Gaza update

Thousands appeared to have fled from the Shifa hospital as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle outside its gate. Hundreds of patients stuck inside, including dozens of babies, are at risk of dying because there is no electricity, health officials said. Read more.

AP News - The Israeli military said it had placed 79 gallons of fuel near the hospital to help power its generators, but that Hamas militants had prevented staff from reaching it. The Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza disputed that, saying the fuel would have provided less than an hour of electricity.

Evidence collected since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack revealed the group’s plans to strike deeper into Israel and spark a wider regional war.

Dozens of Gaza’s hospitals have effectively stopped functioning, due to fuel shortages and ground battles between Israel and Hamas. Israel asserts that Hamas fighters are sheltering beneath hospitals, and has ordered facilities in the north to evacuate. Patients and doctors have been caught in the crossfire of heavy street fighting, and humanitarian groups are pleading for combat near hospitals to end. 

As the war between Israel and Hamas continues into its second month, the conflict has led to battle lines being drawn at colleges across the U.S., Richard Leiby reports. Pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protest movements have mobilized student supporters, bedeviled administrators and politicians and provoked controversies on campuses nationwide.  “The massive protests that have roiled campuses resemble none since perhaps the Iraq War and, before that, Vietnam,” he writes. (Read More)

Israeli forces have reached the gates of Gaza’s largest hospital as hundreds of patients, including dozens of babies, remained trapped inside. Thousands of people have fled al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, but health officials said the remaining patients were dying due to energy shortages amid intense fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants.Lifesaving equipment such as incubators cannot run without fuel to run generators. At least 32 patients, including three premature babies, had died over the past three days, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said Hamas’s attacks on Israel in which the militant group killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, did not justify the collective punishment of Palestinians. “You cannot use the horrific things that Hamas did as a reason for collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” he told CNN.