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Israeli strikes have killed more than 150 Palestinians in an operation focusing on the Jabalia refugee camp this week, with thousands more trapped in the ruins of the settlement in northern Gaza after a year of war with Hamas.

The camp has been the scene of several pitched battles between Israeli forces and Hamas, as the militant group attempts to regroup in areas from which the Israel Defense Forces had retreated.

This week’s offensive started with the encirclement of Jabalia, leaving a single street for its civilians to exit from. The IDF said it had “eliminated” at least 50 Hamas fighters this week, including several it said had taken part in the October 7 cross-border raid that sparked the conflict. Local health officials said at least 150 people had been killed in and around Jabalia in the past week.

“It’s more than scary — the situation is critical,” said Mustafa, who managed to escape from Jabalia before the offensive began. “It seems that the Jabalia camp will be deleted from Gaza’s geography.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to endorse a political solution for Gaza, leaving the military fighting an intermittent insurgency as international aid groups struggle to provide a population of nearly 2.3mn civilians with enough food, medicine and shelter to survive.

Some 300,000 civilians, the UN and others said, are living in the ruins of their neighbourhoods and homes in northern Gaza, separated from the rest of the population by an Israeli military corridor that divides the besieged enclave into two sectors.

In the past few days, the IDF has demanded that thousands of civilians evacuate the northern sector and run a gauntlet of checkpoints to reach al-Mawasi, a fetid and crowded “humanitarian zone” alongside the Mediterranean. Many are too scared by the violence outside their homes to flee.

Ibrahim al-Kharabishy, a lawyer and the father of four children including a baby, said they constantly hear explosions from artillery and warplanes. His family is safer indoors, rather than out on the streets, where Palestinian looters add to the risk from the military’s operation.

“[The army] called us this morning and ordered us to evacuate, but we are staying at home because it is the only refuge we have left,” he told the Financial Times over the phone. “I am not being obstinate with the army, but we are unable to go. We need a safe place to go to.”

All they have at home is flour, and he said Israel was using hunger to “empty out the north.” Israel has denied the accusation repeatedly.

Food has all but run out in northern Gaza, the World Food Programme said, since the main crossings closed on October 1.

“WFP distributed its last remaining food stocks in northern Gaza to partners and kitchens sheltering newly displaced families — but these are barely enough to last two weeks,” WFP said.

At least 42,000 Palestinians, local health officials estimate, have been killed since the war began on October 7 when Hamas killed 1,200 people within Israel, the Israeli government said, and took 250 or so hostage. More than 100 hostages are still being held.

The renewed fighting in the Jabalia camp has been overshadowed by Israel’s offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon, where nearly a quarter of the country’s territory is under an evacuation order from the Israeli military, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates.

On Saturday, Israel warned 20 more Lebanese villages that they too could face harm as the IDF’s ground invasion spread.

According to an FT count, since it began its ground invasion to combat Hizbollah on October 1, Israel has warned about 140 communities in south Lebanon to flee their homes. The IDF has commanded residents to move north of the Awali river, which runs at least 80km north of the southern tip of Lebanon.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, arrived in Beirut on Saturday as fighting flared across the southern Lebanese-northern Israeli border. Hizbollah said it had targeted an explosives factory south of Haifa as well as an Israeli bulldozer in the south Lebanese village of Ramia.

Two drones from Lebanon made it as far south as Herzliya, a prosperous Tel Aviv suburb, before one was shot down and the other hit a nursing home. No casualties were reported.

A soldier in the UN international peacekeeping mission Unifil, which patrols the Lebanese-Israeli border, was shot and hospitalised on Friday night. Unifil said that the peacekeeper had been hit by gunfire that came from fighting near its headquarters in Naqoura, southern Lebanon. The UN force said it did not know which side fired the bullet. 

Hours earlier, two Unifil peacekeepers were hurt by unattributed explosions near an observation tower. Israel’s military said it was looking into the incidents, and accused Hizbollah of operating near Unifil positions. 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — With the presidency on the line in battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, why would Donald Trump venture into California, one of the most solidly Democratic states, just weeks before Election Day?

Trump is almost certain to lose California, and that won’t change after his scheduled Saturday stop in Coachella, a desert city east of Los Angeles best known for the annual music festival bearing its name. Still, there are practical reasons for him to visit, despite the Republican nominee’s prospects Nov. 5 in the most populous state.

The former president lost California in a landslide in 2020. He did get 6 million-plus votes, more than any GOP presidential candidate before, and his margins topped 70% in some rural counties that typically favor conservatives on the ballot.

That’s an enormous pool of potential volunteers to work on state races and participate in phone banks into the most contested states. And Trump is likely to draw extensive media coverage in the Los Angeles market, the second-largest in the country.

Trump is visiting Coachella in between stops in Nevada, at a roundtable outside Las Vegas for Latinos earlier Saturday, and Arizona, for a rally Sunday in Prescott Valley. He narrowly lost those two swing states to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

Going to California gives Trump the “ability to swoop in and leverage this big population of Trump supporters,” said Tim Lineberger, who was communications director for Trump’s 2016 campaign in Michigan and also worked in the former president’s administration. He’s “coming here and activating that.”

Lineberger recalled Californians making calls to Michigan voters in 2016 on Trump’s behalf and said the campaign’s decision to go into safe, Democratic turf at this point was “an aggressive, offensive play.”

California is also a fountain of campaign cash for both parties, and Trump will be fundraising. Photos with the former president in Coachella were priced at $25,000, which comes with special seating for two. A “VIP Experience” was priced at $5,000.

With congressional races in California in play that could determine which party controls the House, the Coachella rally “is a get-out-the-vote type of thing that motivates and energizes Republicans in California, when they are not as close to what is going on in the national campaign,” Republican consultant Tim Rosales said.

Rosales also said to look for Trump to continue his long-running spat with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

For Republicans, “It’s motivating when you can pick at California a little bit and the governor … will take the bait,” Rosales said.

Newsom on Wednesday predicted Trump would be denigrating the state at the rally, overlooking its strengths as the world’s fifth-largest economy. The governor said that for the first time in a decade, California has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state.

“You know, that’s not what Trump is going to say,” he predicted.

Jim Brulte, a former chairman of the California Republican Party, said he thinks Trump is angling for something that has eluded him in previous campaigns: winning more total votes than his Democratic opponent.

“I believe Donald Trump is coming to California because he wants to win not only in the Electoral College, but he wants to win the popular vote. There are more registered voters in California than there are residents in 46 of the other 49 states,” Brulte said.

The Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles sits on the Pacific Coast, south of the city. But Trump has long had a conflicted relationship with California, where a Republican has not carried the state since 1988 and Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by about 2-to-1.

California was home to the so-called Trump resistance during his time in office, and Trump often depicts California as representing all he sees wrong in America. As president, he called the homeless crises in Los Angeles and San Francisco disgraceful and threatened to intercede.

He is likely to spend time on Saturday linking California’s problems to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee and a San Francisco Bay Area native who was California’s attorney general and represented the state in the Senate.

His campaign issued a statement alleging that under Harris, “the notorious ‘California Dream’ has turned into a nightmare for everyday Americans.”

Jessica Millan Patterson, chairwoman of the state GOP, said she looked forward to hearing Trump contrast his agenda with a Democratic White House that “has left Californians less safe and with less money in their pockets.”

Republicans, she promised, “will do our part to secure a House majority.”

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China said on Saturday it would issue more debt to boost the property market, recapitalise banks and help cash-strapped local governments, as Beijing seeks to reassure investors over its efforts to lift the economy.

Announcing the measures at a briefing in Beijing, Minister of Finance Lan Fo’an gave few details on the amount of funding but suggested that the government plans more stimulus measures to shore up growth.

“Our countercyclical adjustment goes far beyond what I have mentioned,” Lan told reporters, adding that more steps were under discussion. “The central government, when it comes to increasing the deficit and increasing debt, we have significant room.”

Markets are waiting for signs that Beijing will increase fiscal spending to back up monetary stimulus plans, amid persistent doubts over the strength of the world’s second-largest economy.

Stocks in China plunged this week after state planners held a press conference on the economy but failed to give details of stronger fiscal support.

Lan said Beijing would issue bonds to enable local governments to buy back idle land from developers as well as some of China’s millions of unsold new homes. The government will also issue a special-purpose bond to help large banks replenish their capital, which would enhance their ability to lend.

Beijing would also give more help to groups such as students and low-income earners, Lan said.

The Ministry of Finance cannot announce specific amounts of extra fiscal stimulus until these are rubber-stamped by China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress. Its next standing committee is expected in the coming weeks.

The government’s stimulus efforts follow declining household and stock market confidence on the back of a prolonged property sector slowdown and state crackdowns on sectors such as ecommerce and finance.

After months of incremental measures to shore up flagging domestic demand, Beijing suddenly changed tack in late September, with the central bank launching China’s biggest monetary stimulus since the pandemic.

The measures, which included extensive support for the stock and property markets, drove the benchmark CSI 300 index up 24 per cent before a week-long holiday. But markets tumbled again on reopening this week after disappointment with the state planners’ briefing.

Alicia García-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis, said it was difficult to understand why Beijing was not acting more forcefully or providing more clarity on the spending plans. “I don’t think it will lift the market massively,” she said after Lan spoke on Saturday.

The finance ministry’s policies on reducing local government debt and stabilising the property market were sound from a macroeconomic viewpoint but the market was seeking more, said Raymond Yeung, chief economist for Greater China with ANZ.

“I think the market will be disappointed,” Yeung said. “Everyone was looking for a number but the finance minister did not give us one.”

He said the ministry could have offered a proposed expenditure figure to be confirmed by the NPC.

Heron Lim, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, said bailing out local governments would help them to increase spending, boosting the economy.

But without a figure for the central government’s stimulus package, investors might take “a step back until they are absolutely certain of the direction fiscal support is taking”, he said.

However, Andy Rothman, an investment strategist at the Matthews Asia fund, said the series of press conferences from economic planners indicated a “fundamental shift” on the economy by China’s leader Xi Jinping.

“Xi understands that the policy response must be significant if it is to restore confidence among consumers and entrepreneurs . . . It will take time [but] a turnaround in confidence is likely on the horizon,” Rothman said.

Lan said one of the most significant areas of new spending would be easing the debt burden of local governments. Many relied heavily on property and related industries for their revenue.

“This upcoming policy will be one of the largest in recent years in addressing debt risks,” Lan said, adding it would boost confidence by helping local governments to pay salaries and other bills.

Economists have estimated that China needs to spend up to Rmb10tn ($1.4tn) over two years on additional stimulus measures to reflate the economy, adding that much of it needed to be directed at households to shore up domestic demand.