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Israeli forces have dropped leaflets warning Palestinians to leave southern Gaza, residents in the besieged city of Khan Younis have said.

It is feared the leaflets could signal Israel is planning to broaden its offensive to the south – where hundreds of thousands fled to escape its bombardment and ground assault.

Israel-Gaza live updates

They warned civilians to evacuate and said anyone in the vicinity of military positions is “putting his life in danger”.

Two reporters working for the Associated Press news agency who live east of Khan Younis confirmed they had seen the leaflets.

The Israeli military declined to comment – but defence minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday that the ground offensive will eventually “include both the north and the south”, vowing to “strike Hamas wherever it is”.

Similar leaflets were dropped in northern Gaza ahead of Israel’s ground invasion, warning people to travel south.

Expanding operations to the south, where there are already daily air raids, threatens to deepen the severe humanitarian crisis in the war-torn territory.

More than 1.5 million people have been displaced in Gaza, with most travelling to the south, where food, water and supplies continue to dwindle.

The area was cut off from the outside world for the fourth time when communication services went down due to a lack of power, according to the Palestinian telecoms provider.

Gaza has experienced three previous mass communication outages since the ground invasion began.

Tanks and troops crossed the border with northern Gaza on 26 October in what was described at the time as the “biggest incursion” of the conflict so far, almost three weeks after the 7 October Hamas attack.

More than 1,200 people were killed in the massacre with 240 taken hostage, Israel has said.

Hospital in northern Gaza under siege

Israeli soldiers continued searching underground levels of al Shifa Hospital in the north – the largest hospital in Gaza – on Thursday, following a raid that began early on Wednesday.

Technicians responsible for running the hospital equipment were detained, the health ministry in Gaza said in a statement.

The military released footage from inside the hospital showing three duffle bags allegedly found hidden around an MRI lab – each containing an assault riffle, grenades and Hamas uniforms.

The unverified video also showed a closet containing a number of assault rifles without ammunition clips, the military claimed.

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However, Israel has yet to produce any evidence of the central Hamas command centre that it claims is concealed under the complex.

After encircling the hospital for days, Israel is now under pressure to prove Hamas has used patients, staff and civilians sheltering there to provide cover for fighters.

The allegation – which the US says it has intelligence to support – is part of Israel’s broader claim that Hamas is using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Hamas and officials at the Hamas-run health ministry deny fighters operate in the hospital, which employs around 1,500 people and has more than 500 beds – with Palestinians and human rights groups accusing Israel of recklessly endangering civilians.

Troops ransacked the basement and other buildings, before questioning and scanning the faces of patients, staff and people sheltering in al Shifa during the raid, according to Munir al Boursh, a senior official with Gaza’s health ministry inside the hospital.

The Israeli military said soldiers were accompanied by medical teams bringing incubators and other supplies to the hospital – where the health ministry says 40 patients including three babies have died since al Shifa’s emergency generator ran out of fuel on Saturday.

Another 36 babies were at risk of death, the ministry said.

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More than 11,200 Palestinians have been killed during the conflict, two thirds of whom are women and children, according to Gaza’s health authorities.

Another 2,700 have been reported missing, with most believed to be buried under rubble.

A Russian artist and musician who swapped price tags in a St Petersburg supermarket with anti-war messages criticising Russia’s actions in Ukraine has been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony.

Sasha Skochilenko, 33, was arrested and jailed in April last year after the incident at the branch of supermarket chain Perekrestok.

Ukraine war latest updates

She was sentenced on Thursday for supposedly discrediting Russia‘s armed forces.

Given the 19 months she has already spent in pre-trial detention, the sentence will be reduced by more than two years.

The prosecution claimed she was acting out of political hatred.

However, Skochilenko says she was neither a political activist nor an extremist, but was acting from pacifist conviction.

She told the judge in her final statement that the case was “bizarre and ludicrous”, and that even employees at her detention centre were astonished at the charges.

She also pointed out that the prosecution of her case and the substantial media coverage it had received had spread the message far wider than might otherwise have been achieved by placing five pieces of paper in a supermarket.

“Had I not been arrested,” she told the court, “it would have been known only to one granny, a cashier and a security guard at the Perekrestok store.

“So why aren’t my investigators and prosecutors facing charges under Article 207.3 (of the Russian Criminal Code, which penalises public dissemination of deliberate false information about the use of Russian Armed Forces), only me?”

Dressed in a tie-dye T-shirt with a huge red heart on the front, Skochilenko made heart signs from inside the glass cage as her supporters chanted “disgrace” and “freedom” after the verdict was read out.

She cut a fragile figure surrounded by burly, balaclava-clad police guards, some of whom had ‘Z’ on their helmets, the symbol of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine.

Her supporters are concerned that her prison term could become a death sentence, given her several severe health conditions.

Skochilenko has written in the past about her struggles with mental health including bipolar disorder. She also has a congenital heart defect and is coeliac.

Her lawyers and supporters are concerned she will not be provided with the food or medical support she needs when she is transferred to a prison colony.

Since the Kremlin introduced the legislation last March criminalising any supposed discrediting of the armed forces, nearly 750 people have faced criminal charges, according to the human rights group OVD-info, which documents political persecution.

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Skochilenko’s case is one of the most high profile, alongside prominent political activists like Ilya Yashin, who received an eight-and-a-half-year term last December under similar charges.

The artist was originally reported to the police by one of the supermarket’s customers.

According to local St Petersburg media outlet, Bumaga, which managed to track that customer down, they themselves were surprised at the verdict, telling journalists “for bits of paper, it should of course have been less”.

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Residents of Khan Younis have received leaflets telling them to move farther south, but few safe options exist.

Palestinians in some areas of Khan Younis say they have received evacuation orders from the Israeli military amid fears that Israel could intensify its assault on southern Gaza.

Residents in Khuzaa, Abassan, Bani Suhaila and Al Qarara in eastern Khan Younis, the biggest city in southern Gaza, were showered with thousands of leaflets dropped by Israeli aircraft overnight and early on Thursday, warning them to leave.

The towns, collectively home to more than 100,000 people in peacetime, are now sheltering tens of thousands more who have fled other areas after Israel ordered residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south.

“For your safety, you need to evacuate your places of residence immediately and head to known shelters,” the leaflets said. “Anyone near terrorists or their facilities puts their life at risk, and every house used by terrorists will be targeted.”

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the leaflets.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the besieged territory of 2.3 million people have fled south as Israel intensified its ground invasion in northern Gaza.

It was not clear where residents in eastern Khan Younis were expected to flee as Israel continues its bombardment in areas in the south where Palestinians were previously ordered to relocate for their safety.

“We have been absolutely clear that at the current moment, we do not consider any part of Gaza to be safe,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said on Thursday.

As Israeli forces continue their ground assault in the northern part of Gaza, aid organisations have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in the densely packed south as Israel’s bombardment and siege severely restricts supplies of food, water, fuel and electricity.

Turk said the conditions make outbreaks of infectious disease and extreme hunger nearly inevitable.

Many of those who have been displaced by the fighting – about 70 percent of Gaza’s population, according to the UN – worry that they will not be allowed to return home.

Israel has said that it is working to eliminate the armed Palestinian group Hamas, which launched deadly attacks on southern Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 captive, according to Israeli authorities,

Israel has responded with an assault on Gaza that has killed at least 11,470 people, more than one third of them children, according to Palestinian authorities.

The dropping of the leaflets on Khan Younis came as Israeli forces raided the al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in Gaza.

The situation at the hospital has raised alarm around the world with hundreds of patients and thousands of displaced civilians trapped inside without fuel, oxygen or basic supplies.

Medics said dozens of patients had died in recent says as a result of Israel’s siege, including three newborns in incubators that lost power.

Israel has said the hospital sits atop a large Hamas command centre, but it has yet to share evidence to validate its assertion after conducting raids inside the hospital that were met with alarm from medical organisations and political leaders.

On Thursday, the human rights group Human Rights Watch said Israel has yet to provide sufficient evidence to justify revoking the hospital’s protected status under the international laws of war.

“Hospitals only lose those protections if it can be shown that harmful acts have been carried out from the premises,” Human Rights Watch UN Director Louis Charbonneau told the Reuters news agency.

“The Israeli government hasn’t provided any evidence of that.”

Rwanda’s government has attacked what it called a “disappointing” verdict from the UK’s top court which ruled a scheme to deport asylum seekers to the African country was unlawful.

The UK government suffered a major setback over its Rwanda scheme when the plan was dismissed by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

But a spokesperson for Rwanda’s government rejected the idea the East African country was unsafe for refugees, and argued there was “nothing wrong” with how it processes asylum claims.

Spokesperson Yolande Makolo told Sky News the judgment had been based on “hypocritical” and “dishonest” assessments by the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR).

Asked what she made of the verdict, she said: “It’s ultimately a decision for the UK judicial system. It’s disappointing – we have a really good record of hosting and welcoming migrants and refugees in this country.”

Rwanda remains “committed” to the partnership and is “ready” to receive migrants, she said.

The Supreme Court had said in its unanimous judgment that those sent to Rwanda would be at “real risk” of being returned home, whether their grounds to claim asylum were justified or not – breaching international law.

Sky’s Mark Austin pressed Ms Makolo on this, to which she said the court had been referring to the risk of refoulment – the forcible return of refugees or asylum seekers to a country they could be subjected to persecution – and that this was based on “hypocritical criticism from the UNHCR”.

She said Rwanda had worked with the UNHCR for a “long time” and had not refouled anyone.

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The first case of a strain of feline coronovirus that has killed thousands of cats in Cyprus has been found in the UK.

In the words of one of the leading experts on the virus, it is “pretty terrifying”.

Professor Danielle Gunn-Moore from Edinburgh University has spent more than two decades researching the illness.

She tells Sky News it’s likely the case traced by scientists wasn’t the first to reach the country – and it’s almost certain to crop up again.

Here’s what you need to know about why this strain is different, the symptoms cat owners should look out for and when you should act.

What happened in Cyprus?

A feline coronavirus started spreading through Cyprus, known as the “island of cats”, in January.

The deadly mutation of the virus is called feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), and is generally fatal unless treated.

Upwards of 8,000 cats died on the island – some reports put the number as high as 300,000.

Infected cats started receiving a human COVID-19 treatment from August, which Professor Gunn-Moore says had been effective in treating the illness.

What is different about the Cyprus strain?

The strain that originated in Cyprus is a recombination of a feline coronavirus and a canine coronavirus, and is called F-CoV-23.

It’s “particularly nasty”, Professor Gunn-Moore says, because it’s taken the pantropic spike from the canine virus – this means it “gets into all cells” rather than staying in one site.

For most cats who get the standard version of feline coronavirus, the virus will stay in the bowel and may cause some diarrhoea – but otherwise the symptoms are mild.

Occasionally the virus will travel to another part of the body and mutate, causing the more serious FIP.

With this “traditional” version of the illness, FIP arises from an “individual mutation in an individual cat”, Professor Gunn-Moore explains.

By the time the coronavirus has mutated to become an FIP-causing illness, it can’t then replicate in the bowel, meaning the more serious version of the illness is not transmissible through the cat’s faeces.

What is “terrifying” about the Cyprus strain is that the cats are shedding the same virus – meaning it has been passed directly between them, rather than needing to mutate individually in each animal, Professor Gunn-Moore says.

Is there anything else different about Cyprus?

There is a chance that the genetics of the cats in Cyprus has something to do with how easily the virus has spread.

Professor Gunn-Moore says she’s “really, really hoping” that is the case because that could mean it wouldn’t spread so “efficiently” in other countries – but at the moment there is no evidence one way or another.

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What do we know about the UK’s first known case of F-CoV-23?

The cat was brought to the UK from Cyprus and was taken to the vet after developing symptoms.

The cat is in quarantine so it can’t go outside and is now being treated with a high dose of anti-virals.

How likely is it the new strain will spread in the UK?

Professor Gunn-Moore has “major concerns” about the virus spreading in the UK.

She says she “can’t believe” this is the first case to exist in the UK.

There is a frequent passage of cats from Cyprus to the UK, she says, with some rescue centres working on a model of bringing back animals from Cyprus to rehome here.

There are also two army bases on Cyprus and people stationed there may be moving their pets between countries.

“Certainly we know that quite a lot of cats are getting rescued from Cyprus pretty regularly, so the chance of this happening again is high.”

What symptoms should cat owners look out for?

The clinical signs of FIP are the same whether it’s the standard strain or F-CoV-23, although neurological symptoms such as wobbliness and seizures are more common with the latter.

Kittens and younger cats are typically more susceptible to FIP, but in Cyprus the virus affected a “sweep of ages” – which also suggested immunity to a previous bout of feline coronavirus didn’t protect against the new strain, Professor Gunn-Moore says.

Other symptoms include a distended belly, possible breathing issues if the cat has fluid around its lungs, being depressed and off their food.

Do cat owners need to be worried?

Cat owners need to be vigilant, Professor Gunn-Moore says, but they don’t need to start keeping pets inside.

If you have rehomed a cat from Cyprus this year, or live near a cattery that gets rescues from Cyprus, you should be particularly careful, she adds.

“If they see the cat becoming depressed or swollen belly or wobbly back end, seizures, anything like that – just a cat that’s not feeling well – go to your vet quickly and say you’re worried about F-CoV-23.”

If the vet does diagnose FIP, they should get in touch with the team at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh which will sequence the virus to see if it is the standard strain or F-CoV-23.

The virus is mostly spread via an infected cat’s faeces. If your cat may come into contact with a cat that’s got a connection to Cyprus – a neighbour’s cat, for example, or other animals at a cattery – you should be extra-vigilant.

How is FIP treated?

There are two anti-viral COVID-19 drugs that are used to treat FIP and are licensed for use in the UK.

Professor Gunn-Moore says while they are expensive, they are effective at treating the illness – and seem to work well on the new strain.