Palestinians leaving besieged Gaza city

GAZA, Nov 10 (Reuters/AFP): Palestinians trudging past Israeli tanks and decomposing corpses along a frontline passage out of encircled Gaza City on Thursday said they feared a new "Nakba", the "catastrophe" of their mass dispossession after Israel was founded in 1948.
Thousands of people were moving south along Salah al-Din road out of Gaza City on Thursday, the only exit route for civilians escaping an intensifying siege as Israeli tanks rolled deeper into the Gaza Strip enclave.
"What do things look like behind us? Destruction and death. We left in fear," said a woman who gave her name as Um Hassan. She had just crossed into southern Gaza from the north of the tiny, crowded territory. "We are the poor Palestinian people whose houses were destroyed," she said, calling it a second Nakba.
The war of 1948, when Palestinians fled or were evicted from their homes, is seared into their collective memory. Many have voiced fears that if forced from their homes now they will, like their ancestors, never be allowed back.
Gaza 'carnage simply must
stop': top UN aid official
The United Nations has called for an end to the carnage afflicting war-torn Gaza during Israel's military campaign, according to a top UN aid official's comments released on Friday.
"The present course chosen by the Israeli authorities will not bring the peace and stability that both Israelis and Palestinians want and deserve," Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations' agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), wrote in a media opinion piece. "The carnage simply must stop."
Iran warns expansion of
Gaza war 'inevitable'
Iran warned the scale of civilian suffering caused by Israel's war on Hamas would inevitably lead to an expansion of the conflict, as officials in Gaza reported Israeli air strikes on or near several hospitals in the Palestinian enclave.
The comments from Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian could ramp up concerns over whether Washington's diplomatic efforts and deployment of US naval forces to the eastern Mediterranean will be able to keep the conflict from further destabilising the Middle East.
"Due to the expansion of the intensity of the war against Gaza's civilian residents, expansion of the scope of the war has become inevitable," Amir-Abdollahian told his Qatari counterpart Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on Thursday night.
Iran's state-run Press TV reported the comments, made during a telephone conversation, on Friday.
Blinken in India for talks
on Israel, China
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will hold talks Friday in New Delhi seeking to bolster India as a regional counterweight to China and win backing for its position on Israel's war with Hamas.
Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will join foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and defence minister Rajnath Singh for annual "two-plus-two" talks India has said will focus on "defence and security cooperation".