GAZA  –  Gaza’s Ministry of Health has refused to receive a container carrying the bodies of 88 Palestinians sent from Israel, without prior coordination or information about their identities.

The procedures for receiving the container were suspended, until Israel provides full data with the victims’ names, time of death and the location they were taken from, the ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday.

This is “the minimum rights of these people and their families”, it said.

Gaza’s Government Media Office called the shipment of unidentifiable bodies an “inhumane and criminal move”, in a separate statement.

Reporting from central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said “the bodies are unidentifiable because they are mostly decomposed”.

“There are signs that those bodies have been in Israel for a long time,” he said.

“The Palestinian Health Ministry said that the Israeli military has deliberately concealed the identity of those Palestinian people. There is no information about their names, genders and the location they have been kidnapped from. The circumstances of their abduction from the Gaza Strip are also unclear,” he added.

The Palestinian Civil Defense said on Wednesday that at least 53 Palestinians have been killed across the Gaza Strip in Israel, attacks on their homes and shelters in the past 24 hours.

One person was killed overnight on Wednesday after a house was targeted in Beit Lahiya in the north of the enclave, and in the Nuseirat refugee camp, two Palestinians were killed when their tent was hit by an Israeli air strike.

Those killed in central Gaza’s Nuseirat were from the al-Ejla family who lost 11 relatives in August.

On Wednesday morning, one body was recovered from the Khirbet al-Adas area north of Rafah. The man found was 70-year-old Khalil Salim al-Nahl, the enclave’s civil defense said.

Earlier, our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic reported that a woman and her five children were killed in an Israeli bombing of a house in the town of Hay al-Nasr, northeast of Rafah.

At least three people were also killed in Gaza City’s Zinjo neighbourhood where the Jundi family home was bombed, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense.

 (Al Jazeera)…[+]

RUSSIA – Russia is planning to attack Ukrainian nuclear power plants, aiming to disconnect them from the energy grid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the United Nations, warning such attacks risk “nuclear disaster Zelensky told the UN General Assembly “radiation does not respect state borders.

Since Russia can’t defeat our people’s resistance on the battlefield Zelensky said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit. For a third winter, Russia is stepping up its strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid in a bid to leave Ukrainians in the dark and cold’’, Zelensky said.

Zelensky’s address to the UN came shortly before he is set to discuss his victory plan” with United States President Joe Biden, which is expected to include Kyiv’s long-stated request to use long-range missiles to strike military targets inside Russia. In his speech Zelensky recalled the “horrifying” moment in the first weeks of the war when Russian attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant ZNPP the largest in Europe, stirred fears among Ukrainians of another Chernobyl-style disaster. No one could know how Russian strikes on the nuclear facility would end, and everyone in Ukraine was reminded of what Chernobyl means he said.  (CNN)…[+]

BEIJING – The body of Ren Jianxin, a former senior leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and former president of the Supreme People’s Court, was cremated in Beijing on Wednesday.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, along with other senior Party and state leaders including Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, Li Xi and Han Zheng, bid farewell to Ren at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Wednesday morning, paying their final tribute to Ren and offering condolences to his family.

Ren passed away due to illness at 1:33 p.m. on Sept. 21 in Beijing. He was 99.

Ren had served as a member of the Secretariat of the 14th CPC Central Committee, head of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the CPC Central Committee, and vice chairman of the 9th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

He was extolled as an excellent member of the CPC, a long-tested and loyal Communist fighter, and an outstanding leader in China’s judicial, prosecuting and public security systems.

Xi Jinping, Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, Li Xi, Han Zheng, Hu Jintao and others either paid Ren a visit while he was in hospital or mourned him and sent their condolences to his family through various means following his passing. (Xinhua)…[+]

WASHINGTON DC – US President Joe Biden has spent nearly a year vowing his determination to prevent the war in Gaza engulfing the wider Middle East. On Tuesday, he repeated that resolve in his last ever United Nations speech as president, as he addressed the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Biden’s calls for restraint from the podium of the UN, like his pleas for Israel and Hamas to finally reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal, are being heard in the hall but not in the region.

On Monday, Israel unleashed hundreds of airstrikes on Lebanon, inflicting the deadliest day on the country since the end of its bloody, sectarian civil war more than three decades ago. Israel’s bombardment killed more than 500 people, according to Lebanese health officials. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group that dominates the country,  reeling and damaged from Israel’s wave of exploding pager attacks last week – launched hundreds of rockets into northern Israel, smashing homes and setting streets ablaze.

Once again the US is trying to restrain Israel, the key regional ally it arms, and urging its adversaries against escalating too, all the while seeking a diplomatic outcome that the sides themselves lack either the ability or will to agree Israel says it’s acting to disarm the Lebanese militia so Israeli residents can return to their homes in the north. Hezbollah says it’s been striking Israel for the past 11 months to deter and degrade Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Months of shuttle diplomacy by the US envoy Amos Hochstein building on already established UN Security Resolutions on Israel and Hezbollah have come to nothing.

Instead, in another split screen moment as Biden was urging calm at the podium at the UN, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video on X vowing: “We will continue to hit Hezbollah. He who has a missile in his living room and a rocket in his garage – he will not have a home. The White House supports what it calls Israel’s right to hit Hezbollah. But the often dysfunctional political relationship with the Israeli leadership has again become apparent over recent weeks, amid serious concerns in the administration that the exploding pager attacks and subsequent Israeli airstrikes could lead to all out war. No call between Biden and Netanyahu was announced despite the crisis of the last week. US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, recently made his tenth trip to the region since the 7 October attacks, but for the first time did not visit Israel. (BBC)…[+]