Gaza update

The pause will be extended an extra day for the release of every 10 additional hostages, Israel said, adding that its forces will resume the war afterward.

Israel's siege of the Palestinian enclave has left virtually the entire population on the brink of starvation and forced many of the territory's overwhelmed hospitals to shut down due to a lack of fuel and other critical supplies, depriving many patients—including premature babies—of necessary treatment.  Progressive U.S. lawmakers who have been calling for a cease-fire for weeks welcomed the newly announced hostage deal but said it's not sufficient, particularly if the Israeli government resumes its devastating bombing campaign once the four-day pause is over—as Netanyahu has said he intends to do.

 AP News - A cease-fire agreement between the Hamas militant group and Israel has been confirmed.

• The Israeli government said that under the deal, Hamas is to free over a four-day period at least 50 of the roughly 240 hostages taken in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
• In exchange, 150 Palestinian prisoners would be released by Israel, mainly teenagers detained over the past year for rock-throwing and other minor offenses.
• The agreement would bring the first respite to war-weary Palestinians in Gaza, where more than 11,000 people have been killed, according to health authorities.
• Some 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, mostly during the initial incursion by Hamas.

Guardian -  Israel’s military offensive in Gaza has produced the deadliest month for journalists since statistics began more than three decades ago. Before yesterday’s deaths, reporters’ watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists had already recorded the deaths of 48 reporters since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.

Israel’s military has this morning claimed that during its campaign in Gaza it has “exposed and destroyed approximately 400 terror tunnel shafts”.

Ahmed al-Kahlout, the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital, has told Al Jazeera that the hospital has received more than 60 dead and about 1,000 wounded people since last night.

The western powers on the UN security council face a choice of either demanding Israel lift its stranglehold on humanitarian aid into Gaza or standing complicit in Israel war crimes and collective punishment, Arab and Islamic foreign ministers said on a visit to London. The ministers are lobbying the five permanent members of the security council to back a new humanitarian resolution instructing Israel to accept that UN agencies, and not the Israel Defense forces, clear aid coming through the Rafah crossing from Egypt to Gaza. At the moment everything has to be inspected by Israel.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces emphasized on Wednesday lunchtime that the military would be implementing an “operational pause” rather than a ceasefire and that forces were still waiting on final details of the agreement. Lt Col Richard Hecht, the IDF’s international spokesperson, told a briefing that “our terminology is not ceasefire, our terminology is an operational pause”, so hinting that Israeli bombing could restart whenever the hostage exchange is completed