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Former Home And Away star Johnny Ruffo has died aged 35, six years after being diagnosed with brain cancer, it has been announced.

The Australian actor and singer died “surrounded by his partner Tahnee and family”.

In August 2017, Ruffo announced that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer and was starting “aggressive treatment”.

“It is with a heavy heart that today we had to farewell our beloved Johnny,” a statement on his official Instagram said.

“He was a very talented, charming and sometimes cheeky boy.

“Johnny was very determined and had a strong will. He battled all the way to the end and fought as hard as he could.

“Such a beautiful soul with so much more to give.

“We all love you Johnny and will remember you for all the joy you brought to our lives. Rest easy.”

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Prime Minister Antonio Costa announced resignation after chief of staff was arrested amid corruption probe.

Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has dissolved parliament and called snap elections, two days after the country’s prime minister resigned amid a continuing corruption investigation.

Rebelo de Sousa said on Thursday that the country would hold snap elections on March 10, the second in as many years.

“I have chosen to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic and hold elections on March 10,” he said in a televised address.

The announcement comes after Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa offered his resignation on Tuesday, following the arrest of his chief of staff as part of an anticorruption investigation that includes allegations of malfeasance and influence peddling.

The 62-year-old Costa, who first took power in 2015, denied any wrongdoing but said that he could no longer continue in his role. Prosecutors have said that he is the subject of a separate investigation.

The state prosecutor’s office has said that the country’s Supreme Court is looking at the “use of the prime minister’s name and his involvement to unlock” the activities being investigated.

“I totally trust the justice system,” Costa said on Tuesday. “If there are suspicions, then the judicial authorities are free to look into them … I am not above the law.”

By law, an election must take place within 60 days of the issuing of a presidential decree dissolving parliament.

Rebelo de Sousa had said that he would only disband parliament, where the Socialist Party holds a majority of seats, after a vote on the budget for 2024.

That budget, which includes tax cuts for the middle class, spending on social programmes for the poor, and a 24 percent increase in public spending amid flagging economic growth, was passed by the house on October 31. It must be finally approved by November 29.

After meeting with the main political parties on Wednesday and the Council of State, a consultative body, on Thursday, the president said that allowing lawmakers time to pass the budget will help “meet the expectations of many Portuguese”.

The corruption probe is focused on allegations of improper behaviour around the development of lithium mining and hydrogen projects in the country, and Costa’s chief of staff, Vitor Escaria, was arrested on Tuesday as police conducted raids on several public buildings and additional properties.

Prosecutors also named Infrastructure Minister Joao Galamba as a formal suspect, and issued arrest warrants for the mayor of the town of Sines, where some of the projects were to be located, and two executives at the company Start Campus, tasked with building the hydrogen production project and data centre.

Washington, DC – More than 500 former campaign staffers who helped elect Joe Biden in 2020 have called on the United States president to work towards a ceasefire in Gaza and end the violence that has killed more than 10,800 Palestinians.

The letter released on Thursday adds to the growing calls from sources close to the Biden administration to push for an end to the war.

“As President of the United States, you have significant influence in this perilous moment,” the letter, first reported by Vox, said.

“You must call for a ceasefire, hostage exchange, and de-escalation, and take concrete steps to address the conditions of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing at the root of the horrific violence we are witnessing now.”

While the Biden administration and Congress remain steadfast in their support for Israel, staff members, grassroots organisations and activists have been expressing growing opposition to the war.

The American Postal Workers Union, which represents US Postal Service employees, also backed calls for a ceasefire on Thursday.

“We call on our government, which is the primary foreign benefactor of the Israeli government, to use all its power to protect innocent lives and to help bring about peace in the region, and not use our tax dollars for more war,” the union said in a statement.

“We join the calls for an immediate ceasefire, the release of hostages, and urgently needed massive humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. The cries of humanity demand nothing less.”

Growing calls

The two statements follow earlier efforts from within the government to push for an end to hostilities.

Last week, employees at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) circulated a letter calling for an immediate ceasefire, and by Wednesday, it had surpassed 1,000 signatures.

Hundreds of Congress staffers also staged a walk-out on Wednesday to demand an end to the war.

Thursday’s letter by people who worked on Biden’s campaign highlighted the mounting death toll in Gaza and the mass displacement of residents in the territory’s northern reaches, noting that scholars have raised alarm about the risk of genocide in the conflict.

The Democratic staffers also said they were “horrified by the devastating Hamas attack against Israeli civilians on October 7″.

United Nations agencies and rights groups have also urged a ceasefire, with UN chief Antonio Guterres warning that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children”.

But early Thursday, Biden ruled out any definitive stop to the conflict. When reporters asked about the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza, the US president said, “None, no possibility.”

Biden has voiced unconditional support for Israel and requested more than $14bn in additional assistance for the country since its war in Gaza started on October 7, angering US progressives, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.

Last month, the US president sparked outrage among Palestinian rights supporters when he cast doubt over the death toll in Gaza, saying that he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”.

Rights experts and fact-checkers defended the numbers, which are released by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza based on hospital and morgue records. They explained that, in previous conflicts, the Health Ministry’s numbers matched the findings of independent researchers.

A senior State Department official also said on Wednesday that the actual Palestinian death toll may be even higher than the official numbers.

“In this period of conflict and conditions of war, it is very difficult for any of us to assess what the rate of casualties are,” Barbara Leaf, assistant US secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told lawmakers.  “We think they’re very high, frankly — and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited.”

The Health Ministry has also said that its current statistics do not account for people who remain under the rubble or who were buried without being registered.

‘His legacy will be genocide’

When Biden ran for president, his supporters often portrayed him as a “decent” man aiming to restore unity in the US after the presidency of Donald Trump.

Biden has suffered personal grief in his life, having lost his wife and young daughter in a car accident in 1972 and his son Beau, a politician and army veteran, to cancer in 2015.

The campaign staffers’ statement called out the US president for appearing to play down — if not dismiss — civilian casualties in Gaza.

“Mr President, you have spoken intimately about the unbearable pain and grief of losing a child,” the letter said. “We were shocked and saddened to see you justify the death of Palestinian children as ‘the price of waging a war’.”

Biden made that comment while questioning the Palestinian death count on October 25, in an appearance before reporters at the White House. “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it is the price of waging war,” he said.

As the US president faces pressure from his own base, his approval ratings among Democrats are slumping. He is also seeing an enormous drop in support in Arab communities.

A recent New York Times poll showed Biden losing to Trump — the likely Republican nominee in the 2024 race — in five key swing states: Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Heba Mohammad, a Palestinian American staffer who worked for the Biden campaign in another swing state, Wisconsin, warned that the carnage in Gaza may become what people remember him for.

“President Biden has the ability and responsibility to save lives and reduce human suffering,” she said in a statement accompanying the letter. “If he doesn’t act swiftly, his legacy will be genocide.”

Israel claims to have the leader of Hamas holed up in his Gaza City bunker.

Yahya Sinwar has led Hamas since 2017, having joined its ranks in the early 1980s.

Believed to be the architect of the 7 October attacks, he is Israel’s most wanted – a “dead man walking”, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who claims to have him “surrounded and isolated”.

Follow live: Key Hamas stronghold ‘secured after 10-hour battle’

He has spent more than 20 years in prison for killing both Israelis and fellow Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the other side.

The 61-year-old’s nicknames include “the face of evil”, “butcher of Khan Younis”, and “man of 12” – in reference to 12 suspected informers he is believed to have killed.

Granted fatwa by Hamas founder to kill collaborators

Sinwar was born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in 1962.

He studied Arabic at the Islamic University of Gaza, which was founded in 1978 by the two men who went on to set up Hamas almost a decade later.

There he became particularly close to one of them, the cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Yassin and Mahmoud al-Zahar co-founded Hamas in 1987 as a Gaza-based political splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to Israeli reports, Sinwar said Yassin granted him a fatwa (a ruling in Islamic law) to kill anyone suspected of collaborating with the Israelis.

He was first arrested for subversive activities in 1982. In prison, he met other key members of Hamas, including Salah Shehade, the former leader of its military wing the Qassam Brigades.

After being arrested and imprisoned again in 1985, he was put in charge of Hamas’s internal security branch, the Majd Force, which sought out and killed suspected Israeli spies.

Dr Ahron Bregman, a former Israeli army major – and now senior teaching fellow in war studies and the Arab-Israeli conflict at King’s College London, said: “The Israelis tried for many years to recruit him as a collaborator himself, offering him massive incentives.

“But it never worked with Sinwar. In fact he became notorious for killing Palestinians suspected of collaborating.”

Learnt fluent Hebrew in prison

In 1988 he helped abduct and kill two Israeli Defence Force soldiers, which saw him sentenced to 22 years in an Israeli prison.

Despite being incarcerated, Sinwar used the time to his advantage – learning fluent Hebrew to better understand his enemy and ascending to become leader of Hamas prisoners in Israel.

Dr Bregman says: “He would read Israeli newspapers on a daily basis. He understood them way better than they understood him – hence his ability to deceive them and catch them off guard by executing his military operation so effectively in October 2023.”

Fifteen years into his prison sentence, he went on Israeli television and spoke in Hebrew, calling for a truce with Hamas.

He was released in 2011 as part of the swap of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for just one hostage Israeli soldier – Gilad Shalit.

Commenting on his imprisonment afterwards, Sinwar said: “They wanted the prison to be a grave for us. A mill to grind our will, determination and bodies.

“But thank God, with our belief in our cause we turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and academies for study.”

Forced suspected informer to bury his own brother

Back in Gaza he continued to increase his influence among Hamas’s highest ranks.

He remained committed to his original task of unmasking and killing traitors – both Israeli collaborators and members of rival militant groups.

A former member of Israeli intelligence told the Financial Times that he once boasted about forcing a Hamas member suspected of informing for a competing faction to “bury his own brother alive… handing him a spoon to finish the job”.

In 2015 he is thought to have been involved in the torture and killing of fellow Hamas commander Mahmoud Ishtiwi.

He was accused of embezzlement and “moral crimes”, including alleged homosexual activity, with Sinwar thought to have orchestrated his murder over fears he could compromise the group.

Commenting on how he killed another collaborator, he told how he and a group of others blindfolded Ishitiwi and drove him to a makeshift grave, before strangling him with a kaffiyeh (Arabic male headdress) and burying him there.

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‘Mythical figure’ in Palestinian history

The same year he is thought to have killed Ishtiwi, he was designated a terrorist by the US government.

He replaced Ismail Haniyeh as Hamas leader in early 2017 and was re-elected in 2021, later surviving an assassination attempt.

As leader he has increased the group’s use of force, stepping up protests and rocket fire at the Israeli border.

With his military background, he is seen as someone capable of uniting Hamas’s armed and political wings.

Dr Bregman describes him as a “man of few words” and a “natural leader… charismatic, secretive and manipulative”.

“He will be remembered as the architect of the 7 October attacks and the person who inflicted on the Israelis their most terrible disaster since the establishment of their state in 1948,” he adds.

Although his methods have been “barbaric”, Dr Bregman believes it will be seen, “from a Palestinian point of view, in spite of the terrible price they are paying now, as a great victory”.

“Sinwar has earned a place in the pantheon of great Palestinian leaders,” he adds.

Testimonies from people on the ground in Gaza, however, suggest his violent methods have left many of them disillusioned with Hamas.

With Israel’s promise to destroy Hamas and all of its leaders, Dr Bregman believes they will “get him in the end”.

But before then he could be offered safe passage to another country as part of political deal, as former Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat was to Tunisia in 1982.

“Whatever his fate, there is no doubt Sinwar will go down in Palestinian history as a mythical figure,” Dr Bregan says.

Israel has agreed to four-hour humanitarian pauses in fighting every day – allowing Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate, the White House has said.

Despite the US announcement Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested any pauses would not be across the whole territory, and there was no official confirmation of a plan for recurring breaks.

An Israeli Defence Force spokesperson told Sky News there was no significant change on the ground.

President Biden later tweeted that there would be: “Two humanitarian passages that will allow people to flee hostile areas in Gaza.

“Let me be clear,” he added, “Israel makes its own decisions.

“They are fighting an enemy embedded in the civilian population, which places innocent Palestinian people at risk.

“They have an obligation to distinguish between terrorists and civilians and fully comply with international law.”

Fighting between Israel and Hamas has intensified in the north and in Gaza City – forcing thousands to flee to the south.

Joe Biden has been pushing for a multi-day stoppage, in the hope this could lead to hostages being released.

The US president said there is “no possibility” of a formal ceasefire at the moment – and expressed frustration that it had taken so long for the humanitarian pauses to be enforced.

Under the agreement, Israel would announce each four-hour window at least three hours in advance.

ActionAid has warned this is not enough – and only a permanent ceasefire will help the people of Gaza.

Riham Jafari, a coordinator for the international charity, said: “Today’s announcement offers precious little to the two million people in Gaza – displaced, injured and traumatised – who have faced a month of relentless bombardment and seen critical infrastructure all but destroyed.

“What use is a four-hour pause each day to hand communities bread in the morning before they are bombed in the afternoon? What use is a brief cessation in hostilities when hospital wards lie in ruins and when roads used to deliver medical supplies and food are destroyed?”

Israeli strikes pounded Gaza City overnight – and Israeli troops were about 1.8 miles from al Shifa Hospital in the heart of the city centre, the hospital’s director said.

Many are fleeing along roads such as the Salah al Din – with some carrying white flags to show they are civilians.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said they had taken a key Hamas stronghold after a 10-hour battle.

Troops belonging to the Nahal Brigade, one of the IDF’s main infantry units, secured “Outpost 17” in west Jabaliya in northern Gaza.

The IDF said it engaged in fighting “above ground and in an underground route”, suggesting Hamas may have used some of its vast tunnel network during the battle.

Israel-Gaza latest: Palestinian fatalities ‘may be higher’ than 10,000

Aid conference in Paris

It comes as officials from Western and Arab nations, the UN and non-governmental organisations met for an international conference in Paris with the aim of providing urgent aid to civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The conference gathered about 80 countries and organisations to find ways to help wounded civilians escape the siege.

More than 1.5 million people – or about 70% of Gaza’s population – have fled their homes, and an estimated $1.2bn (£977m) is needed to respond to the crisis in Palestinian areas.

Humanitarian organisations have called for more aid to flow into Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas.

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Sky’s Mark Stone is on the Israeli-Egypt border at Nitzana, and has given an update on the status of the Rafah crossing into Gaza and the flow of aid.

He said “the border is open and trucks have been passing through … [but at] a trickle”.

Delays are occurring because Israel is insisting on checking every truck that enters Gaza from its own soil.

“About 100 trucks a day at the moment are being allowed to pass from Egypt into Israel where they are security screened,” he said.

Once cleared, the trucks travel back into Egypt and are allowed to pass into Gaza at the Rafah crossing.

Israel has rejected any calls for a ceasefire until Hamas releases the roughly 240 hostages that it took during the attack on 7 October.

Hamas killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli tallies – in the single worst day of bloodshed in the country’s 75-year history.

Palestinian officials said 10,569 Gaza residents had been killed as of Wednesday, about 40% of them children.