growing panic in rafah, after israel's prime minister, benjamin netanyahu, orders the military to prepare for an offensive in the southern city, where some 1.4 million people are sheltering. police are searching the river thames for the body of abdul shokoor ezedi, the clapham chemical attack suspect. detectives believe the 35—year—old may be dead after going into the water near chelsea bridge in west london. and an explosion of light and colour, as china celebrates the lunar new year and welcomes in the year of the dragon. the celebrations culminate on the 15th day with a lantern festival. now on bbc news, seventh october: israel's darkest day.

saturday, october 7th, 2023. the day starts peacefully, normally, but as dawn breaks, a massacre unfolds. first, the palestinian militant group hamas fires thousands of rockets into the communities of southern israel. the barrage provides cover for a terrifying, unprecedented second phase. allahu akbar! thousands of members of the group, designated a terrorist organisation by the uk, us and other countries, break through the perimeter fence and into israeli territory. they film as they stream through. some are on motorbikes. many more are on foot. and they begin to run. just a few miles away, hundreds of people have gathered at a music festival. as the rockets fly overhead, palestinian gunmen attack the party from several directions.

it was one of the worst days in israel's history, its people killed in cold blood, hundreds of hostages dragged away, a nation traumatised. i'm anna foster, and for the bbc, i spoke to those who survived, who lost loved ones on october 7th or have family members still held hostage in gaza. this is their story. we drove, we tried to pass people running because everyone was scattered around. and we also tried to help out people to take them with us. we already uploaded most of our equipment, so we didn't have much room, but we tried to save people on the way. they were fleeing for their lives. they were trying to find a way to get out of there as fast as they could with minimum damage. at 6:30 in the morning, gilad karplus was at the nova music festival when red

alert sirens began to sound in southern israel. sirens it's a familiar noise and it means that rockets are being fired from gaza. israelis living in those border communities know the drill well, but this time something was different. i didn't see, i heard. it was 6:30 in the morning and we were asleep. naomi adler was with her husband and three children at home in the kibbutz of nahal oz. my three boys were asleep in their room, which is our shelter, and we woke up to ten minutes of nonstop bombings. we ran into the safe room, shut the door, the metal door, shut the metal window and just stayed there for ten minutes. nonstop. and we live on a... we know bombings. we know sirens.

this was nothing like that. i felt like bombs were being thrown on my head. and itjust didn't stop for ten long minutes. and my husband and ijust held each other and i wasjust saying, "what the hell is going on? "what is this? " and it just wouldn't stop. shouting and gunfire as the violent attacks started to spread, hamas's military wing announced in a ten—minute recorded message published online the start of what it called operation al—aqsa flood. it urged palestinians to attack israeli communities with whatever weapons they had. chanting in nahal oz, the idan family took shelter inside their safe room, but it didn't protect them from what was to be a horrifying ordeal.

at the nova music festival, hamas attackers had begun to shoot and kill. more than 260 partygoers were murdered at the site. i spoke to gilad, unplanned, just two days later, on 9th october. we saw him in the street with a white bandage around his head and asked if he'd been attacked. the bullet went through here to out here. so it went... it went in...? yeah, you can see it went in and out. yeah. we got into a collision course with eight terrorists. they wore half military

uniform, israeli uniform. they wore shirts, israeli military shirts, and they were ridden on motorcycles, and guns. we hit two of them with our car, and they started chasing us. and they shot a bullet on the side. and from the shrapnel of that bullet it hit my head in the back. i saw bleeding. i don't know what was the situation there, if i had a bullet in my skull or not, i didn't know anything. ijust only knew i need to hold my head stuck here as i can so i won't bleed out. and i also had to stay awake because i couldn't go to sleep. i knew that if i was going to sleep, i think it would be over. i didn't know what's going on. later on we got into a kibbutz called be�*eri. um...at first we honked our horn because we thought maybe there was a security guard that can give us information or anything like that. and firstly, we knew that there was nothing there. we found a shower bathroom unit.

we broke in. we had to break the glass and get inside and hide. and because all the floor was with the glass, we had to stay super quiet because we knew that every minute it could make you know where we were. by now, israelis were waking to live news reports beginning to detail the destruction. a lot still wasn't known. those who had loved ones in the south began frantically searching for information. michael levy knew his brother or and or�*s wife inav were at the nova festival. i woke up at... the same morning at 6:31; am. i still remember the exact time. i woke up to the noise of sirens and i immediately... ..turned on the tv to try

and understand what's going on. and i saw its all over the place. i called my mother, because i saw there are sirens where they live as well and so i wanted to see, to check on them. she said that they are ok but that or and einav went to the nova festival and that they all texted her that they are heading back. they got there at 6:20am, about ten minutes before hell started. er...few minutes after, he texted her again saying that they are hiding in a bomb shelter next to the road. we found their car... day after, we saw it on one of the newspapers. one of the doors was still open. so they ran from the car into the bomb shelter to hide.

from inside, or called my mother, terrified. my mother heard it in his voice and asked him, "or, what's going on? "is everything ok?" and the only thing he told her was, "mom, you don't want to know "what's going on here." and that was the last thing we heard from them. that was 7:39am. about ten minutes after, and i know this now because i had to watch all the videos, a group of terrorists arrived to this bomb shelter and started throwing grenades into it and shooting into it, murdering einav and 17 other people, and kidnapping or along with three others. our kibbutz is beautiful. the people are amazing.

what happened to it? we had... i had no idea that it happened elsewhere. i had no idea about the... about kfar aza, or re'im, and the party. and be'eri. i have friends in all of those places. i have friends who have been murdered.se family members are kidnapped. hours after the attacks were launched, the israel defence forces finally started to regain some control. it was a long and bloody process. in nahal oz, gali idan and her family were trying to survive inside their safe room. danger was getting closer. gunfire

hamas gunmen held them captive metres away from maayan�*s body. then the attackers started to livestream the family's ordeal on gali's own facebook account. eventually, tsachi is dragged away from his wife and children and taken as a hostage to gaza. close by, in kibbutz be'eri, gilad was still hiding, hours after fleeing from the nova festival.

close by, in kibbutz be'eri, gilad was still hiding, hours after fleeing from the nova festival. it was a very stressful situation. the police also came with a dead body from the party and we had to evacuate it also. he was half dead, half alive. but when we got to the extraction point, he was already deceased. and then after that they took me to the hospital with a different ambulance. and all the way you can see all the carnage, all the death, all the smoke. 18 hours after we went in, idf army got us out. after fearing they would be murdered, naomi, her husband and children finally emerged from their safe room in nahal oz. the way they got us out was with a neighbour who came to our window yelling our name, telling us that it's him and telling us that he's

here with the army outside, you can get out, and open the door for us. we had exactly two, three minutes to pack whatever we could think of at that moment. we remembered to bring my id, but we didn't remember to bring shoes for our kids. um... we tried to make a list in our head of things that we could need, but half of it we forgot. but i said, "don't worry about it. "it's fine. "we'll be fine. "but we're getting out." the army came and got us out. i saw fires everywhere. it was one o'clock in the morning. it was very... it was a scene from a movie. my car and my husband's car and our neighbour's two cars were burnt all the way down to the sheer... only the frame was left. i saw fires everywhere. it was a full—on war zone.

michael was trying to piece together information about the fate of his brother or and sister—in—law einav. he learned that she was killed and he had been kidnapped. i started obsessively calling all the hospitals and asking if they saw someone who matches the description. and there were also a lot of lists of people that were survived, that survived the attack on the nova festival, so i started gathering those and looking for them. and i started calling friends, calling family that might have heard something. but unfortunately, i couldn't, i couldn't find them. and then i started to work more methodically. with the help of good friends, we started to get any piece of information about this bomb shelter. at first we wanted to understand where it was because

there are quite a few. and so i got a video of them inside, and then i saw a painting on the wall, of the outside wall of the bomb shelter. and we contacted the person who painted it to make sure there is only one painting like this in the same area. and then i spoke to survivors from this shelter, and it took us a few days to... ..pick up all the pieces and understand what happened. at the time, we didn't know anything for sure. then after four days, they told us about einav. and after eight days,

they told us about or was kidnapped. the israeli security cabinet declared that a state of war had officially begun on the morning of the 7th. the scale of what had happened was becoming clear. buses took us to a nearby army base about 20 minutes away. i have to say that when they took us, it was almost 2:30 at night, so very dark. and i saw tanks and police blockades. barricades. i saw fires. i saw dead bodies. when we got past all of those

barricades and into the army base and i was finally able to see my neighbours and my friends, i saw one neighbour who was just there crying and she said, "they shot my daughter. "my daughter's dead." she's 18. she was 18. they shot her in the head and they kidnapped her father. and everyone there in that army base at three o'clock in the morning is reunited and looking around and saying, "who's here? "what happened? " she's talking about gali, and the story you heard her describe is about maayan�*s murder and tsachi's kidnapping. gali was and still is hugely traumatised by what she's been through. when we sat and talked, she told me gently that she was having that conversation, recalling the worst moments of her

life in stark detail for tsachi, because she wanted to do anything that might free him. naomi knew how lucky she was that her family had escaped still complete. both of my sons were throwing up. i said, "great, throw up." they were shaking uncontrollably. ijust could hold them and say, "we're safe, "we're safe, we're safe." it took me days to understand what happened because even when the power came back on, i didn't open the news, because i had to stay in a very small space in my head... ..to survive.

to be a good mom. gilad was also able to tell his loved ones that he'd survived. i couldn't call him for a good couple of hours because if i would have called him, i would probably be dead. and my dad, he also, he lives in africa, in kenya. can't imagine what has been going through his mind. sirens what happened after our interview shows you how tense things still were two days on, on 9th october. explosions there's a huge barrage going on overhead just at the moment. we have taken cover. this is... it's actually a memorial building. you can see we're all here in the... there's nick. he's got a camera. indistinct comment yeah, we're going to... we're going to move. get down, get down.

maayan�*s family held her funeral without her father tsachi. gali asked us to be there and to share the story of their pain. i left everything behind on october 7th. myjob, my day—to—day routine, even my time with my family. and i started to work on this. i have one mission in life now, and it's... and it's to bring or and the rest

of the hostages back. michael is still doing everything he can to get his brother released. on 24th november, some hostages were freed every day for a week. but michael's brother was never going to be among them because the agreement was that the israelis released would only be women and children. i mean, as a father, seeing children and mothers and grandmothers being released is amazing. as you said, some of those families i know personally and they became my family. i was happy with them when their loved ones were released and i was sad for them when they weren't released. but yes, you can't deny that the feeling is incomplete and the fact that...

..or and the rest of the hostages are still there isn't easy for us. and i'll do everything in my power to get him back. whatever it takes. him and the rest of the hostages.

hello, it has been quite a quiet start to a weekend, i'm sure that is welcome news, but it was a murky start for some and a bit disappointing probably if you are out walking the dog. that mist has lifted.

we have got some sunny spells coming through and look at this, we have some saturated ground with localised flooding. we have got some showers around today and low pressure still dominates the weather story. it is centred down towards the south—west and with this weather find just bumping into the far north of scotland, in that cold air, some of the showers have been wintry first thing this morning but it will mainly be rain as we go into the afternoon, just snow with any elevation. this has been the story so far, outbreaks of rain in scotland, showers developing across south—west england, closest to the area of low pressure. so, as we go through the rest of the afternoon, those showers are likely to continue to be on and off throughout the afternoon. we have got a bit of nuisance rain starting to develop up through the kent coast into the east midlands as well. sunny spells elsewhere, a little bit quieter and not as cold, five to 11 degrees. as we go through the night, that rain will continue to be a feature to the east of the pennines, running up through north sea coasts into eastern scotland

by the end of the night. some clearer skies out to the west, here we will see low single figures. but generally those temperatures are between eight and three degrees depending on the cloud cover. as we move into sunday, low pressure continues to be white a feature with the story. we have still got this weather front to ease away first thing on sunday morning, behind it some sunny spells developing and then a few scattered showers out to the west. so it is not a write off by any means. it will be a case of sunny spells and scattered showers, you mightjust have to dodge those showers from time to time. the low pressure systems will continue to feed in a from the will continue to feed in from the atlantic, over the next few days, looking ahead, it is likely will looking ahead, it is likely we'll continue to see the wind direction coming from a south—westerly so our milder but unfortunately, there are no signs of any dryer significant whether to come.

temperatures into the mid—teens in the south.

live from london, this is bbc news. as the united nations warns of looming famine in gaza, people in isolated northern areas tell the bbc of their desperate situation. when it comes to the flour, people are actually using animal feed.

however, even the animal feed is starting to get scarce in the market and people are not finding it. a six—year—old girl who begged for help after being trapped by israeli fire in gaza is found dead — along with two paramedics who tried to rescue her. pakistan's army chief calls for unity after the leaders of two rival parties both claim victory in the election. hello, i'm frankie mccamley. we begin this hour in gaza, where the death toll has now passed 28,000 — according to the hamas—run health ministry — and concern is growing over the shortage of food. the united nations is warning of looming famine, with half of gaza's population now in a food emergency. people living in isolated northern areas have told the bbc that

children are going without food for days, and they're