Speaking on Thursday evening, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari addresses the "unusual footage" from a mosque in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.

In a statement,, external Hagari says Israeli soldiers are required to act professionally and "anyone who does not conduct themselves according to IDF values will face corresponding measures".

The footage Hagari is referring to shows some of the IDF's soldiers singing and praying down a microphone in a mosque in Jenin.

The clips, which are circulating on social media, show scenes of the mosque. In one recording, a song about banishing darkness, associated with the current Jewish festival of Hanukkah, is heard sung in Hebrew through a loudspeaker in a minaret. The person filming laughs and joins in with the song.

Other clips show soldiers inside a mosque reciting a Jewish prayer down a microphone. The Palestinian foreign ministry has condemned what it calls a "mockery of [the mosque's] sanctity".

It comes during an operation against militants in the city, which has so far left 11 Palestinians dead, the Palestinian health ministry says.

Let's bring you another update on the latest comms blackout currently affecting Gaza.

As we mentioned earlier, internet and phone networks across the Palestinian territory again went down on Thursday - with the region's main telecoms firm blaming the "ongoing aggression".

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says it "completely lost contact" with its operations room in the territory, expressing concern for the safety of its emergency workers.

The charity describes this as the fifth such outage in Gaza.

Image source, Getty Images

It’s been more than 45 years since the first Arab-Israeli peace talks, launched by the surprise visit to Jerusalem by the president of Egypt.

Some of the talks have been successful - including between Israel and Jordan, and Israel and several Arab League states. But a settlement has still not been reached in what many consider to be the core conflict - the dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The first talks between Israel and the Palestinians - represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) - didn't happen until 1992.

The Oslo Agreement the following year stipulated that Israeli troops would withdraw in stages from the West Bank and Gaza, and that a "Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority" would be set up for a five-year transitional period.

The two sides agreed to eventually hold “final status” talks, but Hamas and other Palestinian rejectionist groups did not accept Oslo and launched suicide bomb attacks on Israelis. There was also opposition within Israel from the right wing, which became dominant, and Oslo was only partially implemented.

On-off talks continued down the years afterwards, but they collapsed in 2014 and no agreement between the two sides has ever been reached.

Image source, Anadolu via Getty Images

The United Nations has issued a statement warning the "tragic consequences of this conflict will be disproportionately borne by women and girls for generations".

“Pregnant women, along with young children, older persons and persons with disabilities, are at higher risk of communicable diseases, malnutrition and death, all of which become increasingly likely as Gaza’s civilian infrastructure collapses", the statement says.

The UN says the interruption to housing, school and healthcare will destroy the future of young girls in Gaza, which it describes as "already fragile".

Regarding reports of sexual violence by Hamas, the UN adds that these must be investigated and people responsible "must be held accountable".

Witnesses have told the BBC that there were "multiple signs of sexual assault" on the bodies of those attacked on 7 October.

Here are some of the latest pictures that have reached us from Gaza's second city, Khan Younis - where the Israeli military stepped up its shelling of the main street on Thursday, as we reported below.

Image source, Reuters

Image source, Reuters

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Rushdi Abu Alouf
Reporting from Istanbul

Image source, Reuters

The ground incursion into Khan Younis has entered a critical stage.

During the day, Israeli artillery intensified its shelling on Jalal Street, the main road leading into the city centre.

One of the paramedics working in the city in south Gaza told me: "A call came to the ambulance unit at Nasser Hospital. We went to rescue injured people in the city centre, but we were unable to get there because of the intensity of the bombing."

While the Israeli army increases its pressure on Khan Younis, the second largest city in Gaza, Palestinians continue to flee to the much smaller Rafah.

The city on the border with Egypt is unable to accommodate the flood of newcomers pouring into it every day.

Safaa Mahmoud told me as she was leaving Khan Younis: "My father is sick and cannot bear the cold weather."

She added: "We spent the night without shelter, water, or food. We do not have money to buy medicine for my father. We left our home in Gaza under fire to Khan Younis, and now we have to leave again to go to Rafah."

Ali Abbas Ahmadi
Live reporter

Image source, Getty Images

"This feels like a second Nakba," Naim al-Khatib, a Palestinian from Gaza City, tells me.

The Nakba, or 'Catastrophe' in Arabic, refers to the events following 14 May 1948, when Israel declared independence. In a war which began the next day, up to 750,000 Palestinians who had lived on that land fled or were expelled from their homes.

Neither they nor their descendants have been allowed by Israel to return, and many still live in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and other neighbouring countries.

Al-Khatib says his flight from Gaza City to Cairo feels like the stories his parents used to tell him about fleeing their homes in 1948.

They left everything, he says, believing they would be back in "a matter of days or weeks".

That is one reason some Gazans have been reluctant to leave their homes, despite repeated evacuation orders by Israel.

Al-Khatib says he would have remained too if his family had left safely.

"Everything we go through, our mindset keeps rejecting the idea of leaving our home for fear of not being able to get back," he says.

He adds that many people are posting photos on social media of themselves leaving their homes last month alongside those of their ancestors leaving theirs in 1948.

"But those photos are in colour, not in black and white," he says.

Earlier this month, a senior UN official accused Israel of seeking to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt. Israel rejects this allegation, saying "there is not, never was and never will be an Israeli plan to move the residents of Gaza to Egypt."

Ali Abbas Ahmadi
Live reporter

Image source, Naim al-Khatib

Naim al-Khatib fled Gaza to Egypt in November, and describes the difficult emotions when he was forced to leave his home unsure of when he would return.

"It was a lot of mixed feelings actually," he says. "On one hand I'm happy to have saved myself and my family during the hardship and plight of war."

But on the other hand he is worried that he won't be able to return home to Gaza City. He describes how he fled with just a "few clothes and few papers", and left behind friends and family.

"All my life is there waiting for me."

Al-Khatib was forced to flee twice before eventually leaving the Gaza Strip for Egypt in November. He says he was allowed to leave because one of his daughters holds an American passport.

Speaking to me from Cairo, he says those mixed feelings remain - he wants to return, but fears what he will find when he gets back.

"I'm worried I won't be able to get back to my home to Gaza, but I have no plans to leave Gaza. I left it forcibly for the single reason of saving my family," he says.

But at the same time, he adds, he is worried that he has lost the means to support three college-going children.

"Getting back immediately to Gaza worries me also, because I don't know how life is like at the moment, whether I will be able to resume a normal life, get back my financial resources. All that worries me and keeps me up at night."

Image source, Naim al-Khatib

US President Joe Biden says he wants Israel to "be more careful" in pursuing its war with Hamas.

Asked by a reporter whether he wanted Israel to scale back its assault on Gaza, the US leader said he wanted Israel to do more to protect civilians:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier told President Joe Biden in a phone call that the US had a historic responsibility to secure a lasting ceasefire in Gaza as swiftly as possible.

In a statement about the conversation, Erdogan's office said he told Biden a ceasefire could be reached quickly if the US government stopped offering unconditional support to Israel.

Turkey's leader also said Israel's prolonged attacks may have negative global consequences.

And here's news of another planned US visit. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, will tomorrow meet Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, an American official is quoted by Reuters as saying.

The PA governs parts of the occupied West Bank not under Israeli control - and is a separate organisation to the government that operates in Gaza, which is run by Israel's enemy Hamas.

The top US general, General Charles Q Brown, will join US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for meetings in Israel in the next few days.

The announcement was made by Pentagon press secretary, Major General Patrick Ryder in a press conference.

Austin's visit was announced just a couple of days ago, and he will also spend time in Qatar and Bahrain.

This will be the latest in a series of visits made by top US officials to the country since the war began - national security adviser Jake Sullivan is there at the moment, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited last month.

Mark Regev - a senior adviser to the Israeli prime minister - has rejected comments made by US President Joe Biden that Israel is "indiscriminately bombing" parts of Gaza.

On Tuesday, Biden told a closed-door fundraising event that Israel was losing international support as a result.

Speaking to the BBC, Regev says the assertion is "not true".

He adds that, at a meeting earlier today, the Israeli military showed the US its "rigorous process" of selecting targets.

Asked whether concerns Israel's allies have raised about civilian deaths in Gaza have affected the country's decision-making, he says "of course".

"We can disagree on tactics but we share the same goal," he says, adding that Israel has done its "utmost" to protect civilians and facilitate access for humanitarian aid.

Barbara Plett Usher
US State Department correspondent, BBC News

President Biden’s recent comments about “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza has heightened scrutiny on whether Israel is meeting conditions for the use of American weapons.

The administration’s arms transfer policy requires the State Department to determine that the weapons it sells are unlikely to be used for genocide, crimes against humanity, breaches of the Geneva conventions or serious violations of international law.

The spokesman Matthew Miller was pressed on this again today. He repeated that the department is monitoring and collecting information on the conflict, but has made no legal determination on whether Israel is complying with the laws of war.

He also stressed that the administration makes clear to Israelis they should be doing more to minimise civilian harm in Gaza, and has seen “progress in a number of areas".

But there’s growing disquiet among some in congress about Israel’s military conduct. Five Democratic senators wrote to the president last week asking for details about US oversight and accountability measures on arms sales to Israel.

Biden told a closed-door fundraising event on Tuesday that Israel was starting to lose international support because of its destructive bombing campaign.

Earlier we reported that the Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely said “absolutely no” when asked if Palestinians should have their own state in any peace deal in the future.

The two-state solution is the idea that establishing an independent Palestine alongside Israel would create a way for the two peoples to co-exist peacefully.

Now UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron has branded her rejection of a two-state solution as "disappointing", but says "we should not put too much weight on one interview".

"I think it is still possible but I think the pathway from where we are today to getting there is very, very difficult," Cameron told the European Affairs Committee in the UK's House of Lords.

Earlier, he said that "extremist settlers" responsible for violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank would no longer be permitted to come to the UK.

Lipika Pelham
BBC World Service

Image source, Getty Images

The worldwide writers' association PEN International says it is "gravely concerned", external at the arrest by Israeli forces of a prominent Palestinian artist, Ahmed Tobasi, and the general manager of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Mustafa Sheta.

Speaking to the BBC, the theatre's associate artistic director Zoe Lafferty said Israeli soldiers had broken into the theatre on Wednesday morning as part of a raid on the camp, destroyed its offices, and later stormed Sheta's house.

Tobasi was born in Jenin refugee camp, joined the armed group Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a teenager and spent four years in an Israeli prison before joining the theatre. One of the plays he has performed in, And Here I Am, tells his own story.

PEN International has called for both men to be released immediately. Israel has not yet commented on the reports - the BBC has asked the Israeli authorities about the men's reported arrest.

The US government wants the war between Israel and Hamas to end "as soon as possible", a national security spokesman for the White House has said.

John Kirby was speaking to reporters in Washington DC about today's visit to Tel Aviv by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

He said Sullivan discussed Israel moving to "low-intensity operations" in Gaza "in the near future" in the talks.

"But I don't want to put a timestamp on it,” Kirby added.

He also said the US was not "dictating terms to the Israelis of how long it has to take".

"[The war] has to take as long as they feel they need to take to be able to eliminate this threat, but obviously we all want it to be over as soon as possible," he said.

Israel's defence minister told Sullivan the conflict would last "several months" more - though CBS News has cited two US officials as saying Israel has told the White House that the current phase of the offensive should be over in two to three weeks.

Ido Vock
BBC News

German authorities say they have made four arrests of suspected Hamas members linked to an alleged plot to attack Jewish sites.

Danish authorities also said they had arrested three people accused of preparing an attack. It was not clear whether the Danish and German investigations were linked.

Danish PM Mette Frederiksen said the threat was "as serious as it gets".

German prosecutors said in a statement that three suspects linked to Hamas were arrested in Berlin and one in the Netherlands. Hamas, which runs Gaza, is a banned terrorist group across Europe.

The three held in Berlin were Lebanese and Egyptian, according to German prosecutors.

• Read more here

Image source, Getty Images

Hamas ideology will be tough to dismantlepublished at 19:15 Greenwich Mean Time 14 December 2023

19:15 GMT 14 December 2023

Hugo Bachega
Middle East correspondent, in Jerusalem

Up until now, Israeli authorities say around 7,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, from an estimated 20,000 the group had before the war.

In some areas in Gaza, Hamas and its allies are fighting back. And top Hamas leaders have not been captured or killed yet, including the head of the group in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. Israel believes they are hiding in Khan Younis, which has been the focus of the Israeli military in the south.

Even if the Hamas infrastructure is destroyed, its ideology is likely to resist. There are some signs, for example, that Hamas’s popularity is rising in the occupied West Bank.

Amid so much loss of life and suffering, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani gave a warning last weekend: the war risked radicalising an entire generation across the Middle East.

Hugo Bachega
Middle East correspondent, in Jerusalem

Image source, Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, again, said the war against Hamas will continue “until absolute victory”.

This time, the remarks were made as he met the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who is visiting Israel as calls grow for a ceasefire in Gaza amid mounting casualties and a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Since launching the war in response to the 7 October attacks carried out by Hamas, Netanyahu has vowed to eliminate the group.

Vast areas of Gaza have been turned into ruins and more than 18,000 people have been killed, according to the local health authorities, including around 7,000 children. Hundreds of thousands of others have been displaced, and are now struggling to survive amid widespread shortages of basic supplies.

Sullivan came to Israel to discuss a possible timeline for the end of the conflict. But is Israel close to eradicating Hamas?

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told Sullivan that destroying the group would take “more than several months”. Israeli military officials reportedly say they still need weeks before they can finish intensive operations.