The Israeli military has said it is expanding ground operations and warned residents of Gaza City to move south.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), said late on Friday: “In addition to the attacks that we carried out in recent days, ground forces are expanding their activity this evening.
“The IDF is acting with great force… to achieve the objectives of the war.”
Overnight Israeli fighter jets hit 150 underground targets in the northern Gaza Strip, the IDF said on Saturday.
This included “terror tunnels, underground combat spaces and additional underground infrastructure” and resulted in the deaths of several Hamas members, it added.
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IDF ‘expanding ground operations’
Hamas has said its fighters were clashing with Israeli troops in Gaza’s northeastern town of Beit Hanoun and in the central area of al Bureij.
“The al Qassam brigades and all the Palestinian resistance forces are completely ready to confront (Israel’s) aggression with full force and frustrate its incursions,” Hamas said in a statement early on Saturday.
“Netanyahu and his defeated army will not be able to achieve any military victory.”
The Israeli military also said it has killed the head of Hamas’ aerial wing, who had helped plan the 7 October attack and was responsible for the paragliders who flew across the border.
Image: Explosions in the northern Gaza Strip. Pic: AP
The IDF said troops had used vessels to attack “Hamas military infrastructure”, with support from aircraft, along the coast in the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday night.
Officials released footage of what they said was the raid, but did not go into further details.
The video showed explosions near the sea and soldiers firing their weapons in the dark.
However, Hamas disputed the IDF’s version of events in a statement and said its forces had repelled the raiders, Israeli media reported.
Israeli forces also said they carried out a separate ground raid on the outskirts of Gaza City on Thursday night, as part of a second wave of recent incursions into the territory.
Image: IDF says fighter jets struck targets in the northern Gaza Strip overnight. Pic: IDF
Israel has amassed hundreds of thousands of troops along the border with Gaza ahead of an expected ground offensive.
However, according to Sky News’s military analyst, Sean Bell, any offensive is likely to start with moving tanks and armoured vehicles across the border.
“There are lots of phases military operations go to, to gradually ramp up and de-risk the ultimate invasion,” he said.
“And we’ve seen that over the last few nights – an increase in the bombing campaign, what the IDF calls raids – all of this is testing Hamas’s defences and what threats will face the IDF as they get closer to mounting the offensive.
“The first phase of that is likely to be an armoured push over the border, probably to encircle the city of Gaza.
“But the challenge is the IDF doing an urban battle on foot – clearing Gaza City and worse the tunnels. I think that will be an extremely dangerous undertaking.”
Ground invasion seems imminent – but Israel won’t announce it before it does
An announcement on Friday evening by the military that it would be expanding its raids into the territory followed what appeared to be a significant ramping up of an already unprecedented barrage of airstrikes against the Palestinian enclave during the day.
The night sky over Gaza flashed orange and the boom of explosives impacting could be heard loudly from the Israeli town of Ashkelon, around eight miles away.
The language used by Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defence Forces spokesman, to describe what was planned, stopped short of declaring this to be the moment of the full ground invasion.
But Israel is not going to announce such a move before it has begun, hoping to maintain some element of surprise.
Commanders have also said that this war against Hamas would be conducted differently to previous conflicts – though it has not specified how. It makes it hard to predict what will come next.
Israel is under pressure to delay the invasion while more time is given to negotiate the release of more than 220 hostages taken captive by Hamas.
There are also significant concerns about the risk of a widening of the war against Hamas triggering an escalation into a regional conflict.
But the huge military build-up along Israel’s border with Gaza points to a clear intent by political and military leaders to push forward with their plans to invade.
Meanwhile, Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister of Israel’s neighbour Jordan, on Friday accused Israel of “launching a ground war on Gaza”.
“[The] outcome will be a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions for years to come,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He called on the UN General Assembly to support a resolution, put forward by Jordan on behalf of Arab nations, calling for a humanitarian ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
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Loud explosions heard in Gaza
The resolution by the 193-strong world body was approved on Friday – despite Israel and the US both voting against it and the UK abstaining.
However, it does not force any action on either Israel or Hamas.
Israel accuses Hamas of launching attacks from Gaza hospitals
He claimed the Israeli authorities had “concrete evidence” that hundreds of Hamas fighters who took part in the 7 October terrorist atrocity in southern Israel afterwards “flooded” into Shifa hospital, the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip.
Image: Israel has amassed hundreds of thousands of troops and military vehicles at the border with Gaza. File pic: AP
“Right now, terrorists move freely in Shifa hospital and other hospitals in Gaza,” the spokesperson said.
“Hamas’s use of hospitals is systematic… When medical facilities are used for terror purposes, they are liable to lose their protection from attack in accordance with international law.
“The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) will continue making efforts to minimise harm to the civilian population and will continue to act in accordance with international law.”
It was not immediately possible to independently verify the claims.
Another IDF spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, was asked by Sky News if the briefing was to soften the ground for the Israeli military to begin strikes on hospitals.
Image: IDF spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner
Asked if hospitals would no longer be afforded protection under international law, he said: “If these actions continue from hospitals, under certain conditions, hospitals could indeed lose the protections that they are entitled to.
“They (Hamas) have to leave hospitals, they have to let people leave hospitals, they can’t tell them to say and hold them hostage in hospitals.”
However, a doctor from north London, who is currently working in Gaza, claimed the Israeli briefing was an “outlandish excuse” to target hospitals.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah said: “At the end of the day, what they need to be reminded of, continuously, by everybody, and press included, is that the targeting of any hospital is a war crime, regardless of what outlandish excuses they might provide.”
Image: Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah
However, Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said those in Gaza who speak out against Hamas can “face consequences”.
Speaking to Sky News, he said: “If that doctor knows, as we do, that Hamas has built a headquarters in the basement of his hospital, can he say so to Sky?
“Of course, he cannot.”
More than one million have fled their homes
According to Gazaauthorities, more than 7,300 Palestinians have now been killed in waves of airstrikes by Israel in retaliation for a cross-border massacre carried out by Hamas in the south of the country on 7 October.
Officials said the dead include more than 3,000 children and over 1,500 women.
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He also said Israel must allow more aid into Gaza amid a blockade he said is being used to “collectively punish more than two million people”.
Gaza’s sole power station shut down due to lack of fuel days after the start of the war, and Israel has barred all fuel deliveries, saying it believes Hamas would steal them for military purposes.
Internet and mobile phone services have also been cut off in the Gaza Strip, a local telecoms firm and the Red Crescent said.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.
Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.
“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.
“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”
Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.
Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.
Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.
Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.
They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.
Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.
“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’
It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.
Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.
“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.
Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.
He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.
“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.