Al Jazeera said its bureau chief in Gaza, Wael Al Dahdouh, lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson in what it said was an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday. The blast hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza where the family was taking shelter after being displaced, according to the news organization.

“Members of the family of our colleague Wael Al Dahdouh, including his wife, son, and daughter, were martyred in an Israeli bombing,” Al Jazeera wrote in an on-air message.

An emotional Al Dahdouh was seen in a video crying as he stood over his son’s body, wrapped in a white sheet. The distraught journalist was also seen carrying the small body of his grandson through Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza.

Al Jazeera anchor Abdisalam Farah announced the deaths on air, visibly struggling to keep his composure and tearing up.

Al-Dahdouh’s wife, son Mahmoud, and daughter Sham were killed in the strike, Al Jazeera said. Al-Jazeera reported that his grandson, Adam, was declared dead two hours later.

Israel’s leadership has vowed to wipe out Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, in response to its October 7 deadly terror attacks and kidnap rampage in which 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 200 taken hostage.

Its weeks-long siege on Gaza has resulted in a humanitarian crisis inside the enclave, now cut off from the world by a near-total blockade, say aid groups. Israeli airstrikes have decimated entire neighborhoods, leveling homes, schools, and mosques.

More than 6,400 people have been killed and a further 17,000 injured in Israel’s sustained aerial bombardment of the crowded enclave, according to latest figures from the Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.

‘Horrifying’

Advocacy groups condemned the death of Al Dahdouh’s family members on Wednesday. The International Press Institute (IPI) called it “horrifying and outrageous news,” in a statement. “We condemn the killing of civilians and offer our deepest condolences to Wael Dahdouh.”

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 24 journalists have died since the start of this conflict as of Wednesday. Twenty of those killed are Palestinian, three are Israeli, and one is a Lebanese journalist, CPJ said.

The figure includes Palestinian journalist Roshdi Sarraj, according to Palestinian press agency WAFA, which said he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Sarraj was a fixer at French national public radio broadcaster Radio France and had been working with its correspondents since May 2021, according to Radio France.

The main United Nations agency in Gaza says it will have to halt aid operations within a day if fuel is not delivered, in what the organization says would mark the end of a “lifeline” for civilians.

While some aid has reached Gaza through Egypt, those deliveries included food, water and medicine – but not fuel. Israel has refused to allow fuel to enter Gaza since Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack, saying it would only be used by the militant group to fuel its fight against Israel.

UN officials warned the current supplies were “a drop in the ocean” for the needs of 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza and will be of little use without the fuel needed to collect and distribute the aid.

“Without fuel, aid cannot be delivered, hospitals will not have power, and drinking water cannot be purified or even pumped,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council Tuesday.

Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals on the brink of shutting down have repeatedly warned that waves of new patients injured in the daily bombings and babies relying on oxygen supplies will die if fuel is not brought in.

The warnings from senior UN officials came after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killed more than 700 people in 24 hours, the highest daily number published since Israeli strikes against what it called Hamas targets in Gaza began two and a half weeks ago, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah on Tuesday.

“Do we provide fuel for desalination plants for drinking water? Can we provide fuel to hospitals? Can we provide the essential fuel that is currently producing the bread that is feeding people in Gaza?” he said.

UNRWA was founded in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War to provide essential services for Palestinians who had been made refugees by the conflict. It began its operations in 1950 and its mandate has since been repeatedly renewed.

As well as humanitarian aid, UNRWA also provides schooling to almost 300,000 students in Gaza, according to figures from the 2021/22 school year. Recent fighting has meant that schools have become places of refuge for thousands of Gazans who have fled their homes.

But White warned that fuel shortages could lead to the agency “winding down” its operations, even as some humanitarian supplies begin to arrive through the Rafah crossing. White did not specify exactly when that process would begin, but stressed that the agency cannot operate without fuel. “Even if convoys come into Gaza, we won’t have the fuel in our trucks to collect that aid or distribute that aid,” he said.

A deepening crisis

The deteriorating health environment, lack of sanitation, and consumption of dirty, salty water in Gaza is raising fears of a health crisis in which people could start dying from dehydration as the water system collapses while bombs continue to rain down.

Just eight out of 20 aid trucks scheduled to cross into Gaza on Tuesday made the journey, UNRWA said. No specific reason was provided as to why the other 12 trucks didn’t make it through the Rafah crossing.

Since the start of the Israeli siege two weeks ago, six hospitals in Gaza have been forced to close due to a lack of fuel, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

Among those at risk of dying or suffering medical complications are “1,000 patients dependent on dialysis” and “130 premature babies” and other vulnerable patients “who depend on a stable and uninterrupted supply of electricity to stay alive,” WHO said in a statement.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday ruled out any fuel being allowed to enter Gaza, saying Hamas would co-opt fuel for its operational infrastructure and to continue its rocket attacks.

Israel’s leadership has vowed to wipe out Hamas in response to its October 7 deadly terror attacks and kidnap rampage in which 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 200 taken hostage.

In the wake of the assault, Israel launched a sustained aerial bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 6,400 people and injured a further 17,000, according to information from Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza and published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah

More than 700 of those were killed in Gaza in the previous 24-hour period, according to Palestinian officials. Those killed included 305 children, 173 women and 78 elderly individuals, the ministry said.

Some two million people are crammed into the 140 square mile coastal strip that makes up Gaza, half of whom are children.

Al Jazeera said its bureau chief in Gaza, Wael Al-Dahdouh, lost his wife, son, and daughter in what it said was an Israeli airstrike. The blast hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip where the family was taking shelter after being displaced, according to Al Jazeera.

No international consensus

On Wednesday, United States President Joe Biden described killing innocents as “a price of waging war,” and urged Israel to try to avoid civilian deaths.

“I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging war,” Biden said Wednesday during a press conference in the Rose Garden.

Israel should be “incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war against Israel,” rather than civilians. “It’s against their interests when that doesn’t happen.”

Biden also said that he had “no confidence” in civilian death figures provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he said.

Meanwhile, a spat has broken out between Israel and the UN, after Secretary General Antonio Guterres appealed for a ceasefire and said he was “concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law we are witnessing in Gaza.”

Guterres condemned Hamas’ “horrifying and unprecedented” terror attack on October 7, but said it “cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

“It is important to recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said in remarks to the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

His comments sparked a furious response from Israeli officials. Israel’s ambassador to the UN GIlad Erdan said Guterres was “not fit to lead the UN” and called for him to “resign immediately.”

Nearly three weeks since the outbreak of fighting, the UN’s Security Council remains divided on how to proceed with the crisis. Two differing resolutions on the matter, introduced by the US and Russia, both failed to pass on Wednesday.

The draft resolution from the US called for “humanitarian pauses,” not a ceasefire, to allow for aid to reach Gazan civilians. The US previously vetoed a Brazilian draft calling for a humanitarian pause.

The US, Israel, Qatar, Egypt and Hamas are engaged in the ongoing deliberations. Four hostages – two American and two Israeli – have been freed so far. But the hope now is to reach a deal for a bigger group of hostages to be released at once.

Israel has so far held off on making a ground incursion into Gaza, and the US has pressed Israel to further delay to allow for the release of more hostages held by Hamas.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said outside the UN Tuesday it was Israel’s mission to bring the hostages home.

“While we are still here, there are babies that are in captivity, twins, holocaust survivors, and we have one mission: To bring them home,” Cohen said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to tell soldiers on Tuesday a ground offensive was still on track, saying, “we stand before the next stage, it is coming.”

In a television address Wednesday, Netanyahu spoke for the first time since the October 7 attack about his own role in the security breakdown.

“Everyone will have to give answers, me too. This will happen after the war,” he said. “As the prime minister, I’m responsible to secure the future of the country, and now it’s my role to lead the country and the people for crushing victory on our enemies.”

Declassified photos captured by United States spy satellites launched during the Cold War have revealed an archaeological treasure trove: hundreds of previously unknown Roman-era forts, in what is now Iraq and Syria.

Many of those long-lost structures may be gone forever at this point, destroyed or damaged over recent decades due to agricultural expansion, urban development and war. Nevertheless, the discovery of the forts’ existence challenges a popular hypothesis established in the 1930s about the role of such fortifications along the ancient Roman Empire’s eastern border, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Antiquity.

Based on the satellite views, the high number of forts and their widespread distribution hints that the forts may not have been erected to keep enemies out, as the decades-old theory suggested. Rather, the structures were likely built to ensure safe passage for caravans and travelers along routes that saw plenty of nonmilitary traffic. These forts, according to the study authors, were outposts and havens, not hostile barriers.

High-resolution images analyzed in the new study were taken during flyovers by multiple satellites belonging to two US military programs: the Corona Project (1960 to 1972) and Hexagon (1971 to 1986). Corona’s images were declassified in 1995, and Hexagon’s photos were released to the public in 2011.

Images from Hexagon and Corona are invaluable for archaeologists because they preserve snapshots of landscapes that have since undergone significant disruption, said lead study author Jesse Casana, an archaeologist and professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Spy satellite photos vs. the Poidebard survey

Satellite images are especially helpful for searches across the northern part of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East — from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to western Iran — because of the area’s archaeological importance and high visibility of the ground in photos, Casana added.

The research team pored over the images for signs of Roman forts, which have a distinctive square shape and walls that usually measure about 164 to 262 feet (50 to 80 meters) long. The scientists began their search using reference maps from an aerial survey of the region conducted in the 1920s and 1930s by French archaeologist and Jesuit missionary Father Antoine Poidebard. That survey was among the first to photograph archaeological sites from the air, and in 1934 Poidebard reported finding 116 Roman forts.

It was an unprecedented achievement. But nearly a century later, mapping Poidebard’s forts to satellite photos was challenging. Because his map wasn’t large-scale, it contained numerous spatial errors, Casana said. Poidebard also did not provide names or numbers for most of the forts he found, identifying them instead by their proximity to geologic features.

Those forts were aligned north to south along what was once the easternmost boundary of the Roman Empire, according to Poidebard. This arrangement, he claimed, was surely intended to guard against invaders from the east.

But Poidebard’s survey provided only a partial view of Rome’s ancient infrastructure, the researchers found. What he overlooked — and what the satellite photos revealed — was that the north-to-south line of 116 forts was actually only a narrow sliver of a cluster spreading from east to west and containing 396 fortified structures.

The forts spanned approximately 116,000 square miles (300,000 square kilometers), “extending from Mosul, on the Tigris River in Iraq, through Ninawa province, across the Khabur and the Balikh valleys, continuing to the semi-arid plains west of the Euphrates River, leading to western Syria and the Mediterranean,” according to the study.

Oases of safety for ancient Rome

When the archaeologists performed a second survey of an image subset, they found 106 more fortlike structures, hinting that further investigations will yield many more Roman forts. Based on excavations of other Roman sites in the region, the scientists estimated that the forts were built between the second and sixth centuries.

While Poidebard’s row of forts along the Roman Empire’s eastern front looked like a military fortification, this new evidence suggested that the forts collectively served a different purpose. Rather than presenting an impassable wall on a violent frontier, they provided oases of safety and order along well-traveled Roman roads.

Borders in this world “were places of dynamic cultural exchange and movement of goods and ideas,” not barriers, Casana said. And perhaps that perspective holds a lesson for the modern era, he added.

“Historically, as an archaeologist, I can say that there have been many attempts by ancient states to build walls across borders and it has been a universal failure,” Casana said. “If there’s any way that archaeology contributes to modern discourse, I would hope it is that building giant walls to keep people out is a bad plan.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.

Queen Rania of Jordan has accused Western leaders of a “glaring double standard” for failing to condemn the deaths of civilians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza, as Israel’s war on Hamas threatens to destabilize relations between US and Arab leaders.

Israel declared a “complete siege” on Gaza following the October 7 terror attacks by Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls the coastal enclave, that killed more than 1,400 people and saw over 200 taken hostage, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The siege has resulted in relentless airstrikes on densely-inhabited Gaza, and a blockade on vital supplies – including food and water – to the isolated strip’s entire population.

“This is the first time in modern history that there is such human suffering and the world is not even calling for a ceasefire,” Queen Rania added. “So the silence is deafening – and to many in our region, it makes the Western world complicit.”

“Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family, at gunpoint, but it’s OK to shell them to death? I mean, there is a glaring double standard here,” she said. “It is just shocking to the Arab world.”

Latest figures from the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza put the death toll from Israeli strikes at more than 5,000, including more than 2,000 children. At least 35 UN workers have also been killed.

Israel says that it is targeting Hamas terrorists, and has blamed the group for hiding behind civilian infrastructure.

The United Nations and several aid agencies are calling urgently for a ceasefire and for the free movement of humanitarian aid to the increasingly desperate population. Doctors working in the isolated enclave meanwhile warn that power shortages threaten the lives of their most vulnerable patients, including the critically injured and premature infants in need of incubators.

“As a mom, we’ve seen Palestinian mothers who have to write the names of their children on their hands – because the chances of them being shelled to death, of their bodies turning into corpses are so high,” Rania said. “I just want to remind the world that Palestinian mothers love their children just as much as any other mother in the world.”

Growing frustration with the West

Arab leaders have voiced frustration with the perceived unwillingness by the US to try to curb Israel’s siege; Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority pulled out of a planned summit in Jordan with US President Joe Biden last week.

Washington, a close ally of Israel, has remained steadfast in its support of the retaliation on Gaza by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has rebutted calls for a ceasefire.

“In fact, we don’t believe that this is the time for a ceasefire. Israel has a right to defend themselves. They still have work to do to go after Hamas leadership, we’re going to keep supporting them or giving them more security assistance.”

Speaking in the UN Security Council on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, saying that “humanitarian pauses” should be considered, but notably avoided the phrase “ceasefire.”

However, the US vetoed last week a Security Council proposal for a humanitarian pause in the bloodshed, criticizing the draft resolution for failing to mention Israel’s right to self-defense. The United Kingdom also refused to endorse the resolution.

An earlier Russian ceasefire similarly failed.

Israel is committing “crimes against humanity” in its current campaign, nine independent experts working with the UN said in a joint statement on Thursday. The “unspeakably cruel” blockade on Gaza, coupled with “forcible population transfers” is in violation of international and criminal law, the experts added.

Former Israeli hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin has meanwhile warned that the crisis should be a “wake-up call” for both Israelis and Palestinians and called for a change in leadership on both sides.

Baskin, an Israeli citizen, played a key role in the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured and imprisoned by Hamas from 2006 to 2011. Baskin is the author of “The Negotiator: Freeing Gilad Schalit from Hamas,” and he is now in touch with both the Israeli and Hamas leadership in an unofficial capacity.

“It should be no surprise to anyone that we’ve arrived at such a horrific situation,” he told Amanpour in a separate interview on Tuesday. “It has to be a wake-up call for Israel that you cannot keep another people occupied for 56 years and expect to have peace. You can’t lock two million people in an open-air prison and expect there to be quiet.”

“And for the Palestinians, it should be a wake-up call that if you support radical fanatic leaders and refuse to recognize the other people living in your land as having the same rights that you do, then you’re going to suffer this,” he added, speaking from Jerusalem.

“[These are] the most traumatic events for Israel and Palestine since 1948.”

A growing crisis and fears of displacement

Fears are growing that the conflict could spill into neighboring countries in the Middle East, as Israel urges civilians in the northern part of Gaza to relocate south ahead of an anticipated ground operation.

Forcing Gaza civilians to relocate amounts “to the war crime of forcible transfer,” the Norwegian Refugee Council said.

And Jordanian and Egyptian leaders have raised concerns that millions of Palestinians could eventually be pushed out of Gaza and the occupied West Bank and into Egypt and Jordan, respectively, saying such a move could plunge the region into war.

Jordan’s King Abdullah warned last week that the displacement of Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt would be a “red line,” and said neither Jordan nor Egypt would accept refugees from Gaza. He said that any suggestion of the two countries taking in fleeing Gazans was a plan “by the usual suspects to try and create de facto issues on the ground,” suggesting that the refugees may not be allowed to return to their homes.

Asked by Amanpour about her husband’s position, Queen Rania said the people of Gaza face “two choices.”

“Essentially they’re given a choice between expulsion or extermination, between ethnic cleansing and genocide. And no people should be given, [should] have to face, that kind of choice. The people of Palestine should not, [the people] of Gaza should not, be forced to be moved again,” she said.

More than half of Gaza’s population are refugees whose ancestors fled or were expelled from their homes in present-day Israel by armed Jewish groups during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which Palestinians call the Nakba or “the catastrophe.” Israel has never allowed them to return to their homes and many have lived in poverty ever since.

The queen also emphasized that the conflict in the Middle East did not begin on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, highlighting the history of Israel’s occupation and the displacement of Palestinians.

“Most networks are covering the story under the title of ‘Israel at war.’ But for many Palestinians on the other side of the separation wall, on the other side of the barbed wire, war has never left,” she said.

“This is a 75-year-old story, a story of overwhelming death and displacement to the Palestinian people. It is a story of an occupation under apartheid regime, that occupies lands, that demolishes houses, confiscates lands, military incursions, night raids.”

Even before the war with Hamas, tensions were high between Palestinians and Israelis in the occupied West Bank. Following a wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis last year, Israel launched regular incursions and raids into the occupied West Bank targeting what they said were militant strongholds. The resulting violence left a record number of both Palestinians and Israelis dead, numbers not seen in at least a decade.

Since Israel took control and occupied the West Bank in 1967 from Jordan following the Six Day War, large swaths of the territory, which residents hope will form part of a future Palestinian state, has been settled by Israeli civilians, often under military protection.

Most of the world considers these settlements illegal under international law.

Protesters in parts of the Arab world have flooded the streets in recent days to show support for Palestinians under the Israeli siege and bombardment. About 6,000 demonstrators marched in Amman in support of Palestinians on Friday.

“There can never be a resolution except around a negotiating table … there is only one path to this, and that is a free, sovereign, and independent Palestinian state, living side by side, in peace and security, with the state of Israel.”

An 82-year-old man in South Korea had a heart attack after choking on a piece of “live octopus,” or san-nakji, a local delicacy comprised of freshly severed – and still wriggling – tentacles.

Fire station authorities in Gwangju, a city near the country’s southern tip, received a report on Monday morning that a piece of san-nakji had become stuck in a man’s throat, according to a fire station official.

When first responders arrived on site, the man had a cardiac arrest, and they conducted CPR, the official said.

The official did not say whether the man survived.

San-nakji refers to a small octopus that is sliced and served raw, often eaten in South Korea’s coastal areas or seafood markets.

Though the dish’s name translates to “live octopus,” this is slightly misleading – the octopus is killed before serving, with its tentacles cut into portions.

However, it is served immediately after slicing, and is so fresh that the tentacles’ nerves are still active – causing the octopus to appear “live” as it continues moving on the plate.

San-nakji is often served with sesame oil, sesame seeds, and sometimes ginger, and has a chewy texture.

The dish has also previously made headlines, with local media reporting multiple cases over the years of diners dying after choking or asphyxiating on “live octopus.”

In perhaps the best-known case, dubbed the “octopus murder,” a South Korean man was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012 for allegedly killing his girlfriend and claiming it was a san-nakji accident – before he was acquitted by the Supreme Court in 2013 for insufficient evidence.

The first cases of bird flu have been detected in seabirds in the Antarctic, according to the British Antarctic Survey, raising fears the disease will spread rapidly through dense colonies of birds and mammals.

“Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) has been confirmed in brown skua populations on Bird Island, South Georgia – the first known cases in the Antarctic region,” the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement Monday.

South Georgia is part of the British overseas territory east of South America’s tip and just above Antarctica’s main landmass. The British Antarctic Survey believes the birds carried the disease on their return from migration to South America.

In August this year, OFFLU – an open network of global avian influenza experts – warned of a “substantial risk” of a southward spread of the HPAI H5 virus from South America, where it was first detected in October 2022.

In a report published August 23, OFFLU warned that the disease could reach Antarctica and its offshore islands “due to the spring migration of wild birds from South America to breeding sites in the Antarctic.”

It pointed to “immense” negative impact on the Antarctic wild birds and mammal population due to “their likely susceptibility to mortality from this virus, and their occurrence in dense colonies of up to thousands of pinnipeds and hundreds of thousands of birds, allowing efficient virus transmission.”

Bird flu is caused by infections that occur naturally among wild aquatic birds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infected birds can transmit the virus to other animals through their saliva and other bodily discharges.

Antarctica and its offshore islands are home to “more than 100 million breeding birds, six species of pinnipeds and 17 species of cetaceans,” according to OFFLU, which warns of the possibility of “efficient virus transmission” in the region.

One of the key objectives of OFFLU, which was founded jointly in 2005 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organisation for Animal Health, is to gather data on the viruses and analyze disease patterns.

The British Antarctic Survey, which is responsible for the UK’s national scientific activities in Antarctica, operates two research stations on South Georgia, including one at Bird Island where the confirmed cases were identified.

These unprecedented cases come as several countries have experienced record outbreaks of bird flu this year. In Japan, just under 10 million birds were killed to limit the spread of the disease, putting strain on the supply of poultry and sending the price of eggs soaring.

Liberia’s electoral commission on Tuesday scheduled a presidential election run-off for November after results showed that the two frontrunners, President George Weah and opposition leader Joseph Boakai, had failed to secure enough votes.

Weah holds a slim lead at 43.83% of the vote, while Boakai has 43.44%, according to tallied results from 100% of polling places, the West African nation’s election commission said.

Commission chairperson Davidetta Browne Lansanah said the run-off vote would be held on Nov. 14. She said there was a record turnout of 78.86% of around 2.4 million registered voters.

The Oct. 10 election has been widely seen as a test of support for former soccer star Weah, 57, who was criticized in his first term by the opposition and Liberia’s international partners for not doing enough to tackle corruption.

On his campaign trail, he asked voters for more time to fulfill his promise to rebuild the nation’s broken economy, institutions and infrastructure, pledging to pave more roads if reelected.

Liberia is struggling to recover from two civil wars that killed more than 250,000 people between 1989 and 2003 and from a 2013-16 Ebola epidemic that killed thousands.

Boakai, 78, was Weah’s main challenger and campaigned on what he called the need to rescue Liberia from alleged mismanagement by Weah’s administration.

Vital fuel supplies needed to run hospitals and provide water to Gaza are on the verge of running out, a United Nations agency has said, exacerbating the crisis on a densely populated territory already facing severe shortages.

The warning, from the main UN agency working in Gaza, that it will be forced to halt its operations by Wednesday evening due to a lack of fuel comes as Israeli airstrikes on the besieged strip killed more than 700 people in 24 hours, according to Palestinian officials.

“If we do not get fuel urgently, we will be forced to halt our operations in the #GazaStrip as of tomorrow night,” the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) wrote on social media Tuesday. Gaza needs at least 160,000 liters (42,267 gallons) of fuel a day for basic necessities, UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said.

Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals on the brink of shutting down have repeatedly warned that waves of new patients injured in the daily bombings and babies relying on oxygen supplies will die if fuel is not brought in.

A fierce row has meanwhile broken out between Israel and the UN, after Secretary General António Guterres appealed on Tuesday for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” saying “the clear violations of international humanitarian law” are being witnessed in Gaza.

“Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel – and then continuing to bomb the south itself,” Guterres said.

He called Hamas’ October 7 murder and kidnap rampage “appalling” but said it “cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Excellencies, even war has rules.”

“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

Those remarks sparked an angry response from Israeli officials. Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres “to resign immediately” after his remarks and wrote on social media that he was “not fit to lead the UN.”

Erdan then said on Wednesday his country will block visas for United Nations officials. He told the Israeli Army Radio channel that his government had already rejected an application by the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths.

“It’s time we teach them a lesson,” added Erdan.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who was at the United Nations on Tuesday, said he would not meet with Guterres and that “there is no place for a balanced approach.”

“Hamas must be erased off the face of the planet!” Cohen wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

A deepening crisis

The deteriorating health environment, lack of sanitation, and consumption of dirty, salty water in Gaza is raising fears of a health crisis in which people could start dying from dehydration as the water system collapses while bombs continue to rain down.

Just eight out of 20 aid trucks scheduled to cross into Gaza on Tuesday made the journey, UNRWA said. No specific reason was provided as to why the other 12 trucks didn’t make it through the Rafah crossing.

Since the start of the Israeli siege two weeks ago, six hospitals in Gaza have been forced to close due to a lack of fuel, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

Among those at risk of dying or suffering medical complications are “1,000 patients dependent on dialysis” and “130 premature babies” and other vulnerable patients “who depend on a stable and uninterrupted supply of electricity to stay alive,” WHO said in a statement.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday ruled out any fuel being allowed to enter Gaza, saying Hamas would co-opt fuel for its operational infrastructure and to continue its rocket attacks.

Israel’s leadership has vowed to wipe out Hamas in response to its October 7 deadly terror attacks and kidnap rampage in which 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 200 taken hostage.

In the wake of the assault, Israel launched a sustained aerial bombardment of Gaza that Palestinian health officials say has now killed more than 5,000 people.

More than 700 of those were killed in Gaza in the previous 24-hour period, the highest daily number published since Israeli strikes against what it called Hamas targets in Gaza began two and a half weeks ago, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah on Tuesday.

Those killed included 305 children, 173 women and 78 elderly individuals, the ministry said.

Some two million people are crammed into the 140 square mile coastal strip that makes up Gaza, half of whom are children.

No international consensus

As the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens, the international community has struggled to find consensus.

The United States, Israel, Qatar, Egypt and Hamas are engaged in the ongoing deliberations. Four hostages – two American and two Israeli – have been freed so far. But the hope now is to reach a deal for a bigger group of hostages to be released at once.

Israel has so far held off on making a ground incursion into Gaza, and the US has pressed Israel to further delay to allow for the release of more hostages held by Hamas.

Foreign Minister Cohen said outside the UN Tuesday it was Israel’s mission to bring the hostages home.

“While we are still here, there are babies that are in captivity, twins, holocaust survivors, and we have one mission: To bring them home,” Cohen said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to tell soldiers on Tuesday a ground offensive was still on track, saying, “we stand before the next stage, it is coming.”

Israel is gearing up for the next stage of its war on Hamas, following the Palestinian militant group’s brutal October 7 attacks that killed 1,400 people.

Following a week of unprecedented airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, which have killed more than 5,000 people according to Palestinian health authorities, Israel is massing troops and military equipment on its border with the Hamas-controlled enclave and has warned some 1.1 million people in the northern half of the strip to evacuate, according to the United Nations.

As Israel prepares for a ground offensive into Gaza, here’s what you need to know about the 140 square-mile enclave – one of the most densely-populated territories on Earth.

What is Gaza?

Gaza is a narrow strip of land, only about 25 miles long and seven miles wide – just over twice the size of Washington DC.

To its west lies the Mediterranean Sea, to its north and east is Israel, and Egypt is to its south.

It is one of two Palestinian territories, the other being the larger Israeli-occupied West Bank, which borders Jordan.

Who lives there?

Around 2 million people are crammed into the 140-square-mile territory. The overwhelming majority of people are young, with 50% of the population under the age of 18, according to the World Health Organization.

Nearly all of Gazans – 98-99% – are Muslim, according to the CIA World Factbook, with most of the rest Christians.

More than 1 million of Gaza’s residents are refugees, with eight recognized Palestinian refugee camps, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists Palestinians.

What is Gaza’s history?

Inhabited for thousands of years, Gaza has been many things: An Egyptian base, a royal city for the Philistines and the place where the Hebrew Samson, betrayed by Delilah, met his death.

It was part of the Ottoman Empire for most of the period from the 16th to the early 20th century, until Britain took control over the Gaza area after World War I.

The most recent contest for the land began at the end of World War II, when Jews fleeing persecution traveled from Europe in search of refuge after the horrors of the Holocaust.

In 1947, the UN created a plan to split the then-British Mandate of Palestine into two lands, one for Jews and one for Arab people. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founder, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, and most were denied return.

After Israel declared independence, Egypt attacked Israel through the Gaza Strip. Israel won, but Gaza remained under the control of Egypt and the region saw an influx of Palestinian refugees from Israel. Unable to migrate to Egypt and not allowed to return to their former homes in Israel, many were living in extreme poverty.

In 1967, war broke out between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. During the conflict, which became known as the Six-Day War, Israel seized Gaza and held it for nearly 40 years until 2005, when it withdrew its troops and settlers.

Since then, hostilities have regularly broken out between Israel and Palestinian factions including Hamas.

Who controls Gaza now?

In 2006, Hamas won a landslide victory in Palestinian legislative elections – the last polls to be held in Gaza.

Hamas is an Islamist organization with a military wing that formed in 1987, emerging out of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist group that was founded in the late 1920s in Egypt.

The group considers Israel to be an illegitimate state and an occupying power in Gaza. Unlike other Palestinian groups, such as the Palestinian Authority, Hamas refuses to engage with Israel.

The group has claimed responsibility for many attacks on Israel over the years and has been designated as a terrorist organization by countries including the United States, the European Union and Israel. The last war between Hamas and Israel was in 2021, which lasted for 11 days and killed at least 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel.

One of the group’s biggest funders is Iran, according to the US State Department, which said in a 2021 report that Iran provides around $100 million a year to Hamas, among other “​​Palestinian terrorist groups.” The group also receives weapons, and training from Iran, as well as some funds that are raised in Gulf Arab countries, the State Department said.

When did Israel’s blockade start?

Despite Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, since 2007 it has maintained tight control over the territory through a land, air and sea blockade. For nearly 17 years, Gaza has been almost totally cut off from the rest of the world, with severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people.

The blockade has been fiercely criticized by international bodies including the UN, which said in a 2022 report that restrictions have had a “profound impact” on living conditions in Gaza and have “undermined Gaza’s economy, resulting in high unemployment, food insecurity and aid dependency.”

Israel has said the blockade is vital to protect its citizens from Hamas.

“Israel worried that without a blockade, Hamas would have an easier approach to smuggling weapons, to arming itself,” said Bilal Saab, senior fellow and founding director of the defense and security program at the Middle East Institute.

What are the living conditions like?

Even before Hamas’ attacks and Israel’s retaliation on Gaza, living conditions in the enclave were dire.

Human Rights Watch has called the territory an “open-air prison” – Gazans have limited access to healthcare, education and economic opportunities.

Unemployment levels are among the highest in the world, with nearly half of the population unemployed, according to 2022 UN data. More than than 80% live in poverty. “For at least the last decade and a half, the socioeconomic situation in Gaza has been in steady decline,” the UNRWA said in August.

“Beyond the numbers, mental health professionals in Gaza describe a crisis that goes unseen,” said Tania Hary, executive director of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization that focuses on the freedom of movement of Palestinians.

Yet conditions have become exponentially worse since Israel declared a “complete siege” on the enclave in retaliation for Hamas’ attacks, withholding essential supplies of food, fuel and water.

Life became even more perilous for the 1.1 million Gazans living in the north of the enclave, when Israel told them to evacuate southwards, prompting aid workers to warn of a “complete catastrophe.”

The UN World food Program has warned that it was “running out of supplies” to help people in Gaza. Aid flights have arrived in Egypt near the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s southern border, but only a few convoys have been allowed into the enclave so far.

In the meantime, the death toll continues to rise. More people have been killed in the bombardment of the enclave since October 7 than during the six-week Israel-Hamas war of 2014.

Jupiter was one of the first targets observed by the James Webb Space Telescope when it initially turned its infrared gaze on the universe in July 2022. After capturing stunning images that surpassed the expectations of astronomers, the space observatory has now revealed a never-before-seen feature in the gas giant’s atmosphere.

Researchers used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, to take a series of images of Jupiter 10 hours apart, applying four different filters to detect changes in the planet’s atmosphere. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, and the Webb telescope’s unprecedented capabilities have been used over the past year to spot many newly observed celestial features, such as megaclusters of young stars and unexpected pairs of planetlike objects.

The astronomers spied a high-speed jet stream in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere, an atmospheric layer about 25 miles (40 kilometers) above the clouds. The jet stream, which sits over the planet’s equator, spans more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide and moves at 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour), or twice the rate seen with sustained winds of a Category 5 hurricane on Earth.

The study findings, made possible by Webb’s sensitive capabilities, shed light on the dynamic interactions within Jupiter’s stormy atmosphere.

“This is something that totally surprised us,” said Ricardo Hueso, lead author of the study published October 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy, in a statement. Hueso is a physics lecturer at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

“What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation,” he said.

Jupiter’s wild weather

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and is composed of gases, so it couldn’t be more different from Earth. But similar to our planet, Jupiter has a layered atmosphere. These turbulent layers have been observed by previous missions and telescopes attempting to better understand how the different parts of the atmosphere interact with one another. The layers also contain weather patterns, including century-spanning storms such as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and clouds made of icy ammonia.

While other missions have penetrated deeper into Jupiter’s swirling clouds by using different wavelengths of light to peer beneath them, Webb is uniquely positioned to study the higher-altitude layers, about 15 to 30 miles (25 to 50 kilometers) above the cloud tops, and spy previously indistinct details.

“Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” said study coauthor Imke de Pater, professor emeritus of astronomy, Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement.

Jet stream revelations

Researchers compared winds detected by Webb at high altitudes with those within the lower layers picked up by Hubble and tracked changes in wind speed. Both space observatories were necessary to detect the jet stream, as Webb spotted small cloud features and Hubble provided a look at the equatorial atmosphere, including storms not related to the jet. The two telescopes provided a broader look at Jupiter’s complex atmosphere and the processes taking place within the layers.

“We knew the different wavelengths of Webb and Hubble would reveal the three-dimensional structure of storm clouds, but we were also able to use the timing of the data to see how rapidly storms develop,” said study coauthor Michael Wong, planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the associated Hubble observations, in a statement.

Future observations of Jupiter using the Webb telescope may uncover more insights into the jet stream, such as whether its speed and altitude shift over time, as well as other surprises.

“It’s amazing to me that, after years of tracking Jupiter’s clouds and winds from numerous observatories, we still have more to learn about Jupiter, and features like this jet can remain hidden from view until these new NIRCam images were taken in 2022,” said study coauthor Leigh Fletcher, professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, in a statement.

“Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths. If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years — it’ll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come.”