Israel-Gaza war live: UN worker killed in West Bank during Israeli operation | Israel-Gaza war

Julian Borger

Julian Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, has written a piece on Israel’s prime target: the hunt for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Here is an extract:

The nearly year-long hunt for Sinwar has involved a mix of advanced technology and brute force, as his pursuers have shown themselves prepared to go to any lengths, including causing extremely high civilian casualties, to kill the Hamas leader and destroy the tight circle around him.

The hunters are a taskforce of intelligence officers, special operation units from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), military engineers and surveillance experts under the umbrella of the Israeli Security Agency, more widely known by its Hebrew initials or the acronym Shabak.

Personally and institutionally, this team is seeking redemption for the security failures that allowed the 7 October assault to happen. But despite their motivation, they have so far failed to pin down their quarry.

You can read the full piece here:

A man was shot and sustained life-threatening injuries on Thursday in Newton, Massachusetts, after he tackled a pro-Israel demonstrator.

During a news conference on Thursday evening, Marian Ryan, the Middlesex district attorney, said that the incident took place at about 6.40pm on Thursday evening.

A small group of pro-Israeli demonstrators were on one side of the street, Ryan said, and a man, who has not been publicly identified, was walking on the other side of the street and started exchanging words with the group.

Words were “exchanged back and forth”, Ryan said, and then the incident escalated when the individual crossed the street and “jumped upon one of the demonstrators”.

“A scuffle ensued,” Ryan said, adding that during the confrontation the individual who had come across the street “was shot by a member of the demonstrating group”.

The individual sustained life-threatening injuries, and is being treated at a local hospital, she said.

The person who used the gun was identified on Thursday by authorities as 47-year-old Scott Hayes from Framingham. The Middlesex district attorney’s office said on Thursday evening that Hayes was arrested and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and violation of a constitutional right causing injury.

He was scheduled to be arraigned on Friday.

You can read the full piece here:

Israeli airstrikes hit central and southern Gaza overnight into Saturday, killing at least 14 people, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Airstrikes in Gaza City hit one home housing 11 people, including women and children, and another strike hit a tent in Khan Younis housing Palestinians displaced by the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza’s civil defence said on Saturday. They followed airstrikes earlier this week that hit a tent camp on Tuesday and a UN school housing displaced people on Wednesday.

Israel seeking to close down Unrwa, says agency’s chief after school bombing

Patrick Wintour

A campaign is under way to drive the UN relief agency for Palestinians, Unrwa, out of existence, its commissioner general has said, days after 18 people were killed when Israeli jets bombed an Unrwa school in Gaza.

Philippe Lazzarini said in an interview that the Israeli government was seeking to close down the agency, having failed to persuade western donors to stop funding it on the grounds of allegations about links between Unrwa staff and Hamas.

“This deliberate attempt to eliminate Unrwa and prevent it from operating would have devastating consequences for the multilateral system, the UN and the cause of a Palestinian transition to self-determination,” Lazzarini said.

On Wednesday Unrwa said six staff members had been killed in two airstrikes that hit al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza – the highest death toll among its staff in a single incident. The Israel Defense Forces said the strikes killed nine Hamas members, three of whom had doubled as Unrwa workers.

Lazzarini said the IDF had not previously informed his agency that the three staff were Hamas members. “None of these names have ever been on any IDF list notified to us, so I have absolutely no way of being able to authenticate or not,” he said. “These people were working in the shelter … There was no indication they were military operatives.”

Unrwa, one of the UN’s largest agencies, has 13,000 staff working in Gaza and more than 30,000 in the region providing health and educational facilities to Palestinian refugees.

You can read more of Patrick Wintour’s report here:

It has gone 10am in Gaza and Tel Aviv. This is our latest live blog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said on Friday that one of its employees was killed during an Israeli operation in the occupied West Bank, where raids have escalated since last month.

The Israeli military called the UN worker a “terrorist” who posed a threat to troops.

Unrwa said the employee was its first to be killed in the Palestinian territory in more than a decade, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports. But, he is among dozens of Palestinians killed during the large-scale Israeli operation that began days ago and is ongoing, with several more Palestinians dead since Wednesday.

Unrwa identified the employee as Sufyan Jaber Abed Jawwad, who worked as a sanitation labourer. It said he was “shot and killed on the roof of his home by a sniper” in Faraa refugee camp.

An Israeli military spokesperson, Lieut Col Nadav Shoshani, said on X that during an operation in Faraa “a terrorist was identified hurling explosive devices that posed a threat” to forces, leading troops to open fire to remove the threat. It was later “discovered he is also an Unrwa employee”, Shoshani said.

Jawwad’s death is in addition to those of six other Unrwa staffers the UN said were killed in Gaza on Wednesday during a strike on a school turned shelter.

Mourners carried Jawwad’s body through the streets of Faraa on Friday, while in nearby Tubas, funerals also took place for other Palestinians, who were killed by an airstrike.

In other developments:

• The Israeli military said it acted this week in Syria against targets, after Syrian state media reported Israeli airstrikes killed 18 people in western Syria and injured dozens more. The Israeli military targeted “several terrorists” in southern Syria, it said. A war monitor said Israeli forces helicoptered into Syria days ago and destroyed an underground missile production facility built under Iranian supervision, with two US media outlets also reporting the raid. The Israeli military declined to comment.

• Mourners will gather in south-west Turkey on Saturday for the funeral of a US-Turkish activist shot dead while protesting against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The killing last week of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, has sparked international condemnation and angered Turkey. Israel’s military said she was likely shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by its forces. Turkey said it would conduct its own investigation into her death. Eygi’s body, wrapped in the Turkish flag, arrived on Friday at its final resting place in the Aegean town of Didim – Eygi was a frequent visitor to the seaside resort – following a martyrs’ ceremony at Istanbul airport.

• The head of Unrwa said a campaign was under way to drive it out of existence. Philippe Lazzarini, the UN relief agency’s commissioner general, said in an interview that the Israeli government was seeking to close down the agency, having failed to persuade western donors to stop funding it on the grounds of allegations about links between Unrwa staff and Hamas, reports Patrick Wintour.

• Israeli police said on Friday they had arrested a 17-year-old in connection with a vehicle explosion in the central city of Ramla on Thursday that left four people dead. Police had said they suspected the explosion to be linked to “a criminal conflict between crime families in the Arab neighbourhood” of the mixed city.

• The Israeli army took reporters on Friday to tunnels uncovered by troops in southern Gaza, including the entrance to the underground chamber where the bodies of six Israeli hostages killed by Hamas were recovered on 1 September. The military did not allow reporters into the tunnel, in the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah, for security reasons. But it has released footage showing a cramped and airless passage it said was about 20m (66ft) below ground where it said the hostages had been held possibly for weeks.

• Turkey’s spy chief has met a Hamas delegation in Ankara and discussed the negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza, state broadcaster TRT said on Friday.
  Ibrahim Kalin, head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency, had met the delegation from the Hamas political bureau leadership, TRT Haber said, citing Turkish security sources, without saying who the delegation members were.

• Ministers from Muslim and European countries along with the EU’s foreign affairs chief gathered in Madrid on Friday to discuss how to advance a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Together, we want to identify the concrete actions that will enable us to make progress towards this objective,” the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said on X.

• South Africa is “determined” to pursue its genocide case against Israel at the international court of justice and will next month file more evidence, president Cyril Ramaphosa said on Friday. Israel strongly denies the accusation.