The international community overwhelmingly supports an independent Palestinian state as part of a future peace agreement. Netanyahu’s government is filled with hardliners who oppose Palestinian independence.

Netanyahu wants Israel to achieve “total victory” over Hamas. In response to international concern over a Rafah offensive, he has said Palestinian civilians would be evacuated. Where they would go in largely devastated Gaza is not clear.

The suggested timing for the offensive came as the World Health Organisation chief said southern Gaza’s main medical facility, Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, “is not functional any more” after Israeli forces raided it on Friday.

Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a WHO team was not allowed to enter Nasser Hospital on the weekend. In a post on X, he said about 200 patients remained, including 20 who needed urgent treatment elsewhere.

Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant said at least 200 militants had surrendered at the hospital. He also claimed that Hamas was defeated in Khan Younis, and was largely leaderless in Gaza. He gave no evidence to support the claims.

Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said there was no power, no oxygen and not enough staff to treat the patients remaining in Nasser Hospital.

“It’s gone completely out of service. There are only four medical teams - 25 staff - currently caring for patients inside the facility,” he said.

The Israeli military said in a statement that hundreds of militants were hiding in the hospital and some had posed as medical staff. It released images of weapons it said were found along with medications that were transferred from Israel and intended for the more than 100 hostages abducted and held by Hamas. The military said it had arrested at least 100 suspects on the hospital premises.

“The packages of medicine that were found were sealed and had not been transferred to the hostages,” the military said.

Hamas dismisses Israeli allegations, saying they served as a pretext to destroy the healthcare system.

The Gaza Health Ministry said 70 medical personnel were among those arrested, along with patients, leaving 150 patients without medical care. It said Israel refused to allow patients, including newborns, to be evacuated to other hospitals.

The military says it was looking for the remains of hostages inside the hospital and did not target doctors or patients. It said the raid occurred “without harming patients and medical staff, and in accordance with the values ​​of the IDF and international law”.

The October 7 attack killed about 1200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 250 hostages. Militants still hold around 130 hostages, a fourth of them believed to be dead. Most of the others were released during a weeklong ceasefire in November.

The war has killed at least 28,985 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. On Sunday it said 127 bodies were brought to hospitals in the previous 24 hours.

Wael Abu Omar, a spokesman for the Palestinian Crossings Authority, said 123 aid trucks entered Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing on Sunday and four trucks of cooking gas entered through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. That’s well below the 500 trucks entering daily before the war.

In the occupied West Bank, a shootout erupted when Israeli forces went to arrest an armed suspect in the town of Tulkarem. The military said the suspect was killed, and a member of Israel’s paramilitary Border Police was severely wounded. It described the target of the raid as a senior militant. The Palestinian Health Ministry said two Palestinians were killed.

The war in Gaza has threatened to ignite wider conflict in the region. The US Central Command said it conducted five self-defence strikes on Saturday against cruise missiles and drones in an area of Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel group.

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US opposes a new ceasefire resolution

Algeria, the Arab representative on the UN Security Council, has circulated a draft resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire and unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza, and rejecting the forced displacement of Palestinians.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the draft “will not be adopted” and runs counter to Washington’s efforts to end the fighting. The US vetoed previous resolutions that had wide international support.

The US, Qatar and Egypt have spent weeks trying to broker a ceasefire and hostage release, but Qatar said Saturday the talks “have not been progressing as expected”.

Hamas has said it will not release all remaining hostages without Israel ending the war and withdrawing from Gaza. It also demands the release of hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including top militants. Netanyahu has called Hamas’ demands “delusional”.

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Israeli strikes across Gaza continued, killing at least 18 people overnight into Sunday, according to medics and witnesses. A strike in Rafah killed six people, including a woman and three children, and another killed five in Khan Younis, the main target of the southern Gaza offensive in recent weeks. Associated Press journalists saw the bodies.

“All those who were martyred were those whom the Jews asked to move to safe places,” said a bystander after the Rafah strike, Ahmad Abu Rezeq.

In Gaza City, which suffered widespread destruction early in the war, an airstrike flattened a home, killing seven people, including three women, according to relative Sayed al-Afifi.

Israel’s military rarely comments on individual strikes and blames civilian casualties on Hamas because the militants operate in dense residential areas

‘Holocaust’ outrage

The Gaza war has destabilised the entire Middle East as Hamas’s military allies – all Iran-backed paramilitary groups – have targeted Israeli and US interests with missiles and drones.

Israel has also bombed southern Lebanon in a battle with Tehran-backed Hezbollah militants, and the Yemeni Houthi rebels have choked global trade passing through the Suez Canal and Red Sea.

Israel accused Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of trivialising the Holocaust and causing offence to the Jewish people on Sunday after he likened the Israeli war against Hamas militants in Gaza to the Nazi genocide during World War II.

“What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments. In fact, it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” Lula told reporters during the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa.

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem said it would summon the Brazilian ambassador for a reprimand over the remarks, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “disgraceful and grave”.

“This is a trivialisation of the Holocaust and an attempt to attack the Jewish people and the right of Israel to self-defence. Drawing comparisons between Israel and the Nazis and Hitler is to cross a red line,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

Brazil’s presidential palace and the foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the Brazilian Israelite Confederation said Lula’s remarks were a “perverse distortion of reality” and “offend the memory of Holocaust victims and their descendants” and accused his government of an “extreme and unbalanced” stance on the conflict.

Earlier on Sunday, Lula also condemned the suspension of humanitarian aid to the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), urging an investigation into errors without cutting off funding to help those affected by what he called a “genocide”.

“It’s not a war between soldiers and soldiers, it’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children,” he said.

UNRWA is facing a financial strain following Israel’s assertion that 12 out of its 13,000 staff members in Gaza were implicated in Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

Israeli strikes across Gaza killed at least 18 people overnight into Sunday, according to medics and witnesses, while the United States said it would veto another draft UN resolution calling for a ceasefire.

Netanyahu also opposes Palestinian statehood, which the US calls a key element in a broader vision for the normalisation of relations between Israel and regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia.

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His cabinet has adopted a declaration saying Israel “categorically rejects international edicts on a permanent arrangement with the Palestinians” and opposes any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu has vowed to continue the Gaza offensive until Israel achieves a “total victory” over the Hamas militant group and plans to expand it to Rafah, where more than half the enclave’s 2.3 million Palestinians have sought refuge.

In response to international concern about what would happen to the people in Rafah, the Israeli leader has said residents would be evacuated before a ground offensive began there.

Where they would go in largely devastated Gaza is not clear.

Reuters, AP