Israel’s war on Gaza live: Rafah bombarded as Israel plans ground assault

Meeting with Mark Rutte in Jerusalem, Netanyahu says that the war will continue until Israel’s “total victory over Hamas”.

This is Rutte’s third visit to Israel since October 7.

He is also meeting war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, and with Palestinian Authority PM Mohammed Shtayyeh.

In a tweet earlier today, Rutte warned that an Israeli invasion of Rafah would have “catastrophic humanitarian consequences”, and called for an immediate ceasefire that culminates in a “lasting end” to the conflict, including a “viable Palestinian state, next to a safe Israel”.

Husam Zomlot has said Britain’s sanctions on four Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank is a “welcome step in the right direction” nonetheless, urging the UK government to impose an arms embargo on Israel.

“However, all settlements are illegal and all settlers should be treated accordingly. All settlement products and companies profiting from them must be sanctioned. An immediate arms embargo is a legal obligation on the UK government and is urgently needed to stop the genocide in Gaza,” he says.

“This must be followed by sanctions on all Israeli officials and military personnel who are carrying out the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing aggression all over the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The US also recently announced sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories has been refused a visa for months but now she will be banned from Israel, according to Foreign Minister Israel Katz and Interior Minister Moshe Arbel.

In a joint statement, the ministers said the announcement comes following Albanese’s comment a day earlier that the October 7 attacks were a “response to Israel’s oppression”.

“The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression,” she wrote on X, responding to a Le Monde newspaper post reporting on French President Emmanuel Macron honouring the victims of the attack.

Thomas White, the Gaza chief of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, has said UNRWA has seen alarmingly high rates of diarrhea, which can be deadly if there is not enough clean water, in addition to outbreaks of Hepatitis A.

“These are the result of a million people jammed into a pretty small area without access to sanitation,” White said, adding that the conditions in Rafah were grim.

“Hundreds of thousands of people are digging a hole in the sand adjacent to where they’re living, and that’s where they are defecating,” he said.

As an Israeli invasion of Rafah becomes imminent, White said: “The reality of having a million people move in the Gaza Strip into areas that are not set up to accommodate them. Many of them will have to leave the shelters they have constructed here [Rafah] and we will have hundreds of thousands of people living in the open again.”

The captive release operation in Rafah is hailed in Israel as a massive success, a rescue mission even though there were 67 Palestinians who were killed as a result of the diversion bombardment. …

… After this operation, Netanyahu reiterated that the military pressure is the only way to win the war and bring back the captives.

The Rafah mission showed once again what damage and death the Israelis are willing to inflict to try to get some of their military goals accomplished.

Netanyahu is surely going to be using this operation to justify the ground offensive on Rafah. He will say there are captives there and the army has to go in.

It’s just after just after 3pm (13:00 GMT) on Monday, February 12, in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.

Here are some of the main developments today:

• Dozens of people reported killed in Israel’s operation for the two hostages rescued in Rafah, as witnesses recount the night as “terrifying”.
• Israeli snipers have killed seven people and wounded 14 on the premises of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza’s health ministry says.
• Israeli security forces have arrested at least 35 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since Sunday night.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will press for the Rafah offensive to free more captives from Gaza.
• Israel has called on UN relief agencies to help with its efforts to evacuate civilians from Gaza war zones before the Rafah operation.

As jubilation has overtaken Israel after the release of the two captives overnight, Palestinians in Rafah recount a night of horror and devastation.

Forty-day-old Majed al-Afifi is among about 100 people killed by Israeli forces overnight in Rafah, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.

His uncle recounted what happened.

“We heard the bombing without warning,” Said al-Hams, 26, told the Agence France-Presse news agency in the Rafah refugee camp.

His nephew, a twin, “was born exactly 40 days ago and was killed” while their mother was wounded.

Dozens of Israeli strikes pounded Rafah, where 1.4 million people have sought refuge during four months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“The situation was hell,” said Abu Suhaib, who was sleeping dozens of metres (dozens of yards) from where Israeli forces struck.

“We heard the sound of explosions, like hell falling down on civilians,” he told AFP.

The 28-year-old said he heard warplanes firing and a helicopter landing.

The aerial bombardment left five craters at least 10 metres (11 yards) wide and 5 metres (5.5 yards) deep, an AFP journalist said.

“I can’t tell you how we survived the night,” said Abu Abdullah al-Qadi, who was woken by the sound of shooting.

“They killed my cousin. They killed a lot of people with strikes,” he told AFP as dozens of people gathered near the destroyed buildings.

“They stormed this building, and it appears they freed prisoners – and then they bombed it,” al-Qadi said.

“They bombed all the houses next to it,” he added.

The UK has imposed sanctions on four “extremist Israeli settlers” accused of committing human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, following a similar move by the US earlier this month.

The UK government on Monday stated the individuals “threatened and perpetrated acts of aggression and violence” against Palestinians.

The measures were taken under the UK’s Global Human Rights sanctions regime, a government notice showed.

Settler attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have increased sharply since Israel launched its war on Gaza.

David Cameron has called on Israel to halt its current military strategy following its overnight attacks on Rafah as he reiterated calls for a pause in the fighting that could lead to a permanent ceasefire.

“We think it is impossible to see how you can fight a war amongst these people. There’s nowhere for them to go,” the British foreign secretary told reporters.

“We are very concerned about the situation, and we want Israel to stop and think very seriously before it takes any further action. But above all, what we want is an immediate pause in the fighting, and we want that pause to lead to a ceasefire,” he said.

Palestinians walk at the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 12, 2024 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

The Israeli military says its air force attacked a vehicle carrying members of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

It also stated, in a post on X, that it attacked two military buildings and a military site in the areas around Tayr Harfa and Maroun al-Ras.

Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in cross-border attacks since the beginning of the war on Gaza.

Tens of thousands of people from both sides have been displaced due to the border violence.

Smoke billows from the site of an Israeli air strike on the southern Lebanese village of Khiam near the border with Israel on February 9, 2024 [Rabih Daher/AFP]

The Turkish Foreign Ministry says it is “extremely concerned” over Israel’s intensifying attacks on Rafah in Gaza’s south, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering.

“We are extremely concerned by Israel’s escalating attacks on the southern city of Rafah, following the destruction and massacres it has already inflicted on the Gaza Strip,” the ministry said in a statement.

“We consider this operation as part of a plan to expel the people of Gaza from their own land,” it added.

“We call on the international community, in particular the UN Security Council, to take the necessary steps to stop Israel,” the statement said.

Israel has called on UN relief agencies to help with its efforts to evacuate civilians from Gaza war zones before its planned ground sweep of Rafah, a town on the enclave’s border with Egypt which is crowded with displaced Palestinians.

“We urge UN agencies to cooperate,” government spokesperson Eylon Levy said in a briefing.

“Don’t say it can’t be done. Work with us to find a way.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has said that by “killing, destroying, and trying to displace Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, Israel wants to reshape the demographic balance to its advantage, after it shifted in favour of Palestine, for the first time since 1948”, according to the Wafa news agency.

Speaking at the beginning of the weekly cabinet session held in Ramallah, Shtayyeh said that the past 400 days were the bloodiest in the contemporary history of Palestine.

“We have more than 100,000 Palestinians killed, wounded and missing in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, and more than 640 in the West Bank,” he claimed.

“There are also more than 10,000 detainees, and these are not numbers, but rather they indicate children, women, the elderly, young men and women, and they indicate our families and our people, each of them has a history, status, and name, and had a future that was killed by Israel.”

Daniel Hagari has issued a statement in which he said the overnight rescue mission “underscores the importance of our ground operation in Gaza, including Rafah, when conditions allow”.

He added that the Israeli military has a “moral obligation” to bring all the captives home, an obligation it will continue to do everything in its power to fulfil.

Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Rafah on February 12, 2024 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

The spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Gaza says Israeli snipers have killed seven people inside Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, where heavy fighting has been reported in recent days.

“No one can move in the yards of Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis,” Ashraf al-Qudra said in a statement on Telegram.

“Israeli snipers killed seven citizens and wounded 14 staff and displaced people inside the yard [of the hospital],” he added.

He said that ceilings in the dormitory and operations departments collapsed as a result of the explosions around the hospital.

“We need the protection of the technical staff to move in the yard of the hospital to repair the sewage network,” al-Qudra said.

Dozens of protesters are blocking trucks carrying vital humanitarian aid from entering Israel from Egypt at the Nitzana border crossing, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported.

In recent weeks, there have been regular protests to block aid to the Gaza Strip, in particular at the Karam Abu Salem border crossing, known as Kerem Shalom in Israel.

Protesters often include family members of captives being held by Hamas who demand that their release should come before any more humanitarian aid can cross.

Families of captives and supporters protest against the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza in Nitzana, Israel, January 30, 2024 [File: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters]

Israeli security forces have arrested at least 35 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since Sunday night, including a wounded minor and a former prisoner, according to an advocacy group.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said on Telegram that the arrests were mostly in the city of Hebron, while others were made in the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin and Qalqilya, as well as in East Jerusalem.

The armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad says its fighters ambushed Israeli troops early on Monday morning in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, where intense fighting has been reported in recent days.

“Immediately upon the [Israeli] forces’ arrival at the site of the ambush, [al-Quds Brigades] attacked them with machineguns, antipersonnel shells, fortifications and explosive devices, leaving the enemies dead and wounded,” al-Quds Brigades said in a statement on Telegram.

It said its fighters bombarded an Israeli command and control post in central Khan Younis with heavy mortar shells.

• The Israeli military says it rescued two captives overnight: 70-year-old Louis Norberto Har and 60-year-old Fernando Simon Marman. The two men were taken from the Nir Yitzhak kibbutz during the October 7 attacks on Israel.
• Hamas seized around 240 captives on October 7, according to Israeli authorities. Dozens were released during a one-week truce in November.
• Israel estimates that there are 134 captives remaining in the Gaza Strip.
• On Sunday, Hamas’s military wing said two captives had been killed and eight others seriously wounded in recent Israeli bombardments.
• Hamas had laid out a detailed, three-phase plan for a potential deal that would see all captives released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
• There are more than 8,000 Palestinians currently in Israeli custody, many of whom are held without charge.
• Netanyahu appears to have rejected the Hamas plan, promising Israel would continue its military assault on Gaza until “absolute victory”.
• On Sunday, a Hamas leader told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity that “any attack by the occupation army on the city of Rafah would torpedo the exchange negotiations”.

UAE envoy to the UN, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, has said that her country wants to see Israel’s full integration into the region as part of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

“We cannot keep managing this conflict, we have to resolve it which means two states,” she said in remarks quoted by the Reuters news agency.

“There must be an irreversible progression towards a two-state solution,” she added.

Marcia Cross, known for her role as Bree Van de Kamp on the popular TV series Desperate Housewives, has written on her Instagram page: “I’m struggling to comprehend how to live among people with eyes that don’t water, hearts that don’t flinch, and voices that remain silent.”

She ended her statement with emojis of a broken heart and the flag of Palestine.

“There are no words for the horror that has and is being unleashed. And the silence has me believing I am deaf,” she wrote in the post.

Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity also known by its French initials MSF, has said that “Israel’s declared ground offensive on Rafah would be catastrophic and must not proceed”.

“As aerial bombardment of the area continues, more than a million people, many living in tents and makeshift shelters, now face a dramatic escalation in this ongoing massacre,” it said on X.

“Nowhere in Gaza is safe, and repeated forced displacements have pushed people to Rafah, where they are trapped in a tiny patch of land and have no options,” it added.

MSF also said that, since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, the organisation’s medical teams and patients have been forced to evacuate nine different healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip.

It said the MSF facilities have come “under fire from tanks, artillery, fighter jets, snipers and ground troops, or being subject to an evacuation order”.

• The Israeli bombing has killed 67 Palestinians and wounded dozens, according to Ashraf al-Qudra, Gaza’s Health Ministry spokesperson.
• Shaboura’s ar-Rahma mosque and al-Huda mosque in the Yabna camp, where dozens of people were sheltering, were hit.
• There have been reports of heavy shelling in the areas around the Kuwaiti Hospital.
• Israel’s military says it rescued two captives from a house in Rafah’s Shaboura neighbourhood at about 1am on Monday (23:00 GMT on Sunday).
• Hamas says the strikes are “a continuation of the genocidal war” waged by Israel on the Palestinian people.

Mourners react next to the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes at Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah [Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), has told Al Jazeera that there is nowhere left in Gaza for Palestinians to go.

“Rafah already has nearly half of Gaza’s population. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, people have been fleeing to Rafah following Israeli evacuation orders. Families have already evacuated up to 10 times,” she said.

“The question is – where should people go? There is no safe place at all and there is no way to evacuate. On top of that, there is a complete destruction of the infrastructure, and the lack of transportation as well makes it impossible for people to make their way anywhere,” Farsakh added.

The Israeli military has ramped up its attacks on Rafah in southern Gaza as it prepares for a possible ground offensive.

At least 67 Palestinians were killed, including babies and children, in intense overnight Israeli raids in Rafah.

The air raids have caused major destruction in Rafah, damaging homes, businesses and mosques which are hosting 1.4 million Palestinians, most of whom fled their homes in central and northern Gaza due to the Israeli offensive.

Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, says there’s nowhere left in Gaza for Palestinians to go.

About 16,000 people now live per square km in Rafah, the southernmost region of Gaza bordering Egypt.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that there was an air raid alert in Ein HaBesor, an Israeli farm community near the fence with the Gaza Strip.

Sirens along the boundary with Gaza had not sounded for five days.

A salvo of rockets fired towards Israel on December 4, 2023 [File: Mahmud Hams/AFP]

Israeli forces have detained at least 27 Palestinians during military raids in various districts in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to security sources and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, the Palestinian news agency Wafa has reported.

The agency listed the locations of at least 26 detentions, including eight in Hebron, one in Tubas, six in the village of Tal near Nablus, one in the village of Deir Ghassana near Ramallah, two in the town of Azzun near Qalqilya, two more in the town of Arraba near Jenin, and at least six in occupied East Jerusalem.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels say they targeted a cargo ship in the Red Sea, the latest such strike since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Houthis identified the vessel as the Star Iris and the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson, Yahya Saree, said in a televised statement that the ship was American.

However, maritime shipping trackers said the Marshall Islands-flagged ship was Greek-owned, according to Reuters.

Houthis control the country’s most populous regions and have repeatedly launched drones and missiles against Israeli-linked ships in the Red Sea since mid-November. They say the attacks are a response to Israel’s military offensive on Gaza.

They have since expanded their attacks to include US and UK ships after Washington and London launched military strikes on Yemen.

Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed 28,340 Palestinians and wounded 67,984 since October 7, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

In the last 24 hours, Israeli forces killed 164 people and injured 200 in Gaza, a ministry statement on Telegram said.

The UN agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, needs to be able to continue its work while allegations that a dozen of its 13,000 staff members in Gaza were involved in the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel are investigated, the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell has said.

“Nobody else can do what UNRWA is doing, allegations need to be verified … let’s wait for the investigations to take place,” Borrell said ahead of a meeting of EU development ministers in Brussels.

“In the meantime, people have to continue to eat, have to continue going to the doctors.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will not pass up any opportunity to free more captives from Gaza.

He described sustained military pressure until “total victory” over Hamas as essential for Israeli security.

His statement was issued after Israeli special forces freed two captives in a rescue operation in Rafah, southern Gaza.

The prospect of wider operations in the city, which is packed with displaced people, has alarmed the international community.

[Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

[Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

[Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

[Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

Israeli strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah killed 67 Palestinians and wounded dozens, according to Ashraf al-Qudra, Gaza’s Health Ministry spokesperson.

Al-Qudra had earlier said that 48 people were killed in the attacks.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has held talks with Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziad al-Nakhalah, according to a statement by Hezbollah on Telegram.

Hezbollah said that the two discussed the latest developments in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, releasing a photo from the meeting.

Nasrallah and al-Nakhalah stressed the need for steadfastness and continuing to work strongly to achieve victory against Israel, the statement said.

Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, right, and Islamic Jihad chief Ziad al-Nakhalah [Handout/Hezbollah via Telegram]

The ministry has “condemned in the strongest terms the mass massacres” the Israeli forces continue to commit against Palestinians, especially displaced people.

“Israel is officially continuing to target civilians and transfer the war to Rafah to push the population to get displaced under bombardment,” it said in a statement released on X.

“The recent massacres of the occupation are evidence of the validity of international warnings and fears of catastrophic results of the expansion of the war to Rafah,” the ministry added.

Israeli strikes on Rafah early on Monday killed 48 Palestinians and wounded dozens, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Israeli warplanes have bombed a house in the southern Lebanese town of Shihin near the border with Israel, according to Lebanon’s official National News Agency.

The agency said that the attack had caused injuries but did not give a number of casualties.