Middle East crisis: Israeli strikes kill 17 Palestinians in Gaza – live updates | Israel

Gaza’s health ministry has said the three main hospitals in northern Gaza – of which Kamal Adwan is one – are barely functioning and have been under repeated attack since Israel sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and nearby Beit Hanoun and Jabalia in October. The Israeli military claims the aim of the renewed assault on the north is to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping there. But the IDF has attacked hospitals and shelters, with many civilians being killed by Israeli forces amid relentless attacks.

As we mentioned in the opening summary, Israeli forces have reportedly launched more attacks on the Kamal Adwan hospital. Here is a fuller report from Al Jazeera (which we have not yet been able to independently verify):

They (Israeli forces) have been using heavy artillery and detonating explosive devices that had been planted in the areas surrounding the hospital, preventing and impeding the movement of ambulances, as well as that of people seeking to take the wounded from bomb sites to the medical facility.

The most fierce attack on the hospital last night was on its laboratory.

These attacks seem to be deliberate, on purpose, just to push the facility out of service.

It started with quadcopters surrounding the facility, and telling everyone in the facility – via loudspeakers – to leave. By the way, it’s only some 60 people who remain there. They include the director of the hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the medical staff working with him in these difficult conditions and the patients.

Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and developments in the Middle East more widely.

Israeli military airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 17 Palestinian people, 8 of them at a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, medics said.

Palestinian medics said eight people, including children, were killed in the Musa Bin Nusayr school that sheltered displaced families in Gaza City.

Also in Gaza City, medics said four Palestinians were killed when an airstrike hit a car. At least five other Palestinians were killed in two separate airstrikes in Rafah and Khan Younis south of the enclave.

Here is a brief summary of what you else you need to know today:

• Several people have been injured by Israeli attacks on northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, according to Al Jazeera, with Israeli forces reportedly firing directly on the facility’s ICU and maternity ward, as well as at the nearby al-Awda hospital. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital, said the army ordered staff to evacuate the hospital and move patients and injured people toward another hospital in the area. Abu Safiya said the mission was “next to impossible” because staff did not have ambulances to move the patients. “Tonight’s reports of bombardment near Kamal Adwan hospital and order to evacuate the hospital are deeply worrisome. The hospital has been in the midst of fighting for too long and the lives of patients are at risk,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in a post on X late last night.

• The US military said it mistakenly shot down one of its own fighter aircraft over the Red Sea on Sunday morning, forcing both pilots to eject. Both were rescued, one with minor injuries, after the “apparent case of friendly fire,” which is being investigated, US Central Command said in a statement. The fighter was an F/A-18 Hornet flying off the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. One of the carrier’s escort ships, the missile cruiser Gettysburg, “mistakenly fired on and hit” the plane, the statement said.

• The US military carried out airstrikes against a missile storage facility and a command-and-control facility operated by Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, on Saturday. The US military’s Central Command said the strikes aimed to “disrupt and degrade” Houthi operations, including attacks against US navy warships and merchant vessels in the southern Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden. The strike followed a similar attack last week by US aircraft against a command and control facility operated by the Houthis, who control much of Yemen. The US attack on Sana’a came the same day that a Houthi missile struck Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv, injuring 16 people in the second such airstrike in days.

• Turkey has vowed to “do whatever it takes” to ensure its security if the new Syrian administration cannot address Ankara’s concerns about US-allied Kurdish groups it views as terrorist groups, the country’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said on Saturday. Turkey regards the YPG, the militant group spearheading the US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) militants who have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for 40 years and are deemed terrorists by Ankara, Washington, and the EU.

• The UN has warned that people living in makeshift shelters might not survive the winter. Nearly 2 million Palestinians have been displaced by Israel’s war on the territory and are struggling to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.