Live: Major clashes break out near Bethlehem after Israeli raid

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition boycotted a parliamentary vote on Wednesday endorsing US President Donald Trump’s proposal to end the two-year Gaza war.

The motion, introduced by opposition leader Yair Lapid, was mostly symbolic since Netanyahu had already backed the plan after Israel agreed a ceasefire with Hamas in October.

Fewer than a third of the Knesset’s 120 lawmakers took part, with 39 voting in favour and none against.

Israeli media outlets say Yasser Abu Shabab, described as a militia leader in Gaza, has been killed, as conflicting accounts emerge in the absence of any independent verification.

Channel 14 reported his death, while Israeli Army Radio claimed he was killed by unidentified assailants. No further details have been confirmed on the circumstances. 

Palestinian resistance factions have in the past condemned the leader of an Israel-backed armed gang in Gaza, accusing them of operating to protect the occupation's interests. 

The Israeli army has issued a direct warning that it plans to strike the villages of Jbaa and Mahrouna in southern Lebanon, escalating tensions along the border as fears grow for civilians in the area.

Army spokesman Avichay Adraee posted the threat on X, attaching two maps that highlight five specific buildings. Israel claimed, without independent verification, that the marked sites form part of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.

Addressing residents in the targeted areas, Adraee said: “You are located near buildings used by Hezbollah and for your safety, you are required to evacuate them immediately and stay away from them by a distance of at least 300 metres [984 feet].” He added: “Remaining in the area of the marked buildings exposes you to danger.”

The warning comes as Israel continues to expand its military aggression beyond Gaza, increasingly dragging neighbouring countries into the fallout of its regional escalation.

China has pledged $100m in assistance to the Palestinian people, aiming to ease the deepening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and support future reconstruction as Israel’s war and siege continue to devastate the territory.

President Xi Jinping announced the funding on Thursday after talks in Beijing with French President Emmanuel Macron.

On Yom Kippur, two British Jews were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester, during a cruel, antisemitic act of violence. One of them was accidentally shot by police. 

Later that week, while discussing antisemitism at the dinner table, my teenage son, who frequents a high school in Hackney, London, took out his phone and displayed scores of antisemitic Instagram reels. 

Numerous AI-generated clips depicted Orthodox Jews in different settings, appearing to be obsessed with money, while other reels denied the Holocaust - questioning, for example, the possibility of preparing six million pizzas in 20 ovens. A few of his school friends liked the reels, thinking they were funny.   

Antisemitism is alive and well in the UK and across Europe. This must be vigorously clamped down on. But, instead of focusing on this very real problem, major Jewish groups have instead followed the Israeli government by instrumentalising antisemitism in an effort to criminalise and silence Palestinians and their supporters in the struggle for liberation and self-determination. 

The cruel irony is that, in effect, these organisations are dramatically weakening the real fight against antisemitism.

Read more: How the Jewish Chronicle weaponises 'antisemitism' to fuel a moral panic

Israeli settlers injured a Palestinian father and his daughter and torched their vehicle during an attack northeast of Ramallah, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported, as settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank continues with near total impunity.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) has warned that Gaza’s living conditions “are estimated to have fallen back more than 20 years”, saying it urgently needs “all possible resources and capacity” to respond to the scale of devastation inflicted on the enclave.

Unrwa said it continues working “relentlessly” under impossible conditions, and renewed its call for its aid supplies to enter Gaza, denouncing the fact that Israel has not allowed them direct entry for nine months, further deepening the humanitarian catastrophe. 

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government intends to identify Palestinian collaborators it considers willing to take over control in the Gaza Strip, a move critics view as an attempt to impose a compliant leadership under Israeli authority.

“There are Palestinians inside Gaza who are currently fighting Hamas. They say, ‘Enough of the dictatorship of terror.’ They want to control their own destiny, and I think we should give them a chance,” Netanyahu told New York Times journalist Andrew Sorkin.

Israeli  forces shot and wounded a Palestinian man as their raid on the city of Qalqilya in the northern occupied West Bank continued from dawn, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

In a statement, the Red Crescent said, "Our teams are dealing with a live bullet injury to the foot of a 26-year-old man," reported Al Jazeera Arabic.

Israeli occupation authorities sentenced the Jerusalemite prisoner Hayel Issa Deifallah, from the town of Rafat northwest of Jerusalem, to life imprisonment on charges of killing an Israeli soldier, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.

The Wadi Hilweh Information Center for Human Rights in Jerusalem said the occupation court also imposed a financial penalty of around $465,000 in addition to the life term.

Israel accused Deifallah of killing the Israeli soldier in a car-ramming attack at the Burqa junction, east of Ramallah, about 14 months ago.

In March Israeli bulldozers demolished Deifallah’s home in a punitive and collective punishment measure against his family which is against international law.

Israeli settlers wounded seven Palestinians after hurling stones at them north of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, according to reports from the Quds Network and al-Alam radio.

A well-known debate series in Toronto, Canada, has drawn outrage for its plan to host four former senior Israeli lawmakers in a discussion about the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

No Palestinian debaters have been included or invited. 

The Munk Debates, loosely tied to the prestigious Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, is set to livestream the debates on Wednesday evening. It's scheduled to feature former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Israeli justice and foreign minister Tzipi Livni, arguing in favour of a Palestinian state, and former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, along with former Israeli justice and interior minister, Ayelet Shaked, arguing against it. 

The debates only take place twice a year, usually to a crowd of thousands. In this case, the official site appears to only be selling livestream tickets to paid Munk Debates members, rather than the general public.

"This is not an oversight. It is a statement of worldview: the colonizers debating the fate of the colonized while the colonized are silenced. It is an erasure. It is racist. And it is deeply dangerous," Gur Tsubar with Jews Say No To Genocide wrote in a press statement. 

Read more: Prominent Munk Debates on two-state solution to feature four Israeli politicians, no Palestinians

Israeli occupation soldiers arrested the mayor of a town in the Hebron governorate on Thursday as they carried out raids across several areas of the occupied West Bank, reported the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Wafa, citing security sources, said the forces raided a number of neighbourhoods in the town of al-Samou’, south of Hebron, and detained its mayor, Ibrahim Mahmoud Ahmed Rawashdeh.

In a separate raid to the west, in the town of Beit Awa, they arrested Hamam Muhammad Badawi Shalash, a former prisoner, after storming his home, searching it and vandalising its contents.

Member broadcasters of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will meet in Geneva for two days from Thursday to debate whether Israel should be allowed to take part in the Eurovision Song Contest, as anger continues to grow over its genocide on Gaza, the AFP reported.

Several countries, including Iceland, Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands, have warned in recent months that they could withdraw from the 2026 competition if Israel remains in the line-up. Others, such as Belgium, Finland and Sweden, have also signalled that they are weighing a boycott because of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Explaining its position, Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS cited a "serious violation of press freedom" by Israel in Gaza. It also accused Israel of "proven interference... during the last edition of the Song Contest", in which it finished second, claiming it had lobbied audiences abroad to boost its vote.

An Israeli MP has called for Palestinians who set fire to waste to be killed, either by shooting or air strikes.

Zvi Sukkot, a far-right member of the Otzma Yehudit party, proposed the measure during a parliamentary committee discussion on illegal waste-burning on Wednesday.

“The Air Force needs to act and kill them,” Sukkot said. Committee chairman Yitzhak Kreuzer, also from Otzma Yehudit, and Environment Minister Idit Silman of the Likud party, agreed.

“The simplest thing is to send an F-16 to put out the fire,” Kreuzer added.

All three justified the idea of summary killings on the grounds that burning waste “constitutes terrorism”.

Read more: Israeli MP demands Palestinians be killed if they burn rubbish