U.S. strikes Iran-backed targets in Syria as tensions rise in the Middle East

53 UNRWA staffers killed in Gaza, highest number of casualties in conflict ever, agency says

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East says 53 of its staffers have died in Gaza since Oct. 7.

This is the agency’s highest number of casualties in conflict ever, a spokesperson told NBC News.

Fifteen staffers died in one day, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said in a news briefing today.

“They are mothers and fathers,” Lazzarini said. “Wonderful people who have dedicated their lives to their communities. If they were not in Gaza, they could have been your neighbor. One colleague died while on his way to pick up bread from a bakery. He left six children behind.”

Lazzarini called UNRWA staffers “true heroes” who continue working “despite the fact they share the same loss, fear, and daily struggle of millions of Gazans.”

“My Gaza colleagues are the face of humanity during one of its darkest hours,” Lazzarini said.

Lazzarini said he plans to visit Gaza “to express solidarity and amplify the voice of the communities and our staff.”

Remnants of a massacre remain at festival grounds

RE’IM, Israel — T-shirts and swimming shorts, an empty bottle of Grey Goose vodka, bubble wands, shoes, shattered eyeglasses and a pillow from IKEA: These are some of the remnants of a music festival in southern Israel that became a massacre when Hamas militants attacked on Oct. 7.

Nearby, a bomb shelter sits covered in bullet holes. Marks from a grenade blast scar the inside. Israel Defense Forces soldiers say revelers ran here for shelter but were found and killed by Hamas militants.

Three weeks after the attack, much of the area has been cleared of reminders of that day, but the items still left behind tell the story of a frantic rush to escape.

“It tells us that we have to complete our mission,” IDF spokesperson Capt. Ben Rosner said. “We have to dismantle Hamas so that we never have to experience what we experienced on Oct. 7.”

Analysis: Pressure grows on Israel to call a cease-fire

Around the world this week, from the floor of the United Nations Security Council to the European Union to Russia and China, there have been louder calls for a cease-fire.

In principle a pause in the bombing would be needed in order to release large numbers of hostages, a diplomat with knowledge of the hostage talks has told NBC News. The problem is what kind of cease-fire or humanitarian pause in the fighting and for how long?

Neither the U.S. nor Israel supports the idea of any suspension of hostilities that allows Hamas to regroup. And of course, the responsibility for the hostages rests with the militant group. But Israel risks an international backlash if it ignores international calls for the conditions to be created for a mass hostage release.

And imagine the reaction of a country like Thailand, thought to have more than 50 citizens held hostage, if a ground invasion goes ahead and they are killed. What impact might that have on wider sentiment in Asia?

Whether a mass release of hostages is really possible with so little trust may come down to a simple calculation on both sides. What is more important? Diplomacy or military strategy?

Josh Lederman

NBC News’ Josh Lederman reports from outside an apartment building in Tel Aviv today, shortly after a rocket from the Gaza Strip struck. Three people were injured, one seriously, officials said.

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepts most rockets from Gaza, although not all.

In southern Gaza, a girl is pulled from the rubble

Richard Engel

As Israel carried out another incursion into the Gaza Strip, with columns of tanks supported by fighter jets and drones, our crew in the south of the enclave witnessed a strike and ran toward it.

A girl was trapped in the rubble. Eventually she was freed and taken to a hospital where she was treated on the floor.

Coming around, she tells the staff her name is Miral and asks if her father is alive. A medic tells her he’s fine, but actually doesn’t know.

Israel says it strikes Hamas infrastructure in sea raid in southern Gaza

Soldiers from Israeli navy unit Flotilla 13 struck Hamas military infrastructure during a targeted raid from the sea in the southern Gaza Strip overnight, the Israel Defense Forces said.

The area targeted was a compound used by Hamas’ naval commando forces, the IDF said, adding that its soldiers exited following the raid.

A group of Jews and Arabs in Israel has a ‘radical’ idea

JAFFA, Israel — Up a narrow, stone stairwell in this ancient port city, a group of self-confessed radicals plot an evening of interfaith rebellion.

In a sea of hardening views and violent rhetoric after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, this small but growing band have formed an unofficial civil guard in an attempt to prevent the type of urban unrest that has accompanied previous rounds of conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza.

Their mostly leftist movement is a fringe one, a relative speck of cooperation in a land where ethnic and territorial strife is once again reaching a crescendo.

But on a recent humid night, their task was mixing: Israeli Arabs and Jews — and wallpaper paste.

“We are trying to send a message — not just to the local community but to the whole world — that there are people who want to come together and reject the violence that we are seeing,” said Amir Badran, who is Arab, a local councilman with the “We Are the City” party, and one of the group’s leaders. 

Read the full story here.

First an airstrike, then a painstaking struggle to clear debris

People search through buildings that were destroyed during Israeli air raids in the southern Gaza Strip today.

Three injured as a rocket hits a building in Tel Aviv

A direct rocket hit on an apartment building in Tel Aviv today has injured three people, according to United Hatzalah, a volunteer medical response group.

“The scene was one of significant destruction,” United Hatzalah volunteer EMT Yonatan Uziyahu said. “Together with additional EMTs, we provided initial treatment to a young man in his 20s who was moderately injured and to two additional people who sustained light injuries.”

Sirens also sounded in central Israel, including Tel Aviv, and the areas surrounding the Gaza Strip.

Photos: Palestinian men gather to pray in southern Gaza Strip

In the wake of an Israeli air raid, Palestinians gather for Friday prayers at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza.

Russia defends position on Gaza after hosting Hamas

The Russian Embassy in Israel reiterated its position condemning terrorist attacks and violence against civilians “no matter what side it is on,” as well as its calls for a cease-fire.

“We find absolutely unacceptable any attempts to accuse us of supporting terrorism and thereby distort and erode our fundamental approaches as well as cast doubt on the purposeful work of our country to solve primary humanitarian tasks that meet the interests of the citizens of Russia, Israel, Palestine and other countries,” the embassy said in statement.

Today’s statement was released after Israel criticized Russia for hosting a Hamas delegation in Moscow yesterday.

Qatari negotiator ‘hopeful’ of deal for Hamas to release civilian hostages

Mohammed Abdulaziz al-Khulaifi, a senior Qatari negotiator, said he hoped civilians being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip would be released within days.

Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs admitted to Britain’s Sky News that the negotiations were progressing under very difficult circumstances.

U.S. unveils new sanctions targeting Hamas

The U.S. Treasury Department and Department of State unveiled a new wave of sanctions targeting Hamas today to cut off its financial resources.

The move impacts “eight key individuals for supporting Hamas, as well as Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials involved in financing and training Hamas,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said today in a statement.

“Today’s action targets additional assets in Hamas’s investment portfolio and individuals who facilitate sanctions evasion,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said at the Royal United Services Institute in London, according to a statement.

He said the latest designations “underscore the critical role Iran plays in providing financial, logistical, and operational support to Hamas.”

The department is now also going after “new, emerging shell companies, middlemen, and facilitators,” Adeyemo said, adding, “Hamas should have nowhere to hide.”

Blinken also noted that the U.S. is offering millions in rewards for any more information on certain activities and leaders of Hamas. 

The significance of why Hamas chose to attack Israel now

Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel comes at a time when the country faces historic domestic political division, growing violence in the West Bank and high-stakes negotiations with Saudi Arabia and the United States.

After its members killed 200 Israelis and kidnapped dozens more, Hamas claimed it was taking revenge for a series of recent actions by Israel at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque and in the West Bank. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has been conducting an escalating crackdown against what it says are rising Palestinian terror attacks for more than a year.

Former U.S. intelligence and military officers said they believed the timing of the Hamas attack was primarily aimed at disrupting negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia as Riyadh appeared on the verge of a historic step to normalize relations with Israel. 

Read the full story here.

Photo shows destroyed buildings in southern Gaza

People search through buildings destroyed during Israeli air raids in the city of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Friday.

Israel has repeatedly warned Palestinians to evacuate to the south, but continued bombardment of the area has left many Palestinians with no safe place to go.

Oxfam: Starvation being used as ‘weapon of war’ against civilians in Gaza

Starvation is being used as a “weapon of war” against civilians, Oxfam said today, with the enclave receiving just 2% of food since the war began that would have been otherwise delivered.

Airstrikes have destroyed several bakeries and supermarkets, it said, adding those remaining functional cannot meet the demand and are at risk of shutting down due to shortage of fuel and flour.

“Every day the situation worsens,” it said in an emailed statement. “Millions of civilians are being collectively punished in full view of the world.”

Hundreds of thousands still stuck in north, U.N. body says

Almost 400,000 people are still in northern Gaza Strip, despite Israeli warnings to move south, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said today in a news conference.

“Over a million people cannot just pickup and move to the south where there have been repeated bombings,” Lynn Hastings, Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said, adding 53 members of the UNRWA staff have been killed so far.

Around 1.4 million are displaced across Gaza, half of whom are in shelters that are at 2.5 times their capacity, she said. “The health system is overrun,” she said, adding the entire Gaza Strip is under an electricity blackout and has no access to clean water.

Israel’s military carried out another ground raid into the Gaza Strip overnight, with ground troops backed by fighter jets and drones.

Video released by the Israel Defense Forces shows several explosions. The military said that ground forces exited Gaza after the operation and its soldiers sustained no injuries.

Despite hundreds of tanks lined up at the Gaza border, and thousands of Israeli reservists drawn up, Israel has so far stopped short of launching a full ground offensive.

Vivek Ramaswamy confronts Sen. Joni Ernst on Israel

Vivek Ramaswamy confronted Sen. Joni Ernst over her criticism of his position on Israel at an Iowa political fundraising event last Friday, according to two sources who witnessed the tense exchange and video obtained exclusively by NBC News.

Ramaswamy shook Ernst’s hand and held onto it for most of a minute as he aired his frustration. “You might want to understand my Israel policy before commenting,” said Ramaswamy, who was upset about Ernst’s remarks at a panel discussion on foreign policy in New Hampshire a week earlier.

As both smiled through their tough talk, Ernst said: “I’d be glad to talk to you, because I heard you had some perspectives. So I was asking, what is your policy?”

The private interaction illustrated some of the pushback Ramaswamy has been receiving — and how he’s working to overcome it as the conflict has become a key issue splintering the party ahead of a conference with Republican Jewish voters and the third primary debate.

Read full story here.

‘History will judge us all if there is no ceasefire in Gaza,’ says UNRWA Chief

Although intense negotiations have allowed very limited humanitarian aid into Gaza in the past few days, “it was a drop in the ocean,” United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees chief Philippe Lazzarini said yesterday.

“Mothers do not know how they can clean their children. Pregnant women pray that they will not face complications during delivery because hospitals have no capacity to receive them,” Lazzarini said in a statement.

The U.N. has condemned the Hamas attack of Oct 7., he said, “But let there be no shadow of a doubt — this does not justify the ongoing crimes against the civilian population of Gaza, including its 1 million children,” he said.

“The reality today in Gaza is that there is not much humanity left and hell is settling in,” he added.

Death and trauma stalk Palestinian children

In a leveled neighborhood in the city of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, a group of men digging through the rubble found first one hand, then another. When they lifted the body of 11-year-old Sila Hamdan out of the broken cement blocks and dust, they found her sister, 9-year-old Tila, tucked beneath her. 

The girls were killed Tuesday night when a bombing destroyed some 15 homes in the area, killing at least 37, according to local health officials. The recovery of their bodies was filmed by an NBC News team in the Gaza Strip. 

The death of the Hamdan sisters illustrates the heavy toll the war is taking on Gaza’s overwhelmingly young population. Children make up about half of Gaza’s nearly 2.3 million people — many of whom were born during Israel’s strict 16-year blockade of Gaza and are now watching bombs destroy their neighborhoods.

In 2022, 4 out of 5 children in Gaza were already living with depression, fear and grief, according to a report by Save the Children. More than half said they had contemplated suicide. 

This war has only made it worse. 

Read the full story here.

Arabs in Israel fear consequences for speaking out about the war

Some Arab citizens of Israel say they are not speaking out or posting on social media about the Israel-Hamas war out of fear of retaliation for their comments.

Human rights groups say hundreds of Arabs have been fired, suspended from universities, and even arrested in Israel for being accused of sympathizing with terror or supporting Hamas.

Khan Younis resident loses 22 family members after a refugee camp is bombed

Almost two dozen members of Khalil Abu Shamalah family, including women and infants, have been either killed or are missing after a bombing leveled a refugee camp in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. 

Standing in the middle of what used to be the main street for people to access the market, Shamalah told a NBC News crew yesterday, it could take up to three days to recover all the bodies from the rubble of almost 30 buildings.

“The houses that were targeted were my cousins,” he said. “Israel claim that they target military goals but on the ground we know how many civilians have been killed.”

Around him residents frantically dug for any survivors, pulling out lifeless children with their bodies soiled with blood and ash.

Iran: U.S. will not be ‘spared from the fire’ if war goes on

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, was adamant about his position on the Israel-Hamas conflict at the U.N. General Assembly emergency session today: Gaza and the West Bank belong only to “original” Palestinians.

“No institution or country has the right or can give any part of it of this land to another person or group,” he said, adding later that Israel’s claims of self-defense are a “very ridiculous joke.”

Amir-Abdollahian also pointed a finger at the U.S. for holding up action at the Security Council and said the country, which has provided Israel with military aid, won’t escape the consequences.

“I say frankly to the American statesman who are now managing the genocide in Palestine that we do not welcome to expansion of the war in the region, but I warn if the genocide in Gaza continues, they will not be spared from this fire,” he said.

Israeli troops backed by jets and drones raid Gaza City outskirts

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli ground forces backed by drones and fighter jets conducted another raid of Gaza Strip overnight, the Israel Defense Forces said.

The targets in the outskirts of Gaza City included anti-tank missile launch sites, military command and control centers, and individual Hamas terrorists, the IDF said.

Almost every child in Gaza ‘will be forever scarred,’ NGO says

Children in Gaza have been deprived of the critical support needed as they go through extreme physical and mental trauma, a NGO said today, as the collapsing health infrastructure copes with the sheer number of injuries.

These children “will be forever scarred by their experience, living through this terrible nightmare of killing, bombings, insecurity, death and injury,” Steve Sosebee, the founder of Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, told NBC News.

Historically almost 60% of the children had post traumatic stress disorder, he said, adding “We expect that number to be close to 100% when the violence is over.”

“It will take immense effort to even begin to address the depth of the mental health crises,” he added. More than 2,700 children have been killed and hundreds more still trapped under rubble, according to the Palestinian health ministry. 

U.S. launches strikes on Iranian-linked targets in Syria

The U.S. launched strikes on Iranian-linked targets in Syria on Thursday in retaliation for a series of drone attacks on American military bases in the region, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.

“Today, at President Biden’s direction,” Austin said, “U.S. military forces conducted self-defense strikes on two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups. These precision self-defense strikes are a response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militia groups that began on October 17.”

The U.S. military action comes amid rising tensions in the region over the conflict in Israel. Austin called the attacks “separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas” and said they don’t represent a shift in the U.S. approach to the conflict.

From Oct. 17 to Tuesday, U.S. and coalition forces were attacked at least 10 separate times in Iraq and three times in Syria by a mix of drones and rockets, the Defense Department has said. On Oct. 18, at least two one-way attack drones targeted al-Tanf military base in southern Syria, U.S. Central Command said. On the same day, there were two separate drone attacks against U.S. and coalition forces stationed at al-Asad base in western Iraq.

Read the full story here.

E.U. calls for humanitarian pauses for Gaza aid

European Union leaders urged pauses in Israeli bombing and Hamas rocket attacks so humanitarian aid could be delivered to Gaza, and President Joe Biden told Iran’s supreme leader not to target U.S. personnel in the Middle East.

Israel’s military, which has been carrying out limited raids into Gaza as it prepares for a ground incursion of the enclave, said early Friday it was “currently conducting raids in the Gaza Strip” as part of preparations for the next stage of the operation.

As the plight of Palestinian civilians grows more desperate, the issue of whether to have humanitarian pauses or cease-fire agreements in the Hamas-run coastal enclave will come before the 193-member U.N. General Assembly later Friday in a draft resolution submitted by Arab states calling for a cease-fire.

Unlike in the Security Council, where resolutions on Gaza aid failed this week, no country holds a veto in the General Assembly. Resolutions are nonbinding, but they carry political weight.

The Israel-Hamas war has led to rising tensions in the U.S., fueling an alarming increase in antisemitism.

Since Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents are up 388% over the same period last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. There have also been disturbing and violent incidents against Palestinian Americans, including the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old boy.