November 16, 2023 Israel-Hamas war

Our live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has moved here.

The United Nations human rights chief has called on Israel to grant his team access to Gaza to investigate competing claims about the Al-Shifa Hospital.

“We need to look into this by having access. We cannot rely on one or the other party when it comes to this,” Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told CNN’s Beck Anderson when asked about allegations by the Israeli military that Hamas was hiding weapons at the hospital.

He said the situation needs an “independent international investigation, because we have different narratives.”

Pressure on Israel: Israel is under growing international pressure to uncover proof of what it has described as a Hamas command and control center under the Al-Shifa Hospital, as Israeli forces launched a raid at the facility early Wednesday. The Hamas-run government media office denied it was using the hospital as a command and control center — calling the Israeli claims “baseless lies.”

Türk said hospitals had special protection at all times under humanitarian law.

Request for access to Gaza and the West Bank: Türk said investigators could not go to Gaza “while the bombs are falling or while military operations are taking place,” and so his team was monitoring the situation from afar for now. He said he previously asked the Israeli government for access to Gaza and the occupied West Bank but was “still waiting for the answer.”

The actions of both Israel and Hamas since the militant group’s massacre of an estimated 1,200 people on October 7 must be investigated, Türk said.

International humanitarian law in the conflict: Since Hamas launched its brazen October 7 attacks and Israel responded with intensive air strikes and a ground offensive, both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.

“We have seen … grave breaches of international humanitarian law,” Türk said, speaking broadly of the actions from both sides.

With Israeli leaders declaring control of the northern part of Gaza, including Gaza City, there are growing indications that a ground offensive into the southern part of the strip could be imminent.

Aid organizations said any Israeli move into the south of the enclave could make an already bad humanitarian situation considerably worse.

Here are other headlines you should know:

The director of Al-Shifa Hospital on Thursday described a grim picture of the unfolding humanitarian crisis within the medical complex in the Gaza Strip.

In a phone interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic, Mohammad Abu Salmiya spoke of desperate conditions affecting over 650 wounded people, 36 premature babies, 45 kidney patients and 5,000 displaced people.

Abu Salmiya said some there were starving children. 

He reported the death of a kidney patient, with four others on the brink of death due to critical conditions and the absence of dialysis for days.

Abu Salmiya accused the Israeli military of besieging the hospital, sabotaging sections and spending the last 48 hours freely roaming the premises.

On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had begun “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area in the Shifa Hospital.”

Expressing frustration, Abu Salmiya held the world and the Israeli occupation responsible for the dire circumstances, urging immediate intervention.

 The hospital resembles a large prison holding over 7,000 displaced people, medical staff, patients and wounded all while it is facing a severe shortage of essentials, the director said. The Israeli military assault has led to a complete breakdown of life-saving services, leaving the hospital incapable of providing for its inhabitants, he added.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) expressed deep concern Thursday over the fourth communications blackout to hit Gaza after Paltel Group’s announcement of a complete shutdown of communication services across the Strip due to a severe fuel shortage.

This disruption puts internet and phone connectivity at serious risk, posing a grave threat to journalists reporting from Gaza and their vital coverage.

Mansour urged immediate action, calling for Israel and Egypt to “immediately allow fuel into the Gaza Strip as part of the essential humanitarian assistance needed in the region.”

The blackout raises concerns about the potential impact on the flow of accurate information from Gaza and its repercussions on global understanding of the situation.

The intelligence the United States says it has collected that Hamas was using Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command node is primarily signals intelligence, three people familiar with the assessment told CNN.

This included intercepted conversations among the militants discussing the infrastructure, the sources said. Two of the people said the intelligence was solid.

Some background: Israeli special forces raided the hospital Wednesday after saying it was the site of an underground command center for Hamas — a claim denied by the militant group and hospital officials.

Israel released a photo and video Thursday of what it called an “operational tunnel shaft,” which it claimed was found inside the hospital complex.

An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson told CNN on Thursday there are hundreds of miles of tunnels all around the Gaza Strip, including near the hospital.

“We have already found 300 shafts that go into these tunnels, most of them booby trappers, including in the vicinity of that hospital,” Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler said. “Now some of these have been also closed by Hamas and others will be revealed when we find them.”

An image of the alleged Hamas tunnel that was released by the Israel Defense Forces on November 16.

The Hamas-run government media office on Thursday denied it was using Al-Shifa Hospital as a command and control center — calling the Israeli claims “baseless lies.” 

Hamas accused Israel of giving “false scenarios, fabricated narratives, and distorted information” about the Al-Shifa Medical Complex,” in a written statement.

Earlier on Thursday, the Israeli army released a video to back up its claim of uncovering a “tunnel shaft” in the grounds of Gaza’s main hospital. 

The video showed what appeared to be a hole in the ground surrounded by exposed sandy soil, broken bits of metal, and concrete scattered around it a short distance from a hospital building.

Calling the tunnel shaft claim a “ridiculous scenario,” Hamas said it was all “part of a continuous campaign of incitement and deception that has been promoted for years” to justify Israel’s wars against Gaza. “It is a failed attempt to escape future accountability and legal pursuit,” the statement said. 

The statement added that the Palestinian Ministry of Health “has repeatedly requested dozens of times from all institutions, organizations, international bodies, and relevant parties to form technical teams to visit and inspect all hospitals, in order to refute the false incitement narrative.”

Israel’s invasion of Gaza has destroyed decades of work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and set “the whole region on fire,” Jordan’s foreign minister told CNN on Thursday.

Israel had “killed any embrace of peace in the region” and its war against Hamas had pushed regional relations back more than 30 years, Safadi said.

The Jordanian government had been in talks with Israel about exchanging solar power for energy but these discussions have now stopped because people “don’t see any value” in dealing with Israel as its ground offensive in Gaza continues, Safadi said. 

He said he thought the evidence Israel had offered to back its claim that Hamas had a “command node” under the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City was “just ridiculous” and an “insult to intelligence.”

He also pushed back on Israel’s claim that its military operations in Gaza were self-defense.

Israel claims it found an “operational tunnel shaft” inside the Al-Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza City.

Israeli special forces raided the hospital — Gaza’s largest — in the early hours of Wednesday after saying for weeks it was the site of an underground command and control center for Hamas. Doctors and health officials in the Hamas-run enclave have consistently denied the accusation.

CNN cannot independently verify claims by Israel or Hamas.

The video provided by Israel shows exposed earth revealing a hole in the ground. The side of the shaft appears to be reinforced with concrete. Exposed pipes and cabling can also be seen close to the surface. 

At one point the video — which has been geolocated by CNN — tilts up to reveal one of the hospital’s main buildings about 30 meters away from the hole.

The army statement said troops had also found what they said was a booby-trapped car close by containing a large amount of weapons and ammunition.

In a televised briefing Thursday evening, IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said army engineers were working to expose the tunnel infrastructure.

Hagari also said soldiers had unearthed an operational tunnel at the Al-Rantisi hospital in northern Gaza. 

IDF soldiers move along the border with Gaza on Thursday.

Israel is getting close to destroying Hamas’ “military system” in northern Gaza, an Israel Defense Forces official said.

“We’re quite close to destroying the military system that (Hamas) had in the northern Gaza Strip,” IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi said Thursday while visiting troops fighting in the strip.

His statement comes after Israeli leaders earlier in the week said the northern part of Gaza, including Gaza City, was under Israel’s control. 

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel’s ground operations “will last for many months — and will include both the north and the south (of the Gaza Strip),” vowing to “dismantle Hamas wherever it is.” 

The United States has not made any assessment if Israel has “violated international humanitarian law,” State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said Thursday.

“We constantly are monitoring facts as they develop,” Miller said at a briefing.

Israeli forces have been conducting operations in the Gaza Strip that have led to the deaths of more than 11,000 people, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The forces have been active in and around Al-Shifa hospital after claiming that there is a Hamas command and control center in tunnels under the complex.

Under the Geneva Convention, medical facilities must not be attacked, but they can lose that protection if “they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.”

Miller said on Tuesday that the US government had not made a formal assessment about whether Israel was adhering to international humanitarian law, but said he was “not going to speak to internal deliberations inside the department.”

Miller also said the US has pressed for all parties to adhere to their obligations under international humanitarian law “to take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, and we urge all possible steps to mitigate civilian harm.”

Even as he said that the US has not formally assessed Israel to be in violation of the law, Miller reiterated comments from Secretary of State Antony Blinken “that in his (Blinken’s) judgment, far too many Palestinian civilians have been killed as a result of this conflict.”

“Far too many children have been killed as a result of this conflict,” Miller said.

Meanwhile, the UN’s humanitarian agency chief said “carnage in Gaza reaches new levels of horror every day” and called for a ceasefire.  

Medics trapped inside the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City say they are unable to reach wounded people outside because of intense fighting in the area, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said in a statement Thursday. 

From inside the hospital, ambulance crews can hear explosions and heavy gunfire, according to the group, which provides humanitarian and medical assistance.

“There are a number of martyrs and wounded in the hospital courtyard, about 30 meters away, that our teams are unable to reach,” the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said.

Al-Ahli is the only hospital in northern Gaza that is operational and able to admit patients, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late Wednesday.

The hospital can no longer conduct surgeries, a British-Palestinian surgeon working there said on Thursday. “The hospital is now effectively a first aid station,” Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said in a statement. 

Hundreds of wounded people are at the hospital with no access to surgery, Abu-Sittah added.

“They will die from their wounds,” Abu-Sittah said.

The US government has expressed concerns to the Israeli government that American passport holders from the West Bank have not been able to transit through Israel as is required under the Visa Waiver Program, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said Thursday.

“I won’t get into full details of our private diplomatic conversations, but we expect Israel to address those concerns. We expect them to be in full compliance with the Visa Waiver Program and there are remedial measures that we that are available to us if they are not,” Miller said at a briefing.

“There are a full range of remedial measures that can be taken before ultimate suspension” from the program, Miller added.

According to a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the department and its “interagency partners continually monitor implementation of program requirements by all countries in the Visa Waiver Program to ensure full implementation.”

More background: The Biden administration announced in September that Israel would join the Visa Waiver Program, which allows eligible travelers to apply to enter the US without a visa, and it went into effect in late October.

The lack of medical supplies at the Al-Shifa Hospital is forcing staff to make “harrowing” decisions, the facility’s director, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiyah, told Al-Jazeera Arabic in a phone interview from inside the complex Thursday.

Medics have had to amputate patients’ limbs to prevent the spread of infection from wounds that go untreated due to the lack of resources, he said, and there is no medicine for children suffering from diarrhea and vomiting.

Damage from raid: Al-Shifa is at the center of an ongoing Israeli military raid that started in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Abu Salmiyah said medical equipment in the MRI, CT and X-ray departments had been destroyed in the raid, as had the pharmacy, and the hospital was still completely dark due to the lack of electricity. More than 7,000 people were still trapped inside, he added.

Yehudit Waiss is seen in an undated photo.

The Israeli army says soldiers near Al-Shifa Hospital have found the body of Yehudit Waiss, who was kidnapped from the kibbutz of Be’eri on October 7. 

The body was recovered from what the army called a “structure” near the medical facility.

The statement offered no details of how she died, and it is not clear what condition the structure was in when the soldiers found the body. No details have been given about when she is believed to have died.

The Hostages and Missing Person’s Families Forum said Waiss was a 65-year-old grandmother. Her husband, Shmuel, was killed in Hamas’ attack on October 7.

Waiss has been brought back to Israeli territory, the army added, and the family is aware.

A spokesperson for the Israeli military said Waiss was killed by Hamas, without giving details on the cause of death.

This post has been updated with the latest reporting.

People in Gaza are facing an “immediate possibility of starvation” as fuel shortages cripple food production and distribution in the enclave, a United Nations organization that provides food assistance warned.

“Supplies of food and water are practically non-existent in Gaza and only a fraction of what is needed is arriving through the borders,” UN World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Cindy McCain said in a statement Thursday.

According to the WFP, only 10% of necessary food supplies has entered Gaza since the start of the war with fuel shortages severely impacting bread production as well as the distribution of essential humanitarian aid with aid trucks unable to reach their destination.

The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East reiterated these concerns, saying thousands of people taking shelter at UNRWA facilities in Gaza are “dehydrated, exhausted, hungry and shell-shocked.”

The WFP said it has provided emergency food aid to more than 700,000 displaced Gazans and is planning to reach more than one million people in the next few weeks, but stressed these needs cannot be met with only the Rafah border crossing with Egypt open.

“The only hope is opening another, safe passage for humanitarian access to bring life-saving food into Gaza,” said McCain.

Lazzarini reiterated that if the UNRWA isn’t able to get fuel soon, it runs the risk of having to suspend its “entire humanitarian operation” in the enclave.

This post has been updated with the latest comments from UNRWA.

A “total communication blackout” is underway in Gaza due to fuel shortages, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said Thursday.

Lazzarini interrupted a live news conference in Geneva to explain: “no fuel, no hospitals, no fuel, no water, no fuel, no communications.”

UNRWA noted in a post on X that the communications blackout in the enclave means UN agencies won’t be able to coordinate aid convoys to the enclave, including a planned aid operation at the Rafah Crossing Friday.

More background: Internet monitoring firm, Netblocks, also reported earlier that “Gaza is now in the midst of a major internet outage as generator fuel supplies and backups finally run out; telecom services including landline, cellular and Wi-Fi are likely to be unavailable to most residents at the present time.”

Earlier on Thursday, the primary telecom provider in Gaza, Paltel, said that “all telecom services in Gaza Strip have gone out of service as all energy resources sustaining the network have been depleted, and fuel was not allowed in.”

The White House says it remains “convinced of the soundness” of intelligence it says shows Hamas using Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command node, but again declined to provide any further details of what led to that assessment. 

“We have our own intelligence that convinces us that Hamas was using Al-Shifa as a command and control node — and most likely, as well, as a storage facility,” US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters in San Francisco, where President Joe Biden is attending a summit of Pacific leaders.

“We are still convinced of the soundness of that intelligence,” he said.

He repeated: “We’re confident in our own intelligence assessment about how Hamas was using that hospital.”

When pressed again later by CNN’s MJ Lee about whether Israel had shared any new intelligence about the facility with the United States, Kirby said White House officials were in “daily touch” with their counterparts and “certainly interested in their perspectives — what they’re seeing, what they’re doing, what they’re learning.”

But he again declined to provide any more details about what precise information was backing up the American assessment of how Hamas was using the hospital.

“I’m not going to talk about specific intelligence that may pass between the two of us. I will just go back to what I said before, and what I said on the airplane coming out here: Our own intelligence assessment is that Hamas was using, is using, Al-Shifa as a command and control node and potentially as a storage facility to support their planning and their execution of terrorist attacks in the region,” he said.

Smoke rises following Israeli artilley shelling along Lebanon's southern border with northern Israel on November 16.

Throughout Thursday morning, Israel launched missiles and artillery strikes on the outskirts of the Lebanese border villages of Naqoura, Blida, Alma Al-Shaab and Labouneh, according to the Lebanese National News Agency.

Lebanese authorities say the area of Labouneh is “almost barren due” to Israel’s use of “incendiary bombs.”

Meanwhile, sirens were activated in the northern Israeli town of Shtula after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it detected “a number of missiles” launched from Lebanon on Thursday. The IDF said the missiles fell in an open area. 

The IDF also said it was attacking areas across the border in Lebanon with artillery fire after an anti-missile hit the Dovev area in Israel, with no casualties.

The IDF also said in a post on social media that it had attacked “terrorist targets” belonging to Hezbollah on Thursday, including “several military positions.” The IDF also said it “attacked a terrorist who was operating in Lebanese territory, near the peace zone.”

Following the Israeli strikes, Hezbollah launched several attacks towards Upper Galilee in northern Israel. The Iran-backed militant group said it attacked Misgav Am, Bayad, which is across the border from the Lebanese town of Blida, the Yiftah barracks and Metula. 

The IDF said the Misgav area and IDF posts in Metula were attacked but noted there were no casualties. “IDF forces attacked the sources of the fire with artillery fire,” it said on social media.

The IDF also said it attacked a “terrorist cell” that tried to launch anti-tank missiles from Lebanon on Thursday.

European Union Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell, center, walks past debris during his visit to the Be'eri kibbutz near the border with Gaza, on November 16.

The European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell has urged Israel “not to be consumed by rage” as the country continues to reel from Hamas’ October 7 attacks. 

Borrell spoke to the media alongside Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen after touring Israel’s Be’eri kibbutz on Thursday.

Borrell said he was there “to express the European Union’s solidarity with the Israeli people” and call for the “immediate” release of the hostages in Gaza. 

“I understand your rage. But let me ask you not to be consumed by rage,” Borrell said, describing this as the advice that the “best friend of Israel” would give.

He said that although the EU recognizes Israel’s right to defend itself, any response must be in accordance with international humanitarian law. 

“Not far from here is Gaza. And one horror doesn’t justify another. Innocent civilians including thousands of children have died in the past weeks,” Borrell added. 

“One thing is to take care of Israel and another thing is to take care of the people in need,” he continued, stressing this is why the EU is continuing to call for an “unhindered, rapid and safe humanitarian access” to Gaza. 

Some context: Israel launched its military campaign with the stated aim of destroying Hamas and to save the more than 240 hostages taken during the militant group’s brutal October 7 attack, which killed over 1,200 people.

At least 11,470 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah said Thursday, citing medical sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

Remember: US President Joe Biden made similar comments in Tel Aviv in mid-October, lamenting the loss of life from the attacks on Israel, but cautioning Israelis to not “be consumed by” rage.