Israel-Palestine live: Israel bombs Unrwa building in Gaza

Israeli forces on Saturday carried out arrests in Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest medical facility still functioning in the besieged Gaza Strip. 

The facility was raided by Israeli forces on Thursday, and areas within its vicinity in southern Gaza have come under repeated attacks in recent days.

"The occupation forces [Israeli army] detained a large number of medical staff members inside Nasser Medical Complex, which they [Israel] turned into a military base," Ashraf al-Qudra, the Palestinian health ministry's spokesperson, said on Saturday. 

The Israeli military said it was looking for militants in the hospital and had arrested 100 suspects there. The military also said it killed gunmen near the hospital and found weapons inside it.

Hamas has denied allegations that its fighters use medical facilities. 

About 10,000 people were sheltering at Nasser Hospital earlier in the week, but many have since left due to Israel's raid, the health ministry said.

Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, but Israel's war on Gaza has devastated the education sector, killing thousands of students and leaving hundreds of thousands out of school for almost five months.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor, Israel's army has so far killed 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers, in what the rights group describes as "deliberate and specific air raids" on the homes of academic, scientific or intellectual figures.

"The targeted academics studied and taught across a variety of academic disciplines, and many of their ideas served as cornerstones of academic research in the Gaza Strip's universities," the rights group said. 

In the piece below, Middle East Eye looks at some of the academics and scientists killed since the war began. 

Read more: Some of the prominent Palestinian academics and scientists killed by Israel

A delegation of Israeli officials is due to arrive in Qatar next week to negotiate a new prisoner exchange deal, according to a report in Israel's Channel 13.

The delegation will be given "a specific mandate to formulate a response to Hamas's demands before the mediators, according to the circumstances that will arise in the negotiations", the report stated.

Despite several weeks of negotiations, there has been no breakthrough on a second truce deal.

Earlier this month, Hamas proposed a three-stage ceasefire deal that would last 135 days, lead to the end of Israel's war on Gaza and the exchange of Israeli captives for Palestinian prisoners. 

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has blamed Israel for a lack of progress in achieving a ceasefire deal in Gaza.

Haniyeh said on Saturday that Hamas would not "accept anything less than a complete cessation of the aggression, withdrawal of the occupation army from Gaza and lifting of the unjust siege".

The Biden administration is preparing to send arms to Israel even as Washington pushes for a ceasefire in Gaza, according to a report on Friday in the Wall Street Journal citing current and former US officials.

The planned weapons delivery includes MK-82 bombs and KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions that add precision guidance to bombs, as well as FMU-139 bomb fuses.

The value of the arms is estimated to be in the "tens of millions of dollars", according to the report. 

The delivery is still being reviewed internally by Washington, according to a US official, who said the details of the proposal could change before the government notifies congressional committee leaders for approval.

The Biden administration has been criticised for continuing to arm Israel despite allegations that American-made weapons have killed civilians in Gaza.

At the end of last year, the administration skipped two congressional reviews of arms sales to Israel.

Scores of civilians were killed and wounded on Saturday after Israeli air strikes pummelled various areas across the Gaza Strip, according to Wafa news agency.

At least 10 people were killed and 20 injured after Israeli jets bombed houses in the Zaytoun and Sabra neighbourhoods of Gaza City.

In southern Gaza's Rafah, at least six people were killed and nine others wounded after Israeli forces targeted the Shaboura refugee camp. Elsewhere in the south, Khan Younis was also hit by Israeli air strikes.

There were also reports of Israeli artillery fire in central Gaza's Deir al-Balah and Sheikh Radwan towards the north. 

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has apologised after making remarks which suggested Israel had justification to destroy Gaza following Hamas's attack on 7 October.

"If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I'm sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day," Hochul said during a speech on Thursday at a United Jewish Appeal-Federation event in New York.

"That is a natural reaction. You have a right to defend yourself and to make sure that it never happens again. And that is Israel's right."

In a statement on Friday night, she said she regretted "using an inappropriate analogy that I now realise could be hurtful to members of our community", and apologised for her "poor choice of words".

"While I have been clear in my support of Israel's right to self-defence, I have also repeatedly said and continue to believe that Palestinian civilian casualties should be avoided and that more humanitarian aid must go to the people of Gaza," Hochul added.

French President Emmanuel Macron has said that the recognition of a Palestinian state is no longer a taboo for France.

Lawmakers in France voted in 2014 to pressure their government into recognising Palestine, however it turned out to be a symbolic move that did not change Paris's diplomatic stance.

While the majority of countries in the world recognise Palestinian statehood, several western nations, including France, the US and UK have not done so, and believe that statehood can only come following negotiations from Israel.

"Our partners in the region, notably Jordan, are working on it, [and] we are working on it with them. We are ready to contribute to it, in Europe and in the Security Council. The recognition of a Palestinian state is not a taboo for France," Macron said alongside Jordan's King Abdullah II in Paris on Friday.

"We owe it to the Palestinians, whose aspirations have been trampled on for too long. We owe it to the Israelis who lived through the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century. We owe it to a region that longs to escape the promoters of chaos and those who sow revenge," he added.

The French president added that an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah could only lead to an unprecedented humanitarian disaster and would be a turning point in the conflict.

Hello MEE readers. Just one day after Israel's raid on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the harmful results of the operation have materialised.

Five Palestinian patients died at the hospital due to a lack of oxygen caused by an Israeli-imposed power outage that severely restricted supplies, according to health officials.

Israel's first major raid on a large hospital in Gaza, the raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in mid-November - led to a battle of narratives with Israel claiming the hospital was a Hamas command centre. Hamas denied this, and international rights groups expressed major concerns about the raid.

After producing insufficient evidence to back up its claims after the raid, Israel has continued raiding numerous hospitals across Gaza under the allegations that Hamas is operating in the medical facilities.

The government media office in Gaza said that 184 hospitals have meanwhile been rendered out of service due to Israel's war on the enclave.

Here's what else you need to know from today:

• Students at the University of California, Davis passed a measure that would stop their student group's $20m budget from being used on companies named in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

• Egypt's State Information Service denied that Cairo is participating in a process that involves displacing Palestinians in Gaza into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

• A group of senior American, Arab and European officials met in Munich and reportedly discussed formulating a plan for a post-war Gaza that would be linked to the normalisation of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

• Biden said he pushed Netanyahu for a "temporary ceasefire".

• The International Court of Justice said an Israeli military campaign on Rafah would "exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare". However, the court said there would be no additional measures asserted by the ICJ.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society posted on X a documentary clip from BBC Arabic, which follows PRCS workers during the first month of Israel's war in Gaza.

The clip highlights the devastation caused by Israel's bombardment, as well as the risks taken by relief workers to help Palestinians across the enclave in need of rescue and medical treatment.

Watch the clip below.

The university has passed a measure that prevents any of the Associated Students, University of California, Davis (ASUDC)'s $20m budget from being used on companies named in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The move was announced by the university's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

"From McDonald's to Sabra to Chevron, none of our student fees that fund ASUCD operations will be used to financially support 30+ companies that are complicit in Zionist violence," the SJP chapter said on Instagram.

The relatives of two Palestinian-American teens, who were both fatally shot in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, say investigators from the US embassy visited their homes to probe the incidents.

US embassy officials on Thursday visited the home of 17-year-old Mohammed Ahmad Khdour and took pictures of the car he was driving, as well as pictures of the scenes surrounding the incident, the Associated Press reported.

Last week, they also collected medical and legal reports issued by the Ramallah prosecutor's office and the hospital that treated 17-year-old Tawfik Abdel Jabbar, who was killed in January.

Read more by clicking here.

UN secretary general Antonio Guterres made another plea for a ceasefire in Gaza.

“I have repeatedly called for the immediate [and] unconditional release of all hostages [and] a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza,” he said on X.

"That is the only way to massively scale up aid delivery."

A narrow category of which relatives are allowed to leave Gaza, set by the State Department, has left Palestinian Americans with no options to escape Israel's assault on the enclave.

Palestinian Americans, lawyers, and congressional aides say that the process set by the US government is discriminating against Palestinians, and has no basis in American law.

"It's a beautiful portrait of discrimination by the State Department,” one congressional aide told MEE.

In one case, a Palestinian American, and US citizen, has been trying to get her eight-year-old niece out of Gaza. The young child was left orphaned by an Israeli air strike, but she does not fit the category for relatives allowed out of the enclave.

To read the full story, click below.

State Department ‘discrimination’ traps relatives of Palestinian Americans in Gaza