Dharampal Gulati

"Israel is severing all contact with Gaza. There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza. Those workers from Gaza who were in Israel on the day of the outbreak of the war will be returned to Gaza," the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said in a post on X.

In a statement issued late on Wednesday night, the IDF reported that their aircraft had targeted a "Hamas command and control complex" in Jabaliya's Falluja neighborhood, as per CNN.

The Gaza Health Ministry has said that 8,525 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks since the October 7 attacks.

The victims included 3,457 children and 2,136 women, ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qedra said in a statement, Xinhua news agency reported.

Americans have been historically more sympathetic to Israel than to Palestine but the gap has been narrowing. In a 2013 Gallup poll, Americans sympathized with Israel over Palestine 64 per cent to 12 per cent and a poll by the same agency conducted earlier this year showed that the gap had narrowed to 54 per cent to 31 per cent.

The reasons for this state of affairs are multi-fold -- ranging with the PLO -- and now as the Palestinian Authority's lack of success in its mission since the process for a negotiated solution began, Israeli intransigence, provocations, and backsliding, changing regional dynamics, work for the people, and so on.  

So far, 18,967 Palestinians have been injured since the fighting broke out, the Ministry said on Friday in a statement as quoted by Xinhua news agency report. Israel has launched massive airstrikes and limited ground operations against Gaza in retaliation for a surprise attack by Gaza-ruling Hamas militants on Israeli military targets and towns on October 7, which has killed at least 1,400 people in Israel.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have already staged 'limited' raids to fight Palestinian gunmen and say they are targeting sites where Hamas are assembling as they prepare to resist a wider Israeli invasion, Daily Mail reported.

Despite its killing of Israeli civilians and its considerable stockpiles of rockets, Hamas remains a political group with a heavily armed militia, Daily Mail reported.

And while those demonstrations may seem jarring given the widespread deaths in Israel this week, the fact that some have cheered on violence against civilians may obscure the broader political dynamics at play -- both within the Middle East and within the Arab countries themselves, Vox reported.