Middle East crisis live: Aid groups warn of Rafah ‘bloodbath’ if Israel advances; destruction in Gaza a ‘war crime’, says top UN diplomat | Middle East and north Africa

Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said that Israeli forces have killed 340 health personnel and arrested 99 since 7 October.

At least 123 ambulances have been destroyed in the same period, Al Jazeera reports.

Any Israeli military advance into southern Gaza’s Rafah area could cause mass deaths among the more than one million Palestinians trapped there, with humanitarian aid in danger of collapse, aid workers said on Friday reports Reuters.

Israel has threatened to advance from Khan Younis, Gaza’s main southern city, to Rafah, where the population has increased five-fold as people have fled bombardment, often under evacuation orders, since Israel began its assault on Gaza’s ruling Hamas movement.

“No war can be allowed in a gigantic refugee camp,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, warning of a “bloodbath” if Israeli operations expand there.

“Expanded hostilities in Rafah could collapse the humanitarian response,” NRC added in a statement.

About 1.5 million people are now jammed into overcrowded shelters or on the street in a patch of land hemmed in by Egyptian and Israeli border fences and the Mediterranean Sea as well as Israeli forces.

According to Reuters, a doctor who left Gaza last week described Rafah as a “closed jail” with faecal matter running through streets so crowded that there is barely space for medics’ vehicles to pass. “If the same bombs used in Khan Younis were used in Rafah, it would be at least a doubling or tripling of the toll because it’s so densely populated,” said Dr Santosh Kumar.

Humanitarian agencies say they cannot move people to safer areas because Israeli troops are positioned to the north, and that the aid that is allowed into the enclave is not nearly enough to go around.

“All our shelters are overflowing and cannot take any more people,” said Juliette Touma, spokesperson for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) posted on X within the last hour saying that occupation forces were raiding the PRCS al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis.

The national humanitarian organisation did not provide any further details. We will post an update as soon as more information comes in.

Syrian air defences shot down two drones in the west of Damascus on Friday, state media reported, citing a military source as saying the drones came from the direction of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to the west of the capital.

The Israeli military has said it does not comment on reports in foreign media, reports Reuters.

Syrian state media reported earlier that the air defences were responding to “hostile targets” in the vicinity of Damascus.

Since December, Israeli strikes have killed more than half a dozen Revolutionary Guards, including a top intelligence general. Informed sources told Reuters that the Guards had pulled out some of their senior officers as a result. Iran’s ambassador to Syria said on Thursday that Iran remained “present” in Syria.

Iran’s foreign minister is due in Lebanon on Friday and then Damascus early next week for meetings with top officials.

The United Arab Emirates foreign minister called for an intensification of efforts to prevent the expansion of conflict in the region during a meeting of Arab states in Riyadh, the UAE state news agency said on Thursday.

The meeting on Gaza included the foreign ministers of the host country, Saudi Arabia, along with Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and the Secretary-General of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Hussein al-Sheikh.

Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian will travel to Lebanon and Syria to discuss various regional issues, the Saudi-funded news outlet Al-Arabiya reports.

Citing Iranian media reports, Al-Arabiya said Amirabdollahian would be in Lebanon on Friday. It also referred to a report by the Syrian daily Al-Watan, which is close to the government, that said Amirabdollahian would be in Damascus “early next week” for a visit with senior officials.

According to Al-Watan, when in Damascus Amirabdollahian would discuss current developments, including Israeli attacks on Syria and the ongoing war in Gaza. It added that he would then travel onwards to Qatar.

Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights said on Thursday that widespread destruction by the IDF of civilian infrastructure in Gaza “amounts to a grave breach of the Fourth Genevea Convention, and a war crime”.

Türk criticised the “extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.

The UN children’s agency (Unicef) called on all parties to refrain from military escalation in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, warning that there are more than 600,000 children in the area, some of whom have been displaced more than once since the war began four months ago, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Unicef executive director Catherine Russell said in a statement late on Thursday that military escalation in Rafah would mark “another devastating turn in a war” that has killed over 27,000 people according to health officials in Gaza.

She said it could leave thousands more dead through violence or lack of essential services, and further disrupt humanitarian assistance.

“We need Gaza’s last remaining hospitals, shelters, markets and water systems to stay functional,” Russell said. “Without them, hunger and disease will skyrocket, taking more child lives.”

More than half of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people have fled to Rafah, heeding Israeli evacuation orders as the military’s ground offensive expands. Evacuation orders now cover two-thirds of the Gaza Strip.

Russell appealed to all parties to the conflict to adhere to their obligations under international humanitarian law, which includes taking the utmost care to spare civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Al Jazeera have been receiving updates on the Israeli army’s raids in the occupied West Bank overnight and in the morning. The news organisation says that at 11 Palestinians have been detained by Israeli forces there, according to local sources speaking to the Wafa news agency.

In Ramallah, seven Palestinians were arrested as Israeli troops stormed various villages, says Al Jazeera. It says, according to information from the Wafa news agency, that in one of the raids in Sinjil, the Israeli army confiscated three private vehicles and cash in shekels worth nearly $2,800.

According to Al Jazeera’s report another four Palestinians, including a journalist identified as Hamza Safi, were reportedly arrested in a separate Israeli military raid in Tulkarem in the northern West Bank by Israeli soldiers who raided and searched their homes.

An international charitysaid that food is becoming so scarce in Gaza that people are resorting to eating grass. “Every single person in Gaza is now hungry, and people have just 1.5 to 2 litres of unsafe water per day to meet all their needs,” said ActionAid in a statement published on Friday that warned intensifying attacks in Rafah would have “disastrous consequences”.

Riham Jafari, advocacy and communications coordinator at ActionAid Palestine said the charity was “deeply concerned” by reports of a potential ground invasion in Rafah and increased airstrikes on the area. “Let us be absolutely clear: any intensification of hostilities in Rafah, where more than 1.4 million people are sheltering, would be absolutely disastrous,” he said.

Jafari asked “if the final remaining supposedly safe place in the strip came under attack … where on earth is Gaza’s exhausted and starving population supposed to go?”.

He added:

People are now so desperate that they’re eating grass in a last attempt to stave off hunger. Meanwhile infections and diseases are running rampant amid such overcrowded conditions. The only thing that will stop this situation spinning even further out of control is an immediate and permanent ceasefire – it’s the only way to stop more lives being lost and to allow enough lifesaving aid to enter the territory.”

The charity said any attacks would “undoubtedly cause a high number of casualties and make the distribution of aid even more challenging”, given that the area now hosts more than 1.4 million people, or more than five times its usual population.