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AFP: EU leaders will on Thursday debate calling for a “humanitarian pause” in Israel’s war with Hamas.

The 27-nation bloc has long been split between more pro-Palestinian members such as Ireland and Spain, and staunch backers of Israel including Germany and Austria.

After days of negotiations, a draft statement for the summit calls “for continued, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access and aid to reach those in need through all necessary measures including a humanitarian pause”.

That statement – which could change when leaders meet in Brussels – falls short of demands from the United Nations for a “ceasefire”.

Germany, wary of urging a more definitive halt that could tie Israel’s hands, has mooted calls for humanitarian “windows” or “pauses” in the plural.

“Letters, commas, language matter, and that’s how you find agreements,” said a senior EU official.

But diplomats from some EU nations warn that delays over finding the right words as the death toll mounts are hitting the bloc’s global standing and leaving it flailing in the face of developments.

AP: Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have decided to stay in their homes in northern Gaza, despite Israeli warnings that they face grave danger if they don’t move south.

They say evacuation doesn’t make sense considering the relentless bombardment of southern Gaza, where Israel has repeatedly urged the more than one million residents of northern Gaza to seek refuge.

If they flee, they face appalling conditions in overcrowded shelters and persistent shortages of food and water in the south. It is estimated that 350,000 civilians have remained in the north, even as Israel edges closer to a planned ground offensive.

AFP: Cryptocurrency has become the latest front in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, analysts say.

Israeli and US authorities have intensified their financial hunt into Hamas in recent days as they track illicit funds via digital currencies.

Ari Redbord, global policy head at crypto tracking specialist TRM Labs, said there is now less crypto transfer activity on pro-Hamas support networks as a result.

“We are seeing a lot less activity in some respects since the war began,” Redbord told AFP.

This is “primarily because Israel has been very aggressive and successful in taking down these fundraising efforts”, he added.

Two weeks ago, Israeli police revealed they had located and frozen accounts linked to Hamas that sought “to solicit donations on social networks” via Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.

A Binance spokeswoman said it “follows internationally recognised sanctions rules, blocking the small number of accounts linked to illicit funds”.

Redbord, formerly a senior US government adviser, said Hamas had adopted crypto from 2019 at the latest, to seek funding via the Telegram messaging network and even on its own website.

Hamas decided in April that it would no longer accept cash via Bitcoin due to increased global surveillance of the world’s biggest digital unit.

Crypto fundraising is now operated via a network of Hamas-linked support groups.

Here is the video of Biden’s speech earlier in which he called for end to attacks by West Bank settlers and accused Hamas of hiding behind civilians in Gaza.

He also said Israel also must follow the ‘laws of war’. Speaking at a joint press conference with the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, the president said US support for Israel’s defence was ironclad, but criticised the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank by some Israelis:

UNRWA has been sharing its own fuel supplies so that trucks can distribute aid, bakeries can feed people in shelters, water can be desalinated, and hospitals can keep incubators, life support machines and other vital equipment working.

If it continues doing all of that, fuel will run out by Thursday, so the agency is deciding how to ration its supply, UNRWA spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai told The Associated Press.

“Do we give for the incubators or the bakeries? Do we bump clean water or do we send trucks to the borders?” she said. “It is an excruciating decision.”

AP: More than half of Gaza’s primary health care facilities and roughly a third of its hospitals have stopped functioning, the World Health Organization said.

At Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, the lack of medicine and clean water have led to “alarming” infection rates, the group Doctors Without Borders said. Amputations are often required to prevent infection from spreading in the wounded, it said.

One surgeon with the group described amputating half the foot of a 9-year-old boy with “slight sedation” on a hallway floor as his mother and sister watched.

In a swath of Gaza City’s Yarmouk neighborhood reduced to splinters, a bleeding man hugged a child after both were dug out of the rubble. A bakery in Deir al-Balah was flattened. In a nearby hospital, medics treated a boy with a mangled, half-severed leg. One worker lifted a dead baby out of the shattered concrete and rebar of 15 homes hit in the southern city of Rafah.

AFP: There are roughly 2,500 American troops in Iraq and some 900 in Syria as part of efforts to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, which once held significant territory in both countries but was pushed back by local ground forces backed by international air strikes in a bloody multi-year conflict.

US forces and other personnel from the international coalition against the jihadists are deployed at bases in Iraq and Syria that have been the target of the attacks, but the facilities are ultimately controlled by local forces rather than international troops.

American troops in Iraq are playing a training and advisory role following the official end of the coalition’s combat mission in December 2021, while those in Syria conduct frequent raids against IS.

Back to the recent increase in attacks on US forces deployed in Iraq and Syria.

The impact of the attacks has been relatively limited so far, but the possibility of escalation is high, AFP reports.

The Pentagon said Wednesday that 21 US personnel “received minor injuries due to drone attacks” in Iraq and Syria last week, but that all of them returned to duty.

And a US civilian contractor suffered a “cardiac episode” and died while sheltering at a base in Iraq after early warning systems indicated a threat was approaching, according to the Pentagon, which said an attack ultimately did not occur in that case.

There is significant potential for the situation to worsen, especially in the event that a drone or rocket directly kills American personnel.

“What we are seeing is the prospect for more significant escalation against US forces and personnel across the region in the very near term coming from Iranian proxy forces, and ultimately from Iran,” the Pentagon said.

Here is our full story on Biden’s remarks earlier.

Biden has called for an immediate end to Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, as Israel kept up its strikes on Gaza in preparation for a long promised ground invasion.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, Biden said US support for Israel’s defense was ironclad, but added that the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank by some Israelis was “pouring gasoline on the fire.”

“They’re attacking Palestinians in places that they’re entitled, and … it has to stop now,” the president said.

Biden accused Hamas of “hiding behind” Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but said Israel must follow the “laws of war,” in its strikes on the besieged enclave.

More than 6,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, according to the Hamas run health ministry, and there are fears the toll could further soar if Israel pushes ahead with a widely expected ground invasion.

Biden however cast doubt on civilian casualty figures put forward by the Palestinians.

“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging war,” he said.

“But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

The Israeli military said late Wednesday that its aircraft struck at Lebanon in retaliation for the earlier launch of a surface-to-air missile.

“A short while ago, the IDF Aerial Defense Array intercepted a surface-to-air missile fired from Lebanon at an IDF UAV (drone),” the Israeli Defense Forces said in a statement.

“In response, IDF aircraft struck the source of the launch,” it added.

Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which has claimed many of the recent attacks on US forces in Iraq is not one of the established militant groups operating in the region and has not publicly claimed affiliation with or backing from a specific government, AFP reports.

But its claims of attacks on US forces have appeared in Telegram channels used by pro-Iranian armed factions, and the Pentagon has said the organizations “conducting these attacks are supported by the IRGC and the Iranian regime” – a reference to Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The White House has meanwhile said Iran is “actively facilitating” attacks on US forces in the Middle East.

Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told AFP the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a media claiming name, it’s not a group.”

It is the result of various existing Iran-backed groups in Iraq deciding “during the duration of this Gaza conflict to jointly claim all of their attacks,” he said.

American and allied forces deployed in Iraq and Syria as part of an international anti-jihadist coalition have been repeatedly targeted by drone and missile attacks this month, AFP reports.

Although the attacks have not been claimed by a known group with documented links to Iran, Washington says Tehran is involved and has threatened to respond “decisively” to strikes by its proxies.

The recent spike in attacks is linked to the latest war between Israel and Hamas.

Armed factions close to Iran have threatened to attack US interests over Washington’s support for Israel, with one of them – Ketaeb Hezbollah – demanding that American forces leave Iraq or “taste the fires of hell.”

The Pentagon said there were 10 attacks on American and allied forces in Iraq and three in Syria between 17 and 24 October, involving a “mix of one-way attack drones and rockets.”

Many - though not all - of the recent attacks have been claimed by the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq.”

Israeli airstrikes struck a bakery in the al Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza on Wednesday, killing 10 people, according to a statement released by the Gaza government press office. People could be seen sifting through rubble in a large crater as airstrikes continued across the besieged strip. Israel’s military said it had conducted airstrikes across Gaza on Wednesday, targeting Hamas infrastructure: