Israeli tanks took up positions at the gates of Gaza City’s main hospital yesterday, the primary target in their battle to seize control of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, where medics said patients including newborns were dying for lack of fuel.

An internal US State Department dissent memo accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation” about Israel’s war against Hamas, according to Axios.

On foot, by horse-drawn cart and clinging to the sides of overcrowded trucks, Palestinians fled southwards through Gaza to escape Israeli air strikes, telling of their fear, despair and bitter sense of abandonment.

Major hospitals remained cut off yesterday as Israel pressed on with its offensive in north Gaza where doctors said thousands of Palestinians were trapped in dire conditions.

Israeli fighter jets pounded Hezbollah hideouts in southern Lebanon with air strikes yesterday, after an incoming anti-tank missile wounded Israeli civilians near the border, the army said.

Who will govern Gaza when Israel’s military offensive against Hamas ends? After five weeks of fighting, the answer remains shrouded in confusion.

Two premature babies died due to power cuts at Gaza’s largest hospital, Physicians for Human Rights Israel said yesterday, citing doctors there, as fighting rages around the Al-Shifa complex.

Israeli air strikes hit three Gaza hospitals and a school yesterday, killing at least 22 people, and a ground battle was under way at another hospital, Palestinian officials said, as Israel’s forces took on Hamas in the heart of the enclave.

Israeli forces fought Hamas fighters among ruined buildings in the north of the Gaza Strip yesterday, inching their way closer to two big hospitals as the plight of civilians in the besieged Palestinian territory worsened.

Before he fled his home in northern Gaza, where intense fighting now rages between Israel and Hamas, Mahmud al-Masri had a grim job to do: bury his three brothers and their five children in a nearby citrus orchard.

Israel’s widespread and systematic bombardment of housing and civilian infrastructure in Gaza is a war crime, as are the indiscriminate Hamas rocket attacks that hit Israeli dwellings, an independent UN expert said yesterday.

Tahreer Azzam, a nurse at Makassed Hospital in east Jerusalem, has been caring for young, desperately-ill Palestinian patients for 16 years. Since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last month, she now struggles to find them.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians trudged in a forlorn procession out of the north of Gaza yesterday seeking refuge from Israeli air strikes and fierce ground fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters.

Islamic State group attacks killed at least 30 pro-government forces and soldiers in the Syrian desert, a war monitor said Wednesday, in one of the deadliest such assaults this year

One month into the Israel-Hamas war, the achievements of US-led diplomacy have been small or subtle, but both supporters and critics say that is partly by design.

Israel gave civilians still trapped inside freshly encircled Gaza City a four-hour window to leave yesterday and escaping residents said they passed tanks in position to storm it.

Imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi began a hunger strike on Monday in protest against what she said was the jail’s failure to give her access to medical care, the activist HRANA news agency reported.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres yesterday said the protection of civilians “must be paramount” in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, warning that the Gaza Strip was becoming “a graveyard for children.”

Efforts were underway yesterday to resume evacuations of injured Gazans and foreign nationals through the Rafah crossing to Egypt, suspended since Saturday after a deadly attack on an ambulance, Egyptian, US and Qatari officials said.

World Food Programme (WFP) head Cindy McCain said yesterday that the aid currently entering Gaza is “nowhere near” enough to meet the needs of people there, which she added were growing exponentially.