USA News Hub

Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah for Al Jazeera, states that two people have been killed there by drone strikes. He writes for the news network:

A surge in attack drones flying over Rafah has taken place over the past couple of hours. At least two people have been hit in what appear to be targeted killings – one in the western part of the city and the other in the east. They were killed when the drones fired missiles about half an hour apart. The tragedy keeps unfolding. The destruction is overwhelming. Everywhere you go, you see rubble-filled roads.

Pictures coming in overnight from the news wires show Palestinians mourning those killed by the latest round of Israeli airstrikes on Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, an area where Israel’s military has repeatedly ordered civilians to evacuate to.

A memorial at the National Cathedral in Washington on Thursday will honour the seven World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza earlier this month.

José Andrés, the chef and philanthropist behind the Washington-based World Central Kitchen disaster relief group, is expected to speak at the celebration of life service, Associated Press reports.

The aid workers were killed 1 April when a succession of Israeli armed drones ripped through vehicles in their convoy as they left one of World Central Kitchen’s warehouses on a food delivery mission. The Israeli military dismissed two officers and reprimanded three others after the seven aid workers were killed.

The aid workers, whose trip had been coordinated with Israeli officials, are among more than 220 humanitarian workers killed in the six-month-old Israel-Hamas war, according to the United Nations. That includes at least 30 killed in the line of duty.

The Biden administration said that Douglas Emhoff, husband of vice-president Kamala Harris, and US assistant deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell would be among senior administration figures attending.

Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that a boy has been injured during an Israeli security force raid in the town of Beit Furik, east of Nablus.

A Wafa correspondent reported that Israeli forces “raided a number of homes, searched them, and tampered with their contents”, and a Palestine Red Crescent Society spokesperson said its ambulance crews took the boy to hospital after he was shot and received bullet wounds.

An earlier report from Wafa states that 16-year-old Khaled Raed Arouq was shot and killed by Israeli forces during a raid in Ramallah.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.

Al Jazeera reports that Israel continues its aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

The news network writes that “An airstrike targeted a family home in the area of Fukhari, east of Khan Younis. The extent of casualties remains unclear. Meanwhile, more Israeli air raids took place in the western part of Rafah, following earlier reports of overnight strikes on a home in the southernmost city of Gaza that killed at least five.”

A Greek military vessel serving in the EU’s naval mission in the Red Sea intercepted two drones launched by Yemen’s Houthis towards a commercial ship.

Reuters reports that officials at the Greek defence ministry said on Thursday “On Thursday morning Greek frigate Hydra, while it was escorting a merchant ship in the Gulf of Aden, fired at two drones.”

“It destroyed one while the second moved away,” they added. Another defence official confirmed the details of the incident to the news agency.

Greece has supplied a frigate to the EU’s mission, called Aspides, that launched in February to help protect the key maritime trade route from drone and missile attacks. Yemen’s Houthis say they have been targeting Israeli commercial interests in the Red Sea as a show of support for the Palestinian people of the besieged Gaza Strip.

At least 20 people were arrested, including a photojournalist, as police and demonstrators violently clashed at the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday.

Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest against the conflict in Gaza and demand the university divest from companies that manufacture machinery used in Israel’s war efforts, carrying signs and chanting.

Dozens of local and state police – including some on horseback and holding batons – formed a line to stop protesters from marching through campus. Officers pushed them off the campus lawn and at one point sent people tumbling into the street.

According to local reporter Ryan Chandler, police ordered demonstrators to disperse via an audio announcement that could be heard across campus: “I command you in the name of the people of the state of Texas to disperse.”

Welcome to our latest live blog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis. I’m Martin Belam in London and I’ll be with you for the next while.

The White House says it wants “answers” from Israeli authorities after the discovery of mass graves at two Gaza hospitals destroyed in Israeli sieges.

Gaza’s civil defense agency said health workers uncovered nearly 340 bodies of people allegedly killed and buried by Israeli forces at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, reports Agence France-Presse. About 30 bodies were reported found buried in two graves in the Al-Shifa hospital courtyard in Gaza City.

Israeli army spokesperson Major Nadav Shoshani claimed the grave at Nasser “was dug – by Gazans – a few months ago”.

The Israeli army did acknowledge that “corpses buried by Palestinians” had been examined by soldiers searching for hostages, but did not directly address allegations that Israeli troops were behind the killings.

More on that in a moment but first, here’s a summary of the latest developments:

• Israel appears to be readying to send troops into Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the only corner of the strip that has not seen fierce ground fighting and where more than half of the Palestinian territory’s population of 2.3 million has sought shelter. The Israeli military said on Wednesday that two reservist brigades had been mobilised for missions in Gaza, while video that circulated online appeared to show rows of square white tents going up in Khan Younis, 3 miles (5km) north of Rafah, which was decimated in a months-long Israeli air and ground campaign.

• Hamas has released a video of an Israeli-American man held hostage in Gaza who is seen alive and saying that the captives are living “in hell”. He identifies himself as Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, one of the hostages abducted from the Nova music festival in southern Israel during the Hamas attack on 7 October. The video showed him missing a hand. His parents said in a statement they were “relieved to see him alive” but worried for his wellbeing.

• A top Hamas political official has told the Associated Press the militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders. The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of ceasefire talks.

• Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant has claimed that since 7 October 2023, Israeli military strikes have killed half of Hezbollah’s commanders in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military issued a statement earlier to say this morning it struck at what it called “Hezbollah terror targets” in southern Lebanon. “Many forces are deployed on the border and IDF forces are carrying out offensive action currently throughout southern Lebanon,” Gallant said in a statement.

• The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday condemned pro-Palestinian protests at universities in the United States as “horrific”, saying the demonstrations “have to be stopped”, as he categorised students as antisemitic.

In its latest operational briefing, Israel’s military claims that in the last 24 hours it struck at “over 30 Hamas terror targets in the Gaza Strip” which it claimed included “weapons storage facilities, terrorist cells, military structures, and additional terrorist infrastructure.”

The Hamas-led health authority in the Gaza Strip puts the number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s military assault at over 34,000, the majority of which it says are women and children. It has not been possible for journalists to independently verify the casualty figures being issued during the conflict.