Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki yesterday told the UN’s top court his people were suffering “colonialism and apartheid” under the Israelis, urging judges to order an immediate and unconditional end to the occupation.

Fighting, fuel shortages and Israeli raids put the Gaza Strip’s second-largest hospital completely out of service yesterday, local and UN health officials said, as Israel battled Hamas fighters in the devastated Palestinian enclave.

Egypt is preparing safe areas for Palestinian refugees, Cairo said, as the key Qatar negotiator in the ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas admitted they have made no progress in recent days.

A 30-year-old man killed 12 relatives in Iran, official media reported yesterday, in a rare mass shooting in the country.

Israel said it had taken 100 people into custody at one of Gaza’s main hospitals yesterday after troops raided the facility, with fears mounting for patients and staff trapped inside.

There was growing concern yesterday over a key Gaza hospital a day after a raid by the Israeli army, with the Hamas-run health ministry saying several patients had died there due to a lack of oxygen.

Israel’s vow to push ahead with a “powerful” operation in Gaza’s Rafah was met with a growing chorus of international condemnation yesterday, with leaders warning against catastrophic consequences for the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped there.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency said yesterday it had received a report of an explosion near a vessel 85 nautical miles east of Yemen’s port city of Aden.

Two explosions along Iran’s main south-north gas pipeline network yesterday were caused by sabotage, the Iranian oil minister told state TV, without naming any suspects.

Israeli strikes in south Lebanon yesterday killed four civilians including two children and wounded nine other people, a Lebanese security source said, after Israel said it “began a series of strikes in Lebanon”.

Palestinians jammed into their last refuge in Gaza voiced growing fear yesterday that Israel will soon launch a planned assault on the southern city of Rafah after truce talks in Cairo ended inconclusively.

The Israel’s offensive in Gaza, ongoing fighting in Ukraine and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific and Africa herald “what is likely to be a more dangerous decade,” a British military think-tank warned yesterday.

Israel freed two Israeli-Argentinian hostages in Rafah yesterday under the cover of heavy airstrikes which local health officials said killed at least 67 Palestinians and wounded dozens in the southern Gaza city that is the last refuge of about a million displaced civilians.

An Iranian court has sentenced a man to death over the killing of renowned filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui and his wife months ago at their home near Tehran, the judiciary said yesterday.

The World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus yesterday reiterated calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and expressed particular concern at Israeli attacks on Rafah where most of enclave’s inhabitants fled.

Any Israeli ground offensive in Rafah on the Gaza border will “blow up” the hostage exchange negotiations,” Hamas-run Aqsa Television channel quoted a senior Hamas leader as saying yesterday.

Hundreds of thousands of people chanted “Death to Israel” in rallies across Iran to mark the Islamic Revolution’s 45th anniversary yesterday, with some burning US and Israeli flags amid the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Israeli air strikes killed 17 people in Gaza’s Rafah overnight, medics said yesterday, as over a million Palestinians cramming into the border city await a full-blown offensive with the rest of their enclave in ruins and nowhere left to run.

Any Israeli military advance into southern Gaza’s Rafah area could cause mass deaths among the more than a million Palestinians trapped there, with humanitarian aid in danger of collapse, aid workers said yesterday.

Israeli forces yesterday bombed areas in the southern border city of Rafah where more than half of Gaza’s population is sheltering, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a proposal to end offensive in the Palestinian enclave.