Summary:

Israel‘s military on Friday ordered residents of Al-Bureij, in central Gaza, to move south immediately, indicating a new focus of the ground assault that has already devastated much of the Strip. The UN Security Council was poised on Friday to vote on a much-delayed resolution to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza after Washington signalled support following resistance to earlier draft proposals. More than half a million people in Gaza are starving due to insufficient food entering the territory since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a UN report said. French President Emmanuel Macron visited Jordan on Thursday for talks with King Abdullah II on aid deliveries to the besieged Gaza Strip. Israeli officials say 1,139 were killed in the Hamas-led October 7 attacks in southern Israel, among them 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children. More than 20,000 people have been killed in Israel’s ensuing assault on the Gaza Strip, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave.

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UN says more than 1 in 4 people in Gaza are starving because of war. Fourteen Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in three separate attacks on Thursday in northern, central and southern Gaza Strip, medics said. For journalists, the first 10 weeks of the war have been the deadliest recorded, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a report on Thursday. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said it had delivered food into war-torn Gaza through the Israeli Kerem Shalom border crossing in the first direct aid convoy from Jordan. Residents of Khan Younis in Gaza reported intensifying gun battles between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces in the centre and eastern districts of the southern city.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)