Live: Major clashes break out near Bethlehem after Israeli raid
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Marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara is working to push more humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza Strip, where Israel’s assault has shattered daily life and left families struggling through winter with almost nothing.
Posting on the Turkish platform “In Social”, Erdogan said, “I pray to God to have mercy on all the heroes who were martyred in the Israeli attacks, and I salute with respect and in the name of my country our Palestinian brothers.”
He said Turkey is trying to move aid despite Israel’s restrictions and insisted Ankara will “do everything in our power for a just and lasting peace, whether in maintaining the ceasefire or in delivering humanitarian aid.”
His comments come as Israel continues to block or slow the entry of life-saving supplies, leaving Palestinians reliant on sporadic and heavily constrained deliveries.
Athens has seen another show of public solidarity with Palestine as hundreds of people rallied in the city centre to mark the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
Demonstrators gathered in a central park after civil society groups issued a call for nationwide mobilisation. The crowd demanded an immediate end to Israel’s attacks and urged Europe to back what they described as a “free and just solution” for Palestinians.
The march, held annually on 29 November, took on a sharper tone this year, with protesters denouncing Israel’s assault and accusing Western governments of enabling the violence through political and military support.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Israel of breaking the ceasefire, saying it is hiding behind “flimsy pretexts” as its forces continue to violate the truce on the ground.
Speaking earlier, Erdogan said Hamas “is adopting a patient approach in maintaining the ceasefire despite the provocations,” stressing that the movement has held its fire even as Israeli forces push the limits of the agreement.
He also warned of a coordinated “disinformation campaign on digital platforms and Zionist media” aimed at undermining public solidarity with Palestinians. According to Erdogan, these efforts seek to blunt global outrage over Israel’s assault and weaken support for “the oppressed Palestinian people.”
The Israeli army says it has kept up its assault on Jenin, tearing down more buildings across the occupied West Bank city as part of its latest large-scale raid.
In a brief statement, the military said its forces “continue our activity in the northern West Bank and destroyed explosive devices and weapons in Jenin”. It added that troops were “continuing the process of demolishing buildings in the Jenin area and we have found a bomb-making laboratory”.
Israel has used similar claims to justify repeated incursions into Jenin, where bulldozers and armoured units routinely flatten homes, shops and roads. Palestinian residents say the army’s operations amount to collective punishment, with entire neighbourhoods left uninhabitable.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said that 10 Palestinians were injured on Saturday by Israeli settlers and security forces near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
"Ten injuries during settler attacks in the Khala'il al-Luz area south of Bethlehem, including one injury from live ammunition, and nine injuries from beatings," the rescue service said in a statement.
The Israeli army said in a joint statement with the police that its forces "were dispatched to the outskirts of Bethlehem, following a report of a violent confrontation between Israeli civilians and Palestinians".
The confrontations involved "stone hurling between Palestinians and Israelis at the scene, as well as gunfire in the area toward the Palestinians," the statement said.
Israeli troops or settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, including many civilians, in the occupied West Bank since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian health ministry figures.
At least 44 Israelis, including both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or Israeli military operations, according to official Israeli figures.
The toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023 has surpassed 70,000, the Palestinian health ministry has announced.
In a statement, the ministry said on Saturday that the death toll had risen to 70,100.
It said that since the ceasefire came into effect on 10 October, 354 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire.
Two bodies arrived at hospitals in the Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours, the ministry said, one of which had been recovered from beneath the rubble.
It noted that the spike from the last death toll was due to the fact that the data relating to 299 bodies had been processed and approved by the authorities.
Cambridge University student union approved a motion at a debate on Thursday reading: "This House Believes The International Community Has Failed Palestine."
The motion for the debate, which took place between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel speakers, was proposed by Palestinian journalists and campaigner Yara Eid.
Among those opposing the motion were Israeli speaker and former army liaison Hen Mazzig, whose speech was later reproduced in Jewish News, where he described his reception as "hostile".
The House overwhelmingly voted in favour of the motion.
Last month, the Cambridge Student Union passed a motion to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students (NUS) over what it said was its failure to "campaign for Palestine" and support pro-Palestine student protesters.
Read more: Cambridge union approves motion saying world 'failed Palestine'
Israeli settlers on Saturday attacked the village of al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, according to Wafa news agency.
Sources told Wafa that a group of settlers stormed the village and confronted Palestinian residents.
According to the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, Israeli settlers carried out 766 attacks in October in the governorates of Ramallah and al-Bireh, Nablus, and Hebron.
The International Criminal Court's governing body is set to meet in The Hague with uncertainty still surrounding the future of the court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and the outcome of an outsourced investigation into an alleged sexual misconduct complaint against him.
The annual session of the Assembly of State Parties (ASP), which begins on Monday, comes after the ASP's bureau had previously said it expected a United Nations investigation into Khan to be completed by the end of October.
The delay - unacknowledged publicly by the ASP bureau or the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), which is conducting the probe - has left the court in a state of limbo.
The meeting of the ASP, which is made up of representatives from 125 countries that have ratified the ICC's founding Rome Statute, is also taking place at a time of unprecedented threats to the court, prompted mostly by its investigation into Israel over alleged war crimes in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories.
Since February, US President Donald Trump's administration has imposed financial and visa sanctions on Khan, his two deputy prosecutors and six judges, and has threatened sanctions against the court itself - described by some as a doomsday scenario.
The ICC, established in 2002, is the world's only permanent international court with the power to prosecute senior officials for international crimes. It is currently investigating a dozen situations, including Palestine, Ukraine, Darfur (Sudan), Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Philippines.
The court has been functioning without a chief prosecutor since May, when Khan took a leave of absence pending the outcome of the misconduct probe. Khan strenuously denies the allegations against him.
Read more: ICC 'in limbo' as chief prosecutor's fate uncertain ahead of member states assembly
Hezbollah has urged Pope Leo XIV to reject Israeli "injustice and aggression" against Lebanon, in a message to the pontiff who arrives in Beirut this weekend.
A ceasefire agreed with Israel a year ago was supposed to end hostilities, but Israel has carried out near-daily strikes on Lebanon. It has also maintained troops in five southern Lebanon locations it deems strategic.
Under US pressure and fears of expanded Israeli strikes, the Lebanese government has committed to disarming Hezbollah - a move the group has rejected.
"We in Hezbollah take advantage of the occasion of your auspicious visit to our country Lebanon to reaffirm from our side our commitment to coexistence," Hezbollah told the pope in a statement published on its social media channels.
It also affirmed the group's commitment to "standing with our army and our people to face any aggression and occupation of our land and our country", adding that what Israel "is doing in Lebanon is unacceptable ongoing aggression".
"We rely on your holiness's stance in rejecting the injustice and aggression our nation of Lebanon is subjected to at the hands of the Zionist invaders and their supporters," the statement added.
In a speech on Friday, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem welcomed Leo's visit to Lebanon, saying he had tasked members of the group with delivering a letter to the pontiff that would also be published in the media.
He said his group had respected the November 2024 ceasefire and called for an end to persistent Israeli strikes on the country.
"Do you expect there to be a war later? It's possible at some point, yes, that possibility exists," Qassem said, referring to increased fears in Lebanon of a renewed, broader war.
After visiting Turkey, Leo is due to arrive in Lebanon on Sunday for a three-day trip that includes an open-air mass at Beirut's waterfront which organisers expect to draw 120,000 people, as well as an interreligious meeting in the city centre.
Qassem said Friday that "we welcome this visit at this pivotal moment, and we pray that the Holy Father will contribute to spreading peace in Lebanon, liberating it, ending the [Israeli] aggression, and standing by it and by the oppressed, as we have always known him to do".
Reporting by AFP
Israeli forces continued an assault on Tubas in the occupied West Bank for the fourth consecutive day.
The head of the Palestinian Detainees’ Affairs Society in Tubas said that Israeli forces detained 29 men in Al-Far’a refugee camp and later released them. One man remains in detention.
On Friday night, Israeli forces carried out a large-scale campaign of raiding homes in Tubas city, and imposed a curfew across the governorate.
Since the start of the assault, medics have dealt with more than 166 injuries from beatings, around 60 of whom were transferred to hospital for treatment.
The Palestinian Prisoners' Society recorded around 200 detentions, most of whom were later released by Israeli forces.
Wafa news agency reported that two brothers, both children, were killed on Saturday morning by Israeli gunfire in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces' artillery shelling targeted several areas east of Khan Yunis, alongside continued air strikes on the city of Rafah and gunfire from Israeli naval forces toward the Rafah shoreline.
With the killing of the two children, the toll of Palestinians killed since the ceasefire agreement went into effect on 11 October 11 has risen to 354. At least 896 have been wounded during that time, while 605 bodies have been recovered from under the rubble.
Our live blog will shortly be closing until tomorrow morning.
Here are today's key developments:
- Between 60 - 80 living Palestinian fighters remain in tunnels in parts of eastern Rafah under Israeli control, Al Jazeera Mubasher reported, citing Palestinian sources. They are cut off from communication, food, and water.
- Gaza's Civil Defence said its had to scale back services by 50 percent this week because of the lack of fuel in the enclave, which it blames on the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).
- The United Nations said that the killing of two Palestinian men by Israeli soldiers in Jenin in the occupied West Bank appeared to be a "summary execution”.
- The Israeli military has started to demolish homes and buildings in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, as its military operation of raids, detentions, and evictions enters its fourth day.
- Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said that the group has the right to respond to Israel's killing of senior commander Haytham Ali Tabatabai and will "set the timing" for any retaliation.
- Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani condemned the Israeli raid in Beit Jinn in a statement on X, referring to it as “an attack that deliberately targeted innocent civilians”. The raid in southern Syria left 13 people dead and 25 others injured earlier on Friday.
Israeli forces late on Friday detained several young Palestinian men in the town of Ya'bad, southwest of Jenin, the Wafa news agency reported.
Sources told Wafa that Israeli forces severely beat one of them.
The soldiers also carried out a raid of a former Israeli detainee's home - a common tactic used against Palestinians released from Israeli prisons - and ransacked the house before detaining him, Wafa said.
Ya'bad's mayor, Amjad Atatra, said the Israeli military has escalated its attacks on the town over the last three days by seizing private Palestinian land and demolishing homes.
The United Nations said on Friday that the killing of two Palestinian men by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank appeared to be a "summary execution”.
"We are appalled at the brazen killing by Israeli border police yesterday of two Palestinian men in Jenin," UN rights office spokesman Jeremy Laurence told reporters in Geneva, calling the incident "yet another apparent summary execution", in reference to the killings that took place on Thursday in the city of Jenin.
He said UN rights chief Volker Turk is calling for "independent, prompt and effective investigations into the killings of Palestinians", and for those responsible for killings and other violations in the occupied West Bank to "be held fully to account”.
Summary execution is a war crime under the Geneva Convention and international law.
