RT News - November 5th 2023 LATE (includes live updates)

Numbers update. Gaza health ministry reports 9770 civilians dead, 4,880 are children. Unconfirmed more than 23,000 wounded. Day 30. Communications are down again.

Very sad, disturbing images in video.

Overnight, the bombing of north Gaza has continued. Yet another bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp leaving 15 dead. Sanaa Kamal reports.

In central Gaza the bombing has continued. More than 50 are reported killed after an aerial bombing of the Maghazi refugee camp. Rami Almughari reports.

Rory reports on the extraordinary death toll. A young wounded girl tells her story.

Unconfirmed Al-Qassam brigade video shows the destruction of 24 IDF tanks.

Some 60 of the hostages taken by HAMAS have been killed in the IDF aerial bombing and their bodies are now under the rubble. Mansour Shouman reports.

Important : Rory speaks to Malak Khaled who is on the Lebanon border. Things are really getting serious. (Please see a most excellent video - long and a bit dragged out but worth every second https://twitter.com/DontDenyThe/status/1720910687034069323 )

In Sderot, Maria Finoshina reports on the abandoned Israel town. The locals have all but left but some stay and tough it out.

The wood from the trees? - the ideology behind the carnage. Yoni Ben-Menachem makes commentary of the situation.

The Israeli heritage minister, Amihai Eliyahu suggests nuking Gaza. Galit Distel Atbaryan wants to "invest this energy into just one thing - erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth". Rory spoke to Bassim Khoury, former Palestinian economy minister.

Pro-peace and pro-Palestine rallies have continued around the world. Citizens say the citizens of the world must be aware that Israel is committing genocide. Hundreds of thousands have protested their governments this week for a ceasefire and peace.

In Iran a Rabbi has made statements denouncing the Israeli government.

short take: Israeli forces bombard Northern Gaza overnight, raising the Palestinian death toll - reportedly nearing ten thousand people. Thousands of demonstrators make their feelings felt across the world, calling on the international community to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. What was once a lively community, now only has a few souls remaining - RT travels to a once-vibrant Israeli border town whose inhabitants fled after rocket attacks by Hamas.

==== UPDATES "as they happened" 05 November 2023

19:12 GMT
Israeli troops have pushed through central Gaza and reached the coast, splitting the narrow enclave in two, IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told reporters. Hagari’s claim cannot immediately be verified, and Hamas has refuted a similar statement made by the spokesman earlier this week.

18:59 GMT
“For more than an hour, intense bombings have been taking place around hospitals” in northern Gaza, Hamas press chief Salama Marouf told AFP. The aerial attacks, said by multiple sources to be some of the heaviest of Israel’s month-long campaign, took place after phone and internet connections between Gaza and the outside world were severed.

The IDF has alternated between denying attacks on hospitals – as it did in the case of a missile strike on a Christian-run clinic last month – and claiming that Hamas militants are operating out of healthcare facilities, as it did when it launched an airstrike on an ambulance convoy earlier this week.

The Israeli military has claimed that Hamas has built bunkers and tunnels under at least three hospitals in Gaza.

17:20 GMT
Israeli forces shelled a car in southern Lebanon, killing three children and their grandmother, Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen news outlet reported, citing Hezbollah politician Hassan Fadallah. Reuters confirmed the deaths of three people in the strike, but did not specify whether they were children.

Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have been trading cross-border fire since the Israel-Hamas war began, with the intensity of the border clashes ramping up over the last two weeks. Hezbollah forces launched multiple missile attacks on Israeli vehicles and installations on Sunday, claiming to have killed and wounded the crew of one vehicle.

The IDF did not confirm any casualties, but said that it responded to the attacks with airstrikes and artillery fire.

16:59 GMT
Palestinian telecom operator Paltel has said that all phone and internet connections have been severed amid a heavy Israeli bombardment on Gaza. A similar bombardment late last month broke all communications links between the enclave and the outside world, hours before the IDF sent tanks and infantry into the strip.

16:02 GMT
An Israeli airstrike has hit the al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported. Around 20 Palestinians were killed in the strike, the network reported, noting that al-Bureji is the third refugee camp in the enclave to be hit in the last 24 hours, after similar strikes on the Maghazi and Jabalia camps.

Israeli warplanes bombed the Jabalia refugee camp three times in the last week, with the first two attacks killing almost 200 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The IDF claimed that it took out a Hamas commander in the first bombing, but the militant group denied that any of its members were present in the camp.

15:41 GMT
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the PA is prepared to take part in governing Gaza “within the framework of a comprehensive political solution that includes all of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip,” Palestine’s Wafa news agency reported.

Israeli officials have vowed to wipe out Hamas, but have not elaborated on how a post-conflict Gaza will be run. During his meeting with Abbas on Sunday, Blinken told the Palestinian leader that the PA should play a key role in “what comes next in Gaza,” Reuters reported, citing a State Department official.

09:06 GMT
Muhammad al-Hindi, a senior official in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, signaled that all civilian prisoners held by the group will be released if a humanitarian truce is reached.

Since the start of the conflict, Hamas has captured around 240 hostages, including many foreign nationals, with only four released to date. The Palestinian armed group earlier claimed that more than 60 hostages were missing due to Israeli strikes.

According to several reports, the US advised West Jerusalem to delay its ground offensive in Gaza to allow time for hostage negotiations. Nevertheless, Israel “expanded” its ground operations in the enclave on October 27.

06:55 GMT
An Israeli airstrike on the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza has killed more than 30 people, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry. Earlier, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that 51 civilians were killed in the attack. The spokesman for the Israeli military said the IDF is investigating whether it was active in the area at the time of the bombing.

04:34 GMT
Former US President Barack Obama urged to recognize the “complexity” of the Israel-Palestine conflict, both condemning the “horrific” attack of Hamas on Israeli civilians and acknowledging that “the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”

“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” Obama said on the Pod Save America podcast.

02:53 GMT
Tens of thousands of Palestine supporters marched in Washington, DC on Saturday night, demanding an immediate ceasefire and denouncing the “genocide” in Gaza. A group of activists then rallied outside the White House, with some shaking the front gate and smearing the security fence with red paint. https://twitter.com/stevennelson10/status/1720939658819875312
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, however, said that an attempt to breach the gate was “handled without incident” and that no one was arrested.
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===== 04 November 2023

23:23 GMT
The IDF said that Hamas militants attacked Israeli troops operating near a corridor designated for the evacuation of civilians to the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas attempted to prevent Gazan civilians from evacuating, including by firing at IDF soldiers sent to open the route and facilitate the secure movement of civilians,” the IDF wrote on X (formerly Twitter). https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1720845609958043910

20:55 GMT
More than 60 hostages are missing as a result of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades has said. Obeida added that the bodies of 23 Israeli hostages are trapped under rubble.

“It seems that we will never be able to reach them due to the continued brutal aggression of the occupation against Gaza,” he said.

Hamas fighters took around 240 hostages during their assault on Israel, according to the IDF. Five have been freed with the help of Qatari mediators, although Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said on Saturday that Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza “complicates securing their release.”

20:08 GMT
Israeli forces will find Hamas’ Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, “and eliminate him,” Defence MInister Yoav Gallant said on Saturday. Gallant added that “if the residents of Gaza get there ahead of us, that will shorten the war.”

The IDF claimed on Friday that its air and ground forces have killed 10 Hamas field commanders since the war began, while several members of the organization’s political bureau have died in Israeli airstrikes.