Fearful medics and patients are fleeing a hospital in Rafah and transfers of the sick and injured via a border crossing with Egypt are at a standstill due to Israel’s military operation, doctors and residents said.

The two main crossings into the southern Gaza Strip remain shut, virtually cutting off the enclave from outside aid with very few stores stationed inside, said UN agencies yesterday.

Israel played down the likelihood of a ceasefire in Gaza yesterday after Hamas said it had accepted a proposal from mediators, even as residents fled the city of Rafah in fear of an Israeli assault.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels said yesterday they had exposed a “spy” network aiding the United States and Israel and arrested suspected members of it.

Lebanese official media said an Israeli strike yesterday wounded three people in the country’s east, with Hezbollah saying it launched “dozens of Katyusha rockets” at an Israeli base in retaliation.

Some 600,000 children packed into Gaza’s Rafah city face “further catastrophe,” Unicef warned yesterday, urging against their forced relocation after Israel ordered an evacuation ahead of its long-threatened ground invasion.

Palestinian civilians in the southern Gazan city of Rafah voiced despair yesterday as Israel dropped fliers urging them to evacuate for their own “safety” ahead of a “limited” military operation.

Prospects for a Gaza ceasefire appeared slim yesterday as Hamas reiterated its demand for an end to the offensive in exchange for the freeing of hostages, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flatly ruled that out.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that his government has decided to shut down the Qatar-based news channel Al Jazeera, with which his administration has had a long-running feud.

An Israeli airstrike killed four members of a family in a house in a border village in southern Lebanon yesterday, civil defence and security sources said.

The chief of the United Nations’ food program has warned of a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza and reiterated calls for a ceasefire in Israel’s offensive in the Palestinian enclave.

Students at Trinity College Dublin protesting Israel’s offensive in Gaza have built an encampment that forced the university to restrict campus access yesterday and close the Book of Kells exhibition, one of Ireland’s top tourist attractions.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels threatened to extend their attacks on Israel-bound shipping to the Mediterranean after months of strikes on vessels in the Red Sea.

Hamas negotiators yesterday began intensified talks on a possible Gaza truce that would see a halt to the fighting and the return to Israel of some hostages, a Hamas official told Reuters, with the CIA director already present in Cairo for the indirect diplomacy.

An Israeli military incursion into Gaza’s southern city of Rafah could lead to a “bloodbath”, the World Health Organization warned Friday, announcing contingency plans.

Police have arrested nearly 2,200 people during pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the United States in recent weeks, sometimes using riot gear, tactical vehicles and flash-bang devices to clear tent encampments and occupied buildings.

An Israeli incursion in Rafah would put the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at risk and be a huge blow to the aid operations of the entire enclave, the UN humanitarian office said yesterday, as the World Health Organization announced contingency plans for an incursion.

Schools and many offices were closed across the United Arab Emirates yesterday as heavy rains returned to the desert country just two weeks after record downpours that experts linked to climate change.

Doubts grew yesterday over the fate of a Gaza truce plan that, as the week began, had raised hopes of an end to nearly seven months of Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave.

At least 141 Palestinian journalists and media professionals have been killed and 70 others injured in Israel’s ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip, the government media office said yesterday.