Middle East: Israel launches strike in Gaza's Khan Younis

Israel will be allowed to take part in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest.

The decision was made after members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) chose not to hold a vote on banning the country, despite boycott threats from several broadcasters over the war in Gaza.

The Netherlands broadcaster AvroTros said it will boycott the event in protest. Spanish and Irish broadcasters are also boycotting the annual festivities. Others have also warned they may pull out, accusing Israel of violating rules meant to keep the contest politically neutral.

Germany, a key supporter of Eurovision, has said it would withdraw if Israel were barred and expressed its support for Israel's participation. 

Read more about the controversy surrounding the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest here.

Israel's Army Radio, citing security sources, reported that a prominent clan leader and head of a Palestinian faction opposed to Hamas in Gaza, Yasser Abu Shabab, had died in a hospital in southern Israel of unspecified wounds.

The report did not say exactly when he died or detail the nature of his injuries.

Hamas and other Israeli authorities did not immediately comment on the Army Radio report, but it was widely reported in the region. 

Abu Shabab heads a Bedouin group called the Popular Forces operating in Gaza's southern Rafah area, in territory still held by Israeli forces. 

Hamas had accused him of collaborating with Israel in the past, a charge he had denied. Hamas had issued prior demands for him to surrender and has been targeting groups inside Gaza opposed to its rule since the shaky October ceasefire came into effect.

Lebanese government media and the Israeli military both reported strikes on southern Lebanon in the aftermath of warnings from the Israel Defense Forces. 

"Israeli warplanes launched a strike on the town of Mahrouna" and another raid targeted a house in Jbaa, Lebanon's National News Agency said. 

Meanwhile, the IDF said its forces "began conducting strikes on Hezbollah terror targets in southern Lebanon." 

Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee also issued an Arabic-language warning to residents of two other settlements near the de facto border.

He called on people living in buildings marked in red on a pair of maps to move 300 meters away from the affected areas "for your own safety." 

The Israeli military has told residents in several areas of southern Lebanon to evacuate several buildings, saying that strikes would be carried out in the near future.

"The (Israeli army) will soon strike military infrastructure belonging to theHezbollah terrorist organization across areas in southern Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah's prohibited attempts to rebuild its activities in the area," Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army's Arabic-language spokesman, said on X.

In the statement, the residents of buildings indicated on attached maps were told they were located near buildings used by the Iran-backed militia.

The buildings indicated are in the villages of Jbaa and Mahrouna.

"Remaining in the area of the marked buildings exposes you to danger," the statement said, saying residents should stay at least 300 meters (around 330 yards) away from them.

Israel has kept up regular airstrikes in Lebanon that it says target Hezbollah members and facilities despite a year-old ceasefire between it and the militia. 

It has also kept troops in five areas in the south of Lebanon despite the ceasefire's stipulation that it pull out entirely.

Lebanon itself and Israel have technically been at war since 1948.

A United Nations Security Council delegation has arrived in Syria, state media has reported, with the declared aim of the visit being to improve ties between the world body and the Middle Eastern country.

The visit, the first by the Security Council to Syria, comes just days before the country marks the anniversary of the ouster of its former longtime authoritarian ruler, Bashar Assad.

State news agency SANA reported that the delegation is "to meet a number of Syrian officials" and members of civil society.

Members of the delegation are scheduled to meet Syria's new authorities, including President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadi against whom the Security Council only recently lifted sanctions. 

Sharaa's forces led the offensive that led to Assad's downfall on December 8, 2024.

The UN ambassador of Slovenia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council, said on Monday the trip came "at a crucial time for the region" and for Syria and neighboring Lebanon, which the delegation will visit on Friday and Saturday. 

The visit would be important in "expressing support and solidarity with both countries, and [...] conveying the messages, also, on the path forward that the Council would like to see in both countries," Samuel Zbogar told a press conference.

Zbogar also noted that "there's still a bit of lack of trust in the UN-Syria relationship, which we try to breach with this visit."

Syria is still recovering from a long civil war that erupted in 2011 after a brutal government crackdown on peaceful protests against Assad.

Since Assad's ouster, the country has also seen considerable sectarian violence.

 

The UN Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, has called for public support in its bid to bring aid into Gaza, saying living conditions in the Palestinian enclave "are estimated to have fallen back more than 20 years."

"The UN needs all possible resources and capacity to be able to respond to the immense needs," it said in a statement on the X messaging app.

 "The Agency’s aid supplies must be allowed in," it wrote. "Raise awareness on Gaza and support the call to lift restrictions on aid."

Israel has long accused UNRWA of having affiliations with Hamas, the militant group that led an incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. An independent panel largely dismissed the chargeslast year.

On the basis of such accusations, however, Germany in November for the first time withheld its support for extending UNRWA's mandate at a preliminary vote in a UN General Assembly subcommittee.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said at the time that Berlin expected "consistent and verifiable reform" before backing a renewal. 

Ahead of that vote, UNWRA chief Philippe Lazzarini said that "virulent disinformation has not only tarnished the agency's reputation — it has strangled funding." He noted that UNRWA faced a $200 million (€171.3 million) shortfall between the final quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.

A final vote in the full UN General Assembly on extending UNRWA's current mandate from mid-2026 to mid-2029 is scheduled for December.

Member broadcasters of the Eurovision Song Contest are holding a two-day meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to debate whether Israel should be permitted to take part in the event.

Multiple countries have threatened to withdraw from the 2026 contest, which will be held in Austria from May 12-16, if Israel takes part, citing human suffering in Gaza during Israel's conflict with Hamas in the enclave. Israel also faces allegations of unfairly boosting its entrant at the most recent contest in Switzerland.

The meeting could see a vote regarding Israel's participation.

Broadcasters will be asked to consider whether new measures introduced to discourage governments and third parties from disproportionately promoting songs to sway voters are sufficient.

The rules were introduced by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs Eurovision, after allegations that Israel artificially boosted the vote its entrant, Yuval Raphael, received in the 2025 contest through a broad advertising campaign.

If members are not convinced that the new rules are adequate to protect the competition's impartiality, there will be a vote on participation, the EBU said.

Germany, for its part, could pull out and not broadcast the contest if Israel is not allowed to participate, a broadcasting industry source told Reuters news agency.

Critics of Israel's participation cite the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, which has surpassed 70,000, according to Gaza health authorities. 

Israel has also faced accusations of using hunger and deprivation as weapons during the conflict by largely barring the entry of aid to the Palestinian enclave. International bodies like the United Nations have categorized Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Israel launched its offensive in response to the October 7, 2023, attack led by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza. 

Israel's army said on Thursday that the remains of a Gaza hostage handed over to Israel a day previously have been identified as those of Thai national Sudthisak Rinthalak.

"Following the completion of the identification process ... IDF representatives, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, informed the family of Sudthisak Rinthalak that his body has been returned for burial," the army said in a statement.

Sudthisak Rinthalak, an agricultural worker, was killed in the deadly Hamas-led militant attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and his body taken to the Gaza Strip and held, the army said.

He was 42 at the time of his death.

Under the first phase of a deal brokered by the US, Palestinian militants have handed over the last 20 living hostages and the remains of 27 out of 28 deceased ones.

The last remaining deceased hostage to be handed over is Israeli.

In exchange, Israel has released nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees, including children and elderly people, and returned the bodies of hundreds of dead Palestinians.

The civil defense authority in the Gaza Strip says five Palestinians, including two children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern town of Khan Younis on Wednesday when the tent they were sheltering in was hit.

The authority told the AFP news agency that the strike occurred near the Kuwaiti Field Hospital in Khan Younis.

The hospital also reported that five people, including two children aged eight and 10, were killed and another 32 were wounded.

The Israeli military said it had targeted a "Hamas terrorist" in southern Gaza in response to a clash with Palestinian militants in the area in which five IDF soldiers were wounded, calling the armed encounter "a blatant violation of the ceasefire agreement" in place in the Palestinian enclave since October 10.

You join our reporting on the Middle East as a fragile ceasefire continues to hold up in the Gaza Strip despite accusations from both Israel and Hamas that the other side has violated the truce.

Israel said it launched an airstrike on a Hamas militant in Khan Younis late on Wednesday in retaliation for such a claimed violation — a reported attack by Hamas fighters on IDF troops in which five soldiers were injured.

Gaza authorities say the strike instead hit a tent with displaced Palestinians, killing five.

Earlier on Wednesday, Israel received the remains of one of the last hostages taken by Palestinian militant groups and has now identified them as those of a Thai national taken in the deadly October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that triggered the Gaza conflict.

Once the last hostages' remains have been returned and Israel releases more Palestinian prisoners in exchange, the US-backed ceasefire plan is supposed to move on to its next phases.

These call for an international stabilization force to be created to ensure security in Gaza, the formation of a technocratic Palestinian administration and the disarmament of Hamas. 

DW will bring you reports on developments in Gaza and across the broader Middle East in this blog from Thursday, December 4.