Israel-Gaza war live: Gaza death toll passes 40,000 as ceasefire and hostage talks begin in Doha | Israel-Gaza war

About 400 Hezbollah members dead after 10 months of Israel clashes

Israel has said nearly all Israelis evacuated from their homes near the Gaza Strip in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attack have returned, AFP reports.

More than 80% of the southern Israeli region’s 50,000-plus population had moved back by July, with 3,700 more people returning since, according to the government agency tasked with reconstruction and rehabilitation of the border communities affected by the deadly attack.

Israeli authorities had offered evacuees from the Gaza border area accommodation in hotels paid for by the state, but that arrangement expired today.

Residents of 10 kibbutz communities that were badly damaged in the Hamas attack will be given temporary housing for at least another year in various locations, Israel’s Tekuma Authority said in a statement.

A handful of other communities that are very close to the Gaza border have been declared unsafe due to the threat of rocket fire from the Palestinian territory, it added.

Earlier today, 40 far-right Israeli activists tried to break into the Gaza Strip to conduct a Jewish prayer service, but were stopped by security services.

“We were honored to take part in an attempt to hold Shacharit prayers inside the Gaza Strip, with the belief that Gaza is part of the Greater Land of Israel and from the clear understanding that only settlement can be considered a victory,” said a statement by the unnamed group, published by the Israeli public broadcaster Kan news.

“And only a Jewish Gaza will remove the threat of rockets, return the hostages from Gaza, and bring security to the south and country as a whole,” the statement continued.

Earlier this year the US and EU sanctioned some Israeli settler groups and key individuals associated with them for their role in extremist violence against Palestinians.

The White House has urged all sides to attend the Gaza ceasefire talks in Doha in order to get a deal implemented, urging Israel and Hamas to compromise and saying progress is still possible in coming days.

Hamas officials, who have accused Israel of stalling, have not joined today’s talks. However mediators planned to consult with Hamas’ Doha-based negotiating team after the meeting, officials told Reuters.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby, in an interview on CNN, also said information shows Iran has not moved off its threat to attack Israel, including potentially through proxies. The US is watching the situation closely and is prepared, though “hopefully it doesn’t come to that,” he said.

Ceasefire and hostage-release talks begin in Doha

With the death toll as per the Gaza health ministry passing 40,000 after 10 months of war, the small, densely packed territory is crammed with bodies, Associated Press reports. Witness accounts and video footage show, the news agency says, that bodies are buried in backyards and parking lots, beneath staircases and along roadsides. Others lie under rubble, their families unsure they will ever be counted.

However, many of these people are not included in the official count. As Emma Graham Harrison reports, the official figures only registers those killed by bombs and bullets as war dead.

“People who died due to indirect impacts of war, including diseases, starvation and the collapse of the healthcare system, are not included [in the war dead],” Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian ministry of health, told Emma. “A committee will be formed to count these [victims], which will start work immediately after the end of the war.”

Israeli officials question the death toll given by the authorities in Gaza and argue that because Hamas controls the government there, its health officials cannot provide credible figures. However, after multiple conflicts between 2009 and 2021, United Nations investigators drew up their own lists of the dead and found they closely matched ones from Gaza.

“Unfortunately, we have the sad experience of coordinating with the Ministry of Health on casualty figures every few years,” Farhan Haq, a spokesperson for the UN secretary general, has said. “Their figures have proven to be generally accurate.”

A Hamas guard who killed an Israeli hostage on Monday acted ‘in revenge’ against instructions after he got news that his two children were killed in an Israeli strike, the spokesperson for the group’s armed al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Ubaida, said on Thursday in a post on Telegram reported by Reuters. The incident doesn’t represent the group’s ethics, he added.

Israel’s spy chief is to join his US and Egyptian counterparts and Qatar’s prime minister for a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks in the Qatari capital Doha, Reuters reports.

Israel’s delegation includes David Barnea, head of the domestic security service Ronen Bar and the military’s hostages chief Nitzan Alon, defence officials said.

CIA director Bill Burns and US Middle East envoy Brett McGurk will represent Washington at the talks, convened by Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, with Egypt’s intelligence chief Abbas Kamel also expected in Doha.

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters on Thursday that the group is committed to the negotiation process and urged mediators to secure Israel’s commitment to a proposal Hamas agreed to in early July, which he said would end the war and required a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

One of the two men killed in the West Bank by an Israeli air strike earlier today was a former prisoner of Israel released in November, AFP reports.

It was the second such fatality within three days involving a former Palestinian inmate freed during a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

Wael Misha, 18, was one of 240 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails in November in exchange for 105 hostages held in Gaza, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club watchdog said.

The exchange took place during the week-long November ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The Palestinian news agency, Wafa said a woman and a child were among seven wounded in the strike on Balata. The Israeli military said two armed militants were killed in a strike.

A military adviser from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace force has died following injuries sustained in Syria over recent weeks, Iran’s Fars news agency, which is managed by the Revolutionary Guard, reported.

“Colonel Ahmadreza Afshari was martyred due to injuries sustained from aerial bombardment from the coalition violating Syria,” Revolutionary Guard commander Hossein Salami said.

Iranian media did not give a precise date for the strike, but said Afshari sustained his injuries between late July and early August.

The US and Israel have both carried out strikes in Syria against Iran-aligned factions, where Tehran’s influence has grown since it began supporting President Bashar al-Assad in a civil war that started in 2011.

Ten months into Israel’s war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. A majority of the dead are civilians and the total represents nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or one in every 50 residents.

But even that figure does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses. “This number, 40,000, includes only bodies that were received and buried,” said Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian ministry of health. “New procedures are being tested to include those who are missing or known to be under the rubble on the list of the dead, but they have not yet been approved.”

About 10,000 airstrike victims are thought to remain entombed in collapsed buildings, Hams said, because there is little heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins looking for them.

The Guardian has published a report about this grim milestone being reached:

More than 40,000 have been killed since 7 October last year

The IDF has ordered more evacuations across Khan Younis in Gaza.

The IDF’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee said in a post on X: “All residents of Blocks 38, 39, 41, 42 in Al-Qarara 3 and Al-Sathar neighborhoods” in the southeastern Gaza Strip to leave their homes and shelters.

“Against the backdrop of the continuous firing of rockets by Hamas and terrorist organizations from your areas, the [Israeli army] will act forcefully against these terrorist elements immediately.”

Israel has issued numerous evacuation orders for areas in and surrounding Khan Younis in recent weeks as it continues its offensive in Gaza.