Israeli tanks and drones attacked a hospital in northern Gaza overnight, igniting fires and causing extensive damage, Palestinian hospital officials said on Thursday. Videos taken by a health official at Al-Awda Hospital show walls blown away and thick black smoke billowing wreckage.
The Israeli military said its forces were operating “adjacent” to Al-Awda Hospital and had allowed emergency workers to come try to put out a fire at the hospital, but said only that, “The circumstances of the fire are still under review.”
Pressure from close allies is mounting on Israel following a nearly three-month blockade of supplies into Gaza that led to famine warnings. Even the United States, a staunch ally, has voiced concerns over the hunger crisis. UN agencies say Israeli military restrictions and the breakdown of law and order in Gaza make it difficult to retrieve and distribute the aid. As a result, little of it has so far reached those in need.
The UN says aid has been collected from only about 90 trucks — out of a total of nearly 200 that have entered Gaza since Israel ended its nearly three-month blockade this week.
“The shipments from yesterday is limited in quantity and nowhere near sufficient to meet the scale and scope of of Gaza’s 2.1 million people,” said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
Gaza’s Heath Ministry said Thursday morning that more than 100 people had been killed across the Gaza Strip and around 250 wounded over the past 24 hours. It was not immediately clear if there were fatalities at Al-Awda Hospital.
Here’s the latest:
Israel says it has intercepted missile fired from Yemen
Early Friday, sirens sounded in parts of Israel as its military said it detected a missile launch by Yemen’s Houthi rebels targeting the country.
The Israeli military said it intercepted the missile as booms could be heard in Jerusalem.
The Houthis did not immediately claim the attack, but it can take hours or even days for the rebels to acknowledge their assaults.
Lebanese prime minister condemns latest Israeli strikes
The wave of airstrikes came two days before municipal elections are slated to take place in southern Lebanon.
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said Israel’s attacks “will not deter the state from its commitment to the electoral process,” and called for more international pressure to make Israel stop bombing his country.
Israel carries out widespread strikes in Lebanon
Israel carried out strikes on multiple areas in southern Lebanon on Thursday, some far from the border, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported.
It described the strikes as “the most violent in some areas” since a ceasefire deal ended the latest Israel-Hezbollah war in November. Residents of northern Israel also reported hearing loud explosions from across the border.
The Israeli army issued a warning ahead of one strike that destroyed a building in the town of Toul, which it described as “facilities belonging to the terrorist Hezbollah.” Video of the strike’s aftermath showed fire and a massive cloud of smoke rising over an area packed with multi-story apartment buildings. Strikes in other areas were carried out without warning.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Israel has struck Lebanon almost every day since the ceasefire. Lebanon says those strikes are in violation of the deal, while Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah to prevent it from re-arming.
Netanyahu names a new head of security agency after pushing to oust the previous chief
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced Thursday his decision to appoint Major General David Zini as the next head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.
Zini is a former army commando and has held a number of top positions in the Israeli military. Netanyahu’s office said that in March 2023 Zini prepared a report warning about the dangers of a surprise attack on Israeli forces along the Gaza border.
Earlier this year Netanyahu moved to fire the agency’s current chief, Ronen Bar, blaming his agency for failures in the lead-up to Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel’s Supreme Court froze Bar’s firing after multiple legal challenges against it, however Bar has since said he will resign in June.
Trump and Netanyahu discuss embassy staffers’ shooting and Iran nuclear deal
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone on Thursday about the shooting that killed two Israeli Embassy staffers outside a Washington reception, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Leavitt said the two leaders also discussed “a potential deal” with Iran to stem its rapidly advancing nuclear program. Trump is expected to dispatch special envoy Steve Witkoff to Italy for talks later this week with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi.
Leavitt said Trump believes the talks are “moving along in the right direction.”
UN says Palestinians stole food from aid trucks in Gaza
UN officials on Thursday said that a small number of trucks carrying flour on Wednesday were intercepted by residents and their contents were stolen.
“As far as I know, this was not a criminal act with armed men,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said during a briefing.
He added that the episode “only reflects the very high level of anxiety that people in Gaza are feeling, not knowing when the next humanitarian delivery will take place.”
Over the last several months, Israel has accused Hamas of siphoning off aid and using it to fund its military activities, without providing evidence. The UN has said that there are mechanisms in place that prevent any significant diversion of aid.
Israel says ‘no food shortage in Gaza’ even as UN says the trickle of aid is ‘nowhere near sufficient’
The Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to Gaza, COGAT, said Thursday that the United Nations is currently allowed to bring in “nutrition products, some food ingredients and medical supplies.”
“According to our current assessment, there is no food shortage in Gaza at this time,” COGAT said in a statement on X.
The UN says aid has been collected from only about 90 trucks — out of a total of nearly 200 that have entered Gaza since Israel ended its nearly three-month blockade this week.
“The shipments from yesterday is limited in quantity and nowhere near sufficient to meet the scale and scope of of Gaza’s 2.1 million people,” said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
The UN has said that around 600 trucks entered during a recent ceasefire, which was the amount necessary to meet people’s basic needs.
Former Israeli leader says only pressure from Trump can end the war in Gaza
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Thursday that the only international leader with enough power to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stop the war in Gaza is US President Donald Trump.
“If at some point the president of the United States, President Trump, will take part and perhaps will summon the Israeli prime minister and say to him in no unclear terms that ‘enough is enough’ — that may be very useful,” said Olmert, an open critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.
“I am against the expansion of the military operations in Gaza, I think that they bring us close to crimes because if there is no purpose and there is not a possible outcome that is worth the cost, then why should we continue?” he said during an interview in his Tel Aviv office.
Olmert said he understands why the EU and countries like Britain, Canada and France sent strong warnings to Israel this week, including threatening sanctions, but believes that ultimately a dressing down from Trump would stop Netanyahu from continuing the war.
Hospitals have special protection under the rules of war. Why are they in the crosshairs in Gaza?
In the Israel-Hamas war, hospitals in the combat zone of hollowed-out northern Gaza have increasingly ended up in the crosshairs. They have also become flashpoints for warring narratives.
Israel claims that Hamas locates military assets under hospitals and other sensitive sites like schools and mosques, and that its fighters use hospitals as shields. Palestinians and rights groups accuse Israel of mounting an all-out attack on Gaza’s health infrastructure to punish the population and force a surrender.
International humanitarian law lends hospitals special protections during war. But hospitals can lose their protections if combatants use them to hide fighters or store weapons, the International Committee of the Red Cross says.

ROME: Iran and the United States prepared for a fifth round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program Friday in Rome, with enrichment emerging as the key issue.

US officials up to President Donald Trump insist Iran cannot continue to enrich uranium at all in any deal that could see sanctions lifted on Tehran’s struggling economy. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi early Friday insisted online that no enrichment would mean “we do NOT have a deal.”

“Figuring out the path to a deal is not rocket science,” Araghchi wrote on the social platform X. “Time to decide.”

The US will be again represented in the talks by Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Michael Anton, the State Department’s policy planning director. While authorities haven’t offered a location for the talks, another round in Italy’s capital took place at the Omani Embassy there. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi is mediating the negotiations as the sultanate on the Arabian Peninsula has been a trusted interlocutor by both Tehran and Washington in the talks.

Enrichment remains key in negotiations

The talks seek to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of some of the crushing economic sanctions the US has imposed on the Islamic Republic, closing in on half a century of enmity.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s program if a deal isn’t reached. Iranian officials increasingly warn they could pursue a nuclear weapon with their stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels.

“Iran almost certainly is not producing nuclear weapons, but Iran has undertaken activities in recent years that better position it to produce them, if it chooses to do so,” a new report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency said. “These actions reduce the time required to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium for a first nuclear device to probably less than one week.”

However, it likely still would take Iran months to make a working bomb, experts say.

Enrichment remains the key point of contention. Witkoff at one point suggested Iran could enrich uranium at 3.67 percent, then later began saying all Iranian enrichment must stop. That position on the American side has hardened over time.

Asked about the negotiations, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said “we believe that we are going to succeed” in the talks and on Washington’s push for no enrichment.

“The Iranians are at that table, so they also understand what our position is, and they continue to go,” Bruce said Thursday.

One idea floated so far that might allow Iran to stop enrichment in the Islamic Republic but maintain a supply of uranium could be a consortium in the Mideast backed by regional countries and the US There also are multiple countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency offering low-enriched uranium that can be used for peaceful purposes by countries.

However, Iran’s Foreign Ministry has maintained enrichment must continue within the country’s borders and a similar fuel-swap proposal failed to gain traction in negotiations in 2010.

Meanwhile, Israel has threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities on their own if it feels threatened, further complicating tensions in the Mideast already spiked by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Araghchi warned Thursday that Iran would take “special measures” to defend its nuclear facilities if Israel continues to threaten them, while also warning the US it would view it as being complicit in any Israeli attack. Authorities allowed a group of Iranian students to form a human chain Thursday at its underground enrichment site at Fordo, an area with incredibly tight security built into a mountain to defend against possible airstrikes.

Talks come as US pressure on Iran increases

Yet despite the tough talk from Iran, the Islamic Republic needs a deal. Its internal politics are inflamed over the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, with women still ignoring the law on the streets of Tehran. Rumors also persist over the government potentially increasing the cost of subsidized gasoline in the country, which has sparked nationwide protests in the past.

Iran’s rial currency plunged to over 1 million to a US dollar in April. The currency has improved with the talks, however, something Tehran hopes will continue as a further collapse in the rial could spark further economic unrest.

Meanwhile, its self-described “Axis of Resistance” sits in tatters after Iran’s regional allies in the region have faced repeated attacks by Israel during its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government during a rebel advance in December also stripped Iran of a key ally.

The Trump administration also has continued to levy new sanctions on Iran, including this week, which saw the US specifically target any sale of sodium perchlorate to the Islamic Republic. Iran reportedly received that chemical in shipments from China at its Shahid Rajaei port near Bandar Abbas. A major, unexplained explosion there killed dozens and wounded over 1,000 others in April during one round of the talks.