that the land would be used to expand Israeli settlements.

Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Friday wrote on X: "We determine facts on the ground and thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine are illegal under international law.

יותר מ-23 אלף דונמים של שטח לטובת ההתיישבות ביו"ש. אנחנו קובעים עובדות בשטח ומסכלים הקמת מדינה פלסטינית! pic.twitter.com/DZBMsy6GWb

— בצלאל סמוטריץ' (@bezalelsm) December 6, 2024

At least six Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombing on Friday in Gaza City and Rafah, according to the Palestinian news agency, Wafa.

Earlier on Friday, MEE reported that two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli bombing in the Zeitoun neighbourhood located in the south of Gaza City. Wafa is now reporting that the death toll in that strike is four Palestinians.

Another two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on Rafah.

Gaza's civil defence agency said 29 people were killed on Friday by Israeli strikes around a major hospital in the northern city of Beit Lahia.

Kamal Adwan hospital, one of northern Gaza's last functioning health centres, was hit by several strikes in the morning, the agency and the hospital director said.

"There was a series of air strikes on the northern and western sides of the hospital, accompanied by intense and direct fire," hospital director Hossam Abu Safieh told AFP, adding that four staff were killed.

Mahmud Bassal, the civil defence agency's spokesman, said, "At least 29 people were killed and dozens were wounded... since dawn on Friday as a result of the continuing Israeli shelling around Kamal Adwan hospital."

The Israeli military denied having hit the hospital or operating near it, saying it is operating "against terror infrastructure and terrorists" in areas including some "adjacent" to the hospital.

Israeli forces arrested three journalists in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the Wafa news agency reported.

The journalists are Motasem Saqf al-Hayt, Momen Samreen and Hatem Hamdan.

Wafa says four other journalists were briefly detained before being released.