Live: Five Palestinian journalists killed, Gaza media office says

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has called for international support for the UN peace keeping mission in Lebanon (Unifil) and for immediate reinforcement of the country's army.

“We know who is attacking Unifil. I’ve been watching videos where it’s clear that Israeli Defence Forces are attacking Unifil, and it is completely unacceptable,” he said during an aid conference for Lebanon in Paris.

“The Lebanese army has to be reinforced, and once there is a ceasefire, the Lebanese army has to deploy in the south,” he added.

At least 34 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since dawn, Al Jazeera is reporting citing medical sources.

27 of them were killed in central and southern parts of the enclave, according to the report.

Earlier, Gaza's health ministry reported that 55 Palestinians were killed and another 132 wounded in the last 24 hours.

Germany has approved over $100m in military exports to Israel in the last three months, according to foreign ministry data released on Thursday.

The revelations coincide with the last legal challenge by rights groups against the government over the use of German weapons in Gaza.

Germany has approved €94,052,394 ($101.6m) in arms exports to Israel since August 2024, according to a government response to a parliamentary inquiry by left-wing lawmaker Sevim Dagdelen.

The new permits followed a significant drop in arms exports to Israel in the first half of the year.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) said on Thursday it had filed an appeal at the Frankfurt Administrative Court on behalf of a Gaza resident, seeking to halt further arms exports.

Reporting by Reuters

The Israeli army has said it intercepted a barrage of rockets launched by Hezbollah towards the upper and central Galilee in northern Israel.

Hezbollah claimed its latest rocket attack targeted the settlement of Karmiel.

It further reported that its fighters were engaged in fierce ground fighting with Israeli soldiers and had "forced them to retreat".

At least four people have been killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike on al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, Wafa news agency is reporting, citing medical sources.

The attack targeted the al-Maghazi Services club, a facility housing displaced families, according to the sources.

The Qatari foreign minister has said that Israeli claims that Al Jazeera journalists are fighters in Gaza should be "treated with scepticism", adding that if the accusations were true, the news site "must act".

On Wednesday, Israel's military claimed that Anas al-Sharif, Talal Aruki, Alaa Salama, Hossam Shabat, Ismail Farid and Ashraf Saraj were members of either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

Blinken said at a press conference in Doha that the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has created an "opening" for progressing and concluding ceasefire talks.

“The reason I believe there is opportunity now is that I believe the biggest obstacle to concluding that agreement was Sinwar and the fact that he is no longer with us perhaps creates an opening for actually moving forward and concluding the agreement," he told reporters.

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has announced $135m in  "humanitarian assistance, water sanitation, maternal health" to Gaza and the West Bank.

The US has spent much of the past year taking credit for what Palestinians say is highly inadequate aid reaching Gaza.

The Biden administration attempted to build a humanitarian pier for goods off Gaza’s coast, but it failed and was dismantled due to weather conditions. It also tried airdrops, which proved deadly as recipients had to wade into deep water to retrieve the packages.

Meanwhile, US annual military aid to Israel has quadrupled since 7 October.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that he expects negotiators to resume ceasefire deal discussions in the coming days.

He made the comments at a news conference in Doha alongside Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani,  following talks between the two about how to move the negotiations forward.

“Today’s meeting was very important and very fruitful, and we had a chance to discuss the latest developments," Thani said, adding that Qatar, the US and Egypt are continuing their efforts to reach a ceasefire deal.

The Israeli military is claiming that its attack on the Shuhadaa school in Nuseirat was targeting a Hamas "command and control complex," without providing any evidence for this claim.

The attack killed at least 17 people, including an 11-month-old baby.

In a statement, the army claimed it had taken "many steps" to limit harm to civilians.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday that Israel aims to "empty" the Gaza Strip of Palestinians, especially in the northern part where it launched a sweeping assault this month.

"It has been a full year since the greatest catastrophe that the Palestinian people experienced after the Nakba of 1948, which is the Israeli war in which crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing are being committed in the Gaza Strip," Abbas said in a speech to members of the Brics group.

"This is part of a plan to empty the territory of its people, especially now in northern Gaza where the occupation forces are resorting to starving the population there."

Reporting by AFP

An Israeli air strike on a school in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp killed at least 16 Palestinians, including children, on Thursday, the local Al-Awda hospital said.

At least 32 more were wounded.

Anti-terrorism and anti-mafia laws are increasingly being used by British authorities to detain and prosecute activists and journalists, according to those affected by the legislation and the legal experts defending them.

Campaigners say there is an ongoing and unprecedented crackdown on the right to protest in the UK, with those most impacted including Palestine activists and climate change protesters. 

The campaign group Defend Our Juries said that since July this year, more than 40 climate and pro-Palestine activists have been imprisoned - either after conviction or jailed on remand, awaiting trial. 

In December last year, the Metropolitan Police said they had made 630 arrests of Just Stop Oil activists in that month alone, a figure that civil rights group Liberty condemned as “staggering and shocking”.

The trend accelerated after Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023, but activists and legal experts say it is part of a broader crackdown on civil disobedience dating back to 2022.

Michael Forst, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, said the situation is the worst it has been in the UK since the 1930s.

Authorities in the UK now have access to a repertoire of legislative and legal levers that have widened police powers and eroded the right to protest.

The measures are in part driven by the global efforts of think tanks representing the interests of fossil fuel companies and the arms industry, which have helped characterise social movements as extremist and are involved in the drafting of anti-protest legislation.

Read more: In Britain, Palestine and climate activists face an 'unprecedented' wave of criminalisation

International support will be needed to shore up and expand Lebanon's army and rebuild the country's destroyed infrastructure, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati told a Paris conference convened amid Israel's war on Lebanon.

Mikati said the Lebanese government had decided to recruit more troops and could deploy 8,000 soldiers as part of a plan to implement a ceasefire and UN Security Council resolution, which calls for the army to be deployed in southern Lebanon.

Reporting by Reuters

Israeli forces have killed at least 55 Palestinians and wounded 132 in the past 24 hours across Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry. 

This brings the death toll in the besieged Palestinian enclave since 7 October 2023 to 42,847, with more than 100,544 wounded and at least 10,000 still missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.

Health officials report that over 60 percent of the victims are children and women.