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At the end of a sixth week of war, a day of burials and death but also signs the conflict is deepening.

In the settlement of Modiin in Israel, the Marciano family were burying their daughter Noa.

Her body was one of two found by Israeli forces near al Shifa hospital in Gaza.

She’d been a soldier in a military base overrun by Hamas on 7 October and was taken hostage.

Follow latest: Huge crowds trying to flee to southern Gaza

Her sister Yuval was choked with tears as she delivered a heart-breaking eulogy.

She said: “I love you. I’m glad at least you’re here. I will bring my grandchildren; I will bring the family.

“I won’t give up on you, everyone will know about Noa Marciano.”

In the moshav of Olesh to the west, another grief-stricken Israeli family are preparing to bury their grandmother this weekend.

Yehudit Weiss was also found dead by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) near al Shifa. She had been taken hostage during Hamas’s initial attack, when her husband Shmulik was killed.

Her son Omer recalled the family’s double heartbreak at being told first about his father’s death, then his mother’s.

“It broke us the first time when they told us about my father and the next time it tore us apart, we didn’t know how to deal with it.

“We are taking it day by day,” he told me.

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Like the relatives of some 240 hostages, they hoped for a breakthrough that would bring their grandmother home.

But the waiting and the uncertainty, he said, have been unbearable.

“It’s unbelievable pain. Every day passes, every hour, every minute, and we don’t have information,” he added.

“We buried our father, and we weren’t able to mourn. We kept ourselves busy, and we did everything we could to bring my mother home.”

In Gaza itself, another family are also preparing to bury relatives. Eleven of them.

The Tabatibi family lost that many in multiple Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip.

Alaa Abu Hasira said they were among the thousands of people who have travelled south from northern Gaza, after being told they would be safer there by the Israelis.

“We were in Gaza City, and as a result of the conflict we moved to Khan Younis. All my sisters died, and my son and daughter also. I wish I had taken my daughter in my arms, and my twin sister also died,” she said.

Others in Gaza were buried alive today.

Israeli airstrikes in Nusseirat have left dozens under the rubble of residential blocks which collapsed in the bombardment.

A Friday of death and burials, ending a sixth week of this devastating war.

It is two years since I was last in the West Bank, and today it is a different place.

Beyond the Israeli checkpoints guarding ever-expanding Jewish settlements, illegal in international law, is a Palestinian population more squeezed than ever before.

We pass shops shuttered, streets deserted and Palestinian communities cut off.

A huge new highway cuts through the landscape. It’s a road for Israelis, linking Israel to the West Bank settlements.

Israel-Gaza latest: Satellite images show huge crowds trying to flee to southern Gaza

We’re trying to reach the Palestinian town of Tulkarm and it’s hard going.

At one roadblock, we stop to talk to the Palestinians beyond.

“The Israelis closed it,” the young man says. “We have businesses everywhere here… we can’t work. It has been closed for about 35 days.”

Then he looks beyond me and backs off quickly. Behind, the Israeli military has turned up.

The Israeli crackdown here in the West Bank intensified after the Hamas attacks from Gaza on 7 October.

On the face of it, it’s about maintaining security and foiling terror threats. But combined with a massive spike in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, including forced displacement, it represents a shocking shift in violence against Palestinians.

It took a while, but we reached Tulkarm eventually. We’d come to meet the Mahmeed family.

“The martyr’s family?” a man says when we ask for directions.

The “martyr” is a 15-year-old boy. Ibrahim and Naheda Mahmeed lost their son two weeks ago. They had watched from the balcony of their home as Taha was shot dead below them.

The whole thing was caught in a horrifying video filmed by Taha’s sister, Sarah. She had been on the balcony at 3.30am on 18 October.

Taha had heard that the “occupier forces”, as they call them, were in their town. He and a friend had gone out, a few metres from his home, to see what was going on.

As Taha leaned his head out into the main road, there were three shots. Taha fell to the ground. Sarah’s screams on the video are piercing and haunting. She’d just filmed her brother being killed.

Moments later, she filmed her father running out to help his son. He too was shot. The video shows him struggling back to the house.

Ibrahim is out of hospital now; his physical wounds healing. He showed me the entry wound in his back and the much larger exit wound in his stomach.

“I saw my son lying on the floor, with no value, like an animal,” he told me.

He repeated what he said he had shouted to the Israeli soldiers up the street.

“I am a father. The boy has been killed. I ask for mercy. Then I heard bullets around me and they hit my back.”

Taha is one of at least 52 children to be killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military since the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on 7 October. That’s more than any other month since 1967.

According to the Defence for Children International, a NGO (non-governmental organisation), 97 children have been killed in the West Bank in 2023, the majority of them in the last two months.

“If this was your son, and what they did to Taha, they did to your son, will you accept to live with them?” his mother asks me, waiting for my reply.

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“They are killing children, all the children who were killed were like Taha, they went to buy things in the shops and rockets fell on them.

“And children, aged 10, 11, 14… and Taha was 15. Most of them are under 20.”

The shooting had happened at 3.31am according to the time stamp on the video which Taha’s sister shared with Sky News.

Another of Sarah’s videos shows the Palestinian ambulance arriving. It is time-stamped 4.44am. That is an hour and 13 minutes after Taha was shot.

It is common for ambulances to be refused access for “security reasons”. In this case it is unlikely it would have made any difference – one of the shots struck Taha in the head.

Sky News has asked the Israel Defence Forces for information about the circumstances leading to Taha’s death. They said they would respond to us, but have yet to do so.

In the name of Israeli security, you have to wonder what impact that has on the people in the West Bank – on the next generation of Palestinians.

“Do you think it is possible for Palestinians and Israelis to live alongside each other?” I asked Taha’s sister, Sarah.

“No,” she answers, with no hesitation. “No. It’s our land. Just for us.”

“All of it?” I ask. “The West Bank? Or all of it?”

“All. It’s our land,” she says.

Western politicians say a two-state solution remains the only fix for this profound problem. That doesn’t make it a solution that feels remotely possible.

My time back in the West Bank has been deeply depressing.

The chief executive of OpenAI – the firm behind viral chatbot ChatGPT – has been ousted after the board said it no longer has confidence in him.

Sam Altman is to depart and will be replaced in the interim by Mira Murati, who is currently chief technology officer for the artificial intelligence company.

In a statement on Friday, OpenAI said the move follows a “deliberative review process by the board” which concluded that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”.

The statement said Altman’s behaviour was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.

Posting on social media following the announcement, Altman wrote: “I loved my time at OpenAI.

“It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit.

“Most of all, I loved working with such talented people. (I) will have more to say about what’s next later.”

Altman helped start OpenAI as a non-profit research laboratory in 2015.

But in the past year, he was thrust into the global spotlight as the face of OpenAI after ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness.

On Thursday, he took part in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation conference in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.

Read more:
Who is Sam Altman?
ChatGPT creator expresses concern about ‘under-regulation’
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Altman predicted AI will prove to be “the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far”.

But he also acknowledged the existential threat posed by the quantum leaps being taking by computers, and the need for guardrails to protect humanity.

“I really think the world is going to rise to the occasion and everybody wants to do the right thing,” Altman said.

Police say there are multiple victims after a shooting at a hospital in the US.

It is not clear what condition the people are in and officers say the incident at New Hampshire Hospital is ongoing.

In a statement, New Hampshire State Police said there are “multiple victims”.

“Troopers are currently investigating a shooting at New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord,” it added.

“There are multiple victims. Additional updates will be released when available.”

New Hampshire Hospital is the state psychiatric hospital, located in the state’s capital city.

An armoured vehicle was approaching the scene outside the hospital.

Aerials of the hospital show an active scene with numerous police cars with lights flashing outside the hospital.

New Hampshire Homeland Security and Emergency Management has said its officials are aware of the “situation unfolding” there.

“Police are on scene and responding,” the department said.

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Leaders discussed efforts to increase the flow of urgently needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

US President Joe Biden pressed on Friday for the immediate release of hostages seized by Hamas in Israel during talks with the leader of Qatar, which has relations with the Palestinian group that governs Gaza.

Biden, in San Francisco for an Asia-Pacific summit, in a telephone call with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani “discussed the urgent need for all hostages held by Hamas to be released without further delay,” a White House statement said on Friday.

Biden also raised Israel’s decision to let two tankers of diesel each day into the war-torn Gaza Strip, following pleas from the United States.

Biden and the emir “discussed ongoing efforts to increase the flow of urgently needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza and Israel’s decision to resume fuel deliveries for life-saving aid,” the White House said.

The pair discussed “strategic relations between the two countries” and ways strengthen them, the Qatari Emiri Diwan said.

The diwan also said Sheikh Tamim held a call with Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. The two leaders discussed developments in Gaza, as well as other “regional and international developments of common interest”.

The call with Bahrain’s monarch comes as Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister travelled to Manama for meetings with the country’s crown prince and other top officials.

Qatar’s foreign ministry said the two sides “stressed the need to immediately stop the war in Gaza and protect civilians”.

Biden two days earlier had told reporters that he was “mildly hopeful” of reaching a deal to free the hostages, believed to include about 10 US citizens.

Fighters from Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, on October 7 infiltrated Israel and killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

Israel’s subsequent air and ground campaign has killed more than 12,000 people, including 5,000 children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.

Qatar has in recent years rejected moves by other Gulf Arab monarchies towards normalising relations with Israel.