Updates: Hamas-Israel ceasefire holds

NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has said he will review all of outgoing mayor Eric Adams’ last-minute executive orders once he takes office.

Adams has less than 30 days in office as new mayor's term begins on January 1, 2026.

Mamdani noted Adams is free to issue directives in his final days, but they will face scrutiny under the new administration.

Israel killed at least six people, including children and women, in multiple air strikes across the Gaza Strip on Thursday as it continues to violate the ceasefire agreement on a near-daily basis, the Middle East Eye reported, citing an Al Jazeera report. 

In one strike, Israeli military incinerated a father Fathi Abu Hussein and his eight-year-old son Bilal and ten-year-old son Mohammed in their tent after they targeted the Al-Mawasi tent camp in a 'safe' zone as people slept and then struck the vicinity of a nearby hospital a short while later, Al Jazeera reported.

The strikes also wounded 16 others.

A federal judge said she was "struggling" to understand why President Donald Trump's administration is preventing a Tufts University PhD student who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism from working on campus nearly seven months after the Turkish citizen was released from an immigration detention center.

Chief US District Judge Denise Casper during a hearing in Boston questioned whether US Immigration and Customs Enforcement acted arbitrarily when it terminated Rumeysa Ozturk's status in a key database used to track foreign students after she co-wrote an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper criticising her school's response to Israel's war in Gaza.

"What’s the rationale for allowing the agency to have the discretion to terminate the record?” Casper asked.

Ozturk's record in the ICE-maintained Student and Exchange Visitor Information System database was terminated on March 25, the same day that she was arrested by masked, plainclothes agents on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home, after the US Department of State revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was the opinion piece, which criticised Tufts' response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide."

Israeli forces killed Samar al-Shurbasi in Gaza City’s al-Tuffah neighborhood, far from the designated “yellow line,” according to Gaza Civil Defence.

Her body lay inside an ambulance as her toddler, born at the start of the war, stood beside it holding his uncle’s hand, staring at his mother’s face, said Palestinian Civil Defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal while describing the painful sight.

The spokesperson called the scene one of the most painful he has witnessed, urging the world to confront the deliberate targeting of Gaza’s civilians.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed two executive orders restricting pro-BDS policies and tightening protest rules near houses of worship, especially synagogues. 

The move comes weeks before Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani takes office, with Adams framing it as a defense against antisemitism.

The head of an armed Palestinian faction that opposes Hamas in Gaza died while mediating a family dispute, the group said on Thursday, in what would be a blow to Israeli efforts to support Gazan clans against the Islamist movement.

Yasser Abu Shabab, a Bedouin tribal leader based in Israeli-held Rafah in southern Gaza, had led the most prominent of several small anti-Hamas groups that emerged in Gaza during the war that began more than two years ago.

His death would be a boost to Hamas, which has branded him a collaborator and ordered its fighters to kill or capture him.

Gaza's Popular Forces said in a statement that its leader died of a gunshot wound as he intervened in a family quarrel, and dismissed as "misleading" reports that Hamas was behind his killing.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged in June that Israel had armed anti-Hamas clans, though Israel has announced few other details of the policy since then.

Israel's military said it struck targets in two southern Lebanese towns on Thursday after ordering the evacuation of two buildings it alleged were being used by Hezbollah’s members.

About an hour after the initial warning, the army's Arabic spokesperson issued another notice instructing residents of buildings in two other towns to leave.

The strikes came a day after Israel and Lebanon sent civilian envoys to a committee overseeing a fragile ceasefire agreed a year ago that both sides have accused the other of breaking.

The envoys would broaden the scope of talks between the long-time adversaries, both sides said.

Israel awaited the return of the last hostage remains held by Palestinian resistance in Gaza, as the military said on Thursday that those of a Thai national had been identified after they were handed over.

All but the remains of Israeli Ran Gvili have since been handed over, though Israel has accused the Palestinian resistance group of dragging their feet on returning bodies.

Hamas has said the process of retrieving the remains has been slow because they have been buried under the vast piles of rubble left by two years of devastating war.

The last hostage body held in Gaza is Ran Gvili, an officer in Israel’s Yasam elite police unit. He fell in battle on that day and his body taken to Gaza.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said the next round of talks with Israel will begin on December 19, calling the reaction to initial negotiations this week "positive".

"It is natural that the first session would not be highly productive, but it paved the way for upcoming sessions that will begin on the 19th of this month," he said, according to information minister Paul Morcos at the end of a cabinet meeting.

The Lebanese head of state stressed, according to Morcos, "the need for the language of negotiation — not the language of war — to prevail", and that there would be no concession over Lebanon´s sovereignty.

"There is no other option but negotiation. This is the reality, and this is what history has taught us about wars," he said, according to Morcos.