Israel’s military ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians living in Gaza City to evacuate Friday ahead of a feared Israel ground offensive. The directive came on the heels of what the United Nations said was a warning it received from Israel to evacuate 1.1 million people living in northern Gaza within 24 hours.
Suffering in Gaza has been rising dramatically, with Palestinians desperate for food, fuel and medicine and the territory’s only power plant shut down for lack of fuel. The morgue at Gaza’s biggest hospital overflowed as bodies came in faster than relatives could claim them.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Israel on Friday, a day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The war has claimed at least 3,200 lives on both sides since Hamas launched an incursion on Oct. 7.
Here’s what’s happening on Day 7 of the latest Israel-Hamas war:
SEOUL, South Korea - A South Korean military plane evacuating 220 South Korean and other Asian nationals from Israel has departed Tel Aviv and was expected to land in South Korea later Saturday, Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said.
The people transported on the KC-330 military transport plane included 163 South Koreans, 51 Japanese nationals and six Singaporean nationals, the ministry said.
South Korea had also sent a civilian plane earlier this week to evacuate 192 South Korean nationals. About 470 South Koreans remain in Israel, most of them long-term residents who have chosen to stay.
No South Korean casualties have so far been reported from the violence in Israel and Gaza.
The Palestinian Health Ministry reported 16 Palestinians killed Friday in the occupied West Bank, bringing to 51 the total number of West Bank Palestinians killed since Hamas waged its brutal assault on Israel last Saturday.
The United Nations says attacks by Israeli settlers have surged there since the Hamas assault.
UNITED NATIONS - Relatives of Israelis abducted during Hamas militants’ attack last weekend pleaded at the U.N. on Friday for the world’s help getting their loved ones home.
Speaking by video from Israel, Yoni Asher told diplomats at an Israel-organized event that he hasn’t slept or eaten since his wife and two small daughters vanished Saturday while visiting his mother-in-law in the country’s south.
His wife called to tell him that they were locked in a safe room after people came into the house and she heard gunshots, Asher said. He said he later saw a video of his wife and daughters, who are under 5 and 3, being loaded into a vehicle, and he tracked his wife’s phone to Gaza.
“I don’t know if I got any more tears left,” he said. “I’m exhausted, and I just want to approach whoever can hear me in the international community. Please bring back my baby girls.”
Hamas fighters took 150 hostages during Saturday’s surprise assault. Alana Zeitchik said a half-dozen of her cousins were snatched from a kibbutz. They were known to be alive as of Friday morning, she said.
“We don’t want more bombs or rockets or blood or tears,” said Zeitchik, who lives in New York. “We want our family back immediately. And we want peace.”
WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden said Friday that it’s a priority of his administration to address the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Speaking at an event in Philadelphia to promote a $7 billion program to kickstart development and production of hydrogen fuel in the U.S., Biden paused to note the deteriorating situation for Palestinians as Israel continues to bombard the strip in retaliation for last weekend’s attacks on Israel.
Biden said he’s directed his team to work with the governments in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab nations and the United Nations to surge humanitarian relief to those impacted by the war.
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do Hamas,” Biden said. “And they’re suffering as a result as well.”
Biden again lashed out at Hamas, saying the militant group in control of Gaza makes the terrorist group Al-Qaida “look pure.”
UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council still hasn’t found a collective voice on the Israel-Hamas war after meeting behind closed doors Friday for the second time in five days.
Russia is proposing a “humanitarian cease-fire,” which could be a tough sell as Israel is expected to undertake a ground offensive against the Hamas militants who rule Gaza and launched a brutal surprise attack on Israel last weekend.
Russia’s draft resolution, obtained by The Associated Press, also condemns “all violence and hostilities directed against civilians and all acts of terrorism.”
Israel isn’t on the 15-member council. There was no immediate public response to the Russian draft from the veto-wielding United States, whose defense chief assured Israel on Friday that “ we have your back.”
Other council members are assessing the draft, and it’s not clear when it might get a vote.
DAMASCUS, Syria - Syria’s president on Friday called on countries of the world to stand together to stop “the crimes that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people.”
Bashar Assad made his comments during a meeting in Damascus with Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, who is on a regional tour that has taken him to Baghdad and Beirut.
Assad said the reason behind the latest wave of violence is that the Palestinian people have been prevented by Israel and Western countries from setting up their own state.
Assad said Syria stands by the “legitimate” rights of the Palestinian people.
Amirabdollahian later told reporters that Israel should stop the “war crimes it is committing before it’s too late.”
Israel has been bombarding the Gaza Strip since the militant group Hamas launched a bloody incursion into the country’s south on Saturday, killing hundreds.
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas as the army prepares for an expected ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu delivered the threat in a nationally televised address late Friday.
Israel has been pounding Gaza with airstrikes since Hamas militants carried out an unprecedented cross-border attack last Saturday, killing over 1,300 people in a brutal rampage. Early Friday, Israel ordered half of Gaza’s population to evacuate their homes.
“This is just the beginning,” Netanyahu said. “We will end this war stronger than ever.”
“We will destroy Hamas,” he added, saying Israel has widespread international support for the operation.
UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees has shifted its Gaza center of operations and some staffers to the territory’s south, but many of the world body’s 13,000 Gaza workers have chosen to remain in the north to continue helping people there, U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said Friday.
The world body earlier warned of “devastating humanitarian consequences” after the Israeli military told the entire population of northern Gaza to leave. Dujarric said Secretary-General António Guterres and other U.N. officials have been working the phones to try to get humanitarian aid into the sealed-off territory and to ensure that civilians are protected.
Asked what it would take for aid to start flowing, the spokesperson said, “what we need is the green light from the Israelis.”
ROME - A few hundred pro-Palestinian students clashed briefly with police in Rome on Friday as they tried to detour from a rally route that had been approved by authorities.
Helmeted police, using shields and batons, pushed back the surging students near Sapienza University when the protesters, many waving or clutching Palestinian flags, tried to head toward a rally being held by right-wing students, Italian news outlets reported.
A rally in Milan - with some participants holding a giant, rainbow-colored peace flag, and others carrying Palestinian flags - went forward without any issues.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Hamas officials say 70 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on convoys fleeing Gaza City.
Hamas’ media office says the cars were struck in three places as they headed south from Gaza City. It was not immediately clear who the target of the airstrikes was, or whether militants were among the passengers.
The army ordered residents to evacuate the city early Friday ahead of an expected ground invasion.
JERUSALEM - The Israeli military has announced that an Israeli drone is currently striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
ALMA Al-SHAAB, Lebanon - An Israeli shell landed in a gathering of international journalists covering clashes on the border in southern Lebanon on Friday, killing one and wounding six.
An Associated Press photographer at the scene saw the body of the dead journalist and the six who were wounded. Some of them were rushed to hospitals in ambulances. One nearby car was charred.
Al-Jazeera identified two of its employees among the wounded. The Lebanon-Israel border has been witnessing sporadic acts of violence since Saturday’s attack by the militant Palestinian group Hamas on southern Israel.
JERUSALEM - The Israeli military says for the first time that ground troops have been operating inside the Gaza Strip.
In a statement Friday, the army said troops had entered Gaza to battle militants, destroy weapons and search for evidence about the missing hostages held by Hamas.
The announcement did not appear to be the beginning of an expected ground invasion of Gaza. Israel has been massing troops along the Gaza border since last Saturday’s deadly incursion by Hamas militants.
WASHINGTON - The White House hosted a virtual conversation on Friday with family members of 14 Americans who are unaccounted for after the Hamas attacks on Israel.
President Joe Biden addressed the families. Other participants included Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser; Roger Carstens, hostage affairs special envoy; John Bass, undersecretary of state; and Brett McGurk, National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East.
CAIRO - The Egyptian Foreign Ministry on Friday condemned the Israeli army’s decision to tell about 1 million people in Gaza to evacuate toward the southern part of the besieged territory.
The move “constitutes a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law, and will expose the lives of more than a million Palestinian citizens and their families to the dangers of remaining in the open without shelter,” the ministry said in a statement.
The evacuation order comes ahead of an expected ground invasion, hiking fears of a massive influx of refugees across the heavily fortified border into its territory.
Egypt called on the United Nations Security Council, which is scheduled to meet Friday, to stop the evacuation.
UNITED NATIONS - The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations says his people’s mass exit from northern Gaza under Israeli military orders may compare to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians amid the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation - an event that Palestinians call the “nakba,” or catastrophe.
Ambassador Riyad Mansour called the current flight “potentially a second nakba” as he spoke to reporters at U.N. headquarters Friday before a meeting of Arab countries’ ambassadors.
The Israeli military told people to leave northern Gaza ahead of an expected ground invasion against the Hamas militants who launched an assault on southern Israel last weekend. While the evacuation order involves the northern part of the territory, Mansour said “there is no place in Gaza that is safe.”
He called for a cease-fire to allow food, medicine and water into the territory.
___
Associated Press writers Kareem Chehayeb and Bassem Mroue contributed to this report.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.