Health officials in the Gaza Strip say that more than 64,000 have been killed in the nearly two-year war. Hamas and Israel meanwhile reiterated their incompatible demands for ending the fighting sparked by the militant group's attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Local hospitals said Thursday that Israeli strikes killed 28 people overnight. Israel is pressing ahead with its planned offensive in famine-stricken Gaza City. In the occupied West Bank, Israelis established a new settlement in a Palestinian city, according to an anti-settlement monitoring group.

The U.N. humanitarian office says a record 383 aid workers were killed in global hot spots in 2024, nearly half of them in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas. U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher says, "Attacks on this scale, with zero accountability, are a shameful indictment of international inaction and apathy." The Aid Worker Security Database says the number of killings rose from 293 in 2023 to 383 in 2024, including more than 180 in Gaza. Sudan was second to Gaza and the West Bank, with 60 aid workers losing their lives in 2024 during civil war. The United Nations is marking World Humanitarian Day on Tuesday.

Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip 20 years ago, dismantling 21 Jewish settlements and pulling out its forces. The Friday anniversary of the start of the landmark disengagement comes as Israel is mired in a nearly two-year war with Hamas. The conflict has devastated the Palestinian territory and is likely to keep troops there long into the future. Israel's disengagement included removing four settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and was then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's controversial attempt to jump-start negotiations with the Palestinians. But it bitterly divided Israeli society and led to the empowerment of Hamas, with implications that continue to reverberate today.

Israel's far-right finance minister says a contentious new settlement construction in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is going ahead, a project that Palestinians and rights groups worry will scuttle plans for a future Palestinian state by effectively cutting the West Bank into two separate parts. The announcement on Thursday comes as many countries said they would recognize a Palestinian state in September at the United Nations General Assembly. Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says the "reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize."

Health officials and witnesses say Israeli gunfire killed at least 25 people while seeking aid. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will "allow" Palestinians to leave during an upcoming military offensive in some of the territory's most populated areas. Netanyahu wants to realize U.S. President Donald Trump's vision of relocating much of Gaza's population of over 2 million people through what he refers to as "voluntary migration" — and what critics have warned could be ethnic cleansing. Efforts to revive ceasefire talks have resumed after apparently breaking down last month. Hamas and Egyptian officials met Wednesday in Cairo.