Issued on: 26/10/2023 – 05:45Modified: 26/10/2023 – 13:43

• The Israeli army said it sent tanks, troops and armoured bulldozers into the Gaza Strip in a “targeted raid” overnight that destroyed multiple sites before withdrawing from the Hamas-controlled territory.

• Lebanese state media said Israel conducted air strikes and drone attacks early Thursday in southern Lebanon, near the tense Israel-Lebanon border where Israeli forces and Lebanese Hezbollah militants have exchanged fire over the past two weeks.

• EU leaders agreed at a summit on Thursday to call for the establishment of “humanitarian corridors and pauses” to get urgently-needed aid into Gaza.

• Hamas on Thursday released a list of almost 7,000 names of Gazans it said had been killed in Israeli strikes after US President Joe Biden cast doubt on its toll figures.

• The death toll in Gaza rose to at least 7,028, including 2,913 children, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said Thursday. The Israeli military updated the number of people confirmed taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 to 224. The official number of people killed in the Hamas attack has not been revised since Saturday; it remains at 1,400.

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Key developments of Wednesday, October 25:

A “massive” Israeli ground incursion into the Gaza Strip would be “a mistake”, French President Emmanuel Macron said in Cairo, warning it would harm civilians without ensuring Israel’s long-term security.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “shocked” at fierce Israeli criticism of a statement he made on Tuesday about the war between Israel and Hamas.  After condemning Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack, Guterres said Tuesday it “did not happen in a vacuum”, and that “the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

The UN warned that it is on the verge of running out of fuel in the Gaza Strip, forcing it to sharply curtail relief efforts in the blockaded territory.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Palestinian militant group Hamas is not a terrorist organisation but a liberation group waging a battle to protect its land. In a speech to his party’s lawmakers in parliament, Erdogan said Israel had taken advantage of Turkey’s good intentions and that he would not go to Israel as previously planned.

The UN Security Council again failed to address the Israel-Hamas war, rejecting rival resolutions by the United States and Russia.

Read our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. 

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)

• Israel-Hamas war
• Israel
• Gaza Strip
• Emmanuel Macron
• Benjamin Netanyahu