UN food agencies warned on Thursday of deadly hunger levels in 16 “hunger hotspots” in coming months, with the Palestinian territories, Sudan and South Sudan, Mali and Haiti of most concern, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Conflict is driving most of the acute food insecurity in all those areas analysed by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme. Extreme weather was a major factor in other regions, while economic inequality and high debt in many developing countries are hurting governments’ capacity to react, according to the joint report covering forecasts for November 2024 to May 2025.

Humanitarian action was urgently needed to prevent starvation and death in the Palestinian territories, Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali, said the report, based on research by experts from the two Rome-based United Nations agencies, reports AFP.

“Without immediate humanitarian efforts and concerted international action to address severe access constraints and advocate for the de-escalation of conflict and insecurity, further starvation and loss of life are likely” in those spots, it found.

Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, along with Nigeria, Chad, Mozambique and Myanmar, are of “very high concern”, it said. In all those countries, conflict was either a major driver of hunger, or a contributor.

A surge in hostilities in the Gaza Strip has raised concerns that the “worst case scenario” of famine will materialise, said the report.

According to AFP, it estimated that 41% of the population, or 876,000 people, will face “emergency” levels of hunger from November until the end of April. Nearly 16%, or 345,000 people, will experience the most serious “catastrophic” levels. As of mid-October, 1.9 million people in Gaza have been displaced, it said.

Conflict forces people to flee their homes, “disrupting livelihoods and income, limiting market access, and resulting in price fluctuations and erratic food production and consumption,” the report said.

With its focus on the most severe and worsening countries, the UN agencies said the report did not “represent all countries/territories experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity”.

The agencies said 2024 marked the second consecutive year of declining funding for humanitarian assistance, while 12 appeals faced funding shortfalls of more than 75%, including for Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria and Myanmar.

Geneva Abdul

A Palestinian student who was stripped of her student visa after remarks she made about the Israel-Gaza war has won a human rights appeal against the UK Home Office’s decision.

The Home Office failed to demonstrate that the presence of Dana Abu Qamar, 20, was “not conducive to public good” after the law student’s visa was revoked in December 2023, according to a tribunal ruling.

She came to the attention of authorities after statements made at a university demonstration on Gaza’s historical resistance to Israel’s “oppressive regime” and a subsequent interview with Sky News.

The dual Jordanian-Canadian citizen of Palestinian origin said:

For 16 years Gaza has been under blockade, and for the first time they are actively resisting, they are not on the defence, and this is truly a once in a lifetime experience.”

She also said:

And everyone is, we are both in fear, but also in fear of what, how Israel will retaliate and how we’ve seen it retaliate overnight, and the missiles that it’s launched and the attacks, but also we are full of pride. We are really, really full of joy of what happened.”

Abu Qamar, who led the Friends of Palestine society at the University of Manchester, said she was misinterpreted and that she was seeking to support Palestinian resistance to occupation and does not condone the use of violence against civilians, nor has she expressed support for Hamas.

The tribunal said the Home Office decision was a “disproportionate interference with her protected right to free speech” under the European convention on human rights. It found that her statements could not be taken as support for Hamas or the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October.

A senior Hamas official said on Thursday that the group rejects any proposal for a temporary halt to more than a year of fighting in Gaza and insists on a lasting ceasefire, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“The idea of a temporary pause in the war, only to resume aggression later, is something we have already expressed our position on. Hamas supports a permanent end to the war, not a temporary one,” Taher al-Nunu, a senior leader of the group, told AFP.

Mediators seeking to broker a Gaza ceasefire are expected to propose a truce of “less than a month” to Hamas, a source with knowledge of the talks told AFP on Wednesday.

Meetings between the Mossad head David Barnea, CIA director Bill Burns and Qatar’s prime minister in Doha, which concluded on Monday, discussed proposing a “short-term” truce of “less than a month”, the source told AFP on condition of anonymity because of the talks’ sensitivity.

The proposal involves exchanging Israeli hostages for Palestinians in Israeli prisons and increasing aid to Gaza, the source added.

“US officials believe that if a short-term deal can be reached, it could lead to a more permanent agreement,” the source told AFP.

Nunu said the group had not received any proposal so far, adding if it gets such a plan, it would respond. However, he reiterated the demands the group has been insisting on for months: “a permanent ceasefire, withdrawal (of Israeli forces) from Gaza, the return of displaced people, sufficient humanitarian aid to Gaza and a serious prisoner exchange deal”.

Israel’s military said on Thursday it shot down a drone smuggling weapons from Egyptian territory to Israel on Wednesday, reports Reuters.

Israeli officials have said during the war in Gaza that Palestinian armed group Hamas used tunnels running under the border into Egypt’s Sinai region to smuggle arms. However, Egypt says it destroyed tunnel networks leading to Gaza years ago and created a buffer zone and border fortifications that prevent smuggling.

Earlier in October, the Israeli military also said it foiled a weapon smuggling attempt from Egypt after downing a drone carrying guns and bullets, reports Reuters.

Israel’s military issued an evacuation order for residents in Lebanon’s Baalbek city and surrounding areas on Thursday, for the second day in a row, reports Reuters.

The Israeli army’s evacuation call for several areas of south Lebanon on Thursday, includes a Palestinian refugee camp, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

It warned it was poised to hit Hezbollah targets in those areas.

“Hezbollah’s terrorist activities force the IDF (army) to act forcefully against it in these areas, and we do not intend to harm you,” the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee said in a post on X.

Among the areas listed was Rashidieh camp, which houses thousands of Palestinian refugees.

US state department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel’s military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, according to three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter.

The incidents – some of which may have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources – have been recorded since 7 October 2023, when the Gaza war started. They are being collected by the state department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance (CHIRG), a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.

State department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.

The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment and coordinated department action.

None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter. Options, the former official said, could range from working with Israel’s government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licenses or withholding future approvals.

The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.

World must act to prevent ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Gaza, António Guterres warns

Patrick Greenfield

The UN secretary general, António Guterres has warned Israel could carry out the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza if the international community does not make a determined stand to prevent it.

Guterres made his appeal at a time of mounting civilian casualties from the Israeli bombardment of northern Gaza. A strike on Tuesday in Beit Lahiya district killed at least 93 people, in what the UN said was just one of at least seven “mass casualty incidents” across Gaza in the past week.

At the same time, aid deliveries to Gaza are reported to have fallen to their lowest level since the start of the war, leading to growing allegations that Israel’s true intention is to drive the remaining Palestinian population out of at least part of Gaza.

The UN secretary general, speaking on the sidelines of the COP16 biodiversity conference in Colombia, suggested that the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza had been prevented until now by its people’s refusal to succumb to the intense pressure to flee their homes and by Arab resolve not to accept mass population transfers.

“The intention might be for the Palestinians to leave Gaza, for others to occupy it,” Guterres told the Guardian. “But there has been – and I pay tribute to the courage and the resilience of the Palestinian people and to the determination of the Arab world – [an effort] to avoid the ethnic cleansing becoming a reality.”

“We will do everything possible to help them remain there and to avoid ethnic cleansing that might occur if there is not strong determination from the international community,” he added.

You can read the full report by Patrick Greenfield in Cali, Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger in Jerusalem here:

Israeli strikes on the West Bank’s Nur Shams refugee camp on Thursday killed two Palestinians including a child, Reuters reports, citing the Palestinian health ministry.

One Palestinian was shot and killed by the Israeli army overnight in West Bank’s refugee camp of Tulkarm, the health ministry added.

The Israeli army said on Thursday it was conducting an operation targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Nur Shams.

Official Palestinian news agency Wafa said a large number of Israeli vehicles and heavy bulldozers stormed the city and headed towards the Nur Shams refugee camp.

According to Reuters, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, al-Quds Brigades, said in a statement they detonated a highly explosive bomb in a military bulldozer to thwart the Israeli army’s raid.

Lebanon’s prime minister has expressed hope that a ceasefire deal with Israel could be reached within days, after Hezbollah’s new leader Naim Qassem said the militant group could agree to a possible truce under certain parameters.

In his first public comments a day after being named to replace former longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, Qassem said however that Israel had yet to agree to any proposal that could be discussed, and that the Iran-backed group will keep fighting until it is offered terms it deems acceptable.

“If the Israelis decide to stop the aggression, we say that we accept, but according to the conditions that we see as suitable,” Qassem said, speaking from an undisclosed location in a pre-recorded televised address. “We will not beg for a ceasefire.”

It came as Israel’s security cabinet met to discuss a possible truce, but also as Israel expanded their bombardment of the group’s bastions, attacking the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, and said it had killed another senior Hezbollah commander.

Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati said he had previously not believed a deal would be possible until after Tuesday’s US presidential election. But he said he became cautiously optimistic after speaking on Wednesday with the Biden administration’s Middle East envoy Amos Hochstein, who was due to travel to Israel on Thursday.

“Hochstein, during his call with me, suggested to me that we could reach an agreement before the end of the month and before November 5th,” Mikati told Lebanon’s Al Jadeed television.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan published what it said was a draft agreement providing for an initial 60-day truce. The document, which the broadcaster said was a leaked proposal written by Washington, said Israel would withdraw its forces from Lebanon within the first week of the 60-day ceasefire. It largely aligned with details reported earlier by Reuters.

Although negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah have made significant progress in the last 24 hours, the Biden administration has not reached a final agreement with either Israel or Lebanon, Axios reported citing two US officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

The draft published by Kan was dated Saturday. When asked to comment, White House national security spokesperson Sean Savett said:

There are many reports and drafts circulating. They do not reflect the current state of negotiations.”

In other developments:

• The Israeli army launched heavy airstrikes on the eastern city of Baalbek, famed for its Roman temples, and nearby villages. Tens of thousands of Lebanese, including many who sought shelter in Baalbek from other areas, fled after an Israeli evacuation warning. Lebanon’s health ministry said 19 people were killed in Israeli strikes on two towns in the Baalbek area on Wednesday. After the airstrikes, the Israeli military said it had targeted Hezbollah fuel reservoirs in the Bekaa valley region.

• In his first remarks as leader, Nassim Qassem said the series of blows dealt to the group in recent weeks had “hurt” Hezbollah, but asserted that the group had been able to reorganise its ranks swiftly after Nasrallah’s death. “Hezbollah’s capabilities are still available and compatible with a long war,” he said.

• Qassem said he would stick to the war strategy laid out by his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel last month after full-scale fighting broke out. “My work programme is a continuation of the work programme of our leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” Qassem said, pledging to press on with “the war plan that he [Nasrallah] developed with the leadership” of the Iran-backed group.

• Donald Trump promised that he will bring “peace” to the Middle East, with the US Republican nominee for president making the pronouncement in a letter just six days before the US election for the White House on 5 November. “During my administration, we had peace in the Middle East, and we will have peace again very soon!” he said in his letter to Lebanese Americans.

• At least 30 people were killed as Israel pummeled Gaza with new bombardments, Palestinian medics said. Eight of today’s victims were killed in northern Gaza. The area Israel hit is near to where medics said at least 93 people had been killed or reported missing on Tuesday in an Israeli strike Washington called “horrifying”.

• The UN security council “strongly warned against any attempts to dismantle or diminish” the operations and mandate of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, Unrwa, after Israel passed a law banning its operations. In a statement adopted by consensus, the 15-member body expressed grave concern over the legislation adopted by the Israeli parliament on Monday.

• The Israeli army said it had killed the deputy head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, Mustafa Ahmad Shahadi, in a strike in the Nabatieh area of south Lebanon. “In an intelligence-directed strike, the Israeli air force struck and eliminated Mustafa Ahmad Shahadi, deputy commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces, in the area of Nabatieh,” the army said in a statement.

• At least 43,163 Palestinians have been killed and 101,510 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said. The ministry said on Wednesday that 102 Palestinians had been killed and 287 injured in the past 24 hours. The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

• Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said it had launched drones at an Israeli base in the port city of Haifa. Hezbollah fighters “launched an air attack at 7.45am (0545 GMT) … with a squadron of attack drones” on a “base in southern Haifa”, the group said in a statement.