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Israel bombed at least four homes in Rafah on Wednesday, raising new fear among the more than a million Palestinians sheltering in the last refuge on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip that a long-threatened ground assault could be coming.

• Ukraine’s navy claims it has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war. Dmytro Pletenchuk from the navy said the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky, which was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was Ukrainian before being captured by Russia in 2014.

• Pletenchuk previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship. He said the weekend attack, using Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot. “Our ultimate goal is complete absence of military ships of the so-called Russian Federation in the Azov and Black Sea regions,” Pletenchuk said.

“The depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it,” James Elder, a spokesperson with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), said after travelling the length of Gaza this week. There is nothing left: Republicans who called for Gaza to be turned into a “parking lot” have got their wish. Amid the ruins, a traumatized and trapped population are being starved to death; an entire generation is seeing their future destroyed. “Starvation is used as a weapon of war,” the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said this week. “Israel is provoking famine.”

While the world’s attention is on Gaza, life for Palestinians in the West Bank is also growing increasingly precarious. There has been a surge in settler violence and a spike in unlawful lethal force from Israeli forces. More than 400 Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been killed by Israeli fire since 7 October, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has said that about 100 of these deaths have been children, most of whom posed no credible threat to heavily armed soldiers from one of the most powerful militaries in the world.

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The rescue operation on the scene of the Moscow attack is over, according to Moscow Oblast Gov. Andrey Vorobyov.

The search for victims at the concert hall is ongoing.

"Today rescuers cleared a huge layer of the auditorium," Vorobyov said in a statement on Telegram. "Over the course of 24 hours, 133 bodies were pulled out from under the rubble, and the identities of 50 dead were tentatively identified."

Officials have not publicly released the identities of the 50 victims.