Key events
Three Israeli and five Thai hostages to be released under ceasefire deal
Three Israeli hostages are to be released on Thursday under the terms of the ceasefire deal with Hamas have been named as Arbel Yehoud, 29, Agam Berger, 20, and Gadi Mozes, 80. Five Thai nationals will also be released, although their names have not been publicly released. In exchange, Israel will free 110 Palestinian prisoners, including 30 minors, according to NGO the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club.
The main UN agency serving Palestinians in the occupied territories, including Gaza, looks set to be shut down on Thursday as Israel defied widespread international support for the agency in a move Unrwa predicted would “sabotage Gaza’s recovery and political transition”.
And for a third straight day, thousands of Palestinians in southern Gaza trekked by foot, motorbike and animal-drawn carts back to their homes in the war-ravaged north after Israeli forces withdrew from the two main roads earlier this week.
The column of people stretched for miles along Gaza’s coastal road on Wednesday. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that over 376,000 Palestinians had reached northern Gaza from the south.
Here are some more recent developments:
-
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist rebel group which led the military operation to topple Bashar al-Assad last month, has been appointed president of Syria for a “transitional period”.
-
Al-Qaida’s affiliate group in Syria, Hurras al-Din, has announced its dissolution just weeks after the regime of Bashar al-Assad was toppled by Islamist group HTS.
-
US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza on Wednesday, then met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The US envoy met with Netanyahu alone for more than two hours, an Israeli official said, before they were joined by other ministers. An Israeli government spokesperson and the White House official declined to provide any details on Witkoff’s visit to Gaza, which Israel’s public broadcaster Kan said included an inspection of the Netzarim corridor.
-
An Israeli airstrike on Wednesday killed at least 10 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said, in an attack which the Israeli military said targeted armed militants. The airstrike was in the area of Tubas, in the northern West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.
-
Turkey on Wednesday condemned an Israeli strike that killed three of its citizens who attempted to illegally cross from Lebanon to Israel. “It has been learned that the three Turkish citizens, with whom contact had been lost while attempting to cross illegally from Lebanon to Israel, lost their lives as a result of an Israeli airstrike in the region,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
-
Egypt’s president rejected on Wednesday a suggestion by President Donald Trump that Palestinians from the war-torn Gaza Strip be moved to neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, saying it would undermine the idea of an independent Palestinian state and that an influx of refugees could destabilise his country. In his first public comments on Trump’s suggestion, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi said “there are historical rights that cannot be ignored” and called the idea “an injustice” to which Egypt would not be party.
-
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, told the UN general assembly that “respect for international humanitarian law is in crisis” and “threatening the very humanity that these laws seek to preserve”, citing the situations Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
-
The official death toll in Gaza since Israel launched its war on the territory after the 7 October attacks now stands at 47,417, according to the territory’s ministry of health. In its latest daily update, the ministry added that the latest figure for people injured was 111,571.
