A new wave of air strikes by Israeli fighter jets yesterday targeted the Gaza Strip, including Khan Younis in the south, the Bureij refugee camp in the center, and Gaza City in the north of the enclave.

Gaza health officials said Israeli military forces fired live rounds at an ambulance evacuating a wounded person in southern Khan Younis, where a deadly ground invasion by Israeli forces is expanding.

The armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad said its fighters bombarded Israeli soldiers and vehicles stationed around the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza with mortar shells.

• WFP reduces rations for Gaza families to ensure coverage for newly displaced
• Australia, Canada, NZ urge Israel to protect Gaza civilians 
• More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled fierce fighting around the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in four days, the United Nations says, after an Israeli operation to extract captives’ bodies from the area.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited former United States President Donald Trump for talks in Florida as Trump denied there were tensions between the pair.
• Clashes have taken place in Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank between the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian fighters during an attempt to arrest Mohammed Jaber, a commander of an armed group who is wanted by the Israeli military.
• At least 39,175 people have been killed and 90,403 injured in Israel’s war on Gaza. The death toll in Israel from the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 is estimated at 1,139 with dozens of people still held captive in Gaza.

 The group also said it engaged in fierce clashes with Israeli forces since Thursday night in the east of Khan Younis, using machine guns and anti-tank shells.

According to Gaza health officials, Israeli military strikes in the past 24 hours had killed at least 21 people, the latest casualties in an offensive that health authorities in the enclave say has killed at least 39,196 Palestinians.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has been forced to reduce rations for families in Gaza to ensure broader coverage for newly displaced people, it said yesterday.

“Food stocks and humanitarian supplies in central and southern Gaza are very limited and barely any commercial supplies are going in,” WFP added in a post on social media platform X.

The World Health Organization is sending more than one million polio vaccines to Gaza to be administered over the coming weeks to prevent children being infected after the virus was detected in sewage samples, its chief said yesterday.

Meanwhile, Australia, Canada, New Zealand urged Israel to protect civilians in Gaza. The three governments have issued a statement on the need for an urgent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, saying “the situation in Gaza is catastrophic”.

“The human suffering is unacceptable. It cannot continue,” it said.

Iran’s government said yesterday the recent meeting of Hamas and Fatah in the Chinese capital is a valuable step in the direction of national reconciliation for Palestine, reports Al Jazeera Online.

Nasser Kanaani, the foreign ministry spokesperson, said on X that the Iranian government backs the Palestinian groups “in confronting the occupation of the apartheid regime of Israel and their collective movement in the direction of exercising the fundamental right to self-determination”.

Peace Now Israel, a group pushing for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said since the offensive on Gaza began, Israel has established at least “25 outposts, most of them agricultural outposts”, in the occupied West Bank.

 “The cabinet approved the establishment of five new settlements: Evyatar, Givat Assaf, Sde Ephraim, Adorayim, and Nachal Haletz, all illegal outposts intended to become official settlements,” the report said.

In the eastern area of Nablus, north of the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces detained seven Palestinians during a raid, according to the Wafa news agency.

Palestinian security and local sources told Wafa that several Israeli military vehicles stormed the area with tear gas and stun grenades near the Askar refugee camp.

Source: Al Jazeera and others News Agencies.