Israel-Hamas war live: White House says it has intelligence that Hamas was using Gaza hospital to run military operations | Israel-Hamas war

The World Health Organization (WHO) has hailed the “heroic efforts” of staff at Gaza’s besieged al-Shifa hospital, and insisted that moving the most vulnerable patients from the hospital has become an “impossible task”.

WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris, speaking to reporters in Geneva, said the “heroic” health workers at Gaza’s largest hospital have been “doing whatever they can to keep going” while the facility has been without power since Saturday and there was not enough food and clean water.

About 700 patients and more than 400 staff are still present at al-Shifa complex, in addition to about 3,000 displaced persons who had sought refuge there, the organisation said. Harris said that 20 patient deaths have been reported in the last 48 hours.

Asked about the possibility of evacuating patients, Harris said that all of those remaining at al-Shifa required critical support to stay alive.

Moving them “would be a very difficult thing to ask in the best circumstances”, she said, let along bombing, armed clashes and a lack of fuel for ambulances, adding:

The best way would be to stop the hostilities right now and focus on saving lives, not taking lives.

Her comments came after the Israeli mission in Geneva slammed the WHO, the UN humanitarian agency and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for criticising Israel’s month-long call for civilians and patients to leave al-Shifa hospital. It said that the international community “could have facilitated the transfer of patients, but they did nothing, except call out Israel and give Hamas a free pass.”

Harris said moving the most fragile patients would inevitably lead to deaths as those people were very vunerable. “Moving them was an impossible task,” she said.

She said it would be “asking doctors and nurses to move people knowing that that would kill them”, adding:

Why would you need to move them? A hospital should never be under attack. A hospital is a place a safe haven. This is agreed under international humanitarian law.

Harris said the organisation was “begging for a ceasefire to happen now”.

Patrick Wintour

The British government appears to have withdrawn an assertion made by the former prime minister Boris Johnson that the international criminal court has no jurisdiction in Israel.

In a statement to MPs on Tuesday, the Foreign Office minister Andrew Mitchell said:

It is not for ministers to seek to state where the ICC has jurisdiction; that is for the chief prosecutor. The chief prosecutor has not been silent on this matter, and I am sure he will continue to express his views.

At a different point he said: “It is not for me to fetter or speak in the place of its chief prosecutor.” Mitchell has been challenged repeatedly to say if he agreed withJohnson, who as prime minister in April 2021 wrote to the Conservative Friends of Israel:

We do not accept that the ICC have jurisdiction given Israel is not a signatory to the Rome statute, and Palestine is not a sovereign state.

Johnson added that an ICC inquiry into war crimes was a partial and prejudicial attack on a friend and ally of the UK.

The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, said the Labour party recognised the ICC’s jurisdiction. It comes amid a wider western shift to more pointed criticism of the way Israel is conducting its campaign to remove Hamas from Gaza.

At least eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, Reuters reported, citing Palestinian medics and local media.

Seven Palestinians were killed in clashes during a raid in the town of Tulkarm near the boundary with Israel, according to reports.

The Israeli army and police said their forces, sent into Tulkarm to detain suspected militants, came under fire and killed several Palestinian gunmen in the ensuing skirmish. An Israeli air strike hit a group of Palestinians who opened fire and threw a bomb at the forces, they said in a statement.

The air strike was carried out by a drone and killed three people, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said. The Tulkarm Brigades said it mourned the seven who were killed.

An eighth Palestinian was killed by Israeli gunfire in Beit Aynoun, north of the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank, medical officials said.

At least 190 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since 7 October, according to figures by the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry.

The White House has said it has unspecified intelligence that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip – including al-Shifa hospital – to conceal or support their military operations and to hold hostages.

The White House’s national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that the US has “information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command and control node”, referring to al-Shifa hospital. He added:

They have stored weapons there and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.

He said those actions constituted a war crime. When asked about evidence to support the claim, Kirby said “it comes from a variety of intelligence sourcing”, AP reported.

The Biden administration had downgraded the classification level of some of the data on Tuesday so it could share its conclusions with reporters, Reuters reported that he said.

Kirby underscored that the US does not support strikes against hospitals, and that Hamas’ actions in the hospitals “do not lessen Israel’s responsibilities to protect civilians”. He said:

To be clear, we do not support striking a hospital from the air. We do not want to see a firefight in a hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care they deserve.

The White House has said it had its own intelligence supporting Israel claims that Hamas was using al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City to run its military operations, and probably to store weapons.

“We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command and control node”, the White House’s national security spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters aboard Air Force One:

They have stored weapons there and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.

He added:

That is a war crime.

He said those actions by Hamas did not lessen Israel’s responsibility to protect civilians in the course of its military operations.

With Israeli forces at the gates of the complex of al-Shifa hospital, and fighting raging with Hamas militants in the streets of Gaza City, patients have been dying owing to energy shortages and dwindling supplies. Some of the hospital’s buildings have been bombed.

At least 32 patients, including three premature babies, died at the weekend, the health ministry in Gaza said, and another 36 babies and other patients at al-Shifa were at risk.

US state department supports evacuations from Gaza hospitals via third parties

Joanna Walters

The US state department has said it is having conversations with humanitarian organizations and third parties about evacuating hospitals in Gaza, Reuters reports.

The US thinks pauses that have been taking place in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in order to allow Palestinians to flee or be rescued “should be longer”, state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a briefing on Tuesday, adding that the US will continue to engage with the Israeli government on this topic.

The department will support an independent third party to conduct evacuations from Gaza hospitals and the US “doesn’t want to see any civilians, certainly not babies in incubators and other vulnerable people, caught in crossfire,” it said.

It is 9pm in Gaza City and in Tel Aviv. Here is a summary of the latest news from the Israel-Hamas war …

• The winter rains have finally arrived in Gaza, bringing new challenges for the besieged exclave’s 2.3 million people who have already suffered through six weeks of war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. After a warm and dry autumn, a Mediterranean thunderstorm broke across the 25-mile by 7-mile (41km x 12km) strip early on Tuesday morning. Water consumption in Gaza has fallen by 90% since the conflict started, according to the latest data from the UN, and many families rushed outside to enjoy the respite from the unseasonable humidity.

• US president Joe Biden said “Hang in there, we’re coming,” when asked whether he had a message to family members of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 and since held in Gaza. He added: “I’ve been talking with the people involved every single day. I believe it’s going to happen.” But like other US officials, he won’t elaborate, arguing that it could jeopardise negotiations. “I don’t want to get into detail,” he said in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.

• Al-Shifa hospital director Mohammad Abu Salmiya has said the hospital is being forced to bury 179 people, including babies and patients who died in the intensive care unit, “in a mass grave” in the complex. A journalist who has been working with AFP said the stench of decomposing bodies was everywhere in the facility. BBC reporter Rushdi Abualouf spoke to a source inside the hospital who said tanks are surrounding the hospital from all directions and that access in and out of the hospital is impossible. Israel has accused Hamas of building command centres underneath medical infrastructure, accusations denied by both Hamas and medical staff.

• Another 200,000 people have fled northern Gaza in the past 10 days, the UN has said, as fierce fighting between Hamas militants and the Israeli army encroaches on hospitals where patients are dying due to energy shortages and dwindling supplies. The UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (Ocha) said on Tuesday that only one hospital in the northern half of the blockaded Gaza Strip, al-Awda, still had electricity and was able to receive patients, with other medical facilities in sprawling Gaza City now mostly functioning as shelters for those fleeing the violence.

• The Israel Defense Forces claims to have struck 200 targets inside Gaza in the past 24 hours, “including terrorist operatives, weapon production sites, anti-tank missile launchers and operational command centres”. The claims have not been independently verified.

• The UK is considering using “air and maritime options” to get more aid into Gaza, including through its bases in Cyprus, a government minister has said. Updating parliament, the foreign office minister Andrew Mitchell said: “We also are urging the Israeli government to increase humanitarian access including by Rafah and by opening up the Kerem Shalom crossing. He added that longer humanitarian pauses covering wider areas would be needed in order to deliver aid to the region”. On Tuesday Israel offered a four-hour cessation of hostilities in a limited area of the Gaza Strip.

• Israeli authorities say they have now identified the remains of 859 civilians killed during the 7 October Hamas attack inside southern Israel. The work to identify bodies is ongoing, they say. On Friday the initial estimated death toll from the 7 October attack was revised down to 1,200.

• Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist believed to have been among the hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza on 7 October, was in fact killed in the initial attack, her family has told Canada’s CBC News.

• Israel’s military has confirmed the death of Noa Marciano, a soldier seen in a hostage video posted by Hamas. Marciano, 19, was abducted by Hamas on 7 October. The al-Qassam Brigades claimed she was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 9 November. The IDF had condemned the video, saying “The Hamas terrorist organization continues to exploit psychological terrorism and act inhumanely, through videos and photos of the hostages, as done in the past,” and this morning listed her as a “fallen soldier held captive by a terror group.”

• A senior member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said on Tuesday Gaza could not survive as an independent entity, and Palestinians there should agree to “voluntary emigration” and leave for other countries. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said: “I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world. This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger. The state of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza.”

• The leader of Yemen’s Houthis has said they will continue to attack Israel, and are looking to target Israeli vessels in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait.

• Humanitarian aid sent by Italy to Gaza is entering the area, the Italian foreign minister said.

• The US on Tuesday, in coordination with the UK, imposed a third round of sanctions aimed at the Palestinian militant group Hamas since 7 October, targeting its leaders and financiers.

• Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s accusation of fascism against Israel was “absurd”. Israel “is a democracy” and “a country that is bound to human rights and international law and acts accordingly”, Scholz said.

• Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, told his Australian counterpart Penny Wong in a call on Tuesday that Israel’s targeting of hospitals and schools in Gaza amounted to an “open violation of international law”.

• The Hamas-led health ministry in Gaza says that over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action since Israel began its campaign in Gaza. It has not been possible for journalists to independently verify casualty figures being issued during the conflict.

• A dozen film-makers and artists have withdrawn their work from the world’s largest documentary festival, being held in Amsterdam, after its organisers strongly condemned the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at an opening night protest.

• The Football Association in England has suspended a council member who said “Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu”. Wasim Haq, who joined the FA as a BAME football communities representative in 2019, became the subject of an investigation after a post on social media about Israel’s war with Hamas led him to be accused of antisemitism.