Updates: Hamas-Israel ceasefire holds

The Palestinian Health Ministry shared the post-ceasefire death toll in Palestine, saying after the arrival of seven more bodies across hospitals in the Strip, the total count rises to 318 since the Trump-brokered ceasefire on October 10, Al Jazeera reported. 

In a statement, the ministry said 30 people were also wounded in the last two days, bringing the total injuries since the ceasefire to 788.

Numerous victims remain trapped under rubble and in streets where ambulance and civil defense teams cannot reach them, the ministry said.

A civil society forum examining alleged Israeli war crimes in Palestine has opened in Barcelona under the banner of the International People’s Tribunal on Palestine, Al Jazeera reported.

The two-day tribunal aims to probe crimes it accuses Israel and its supporters of committing, drawing on testimony from witnesses and experts.

Organised by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, the International People’s Front and the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, the forum says it will present evidence from “key witnesses and experts” to expose what it calls the “genocidal use of ecocide and forced starvation” against Palestinians by the “Zionist occupation”.

It also says it seeks to highlight what it describes as the complicit role of the United States and other backers of the occupation, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany and others, as well as “so-called private entities like the US and Zionist-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.

More than 200 makeshift displacement sites sheltering hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza face a severe risk of flooding this winter, Al Jazeera reported, citing the latest United Nations humanitarian assessment.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory, 214 active sites have been identified as being at particularly high risk because of their locations and poor conditions.

• Search operations for the remains of numerous missing Gaza residents will start Saturday in Maghazi camp, with assistance from the Red Cross, Egypt’s committee, and local police, the Palestinian Civil Defence announced.
• Despite the temporary ceasefire, Israeli forces conducted multiple lethal strikes in Gaza yesterday, including a drone attack in Beit Lahiya that left four children wounded, Wafa reported.
• The Israeli military said it had eliminated six Palestinian militants and detained five others who emerged from tunnel openings in Rafah, east of the yellow line.
• Israel carried out an additional fatal strike in southern Lebanon, targeting a vehicle in the Bint Jbeil area and killing one occupant.
• According to the UN World Food Programme, access to food in Gaza has seen some improvement during the ceasefire but remains inadequate, with only 30% of planned food parcel deliveries achieved.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his rejection of Palestinian statehood, stating plainly that such a state “will not exist.”

At least 67 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza even after the so-called ceasefire took hold, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday, calling the deaths a devastating reminder of how fragile and uneven the pause in fighting has been.

Speaking at a news conference in Geneva, Unicef spokesperson Ricardo Pires said the tally includes a baby girl killed in an Israeli air strike on a home in Khan Younis on Thursday. The count also covers seven other children killed the previous day as Israeli attacks continued across the enclave.

“This is during an agreed ceasefire. The pattern is staggering,” Pires told reporters, referring to the deaths recorded since October 11 — the first full day of the US-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas.

He stressed that the toll is not abstract or distant. “As we have repeated many times, these are not statistics: Each was a child with a family, a dream, a life – suddenly cut short by continued violence.”

Unicef has repeatedly warned that children remain the most exposed in Gaza. The agency estimated last month that 64,000 children have been killed and injured in Israeli attacks since the war erupted in October 2023.

The Israeli military said it claimed an air strike on a Palestinian compound, leaving 13 Hamas members killed, Al Jazeera reported.

In a statement, Israel’s military said its attack on the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp near Lebanon’s Sidon on Tuesday killed 13 Hamas members at a “training compound” there.

The Palestinian health ministry said that Israeli forces fatally shot two teenagers overnight in the town of Kufr Aqab in the occupied West Bank.

"The young man Amr Khaled Ahmed Al-Marbou and the boy Sami Ibrahim Sami Mashayekh were martyred by occupation forces gunfire in the town of Kufr Aqab near Ramallah," the ministry said in a statement.

The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) reports that since the US brokered ceasefire, at least 67 children have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza.

In its statement, Unicef highlighted that nearly two children are killed each day on average.

The Israeli military has reported that an airstrike in eastern Rafah killed five fighters as they "emerged from a tunnel" in an area under Israeli control, Al Jazeera reported.

According to an official statement, troops from the Nahal Brigade observed the fighters approaching in a way that was deemed an “immediate threat” and coordinated with the Air Force to target them.

The military added that its forces “will continue operations to neutralise any immediate threats” in the area.