Middle East crisis live: Netanyahu indicates Gaza truce talks focused on release of all hostages
Date: 2025-08-13T07:29:11.000Z
Title: Benjamin Netanyahu
Content: Israeli prime minister has hinted that ceasefire efforts in Gaza are now focused on a comprehensive deal that would release the remaining hostages all at once, rather than in phases.
Arab officials told the AP news agency last week that mediators Egypt and Qatar were preparing a new framework for a deal that would include the release of all remaining hostages in one go in return for a lasting ceasefire and Israel's withdrawal.
The long-running indirect talks appeared to break down last month, but a Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo for fresh talks on Tuesday.
In an interview with Israel's i24 News network on Tuesday, Netanyahu was asked if the window had closed on a partial ceasefire deal.
'I think it's behind us,' Netanyahu replied. 'We tried, we made all kinds of attempts, we went through a lot, but it turned out that they were just misleading us.'
'I want all of them,' he said of the hostages. 'The release of all the hostages, both alive and dead – that's the stage we're at.'
He added that Israel's demands haven't changed, and that the war will end only when all hostages are returned and Hamas has surrendered.
Other key updates include:
The United Nations has warned that starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at the highest levels since the war began. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric reported the warning from the World Food Program and said Gaza's Health Ministry told UN staff in Gaza that five people died over the last 24 hours from malnutrition and starvation. The ministry says 121 adults and 101 children have died of malnutrition-related causes during the war.
The foreign ministers of 25 countries including the UK, Australia, France, Spain and Japan as well as two signatories from the EU released a joint statement saying that 'humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels'. The statement called for the government of Israel to let in a 'flood' of aid.
The World Health Organization said Israel should let it stock medical supplies to deal with a 'catastrophic' health situation in Gaza, before Israel enacts plans to seize control of Gaza City.
Gaza's Hamas-run government media office has said Israel is blocking the entry of more than 430 food items into the territory, despite allowing some aid trucks through last month under international pressure.
Australia prime minister Anthony Albanese said his Israeli counterpart was 'in denial' about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, a day after announcing Australia would recognise a Palestinian state for the first time.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
‘It's post-apocalyptic': Children undergoing surgery without anaesthetic in Gaza hospitals, says NHS doctor
An NHS consultant has described having to operate on a child without anaesthetic under 'post-apocalyptic conditions' in one of Gaza's overwhelmed hospitals. Dr Nada al-Hadithy, an NHS consultant plastic surgeon and burns specialist, said teams of surgeons had been working for 14 or 15 hours each day dealing with blast injuries, burns and bullet wounds. Yet the number of casualties meant that they had still been unable to deal with all the cases that needed treatment. Dr al-Hadithy, who recently returned from volunteering with a medical charity at Gaza's Nasser Hospital, said surgeons were also dealing with shortages of equipment and supplies. She said: 'You have literally got beds on the floor in the corridor and it's bed, to bed, to bed. 'It's post-apocalyptic, the number of patients rammed into that hospital because there's such desperate need.' She went on: 'One day I was forced to operate on a child that was not anaesthetised and I will never ever forget the crying.' The boy had a serious burn which had turned septic and had been given strong painkillers such as morphine, but the hospital's anaesthetic machine was not working due to a broken part. She said: 'He was saying the same thing over and over again, but he was awake. I've got children, every parent will always want to do their absolute best to protect their child and any adult seeing a child in pain would want to take steps to help that child. These things in my head just go over and over all the time.' Gaza has been under Israeli bombardment and a ground offensive for 22 months since Israel began its retaliation for Hamas' October 7 attacks that killed around 1,200 and took around 250 hostages. The Hamas-run health ministry says more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the conflict. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but has said that women and children make up more than half the dead. Israel claims those figures are inflated. Dr al-Hadithy said the majority of her patients had been children. She said: 'It was predominantly blast [injuries], shrapnel embedded and traumatic amputations and burns. A big, big number of burns. The burns [patients] sadly did very, very badly.' A lack of facilities and supplies meant burns cases which would have survived in the UK were dying in Gaza, she said. Children with severe burns would also need years of follow-on care and operations to stop them becoming crippled, as burn tissue thickened and toughened with time. She said: 'A big burn in a child is a life sentence. It's not one and done. It's multiple operations for the rest of their childhood, until they are at least 22, 23.' Both patients and hospital staff were increasingly showing signs of malnutrition, she said. Patients not getting enough food were struggling to heal and fight off infection. She said: 'I have a lot of patients I can't stop thinking about. I close my eyes and just see so much infection. The amount of infection and malnutrition just meant that they just weren't healing.' She said one case that had stayed with her was two young brothers who were badly wounded while their parents and other siblings died. The younger brother, Osaid, had bad burns to his legs and across his chest, while the older brother, Khalid, had a piece of shrapnel in his brain and 40 per cent burns across his body. Khalid had so little food to eat that he was getting weaker and surgeons were struggling to get his wounds to heal. The pressure of dealing with constant war wounds and the need to turn any available space into wards to treat trauma cases meant cardiac, cancer and diabetes care in the hospitals had been downgraded in priority. She said the scale of what she had seen had struck her soon after she returned to the UK following her volunteer stint. Becoming tearful, she said: 'I am desperate to go back. I can't stop thinking about my patients. I remember taking my kids to the playground. It was such a relief to see children intact. At the playground you just see all these beautiful, joyful children and their bodies were not burned or without limbs. I have never seen so many child amputees in my life.' She said despite the difficulties and shortages, she had been inspired by working with Palestinian medics, who were 'incredibly hard-working'. She said: 'The Palestinians and the Gazans have been so dehumanised during this conflict. They are spoken about without their individual stories, they are spoken about as numbers. 'But they are amazingly smart, capable, hard-working people who are doing their absolute best for their communities.' More than100 aid organisations working in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank on Thursday accused Israel of 'dangerously weaponising' aid in its application of new rules for registering groups involved in delivering humanitarian assistance. 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The Independent
5 hours ago
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Heat and thirst drive families in Gaza to drink water that makes them sick
After waking early to stand in line for an hour under the August heat, Rana Odeh returns to her tent with her jug of murky water. She wipes the sweat from her brow and strategizes how much to portion out to her two small children. From its color alone, she knows full well it's likely contaminated. Thirst supersedes the fear of illness. She fills small bottles for her son and daughter and pours a sip into a teacup for herself. What's left she adds to a jerrycan for later. 'We are forced to give it to our children because we have no alternative,' Odeh, who was driven from her home in Khan Younis, said of the water. 'It causes diseases for us and our children.' Such scenes have become the grim routine in Muwasi, a sprawling displacement camp in central Gaza where hundreds of thousands endure scorching summer heat. Sweat-soaked and dust-covered, parents and children chase down water trucks that come every two or three days, filling bottles, canisters and buckets and then hauling them home, sometimes on donkey-drawn carts. Each drop is rationed for drinking, cooking, cleaning or washing. Some reuse what they can and save a couple of cloudy inches in their jerrycans for whatever tomorrow brings — or doesn't. When water fails to arrive, Odeh said, she and her son fill bottles from the sea. Over the 22 months since Israel launched its offensive, Gaza's water access has been progressively strained. Limits on fuel imports and electricity have hampered the operation of desalination plants while infrastructure bottlenecks and pipeline damage choked delivery to a dribble. Gaza's aquifers became polluted by sewage and the wreckage of bombed buildings. Wells are mostly inaccessible or destroyed, aid groups and the local utility say. Meanwhile, the water crisis has helped fuel the rampant spread of disease, on top of Gaza's rising starvation. UNRWA — the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees — said Thursday that its health centers now see an average 10,300 patients a week with infectious diseases, mostly diarrhea from contaminated water. Efforts to ease the water shortage are in motion, but for many the prospect is still overshadowed by the risk of what may unfold before new supply comes. And the thirst is only growing as a heat wave bears down, with humidity and temperatures in Gaza soaring on Friday to 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Searing heat and sullied water Mahmoud al-Dibs, a father displaced from Gaza City to Muwasi, dumped water over his head from a flimsy plastic bag — one of the vessels used to carry water in the camps. 'Outside the tents it is hot and inside the tents it is hot, so we are forced to drink this water wherever we go,' he said. Al-Dibs was among many who told The Associated Press they knowingly drink non-potable water. The few people still possessing rooftop tanks can't muster enough water to clean them, so what flows from their taps is yellow and unsafe, said Bushra Khalidi, an official with Oxfam, an aid group working in Gaza. Before the war, the coastal enclave's more than 2 million residents got their water from a patchwork of sources. Some was piped in by Mekorot, Israel's national water utility. Some came from desalination plants. Some was pulled from high-saline wells, and some imported in bottles. Every source has been jeopardized. Palestinians are relying more heavily on groundwater, which today makes up more than half of Gaza's supply. The well water has historically been brackish, but still serviceable for cleaning, bathing, or farming, according to Palestinian water officials and aid groups. Now people have to drink it. 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Airstrikes destroyed some of the transmission pipelines as well as one of Gaza's three desalination plants. Bombardment and advancing troops damaged or cut off wells – to the point that today only 137 of Gaza's 392 wells are accessible, according to UNICEF. Water quality from some wells has deteriorated, fouled by sewage, the rubble of shattered buildings and the residue of spent munitions. Fuel shortages have strained the system, slowing pumps at wells and the trucks that carry water. The remaining two desalination plants have operated far below capacity or ground to a halt at times, aid groups and officials say. In recent weeks, Israel has taken some steps to reverse the damage. It delivers water via two of Mekorot's three pipelines into Gaza and reconnected one of the desalination plants to Israel's electricity grid, Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel told The Associated Press. 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COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of humanitarian aid to Gaza, said it has allowed equipment into the enclave to build a pipeline from the plant and deliveries could start in a few weeks. The plant wouldn't depend on Israel for power, but since Israel holds the crossings, it will control the entry of water into Gaza for the foreseeable future. But aid groups warn that access to water and other aid could be disrupted again by Israel's plans to launch a new offensive on some of the last areas outside its military control. Those areas include Gaza City and Muwasi, where much of Gaza's population is now located. In Muwasi's tent camps, people line up for the sporadic arrivals of water trucks. Hosni Shaheen, whose family was also displaced from Khan Younis, already sees the water he drinks as a last resort. 'It causes stomach cramps for adults and children, without exception," he said. 'You don't feel safe when your children drink it.' ___ Metz reported from Jerusalem. Alon Berstein contributed reporting from Kerem Shalom, Israel. ___
Times
6 hours ago
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My session with the beach therapist stopping sunbathers feeling sad
'What is worrying you this morning?' asked the psychologist, pulling out a pen and sheet of paper. Off the top of my head I mentioned climate change, because temperatures in Italy were edging towards a freakish 40C, then added 'war' because I had just read of more people killed in Gaza and finally I listed my teenage son, since it was A-level results week. Alessandro Iacubino drew two concentric circles and wrote 'son' in the centre then 'war' and 'climate' in the outer ring. 'Let's start by focusing on where you can make a difference: your son,' he said. So began my first ever session with a psychologist, which was taking place next to a group of men in trunks playing cards and women in colourful bikinis stretched out to catch the rays. We were sat under a umbrella on the sand at a bustling beach club in Puglia. Iacubino, 47, turns up here on the Gargano peninsula once a week, hangs a 'psychologist' sign from an umbrella and offers free advice to holidaymakers who might balk at booking an appointment to lie on a sofa in an office. He explained: 'There is a stigma about seeing a psychologist but people need to know psychology is not just for those with problems, it's about preventing problems before they happen. And the beach is a great place to meet people.' After clocking up 100 free consultations on the sand over 15 days this summer, the psychologist from Puglia has become a media star, being interviewed by newspapers and national TV. In his day job Iacubino is regularly hired by companies to help their workers and has held sessions in ports amid the shipping containers and in food factories — meaning he already knows something about psychological outreach. 'In Europe the use of mental health medication has soared by 40 per cent in ten years and one in ten Italians take benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium, so we have a problem,' he said. 'Last summer I was at the beach when someone asked me about my job and people starting requesting advice, giving me the idea to bring my work to the seaside.' During a whistle-stop tour of beaches in Bari, Cagliari and Rimini, where he teamed up with an organisation pushing for free psychological care, local mayors thanked him for his work. He said that he finds people can be more willing to discuss anxieties on a busy beach than in the privacy of his office, adding: 'Here I am not behind a desk and people don't feel judged.' Some 70 per cent of his beach customers have been women, mostly aged 30 to 50. He said: 'It's mainly anxiety over anything from children to work to fear of the future. Stress like that causes difficulty making important decisions, low self-esteem, lack of concentration and brain fog. But if you can deal with it in time, you can head off the more serious problems it leads to, like depression.' However, his venture has been criticised from within his own profession. Puglia's association of psychologists admonished Iacubino for practising 'pop psychology' and 'discrediting the professional nature and seriousness of our work,' by setting up shop in the 'informal' setting of a beach club. Iacubino said he was not looking for a fight but argued: 'We psychologists are too distant, too academic.' Pointing to the 'psychologist' sign swinging in the sea breeze from his umbrella, he added: 'This sign has scared a whole profession.' One piece of advice Iacubino gives to stressed-out beachgoers is to dwell on positive memories. 'We instinctively focus on negative memories because we think they are instructive and will safeguard us,' he said. During our informal consultation, he advised that I think of five actions to tackle my stress about my son, starting with making more free time to help him out. He said: 'What I do here is more about personal growth than therapy, but it means problems can be halted early. If, on the other hand, I see real issues, I can refer them for therapy.' Around him at the Fuori Rotta beach club, stress appeared in short supply as sun seekers lined up to buy ice creams at the kiosk and children splashed in the shallows. But Italy's beach clubs have become a lightning rod for national anxieties this summer, as a decline in business is blamed on rising entry fees and seized on by opposition parties as a sign of creeping poverty, drawing furious rebuttals from the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Beachgoers at the Fuori Rotta welcomed Iacubino's initiative. 'Where better to do this than at the sea, where people are trying to improve their health,' Claudia Giagnorio, 45, said as she headed for the surf. 'It's a great chance for people to work on their problems,' Jasmine D'Orio, 15, said. 'I might go and have a word,' Gianluca Tenace, 44, a tiler, said. Aurora Morrone, the manager of the club, said Iacubino was good for business. She said: 'I was surprised to get calls from people asking when he would be here so they could meet him. Now I think we will be seeing more beach clubs with psychologists.'
