Live: Israel delays release of 602 Palestinian prisoners

The United Nations World Food Programme urged the international community and "all donors" on Thursday to help feed millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and rebuild it.

The UN agency said it had provided more than 15,000 tonnes of food since a fragile 19 January ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, feeding more than 525,000 people, but that much more needed to be done.

"We call on the international community and all donors to continue supporting WFP's life-saving assistance at this pivotal moment," deputy executive director Carl Skau said.

"The scale of the needs is enormous and progress must be maintained. The ceasefire must hold," he said in a statement.

Skau said critical sectors are beyond food. "Water, sanitation, shelter, even getting children back into school - we need to work together," he said, adding that "this requires funding".

US President Donald Trump has said he plans to take over the Gaza Strip, transfer its Palestinian population to other countries, and rebuild the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Speaking at a White House press conference on Tuesday, with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on, Trump also said that Egypt and Jordan would “give us the kind of land that we need to get this done”.

More than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed during the 15 months since Netanyahu declared war on Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 on southern Israel that left 1,139 people dead. Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Gaza has been reduced to rubble by Israeli forces using US-supplied armaments. The UN agency Ocha says almost all of the homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

The destruction also extends to 80 percent of Gaza's commercial facilities, 88 percent of its school buildings, 68 percent of the road networks, and 68 percent of farmland.

Read more: Donald Trump's Gaza plan: Ethnic cleansing or a crime against humanity?

Jordan's King Abdullah plans to warn US President Donald Trump that the US's plan to forcibly move Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan threatens the country's survival and jeopardises the kingdom’s peace with Israel, according to three senior Jordanian officials.

"This is existential. There is very strong public opposition, and it's not something Jordan can entertain. This is not an economic or a security issue for Jordan, it's an identity issue," said Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister who helped negotiate Jordan's 1994 peace treaty with Israel.

One of the senior officials said there had been a flurry of phone calls by King Abdullah to muster support from regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar ahead of his meeting with Trump in Washington on 11 February.

"This is the biggest test in ties with our strategic ally," the Jordanian official said.

Reported by Reuters

Sources close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it is uncertain whether an Israeli delegation will travel to Qatar this weekend, Haaretz reported on Thursday.

Netanyahu announced on Tuesday that a delegation would head to Doha after meeting with Trump's Middle East envoy.

Hamas has condemned US President Trump’s statements as “absolutely unacceptable” in a statement on Thursday, Al Jazeera reported.

“Trump’s remarks about Washington taking control of Gaza amount to an open declaration of intent to occupy the territory,” said the group's spokesperson Hazem Qassem.

“Gaza is for its people and they will not leave," Qassem said, calling for the convening of an emergency Arab summit to 'confront the displacement project'."

US President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Thursday to sanction the International Criminal Court for targeting the United States and its allies, such as Israel, a White House official said.

The order will place financial and visa sanctions on individuals and their family members who assist in ICC investigations of US citizens or US allies, said the official.

Egypt on Thursday said Israeli support for Donald Trump's plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza "weakens and destroys the negotiations on a ceasefire agreement and incites a return to fighting".

The statement from Egypt's foreign ministry referred to "statements issued today by a number of members of the Israeli government", without naming them.

Earlier on Thursday Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had instructed the military to formulate a plan for Palestinians to leave Gaza, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the proposal "remarkable".

Egypt said the plan "constitutes a blatant and flagrant violation of international law... and infringes on the most basic rights of the Palestinian people".

The announcement by US President Donald Trump on Tuesday that he intends to take over the Gaza Strip for redevelopment has sent shockwaves across Egyptian diplomatic and intelligence circles, but no course of action has yet been planned, Middle East Eye can reveal.

The government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has repeatedly rejected Israeli statements suggesting that Palestinians should be resettled in Egypt. It has also firmly reiterated its support for the two-state solution and opposition to the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza since the beginning of Israel's onslaught on the strip in October 2023.

Since his return to the White House on 20 January, Trump has claimed that Egypt and Jordan are open to the idea of relocating Palestinians to their territories.

However, Egypt and Jordan have rejected this plan outright, with their leaders, foreign ministers, and several senior officials expressing their opposition. 

Despite this explicit rejection, Trump alleged last week that he had a phone call with the Egyptian president, during which he directly requested the implementation of his displacement plan. However, no details were provided by Cairo or Washington regarding Sisi’s response.

Read more: Egypt's Sisi scrambling to respond to Trump's Gaza seizure plan

Israel's defence minister Israel Katz ordered the military to prepare for "voluntary" departures from Gaza, following Trump's proposal to "clear out" the territory.

"I have instructed the IDF (military) to prepare a plan to enable voluntary departure for Gaza residents," Katz said, adding they could go "to any country willing to accept them".

Reporting by AFP

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem warned that US President Donald Trump's plan to "clear out" Gaza and displace its people was a "declaration of intent to occupy" the Palestinian territory.

The Palestinian group also called for "an urgent Arab summit to confront the displacement project" to expel Palestinians from Gaza, Qassem said in a statement.

Reporting by AFP

Gaza's Civil Defence has condemned "Israeli intransigence and procrastination" over bringing essential equipment into the strip.

An organisation spokesperson told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israel is blocking mobile homes and heavy machinery - needed to clear roads and remove rubble - from entering the enclave.

Palestinians in Gaza are having to endure wintry temperatures in flimsy tents, with children at heightened risk of respiratory diseases.

Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, has warned that should US President Donald Trump's plan to "clear out" Gaza become state policy, "it would potentially amount to state cleansing".

"If done with intent, it would be forced displacement. And if that forced displacement was done as part of a systematic and widespread attack against the civilian population as a matter of state policy, it would actually be a crime against humanity,” he said.

Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man in the town of AL-Maghraqa, north of  the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, Wafa news agency is reporting.

According to the report, the victim was Salman Rushdi Salman Abu Ghoula.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week tore the mask off 16 months of gaslighting by western leaders and by the entirety of the western establishment media. 

United States President Donald Trump finally dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza. 

This was always, he told us, a slaughter made in the US. In his words, Washington will now "take over" Gaza and be the one to develop it. 

And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing. 

Palestinians, he said, would be "settled" in a place where they would not have to be "worried about dying every day" - that is, being murdered by Israel using US-supplied bombs. 

Gaza, meanwhile, would become the "Riviera of the Middle East", with the "world’s people" – he meant rich white people like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties in their stead. 

If the US "owns" Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there just happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new "owner". Palestinians have, of course, never been allowed to develop their gas fields. 

Read more: The Gaza 'war' was a lie, as is the ceasefire. Trump just told you

The death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since 7 October 2023  to 47,583, the enclave's health ministry said on Thursday.

It said that rescue teams had recovered the bodies of 28 people from the rubble, but the toll also includes one person who succumbed to injuries sustained in a previous Israeli attack and two others shot dead by Israeli forces.

According to the ministry's figures, some 562 bodies have been recovered from the rubble since the ceasefire deal took hold on 19 January.