Israeli defence minister says his country is planning for a long conflict as senior Hamas official is killed in Beirut drone strike

• Israel-Gaza war – live updates

The death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza has climbed to more than 22,000 after a day of intense fighting across the territory, including in the southern city of Khan Younis, where the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) said five people had been killed in a second Israeli attack on its compound.

The day after Israel announced the first drawdown of troops from Gaza, there was no sign of relief for its residents, who after three months of heavy bombardment and weeks of ground fighting, are almost all displaced, hungry and stalked by disease.

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AFP reports that in addition to the four Palestinians the IDF said it killed overnight in the occupied West Bank, Israel says it has arrested seven others.

More than 2,550 people have been arrested in the territory since the Israel-Hamas war began.

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At the Vatican, Pope Francis recalled 2023 as a year marked by wartime suffering.

During his traditional Sunday blessing from a window overlooking St Peter’s Square, he offered prayers for “the tormented Ukrainian people and the Palestinian and Israeli populations, the Sudanese people and many others”.

At the end of the year, we will have the courage to ask ourselves how many human lives have been shattered by armed conflict, how many dead and how much destruction, how much suffering, how much poverty?

Official says intense new phase of war to last at least six more months as country also prepares for Lebanon conflict

• Israel-Gaza war – live updates

Israel is withdrawing some troops from Gaza but preparing for an intense campaign to continue there for “six months at least” as well as expanding preparations for a Lebanon war, a senior official has said.

There is growing international pressure to curb an offensive that has so far killed nearly 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children. Even Israel’s staunchest ally, the US, which rejects calls for a ceasefire, has started pushing the government to scale back the ferocity of its attacks.

Heavy bombing continues, while Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has shown unparalleled ‘morality’ in its conduct in Gaza

• Israel-Gaza war – live updates

At least 100 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours, as the three-month-old conflict between Israel and Hamas rolls into the new year with no end in sight and only tentative Israeli government plans for discussing the day after the war is over.

The Hamas-run territory’s health authority said about 48 people were killed overnight on Sunday in heavy Israeli bombing of Gaza City, where pockets of fierce fighting are ongoing despite claims by the Israel Defense Forces that the north of the blockaded exclave is largely under Israeli operational control.

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US Navy helicopters sank three of four small boats used by Iranian-backed Houthi militants to attack a merchant vessel in the southern Red Sea on Sunday, US central command wrote on X.

Responding to distress calls from the Maersk Hangzhou, helicopters from the USS Eisenhower and USS Gravely were said to have returned fire on the Houthi boats in self-defence and sank three of the vessels with no survivors.

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