The White House said on Tuesday its independent intelligence supported Israel’s claim that Hamas was using Gaza’s hospitals, including its biggest, to hide command posts and hostages while a glimmer of progress emerged in hostage negotiations.

President Joe Biden said he was in discussions daily with parties involved in talks to secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas in its cross-border rampage into Israel on Oct. 7. More than 235 people are thought to still be held by the Islamist group in Gaza.

When asked by reporters at the White House what his message to family members of hostages was, he said: “Hang in there, we’re coming.”

ABC News reported that progress had been made on a hostage deal. A breakthrough could come in the next 48 to 72 hours, it said, citing a senior Israeli political source.

White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters on the presidential plane, Air Force One, that intelligence confirmed the Hamas group, which rules Gaza, used tunnels underneath Al-Shifa and other hospitals to conceal military operations and to hold hostages.

Israel has made the same claims, which Hamas denies.

“We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command and control node” and probably to store weapons, Kirby said. “That is a war crime.”

Five weeks after Israel swore to destroy Hamas in retaliation for operatives’ cross-border assault, the fate of Al-Shifa has become a focus of international alarm, including from Israel’s closest ally, the United States.

Israeli forces have waged fierce street battles against Hamas fighters over the past 10 days, advanced into the centre of Gaza City and surrounded Al-Shifa, the seaside enclave’s biggest hospital.

Kirby said that the U.S. intelligence came from a variety of methods but that he could not be specific about the evidence.

Hamas said on Telegram it rejected U.S. claims about its use of hospitals and that they “give a green light to the Israeli occupation to commit further brutal massacres targeting hospitals.”

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, said that even if Hamas was proven to be using hospitals to conduct military operations, international law required that effective warnings be given before attacks.

This meant people there needed a safe place to go and a safe way to get there, Shakir said. “It’s very alarming because you have to remember hospitals in Gaza are housing tens of thousands of displaced persons.”

AL-SHIFA THE FOCUS OF CONFLICT

Hamas says 650 patients and 5,000 to 7,000 other civilians are trapped inside Al-Shifa hospital grounds, under constant fire from Israeli snipers and drones. Amid worsening shortages of fuel, water and supplies, it says 40 patients have died in recent days, including three premature babies whose incubators were knocked out.

Palestinians trapped in the hospital were digging a mass grave on Tuesday to bury patients who died and no plan was in place to evacuate babies despite Israel announcing an offer to send portable incubators, Ashraf Al-Qidra, Gaza’s health ministry spokesman, said.

An Israeli officer who oversees coordination with Gaza told Reuters he had been in contact with Al-Shifa’s hospital director and presented a plan to evacuate the babies through a safe corridor, possibly to Egypt. He said he was awaiting a response.

Reached by telephone inside the hospital compound, Qidra said that so far no arrangements had been established to carry out any evacuation. “The occupation is still besieging the hospital and they are firing into the yards from time to time,” he said.

Qidra said there were about 100 bodies decomposing inside and no way to get them out.

“We are planning to bury them today in a mass grave inside the Al-Shifa medical complex. It is going to be very dangerous as we don’t have any cover or protection from the ICRC,” he told Reuters, referring to the International Committee of the Red Cross/Crescent.

Israel denies the hospital is under siege and says its forces allow exit routes for those inside. Medics and officials inside the hospital deny this and say those trying to leave come under fire. Reuters could not verify the situation.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was deeply disturbed by the “dramatic loss of life” in the hospitals, his spokesman said. “In the name of humanity, the secretary-general calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” the spokesman told reporters.

Medical officials in Hamas-run Gaza say more than 11,000 people are confirmed dead from Israeli strikes, around 40% of them children, and countless others trapped under rubble. Around two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless, unable to escape the territory where food, fuel, fresh water and medical supplies are running out.

Israel says Hamas killed 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 rampage. The United States and Britain imposed a fresh round of sanctions on Hamas on Tuesday.

BIDEN ADVISER HEADS TO MIDDLE EAST

Shortly after Biden’s remarks about the hostages, the White House said Biden’s top Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, was heading to the region for talks with officials in Israel, the West Bank, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other nations. Efforts to win the hostages’ release will be among the topics on his agenda.

Hamas leader Ezzat El Rashq said on Telegram Israel was not serious about winning the hostages’ freedom “but is stalling in order to gain more time to continue its aggression.”

The armed wing of Hamas said it was ready to free up to 70 women and children held in Gaza in exchange for a five-day ceasefire. Al-Qassam Brigade spokesman Abu Ubaida said Israel had asked for 100 to be freed.

There was no immediate public response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

Relatives of hostages set off from Tel Aviv on a days-long protest march to Jerusalem to plead for more government action.

Yuval Haran, from Kibbutz Be’eri where Hamas fighters killed scores of civilians including his father, said he was marching out of desperation to free seven family members.

“For 39 days we have been in infinite anxiety. We are living this pain each and every moment. And I cannot keep sitting down and waiting,” he said. “They must be brought home now.”

In Washington, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered on Tuesday for a “March for Israel” to show solidarity with Israel in its war with Hamas and condemn rising antisemitism.

Nearly five times more people will likely die due to extreme heat in the coming decades, an international team of experts warned on Wednesday, adding that without action on climate change the “health of humanity is at grave risk”.

Lethal heat was just one of the many ways the world’s still-increasing use of fossil fuels threatens human health, according to The Lancet Countdown, a major annual assessment carried out by leading researchers and institutions.

More common droughts will put millions at risk of starving, mosquitoes spreading farther than ever before will take infectious diseases with them, and health systems will struggle to cope with the burden, the researchers warned.

The dire assessment comes during what is expected to be the hottest year in human history — just last week, Europe’s climate monitor declared that last month was the warmest October on record.

It also comes ahead of the COP28 climate talks in Dubai later this month, which will for the first time host a “health day” on December 3 as experts try to shine a light on global warming’s impact on health.

Despite growing calls for global action, energy-related carbon emissions hit new highs last year, the Lancet Countdown report said, singling out still massive government subsidies and private bank investments into planet-heating fossil fuels.

– ‘Crisis on top of a crisis’ –

Last year people worldwide were exposed to an average of 86 days of life-threatening temperatures, according to the Lancet Countdown study. Around 60 percent of those days were made more than twice as likely due to climate change, it said.

The number of people over 65 who died from heat rose by 85 percent from 1991-2000 to 2013-2022, it added.

“However these impacts that we are seeing today could be just an early symptom of a very dangerous future,” Lancet Countdown’s executive director Marina Romanello told journalists.

Under a scenario in which the world warms by two degrees Celsius by the end of the century — it is currently on track for 2.7C — annual heat-related deaths were projected to increase 370 percent by 2050. That marks a 4.7-fold increase.

Around 520 million more people will experience moderate or severe food insecurity by mid-century, according to the projections.

And mosquito-borne infectious diseases will continue to spread into new areas. The transmission of dengue would increase by 36 percent under a 2C warming scenario, according to the study.

Meanwhile, more than a quarter of cities surveyed by the researchers said they were worried that climate change would overwhelm their capacity to cope.

“We’re facing a crisis on top of a crisis,” said Lancet Countdown’s Georgiana Gordon-Strachan, whose homeland Jamaica is currently in the middle of a dengue outbreak.

– ‘Staring down the barrel’ –

“People living in poorer countries, who are often least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, are bearing the brunt of the health impacts, but are least able to access funding and technical capacity to adapt to the deadly storms, rising seas and crop-withering droughts worsened by global heating,” she said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to the report by saying that “humanity is staring down the barrel of an intolerable future”.

“We are already seeing a human catastrophe unfolding with the health and livelihoods of billions across the world endangered by record-breaking heat, crop-failing droughts, rising levels of hunger, growing infectious disease outbreaks, and deadly storms and floods,” he said in a statement.

Dann Mitchell, climate hazards chair at the UK’s Bristol University, lamented that “already catastrophic” health warnings about climate change had “not managed to convince the world’s governments to cut carbon emissions enough to avoid the first Paris Agreement goal of 1.5C”.

The UN warned on Tuesday that countries’ current pledges will cut global carbon emissions by just two percent by 2030 from 2019 levels — far short of the 43 percent drop needed to limit warming to 1.5C.

Romanello warned that if more progress is not made on emissions, then “the growing emphasis on health within climate change negotiations risks being just empty words”.

Tens of thousands packed a rally in Washington on Tuesday to support Israel and to condemn anti-Semitism in a riposte to weeks of largely pro-Palestinian demonstrations across a deeply divided United States.

With senior members of Congress addressing the event on the National Mall, near the Capitol, the crowd rapidly swelled with people wearing the white and blue colors of Israel and waving placards calling on Palestinian group Hamas to free hostages.

Despite fierce controversy in the United States over the intensity of the Israeli military response to the October 7 surprise cross-border attack by Hamas, rally goer Sergei Kravchick, said, “We of course support Israel…. We’re doing exactly what we have to do.”

Kravchick, 64, said he was “proud” to see the large turnout.

The demonstration, dubbed the March for Israel, centered on combating anti-Semitism and calling for the release of the 240 hostages held by Hamas, according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, one of the organizers.

Hamas fighters stormed across the border from the Gaza Strip, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials.

Since then, the Israeli army has heavily bombarded Gaza and launched a ground invasion, killing more than 11,200 people, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The heaviest fighting has centered around Gaza hospitals.

Speaking by video link from Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog told the crowd they were “marching for the right of every Jew to live proudly and safely in Israel and the US and the world.”

“No one will break us,” he said.

US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — a Democrat — and House Speaker Mike Johnson — a Republican — also spoke, as well as family members of the hostages.

“America feels your pain,” Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States.

– Heavy police presence –

The demonstration comes after multiple large protests around the country — and in cities around the world — calling for a ceasefire and criticizing the Israeli military.

Security was tight, reflecting the wider tensions.

Police stationed snowplows as temporary roadblocks nearby and a military style armored vehicle was also deployed. Protesters’ bags were searched before being allowed to enter the area.

In contrast to pro-Palestinian demonstrations from New York to Los Angeles that have focused on the suffering of civilians in Gaza, Tuesday’s crowd turned its anger on Hamas.

Signs included “Annihilate Hamas” and “From the river to the sea, we support democracy.”

Mark Moore, 48, a Christian pastor from Chicago, said he considers Israel “the only bastion of freedom” in the Middle East and that although he wanted peace ultimately, “I’m praying for peace… secured through victory so it does not continue with this endless cycle of violence.”

Less than two weeks ago, a major pro-Palestinian demonstration took place in Washington, with a large crowd marching up to the fence around the White House, protesting against President Joe Biden’s staunch support for Israeli military policies.