Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said the crossings of the first British nationals was a “hugely important first step”.
He said the UK is working with Egyptian and Israeli authorities to ensure the crossing stays open, so all Britons can get out to safety in the coming days.
Image: Pic: AP
But there are still foreign nationals struggling to leave.
A UK-based academic and her five children were unable to leave Gaza for Egypt as the first group of injured evacuees moved over the Rafah border.
Dr Emilee Rauschenberger, 42, told Sky News that her family came to the border as they got notice from the UK’s Foreign Office that the crossing might be opening.
She said the family wanted to travel back to Manchester, having travelled to Gaza to visit her husband’s family three weeks ago.
“We want to leave Gaza and go back to Britain,” she said. “A few days after the war started we had to leave our homes and move to Khan Younis. We have been displaced the whole time.”
In other developments: • The UK’s foreign secretary says teams are ready to assist British nationals in Gaza as soon as they are able to leave; • The Israel Defence Forces says 16 of its troops have been killed in Gaza since Tuesday; • Hamas claims seven hostages have been killed during a strike on a refugee camp in Gaza; • Around 51 trucks carrying aid have arrived in Gaza.
‘Lots of bombing’ and daily struggles for food
Dr Rauschenberger has worked for the education organisation, the Queen Rania Foundation, in Jordan for two years.
She said her family, including her five children – aged 14, 12, 10-year-old twins and a four-year-old – have had no electricity and no sanitary drinking water while in Gaza.
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Dr Emilee Rauschenberger on trying to leave Gaza
No humanitarian aid was delivered to the area they were in, and they had to go out daily to find food, she said.
“At night there is lots of bombing, especially in the last week. It’s very difficult. I am just waiting with my five kids and my husband to go,” she said.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Foreign Office said in a text to Britons in Gaza: “Once we receive confirmation that you are permitted to cross the Rafah border, we will send a message to ask you to travel to the crossing.
“Crossings are expected to take place across a number of days.”
It said it has given a full list of names of British nationals and dependants in Gaza to Israeli and Egyptian authorities.
‘I just want to come home’
Another who didn’t cross the border today was 29-year-old Briton Zaynab Wandawi, who is in Gaza with 10 members of her family.
Speaking to Sky News, Ms Wandawi’s mother, Lalah Ali Faten, said the family travelled in hope to the border today but didn’t find their names on the list of those permitted to cross into Egypt.
Image: Zaynab Wandawi (right) and her mother Lalah Ali Faten
“They are working on a list of names, and we are very hopeful that their names will be on tomorrow’s list,” Ms Faten said.
Giving an update on her daughter’s condition from Manchester, Ms Faten said the family ran out of drinking water yesterday and have been bathing in seawater.
“The last message I got from her was her saying ‘Mum, I just want to come home’,” Ms Faten said.
‘Be ready to go’
Meanwhile, Dr Abdel Hammad, a surgeon at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, said he was told “be ready to go” by the Foreign Office as he waited to cross the border into Egypt.
He arrived in Gaza on 6 October, a day before the attack on Israel by Hamas.
Dr Hammad told Sky News that he was about 5km from the Rafah crossing, and was waiting to be allowed through.
Image: Dr Abdel Hammad
President Joe Biden said American citizens were expected to be among the first group of foreigners able to leave Gaza for Egypt via the Rafah crossing today.
“We expect American citizens to exit today, and we expect to see more depart over the coming days,” he wrote on social media platform, X.
A deal, mediated by Qatar, was struck between Egypt, Israel, and Hamas, to open the crossing to foreign and dual nationals currently trapped in Gaza.
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0:50
Crowds enter Rafah crossing from Gaza
Image: Palestinians cross to the Egyptian side of the border. Pic: AP
Footage broadcast on Egyptian state TV – and seen by Sky News – showed injured people being transported in ambulances across the border from the Gaza Strip.
Egypt’s health ministry said a field hospital has been set up in an Egyptian town near the crossing.
Image: Earlier, a convoy of Egyptian ambulances were seen waiting to go through the Rafah crossing from the Egyptian side
The Italian foreign minister also confirmed four Italian citizens, one of whom was accompanied by his Palestinian wife, were also among those who have already left Gaza.
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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.