By Ted Regencia, Lyndal Rowlands, Ali Harb and Virginia Pietromarchi

    Two deaths reported after Israeli strike hits bakery inside refugee camp

    Al Jazeera Arabic is reporting that two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air raid in Gaza, which we reported earlier today.

    The strike hit a bakery in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, it said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

    UN chief urges ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’

    Following his earlier comments in which he condemned the hospital attack , Antonio Guterres has just now called for an “immediate” ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.

    “I call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire to … ease the epic human suffering we are witnessing,” the UN chief told a forum of the Belt and Road infrastructure project in China’s capital, Beijing.

    Biden ‘between a rock and a hard place’ on visit to Israel

    Twenty-four hours ago, this was an entirely different trip for Joe Biden, and I bet he wished he did it before because now it puts him between a rock and a hard place.

    He is going there after having fully committed US support to Israel at a time when, here in the US, it was widely perceived as Israel defending itself against a brutal attack by Hamas. And now it is Israel accused of targeting civilians in this hospital explosion, which its leaders have denied.

    John Kirby, the spokesperson of the White House, on the trip there briefed reporters and said Biden is going to come with some tough questions for his ally Benjamin Netanyahu.

    He was scheduled to talk with the Israeli prime minister, the families of those who were killed, and those who were taken captive by Hamas.

    But he now has to do a balancing act and show that the US cares about Palestinian civilians in this instance, as well and get his national security team looking independently into what exactly happened there.

    Multiple deaths, injuries reported in Israeli air raids across Gaza

    At least 37 more people have been killed in separate air raids targeting two neighbourhoods at a refugee camp in northern Gaza.

    Gaza’s interior ministry said the Israeli bombardments hit the areas of al-Qasaib and Halima al-Saadia in Jabalia.

    In southern Gaza, at least two people were also killed and seven others wounded in an Israeli air raid early on Wednesday, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.

    The report said the bombardment hit a residential apartment in the town of Hamad in Khan Younis.

    An undetermined number of deaths were also reported in Yarmouk following another Israeli strike.

    Hospital bombing raises questions over Israel-Arab ‘normalisation’

    The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, three countries that have all forged formal ties Israel, have condemned the bombing of al-Ahli hospital and blamed Israel for the attack, effectively dismissing Israeli claims that the facility was hit by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.

    Saudi Arabia also strongly condemned the attack, calling it a “heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces”.

    The Biden administration has been pushing for so-called normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a policy priority in the region.

    “The regional dynamic is taking a sharp downward turn tonight & US policy crumbling into the sand,” US analyst Charles Lister wrote on X.