Israel-Hamas war live: Biden decries Hamas ‘campaign of pure cruelty’; Blinken expected to meet Palestinian president Abbas | Israel

Fifteen Palestinians were killed and several were wounded in an Israeli air strike in Gaza, Hamas Aqsa radio said on Thursday.

The death toll in Gaza stands at over 1,200 people.

The Israeli Ai Force has announced on X that it killed a senior Hamas operative overnight. In a pair of tweets, the IAF wrote:

During the night (Thursday) the Air Force launched a wave of attacks with the aim of continuing to damage the commando force of the terrorist organization Hamas known as “Nachaba”, by attacking operational headquarters which were used by operatives who infiltrated the Otaf settlements last Saturday.

Also, Air Force aircraft killed Muhammad Abu Shamla, a senior operative from the Hamas naval formation in the Rafah Brigade. Abu Shamla’s house was also used to store naval weapons intended to carry out terrorist operations against Israel.

Donald Trump used the war in Israel to test new lines of attack against Joe Biden at a Republican event on Wednesday in Palm Beach, as his campaign sought to weaponize for political gain the deepening conflict that could still be raging around the time of the 2024 presidential election.

The former president’s extended remarks on Israel, at an event hosted by the longtime pro-Trump group Club 47, provided a clear insight into Trump’s intention to wield the war as a cudgel against Biden on touchstone foreign policy issues.

They also marked his most substantial remarks on the war since Hamas militants launched attacks against Israeli civilians over the weekend.

What is Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza?

Peter Beaumont

As the movement’s founding charter made clear, Hamas was dedicated from the start to extinguishing the existence of the state of Israel. It saw armed violence as part of that struggle, modelling its early armed wing on the fedayeen, Palestinian armed groups that emerged in the 1950s after the establishment of the state of Israel.

That armed wing would come to be known as the Izz ad-Din al Qassam brigades [al-Qassam brigades] who from their very beginning embraced the use of terror tactics against Israel, carrying out their first suicide bombing in 1993 in conjunction with Islamic Jihad.

But the movement attracts substantial popular support, and also incorporates teachers, surgeons, urban planners and police in its civil administration of Gaza.

The reality is Hamas is many things. While it runs Gaza’s health service, it is also a sinister organisation committed to the mass murder of Israelis. It administers the education service while its police have broken the bones of children caught wearing scarfs signalling family affiliation with the rival Fatah movement.

It runs the courts while, during the 2014 Gaza war, its forces abducted, tortured and murdered Palestinians accused of “collaborating” with Israel and others. It is unavoidably part of the fabric of the life in Gaza.

Sydney pro-Palestine march replaced with ‘static demonstration’

Tamsin Rose

In Australia a planned pro-Palestine march through the streets of Sydney on Sunday has been scrapped in favour of a “static demonstration” at Hyde Park after the state premier, Chris Minns, vowed to stop any protests.

Event co-organiser Amal Naser said the decision had been made to avoid dealing with legal issues related to obtaining police protection for a march.

“We’ll be holding a static demonstration. We’re going to be out, loud and proud and we’re not going to bow down to the pressures that we’ve been experiencing from police and the premier,” she said on Thursday.

“We have full intention to march next week and every week after that as long as we need.”

Minns on Wednesday vowed to stop further pro-Palestinian marches after he’d earlier apologised for allowing Monday night’s event that ended with antisemitic slurs being hurled on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

In previous encounters, says Nebal Farsakh, there would always be some time without airstrikes.

“But now, there is not a single minute. That’s why the casualties keep going up and up,” says Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent.

At Shifa hospital in Gaza city, reporters from the Associated Press witnessed wounded people streaming through the doors as lifeless bodies arrived under bedsheets. As workers mopped up blood, and relatives rushed children with shrapnel wounds into surgery, explosions continued to thunder around the hospital.

Over five days, Israeli warplanes have pummelled Gaza with an intensity that its war-weary residents had never experienced. The airstrikes have killed more than 1,100 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Officials have not said how many civilians are among the dead, but aid workers warn that Israel’s decision to impose a “complete siege” on the crowded enclave of 2.3 million people is spawning a humanitarian catastrophe that touches nearly every one of them.

There is no clean water, and after the territory’s only power plant ran out of fuel on Wednesday, electricity has become a precious commodity, while the enclave sits in near-total darkness during the night.

“This is an unprecedented scope of destruction,” says Miriam Marmur, a spokesperson for Gisha, an Israeli human rights group. “Israeli decisions to cut electricity, fuel, food and medicine supplies severely compound the risks to Palestinians and threaten to greatly increase the toll in human life.”

Paul Karp

The Australian government is planning a third repatriation flight from Israel, anticipating “quite large demand” to flee a conflict with ramifications for “months or years to come”.

The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, has insisted “safety and security of Australians” is the top priority, as the government faces questions about why Qantas is conducting the flights while some other nations send their military because commercial operators will not fly.

The foreign minister, Penny Wong, said the decision was based on “availability” and arranging flights “as quickly as we could”.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday, a Palestinian official said early on Thursday.

Hussein Al-Sheikh, secretary general of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, also said on messaging platform X that Abbas will meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Amman on Thursday.

Pjotr Sauer

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long portrayed himself as a friend of Vladimir Putin. In a memoir published during Russia’s war on Ukraine, Netanyahu repeatedly lauded the Russian leader for his intellect and his “particularly friendly attitude” toward the Jewish people.

Putin, too, has over the years cast himself as a loyal ally of the Israeli state, promoting cultural ties and visa-free travel between the two countries.

But after the worst attack on Israel in decades, the much-touted friendship appears to have vanished.

Four days after the start of Hamas’s surprise attack, Putin is yet to call Netanyahu, while the Kremlin has not published a message of condolence to the country, a diplomatic gesture of goodwill that Russia routinely sends out to global leaders following deadly incidents on their soil:

The death toll in Gaza rose to 1,200 early Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said, including 51 people killed in what the Israeli military called a large-scale attack in the hours before daylight.

The most recent Israeli death toll stands at 1,200.

AFP: Twenty-one Thai nationals have been killed in the conflict between Israel and militant group Hamas, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said Thursday, up from the previous toll of 20.

“The update from last night is bad news that one more Thai died, the number rises to 21,” he said.

There are approximately 30,000 Thais in Israel, mostly working in the agriculture sector, according to Thailand’s labour ministry.

Fears are mounting over the fate of 14 Thai citizens who have been taken hostage.

Worried families gathered Thursday morning at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport to await the arrival of a commercial flight carrying 15 Thais, including many wounded.

Yanisa Thaweekaew, whose son Supipat Kongkaew has worked on an Israeli avocado farm since last year, said she hadn’t slept in days.

“My son is everything to me. I was worried. He is the only son I have,” she told AFP.

“I cried every day knowing that he lived in the red zone.”

More than 338,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in the Gaza Strip, the United Nations said, as heavy Israeli bombardments continue to hit the Palestinian enclave.

“Mass displacement across the Gaza Strip continues,” the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said in a statement sent on Thursday.

By late Wednesday, the number of displaced people in Gaza had risen by an additional 75,000 people from the figure given 24 hours earlier, reaching 338,934, it said.

Israeli forces said 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed in the onslaught – the worst in the country’s history.

In Gaza, officials reported more than 1,100 people have been killed in Israel’s sustained campaign of air and artillery strikes.

OCHA said nearly 220,000 people, or two-thirds of the displaced people, have sought shelter in schools run by the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Another nearly 15,000 people fled to schools run by the Palestinian Authority, while more than 100,000 were being sheltered by relatives, neighbours and a church and other facilities in Gaza City.

Joe Biden addressed a round table of Jewish leaders in Washington on Wednesday, where he described the bloody assault on Israel by Hamas as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”.

“This attack was a campaign of pure cruelty, not just hate, but pure cruelty against the Jewish people, and I would argue it is the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” he said.

“Silence is complicity,” Biden said. “I refuse to be silent”. He said he had spoken again today with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and that the US is “surging” additional military assistance to the Israel Defense Forces.

He said the US was “working on every aspect” of the hostage crisis in Israel, but that “the idea that I’m going to stand here before you and tell you what I’m doing is bizarre”.

This is the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war with me, Helen Sullivan.

Top developments this morning: US President Joe Biden has said that the Hamas attack on Israel was the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”

Speaking to Jewish community leaders in Washington, Biden said: “This attack was a campaign of pure cruelty, not just hate, but pure cruelty against the Jewish people, and I would argue it is the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”

Meanwhile in Gaza, more than 338,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nations said, as heavy Israeli bombardments continue to hit the Palestinian enclave.

“Mass displacement across the Gaza Strip continues,” the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said in a statement sent on Thursday.

By late Wednesday, the number of displaced people in Gaza had risen by an additional 75,000 people from the figure given 24 hours earlier, reaching 338,934, it said.

The Gaza strip’s sole power station has run out of fuel and, amid continuing strikes by Israel, hundreds of terrified people are seeking t shelter in the entrance of the enclave’s largest hospital.

Gaza’s hospitals are running dangerously low on supplies. There is a shortage of everything from bandages to intravenous fluids, beds to essential drugs, said Richard Brennan, regional director of the World Health Organization.

“It’s almost as bad as it gets,” Brennan said. “It’s not just the damage, the destruction. It’s that psychological pressure. The constant shelling … the loss of one’s colleagues.”

More shortly. Here are the other key recent developments in the conflict:

• Biden warned Iran to ‘be careful’. During his speech to a group of Jewish community leaders in Washington, adding that the US is sending more military assistance to help Israel fight Hamas militants. Biden’s remarks marked the first time he connected the US deployment of a carrier fleet near to Israel to concerns Iran might seek to become involved, Reuters reported.

• Biden also said the US was “working on every aspect” of the hostage crisis in Israel, but that “the idea that I’m going to stand here before you and tell you what I’m doing is bizarre”.

• IDF spokesperson says ground offensive will come ‘when opportune and fit for our purposes’. A ground offensive will be launched on Gaza “when opportune and fit for our purposes”, IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus said in an update early on Thursday.

• Turkey is carrying out negotiations aimed at securing the release of Israeli civilians held by Hamas, according to reports. Talks were being carried out by Turkish officials after instructions from the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to a senior Turkish official.

• The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has called for essential “life-saving” supplies of fuel, food and water to be allowed into Gaza. Guterres, in remarks to the press on Wednesday, said he will never forget the images of the “supercharged cycle of violence and horror”. He said he was in continuous contact with leaders in the region, and warned against any “spillover” of the conflict. “I appeal to all parties – and those who have an influence over those parties – to avoid any further escalation,” he said. Guterres called for the immediate release of all Israeli hostages held in Gaza, and urged that international humanitarian law to be upheld and civilians to “be protected at all times”.

• Israel’s new war cabinet vowed to ‘wipe Hamas off the face of the earth’. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the nation alongside the opposition party leader, Benny Gantz, after the pair agreed to form an emergency government to direct war against Hamas. The cabinet consists of Netanyahu, Gantz, and Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant. During the fighting with Hamas, the emergency government will not take up any unrelated policy or laws, Netanyahu and Gantz said in a joint statement.

• The US has confirmed the deaths of at least 22 American citizens, a state department spokesperson said. They said. We extend our deepest condolences to the victims and to the families of all those affected. The number is up from 14 on Tuesday.

• 17 Britons missing and feared dead in Hamas attacks. Seventeen British nationals, including children, are feared dead or missing in Israel after attacks by Hamas, the Guardian understands. The atrocities have so far claimed at least 2,100 lives.

• The Palestinian death toll since Saturday stands at 1,100, including 326 children, and there are 5,339 injured. At least 30 people were killed and hundreds wounded as Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with hundreds of airstrikes overnight, a Hamas government official said. More than 260,000 people have fled their homes in the Gaza Strip as heavy Israeli bombardments from the air, land and sea continued, the UN said.

• The Israeli death toll stands at 1,200. More than 2,700 are wounded. The jump in the death toll (up by 200) is “not because there is ongoing fighting,” an IDF spokesperson said, but because “now as the time has gone by we are discovering bodies of dead Israelis in the various communities that Hamas infiltrated and where they conducted their massacres”.