Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.

Coming to you live from London, I'm James Kamara Sami.

Coming up a bit later on in the programme, Britain's Prime Minister,

Sakeir Starma has suffered a major setback after his deputy Prime Minister Angela Rainer has resigned.

Are we going to get the latest on that in about 15 minutes time? First, though,

we're going to get the latest on the developments in Gaza, where Israel says it has now captured

40% of Gaza City, the largest urban centre in the territory, and it's announced its intention

to strike multi-story buildings there, which it says Hamas has converted into military infrastructure.

It all comes as Israelis have been marking 700 days since the October the 7th attacks,

which of course resulted in more than 1,000 people being killed in around 250 being taken hostage.

It's thought that around 20 of those hostages are still alive in Gaza.

And in the past few hours, Hamas has released videos showing two of them. Let's get the latest

from our correspondent, our Middle East Bureau editor. In fact, Joe Floto, who joins us now from Jerusalem.

Joe, what is the latest that you're hearing on the military operation in Gaza City?

So as you alluded to there, the Ministry of Defence here has said that the Army will now start

targeting high-rise buildings in and around Gaza City.

Gaza is a relatively flat area of land and the taller buildings give some kind of military advantage,

the army say, to Hamas. So what they're doing is systematically destroying those buildings.

And this morning, we've had a very spectacular detonation of one of the few remaining high rises

left in Gaza City, the Mushdah Tower in the Rimal area of the city.

That was a sort of upmarket part of town, incidentally, where the BBC used to have its offices in that area.

And that tower block was destroyed thoroughly this morning.

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