Middle East crisis live: Gaza hostage Qaid Farhan Alkadi rescued in ‘complex operation’, says IDF | Israel-Gaza war

The Israeli hostage rescued in Gaza on Tuesday was recovered by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from a tunnel in “a complex rescue operation”, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.

Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, a member of the Bedouin community in southern Israel, was rescued in an underground tunnel, Hagari told a briefing.

Alkadi is in stable medical condition and has been transferred to a hospital for medical checks, he added.

The IDF spokesperson did not provide any details of the rescue operation, citing the security of the remaining hostages and Israeli forces. Hagari added:

We will not rest until we complete our mission to bring all our hostages back.

Gaza polio vaccine rollout hindered by Israeli evacuation orders, says UN

Julian Borger

The UN has said its ability to function in Gaza is being crippled by a flurry of Israeli evacuation orders, herding Palestinians into ever smaller and remote areas, days before a critical effort to contain a polio outbreak.

Aid workers warn that without a humanitarian pause, a vaccination drive due to begin this weekend could fail to reach enough children to stop the spread of the virus, which was detected there this month for the first time in 25 years.

A baby has already been partly paralysed by the disease, and health experts have warned it could spread rapidly given the terrible sanitation and overcrowding in camps for Gaza’s exhausted, displaced population.

“One thing for sure is that it’s almost impossible to lead a polio vaccination campaign at scale in an active combat zone,” said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesperson in the region for the UN child welfare agency, Unicef.

Jen Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office OCHA has given some details on an uptick in the number of evacuation orders Israel’s military has issued over the past month.

Speaking at a UN briefing, Laerke said Israel has issued three evacuation orders since Friday and 16 mass evacuation orders throughout this month. The three issued since Friday have affected 8,000 people in 19 neighbourhoods, Laerke said. “Only 11% of the territory of the Gaza Strip is not under evacuation orders,” he added.

Laerke expressed specific concern about the evacuation orders issued in the Deir-al-Balah area on Sunday, which he said affected 15 premises hosting UN and NGO aid workers, four UN warehouses, al-Aqsa hospital, two clinics, three wells, one water reservoir and a desalination plant.

“The sum of this is that it effectively upends a whole life saving humanitarian hub that was set up in Deir-al-Balah after its earlier evacuation from Rafah back in May,” he said.

Israeli troops have rescued a hostage in the southern Gaza Strip, the military said on Tuesday.

It said Qaid Farhan Alkadi was recovered in “a complex rescue operation” and said his medical condition was normal, Reuters reported.

• The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers. A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.

• At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

• Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children. The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.

• The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said. Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.

• Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel. “And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”

• The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.

• The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.

• The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised. Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.

• Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the occupied West Bank on Monday in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck a militant operations centre in the camp, and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the West Bank after reports of an abduction.

• Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports on the settler raid, it added.

• Some Israeli officials and media reacted with satisfaction on Monday after a long-expected missile attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement appeared to have been largely thwarted by pre-emptive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Hezbollah had suffered a “crushing blow” from the Israeli strikes but that a longer lasting solution was still needed.

• Benjamin Netanyahu faced a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.

• The United States continues to assess that the threat of attack against Israel by Iran and its proxy groups still exists, the Pentagon said on Monday, after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander. “I would point you to some of the public comments that have been made by Iranian leaders and others … we continue to assess that there is a threat of attack,” Pentagon spokesperson air force Maj Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters.