Key events
Israeli media is reporting that overnight Israel’s security forces raided a hospital in Halhul, near Hebron, and arrested a suspect in an car bombing.
Reports say that members of Israeli security forces were in civilian clothing when they entered the hospital to detain the main. Haaretz reports he has been taken by the Shin Bet for questioning. The suspect had been injured in a car bomb explosion on 13 August.
Local media sources put the death toll from this morning’s Israeli attacks on Gaza at five. Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that three citizens were killed and others were injured after a family house was bombed in Jabalia camp. Two people were killed and others injured in the bombing of a street in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City.
Wafa also reports that Israeli forces “blew up residential buildings in the northern areas of al-Bureij camp” and alos carried out an airstrike on a house in al-Nuseirat camp.
The claims have not been independently verified.
Al Jazeera reports that in the last couple of hours two people have been killed in an Israeli attack on the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza City in the north of Gaza. Additionally, there has been a reported airstrike on the Jabalia camp in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Overnight the IDF twice reported warning sirens sounding in Israel, once in northern Israel and once near the Gaza Strip. Both instances turned out to be false alarms.
Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.
UN chief António Guterres has condemned an Israeli airstrike on a central Gaza school being used as a shelter for displaced Palestinians that killed 18 people, according to the Hamas-run territory’s civil defence agency.
“What’s happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable,” he wrote on social media, adding that six Unrwa workers were among the dead. “These dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now.”
Israel’s military claimed its air force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command-and-control centre” on the school grounds.
An IDF spokesperson claimed that prior to the attack “a series of measures were taken to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, including the use of precision weapons, the use of aerial imagery, and additional intelligence.”
Here is a summary of the day’s other main news.
-
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa, has said that the staff who died in Wednesday’s attack had been providing support to families who had sought refuge in the school, and that at least 220 of his agency’s staff had been killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
-
Elsewhere on Wednesday, a strike hit a home near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing 11 people, including six brothers and sisters ranging from 21 months to 21 years old, according to the European hospital, which received the casualties.
-
Hamas said on Wednesday that its negotiators had reiterated their readiness to implement an “immediate” ceasefire with Israel in Gaza based on a previous US proposal without new conditions from any party. The group said in a statement that their negotiation team, led by senior official Khalil al-Hayya, had met mediators in Doha to discuss the latest developments in Gaza.
-
CIA director William Burns, who is also the chief US negotiator on Gaza, said on Saturday that a more detailed ceasefire proposal would be made in the next several days. The previous proposal put forward by president Joe Biden in June laid out a three-phase ceasefire in return for the release of Israeli hostages. However lingering issues, including control of the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow stretch of land on Gaza’s border with Egypt, remain.
-
Joe Biden has described the Israel Defense Force’s fatal shooting of the Turkish American protester Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi as “totally unacceptable” in his first extensive comments on her death. In a statement on Wednesday, Biden said that Israel had “acknowledged responsibility” for Eygi’s death, but he stopped short of backing the demands put out by Eygi’s family and other human rights advocates for an independent inquiry into the fatal shooting of the American activist at a protest in the West Bank town of Beita last week.