Middle East crisis live: four children among dead after Israeli strike near Beirut hospital, ministry says | Israel-Gaza war

The Gaza civil defence agency said last week that at least 400 people have been killed in the ongoing Israeli assault in northern Gaza that began on October 6.

The Israeli military says it is targeting Hamas militants who have regrouped in the area, Agence France-Presse reports.

Though not a formal Israeli policy, analysts have told AFP that proposals for a full siege of northern Gaza to close in on militants were gaining traction.

And some members of the Israeli government have openly called for the resettlement of the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in 1967 and maintained troops and settlements there until 2005.

Palestinians evacuating on the orders of the Israeli military told AFP they were made to wait for hours at checkpoints and some were asked if they were connected to Hamas.

Below is an agency image selected by the Guardian to show aspects of the growing death toll in this part of Gaza this week, while being very much less bloody and graphic than many images available.

• At least 18 people were killed, including four children, and 60 were wounded in an Israeli strike on Monday near Beirut’s main government hospital, the health ministry said on Tuesday. Israeli jets hit a Hezbollah target close to the Rafik Hariri university hospital in Beirut but did not target the hospital and it was not affected by the strike, the Israeli military said on Tuesday.

• Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meeting with US secretary of state Antony Blinken, said there was a need for a security and political change in Lebanon that would allow displaced Israelis to return safely to their homes. Netanyahu met with Blinken for two-and-a-half hours on Tuesday and the meeting was friendly and productive, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office, Reuters reported.

• At least 63 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon over the last day, bringing the total death toll to 2,530, the Lebanese government said on Tuesday. It also said that more than 11,800 people had been wounded by Israeli strikes on Lebanon since October 2023.

• Gaza’s economy has been left in “utter ruin” by the year-long war between Israel and Hamas, and it would take 350 years to return to its pre-conflict levels, the United Nations has warned. In a report on the economic costs of the war prepared by its trade and development wing (Unctad), the UN said the fighting since Hamas killed more than 1,000 Israelis on 7 October last year had devastated the remnants of Gaza’s economy and infrastructure.

• Lebanon will need $250m a month to help more than a million people displaced by Israeli attacks, its minister in charge of responding to the crisis said on Tuesday, ahead of a conference on Thursday in Paris to rally support for Lebanon. Nasser Yassin told Reuters the government response, helped by local initiatives and international aid, only covered 20% of the needs of 1.3 million people uprooted from their homes and sheltering in public buildings or with relatives.

• The FBI is investigating the leak of a pair of highly classified intelligence documents describing Israel’s preparations for a retaliatory strike on Iran, the Washington Post reports. “The FBI is investigating the alleged leak of classified documents and working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community,” the FBI said in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we have no further comment.”

• Israel is unlikely to make a “significant move” against Tehran but could instead mount a symbolic limited attack, Revolutionary Guards cultural and social commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said on Tuesday, according to the Iranian Student News Network. Israel is widely thought to be planning retaliation for a missile barrage launched by Iran on 1 October.

• France’s government on Tuesday defended its decision to bar Israeli companies supplying the wars in the Middle East from exhibiting at an upcoming trade fair outside Paris. Organisers of the naval defence exhibition, called Euronaval, posted on the event’s website that Israeli firms can take part in the show and “may have an exhibition stand, provided that their products are not used in military operations in Gaza and Lebanon.”

• British prime minister Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner on Tuesday for the first time met a network of British Palestinians to hear calls for an emergency child evacuation scheme, a Palestinian resettlement scheme and tougher measures to break Israel’s blockade on aid. Starmer, accused by some Palestinians of being instinctively too close to Israel, was asked to consider setting up a pilot evacuation scheme for Palestinian children initially starting with 15 children unable to access any healthcare in Gaza.

• Anneliese Dodds, the British Foreign Office minister, said no UK arms exports are now going to the Israel Defense Forces as she sought to clarify the significance of the UK government decision in September to suspend only 30 of the 300 arms exports licences to Israel. Speaking in the Commons, she also described the amount of aid reaching Gaza in October as unacceptable, and likely to be the lowest amount for a single month since the conflict began. But she did not set out any specific measures apart from diplomatic pressure to ensure a change.

• The Lebanese Red Cross said three paramedics have been injured in an airstrike on south Lebanon while on a rescue mission coordinated with UN peacekeepers. Four ambulance teams were dispatched to the southern city of Nabatieh in coordination with Unifil after a strike there, the Lebanese Red Cross said, adding that “the site was bombed again and three … volunteers were injured and are being transported to hospital”.

• Israel’s army on Tuesday called on residents of a southern Beirut suburb to evacuate ahead of operations targeting what it claims to be Hezbollah’s facilities in the area. “For your safety and the safety of your family, you must evacuate these buildings and the surrounding ones immediately and move at least 500 meters (yards) away,” the army’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on X alongside a map showing two specific buildings to be targeted.

• A Hezbollah spokesperson has acknowledged that some of the militant group’s fighters were captured by the Israeli army without giving numbers, adding that Israel “bears responsibility” for their lives. “On the issue of captives currently held by the enemy, I say: I know that the enemy is not committed to the ethics of war and international conventions but it bears the responsibility of preserving the lives of the captives,” spokesperson Mohammed Afif told reporters, calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross to ascertain their safety.

• Israeli jets hit a Hezbollah target close to the Rafik Hariri university hospital in Beirut late on Monday but did not target the hospital and it was not affected by the strike, the Israeli military said on Tuesday. During a press conference on Tuesday, the director of the hospital, Jihad Saadeh, said Beirut’s main government medical facility had sustained damage due to an Israeli attack nearby.

Gaza’s economy has been left in “utter ruin” by the year-long war between Israel and Hamas, and it would take 350 years to return to its pre-conflict levels, the United Nations has warned.

In a report on the economic costs of the war prepared by its trade and development wing (Unctad), the UN said the fighting since Hamas killed more than 1,000 Israelis on 7 October last year had devastated the remnants of Gaza’s economy and infrastructure.

The report, presented to last month’s UN general assembly, said economic activity across Gaza – which had been weak before the war – had ground to a halt, apart from minimum humanitarian health and food services provided under conditions of severe water, fuel and electricity shortages and significant access constraints.

Construction output was down by 96%, agriculture output by 93%, manufacturing by 92% and services sector output by 76%. Meanwhile, unemployment reached 81.7% in the first quarter of 2024, a rate the UN said was likely to worsen or persist for as long as the military operation continued.

Patrick Wintour

British prime minister Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner on Tuesday for the first time met a network of British Palestinians to hear calls for an emergency child evacuation scheme, a Palestinian resettlement scheme and tougher measures to break Israel’s blockade on aid.

Starmer, accused by some Palestinians of being instinctively too close to Israel, was asked to consider setting up a pilot evacuation scheme for Palestinian children initially starting with 15 children unable to access any healthcare in Gaza.

There have been repeated complaints that the Home Office refuses to supply temporary visas to children needed to be admitted to the UK for private medical treatment. Most of the children would be based in Egypt.

The families also urged Starmer to set up a Family Reunification Scheme for Palestinian refugees that includes legal pathways for families separated from loved ones in Gaza. The scheme would be modelled on the scheme operating for Ukraine, and no figure has been proposed for how many that could be allowed to come

On aid restrictions ministers have already acknowledged that Israel is restricting aid in an unacceptable way especially this month, but have not yet said ministers believe Israel is implementing what is in effect a campaign to starve Palestinians out of Northern Gaza as part of a so-called General’s plan that has been endorsed by the extreme right in Israel.

The families called for a British personnel presence at border crossings to ensure agile inspection processes and monitor and ensure that aid flows unrestricted into Gaza. Britain has repeatedly been denied a diplomatic presence on the aid cross points, but has supplied £1m in emergency aid for medical evacuees in Egypt.

Israel insists aid has increased since a US warning more than a week ago that arms supplies would be blocked unless 300 aid trucks entered Gaza a day.

At least 18 people were killed, including four children, and 60 were wounded in an Israeli strike on Monday near Beirut’s main government hospital, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

Israeli jets hit a Hezbollah target close to the Rafik Hariri university hospital in Beirut but did not target the hospital and it was not affected by the strike, the Israeli military said on Tuesday.

However, the director of the hospital said that due to the Israeli attack, nearby debris, probably from heavy ammunition, had caused damage to the medical facility, Reuters reported.

While there were no casualties among the staff, efforts to rescue people in front of the hospital were ongoing, the director, Jihad Saadeh, added.