Updates: Hamas-Israel ceasefire holds

Israel said it had barred entry to Gaza of foreign medical and humanitarian staff whose organisations were ordered to cease operations unless they register employee details with Israeli authorities and meet other new rules.

Fearing a renewed humanitarian crisis if medical and aid services can suddenly no longer access war-shattered Gaza, some of the 37 international nongovernmental organisations that were ordered to halt work are weighing whether to submit staff names to Israeli authorities, two aid sources told Reuters.

Israeli forces killed at least four Palestinians in two separate strikes in the Gaza Strip, hours after the military said it had hit the site of rocket launch, the latest violence to jeopardise the ceasefire.

Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed at least three people and wounded three others, including children, in a tent in the western area of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Another strike killed a person east of the city, near where Israeli forces operate.

Israel's military said it had carried out a targeted strike on a rocket launch site near Gaza City after identifying a failed launch, as questions mount over when the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire will begin.

The military said the projectile did not cross into Israeli territory and that the launch site was struck shortly after the attempt was detected.

It accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire twice in the past 24 hours. A source from the Palestinian resistance group told Reuters it was checking the allegation.

An Israeli official close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will not move to the next phase of the ceasefire until Hamas returns the remains of the last Israeli hostage still held in Gaza.

Israel said that Lebanon’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah were encouraging but "far from sufficient", after the Lebanese army announced it had completed the first phase of the process.

"The ceasefire agreement brokered by the United States between Israel and Lebanon states clearly, Hezbollah must be fully disarmed," the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.

"Efforts made toward this end by the Lebanese government and the Lebanese armed forces are an encouraging beginning, but they are far from sufficient, as evidenced by Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm," it added.

The UN's beleaguered agency for Palestinian refugees said Wednesday that a "dire" financial crisis had this week forced it to fire hundreds of Gazan staff who had left the territory.

"On Tuesday, 571 local Unrwa staff, outside Gaza, were informed that they were being separated from the agency with immediate effect," a spokesperson told AFP in an email.

For more than seven decades, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has provided aid and assistance to Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

But the agency has seen the voluntary contributions it relies on dwindle as it has become the focus of increasingly harsh Israeli criticism and attacks, causing what the spokesperson called an "unprecedented financial crisis".

While the work Unrwa was mandated to do cost around $880 million in 2025, the agency received only around $570 million in contributions, the spokesperson said.

"As things stand, we expect a substantial shortfall in 2026," they added.

Hamas officials told AFP that search operations for the remains of the last Israeli hostage held in Gaza resumed on Wednesday after a two-week pause due to bad weather.

Israel has previously said it is awaiting the return of Ran Gvili's body before beginning talks on the second phase of the fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas which came into effect in October.

A Hamas official told AFP that the group, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, "accompanied by Red Cross teams, are resuming today search operations for the body of the last Israeli captive in the Zeitun neighbourhood in southeastern Gaza City."

Another official said that search operations had been suspended over the past two weeks due to stormy weather and heavy rain, which had prevented excavators and other machinery from reaching Zeitun.

"The search operations resumed today, and we hope to recover the body to close the exchange file," the official added, urging pressure on Israel to complete the first stage of the ceasefire agreement and open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Of the 251 people seized during Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, only the body of Gvili remains in the Palestinian territory.

The Israeli group representing the families of hostages held in Gaza said in a statement that it welcomed "the pressure that led to the operational decision to resume search efforts" for Gvili´s body.

"After a difficult month of uncertainty and feeling helpless, we are deeply relieved that search teams have returned to the field," Gvili´s parents were quoted as saying in the statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

An Israeli airstrike killed at least two Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, local health authorities said, in what the military said was a retaliatory attack on a Hamas fighter that was launched after its troops had come under fire.

Medical officials did not immediately identify the people killed. They said several people were also wounded in the airstrike, which struck a house in Gaza City. There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

The Israeli military said that Hamas fighters had shot at soldiers earlier on Wednesday and that the airstrike targeted a senior Hamas fighter who had directed attacks on its troops. The military did not say whether it had suffered any casualties.

An Israeli-backed Palestinian militia said it had killed two Hamas operatives in southern Gaza, marking a renewed challenge to Palestinian group.

The armed group, known as the Popular Forces, said in a statement it had carried out a raid in Rafah, killing two Hamas members who refused to surrender and detaining a third. It shared a photo that it said depicted one of the slain men.

Hamas, which brands such groups as "collaborators", declined to comment on the claim, which Reuters couldn't independently authenticate. 

The United Nations said decades-long discrimination and segregation of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank were intensifying, and called on the country to end its "apartheid system".

In a new report, the UN rights office said "systematic discrimination" against Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories had "drastically deteriorated" in recent years.

"There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank," UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.

"Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives -- every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel´s discriminatory laws, policies and practices," he added.

"This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before."

A number of independent experts affiliated with the UN have described the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as "apartheid" but this marks the first time a UN rights chief has applied the term.

Two hunger strikers linked to Palestine Action – Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed – are said to be at risk of imminent death, having gone without food for 65 and 58 days respectively, according to medical professionals as well as their friends and family.

Muraisi, 31, is reportedly suffering from uncontrollable muscle spasms that may indicate neurological damage, and has to “remind herself to breathe”, campaign group Prisoners for Palestine has stated. Ahmed, 28, is experiencing severe chest pain, breathlessness, difficulty speaking and a loss of hearing in his left ear, his elder sister has said. Despite this, he remains “mentally resilient” and intends to “see this through”.

“Death is a very real possibility for Heba right now,” said Hinda, a close childhood friend of Muraisi who chose not to give her surname. She described Muraisi as a loving, kind and selfless person who “always puts others above herself”.

Last year, nine Palestine Action activists on remand undertook hunger strikes after the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, failed to respond to a letter raising concerns about their treatment.

Muraisi and Ahmed are two of three Palestine Action prisoners still refusing food. The third, Lewie Chiaramello, 22, has been intermittently fasting for 44 days due to his diabetes.