Closing summary
Israel issued new evacuation orders for Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday evening, forcing more families to flee. The new orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital, in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
At least 40,435 Palestinian people have been killed and 93,534 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement.
Witnesses and Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondents reported airstrikes and shelling in Gaza overnight. Medics said an airstrike on a Gaza City house killed at least five people, with two rescuers telling AFP more victims may be buried in the ruins in Al-Rimal neighbourhood.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, told his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani, that Iran’s response to the July assassination of the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran – which it blames on Israel - would be “definite and calculated”.
We are closing this blog now, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Middle East coverage here.
Updated
Jordan’s flag carrier Royal Jordanian is set to resume flights to the Lebanese capital Beirut starting on Tuesday morning, Jordan’s state news agency reported.
Jordan’s carrier briefly suspended flights to Beirut on Sunday after tensions between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-aligned Hezbollah movement escalated earlier in the day.
Multiple airlines announced suspensions of flights to Israel on Sunday. British Airways, for example, said it would cancel all flights to and from Israel until Wednesday.
A far-right Israeli minister has sparked fresh outrage by saying he would build a synagogue at Jerusalem’s flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque compound if he could.
Agence France-Presse reports:
National security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has repeatedly ignored the government’s long-standing ban on Jews praying at the site, told Army Radio that if it were possible he would build a synagogue at the al-Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The al-Aqsa compound is Islam’s third holiest site and a symbol of Palestinian national identity, but it is also Judaism’s holiest place, revered as the site of the second temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
“If I could do anything I wanted, I would put an Israeli flag on the site,” Ben Gvir said in the interview.
Asked several times by the journalist if he would build a synagogue at the site if it were up to him, Ben Gvir finally replied: “Yes.”
Under the status quo maintained by Israeli authorities, Jews and other non-Muslims are allowed to visit the compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem during specified hours, but they are not permitted to pray there or display religious symbols.
In recent years, the restrictions at the compound have been increasingly flouted by hardline religious nationalists like Ben Gvir, prompting sometimes violent reactions from Palestinians.
The Al-aqsa mosque compound is administered by Jordan, but access to the site itself is controlled by Israeli security forces. Ben Gvir told Army Radio that Jews should be allowed to pray in the compound.
“Arabs can pray wherever they want, so Jews should be able to pray wherever they want,” he said, claiming that the “current policy allows Jews to pray at this site”.
Several Israeli officials condemned Ben Gvir after his latest comments, and a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said “there is no change” to the current policy…
Palestinian presidency spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh also condemned Ben Gvir, warning that “Al-Aqsa and the holy sites are a red line that we will not allow to be touched at all”.
Hamas, with whom Israel is locked in a bitter war in the Gaza Strip, said the minister’s comments were “dangerous” and called on Arab and Islamic countries “to take responsibility for protecting the holy sites”.
Updated
Residents of Lebanese cities felt only partial relief on Monday that one of the biggest exchanges of fire between armed group Hezbollah and the Israeli military the previous day was over.
Early on Sunday, Hezbollah launched rockets and drones at Israel to avenge a commander killed in an Israeli strike last month. Israeli jets struck dozens of targets in south Lebanon, in what residents there said felt like the “apocalypse”.
“People are relieved, or are relieved a bit, because they took a breather after this attack,” Mohamed Ftouni, a Lebanese shop owner in the southern port city of Tyre, told Reuters.
“We hope that something good will happen, to have some commercial activity and for the situation to improve. Our only hope is that there will be a ceasefire so that we can be done (with war) in Gaza and here, for people to relax more.”
Ibrahim Hussein, another shopkeeper in Tyre, said Lebanon was now back to “the same situation as before”.
Talal Sidani, the owner of an artisanal shop in the capital, Beirut, said he would rather get a war over with than be constantly nervous about when it could start.
“War? Let there be war. We want to work. There’s no work, here we are sitting. Especially us, we have touristic stores, and we rely on tourism - if there is no tourism, bye bye my dears,” he explained.
Both Hezbollah and Israel have both indicated they do not want a full-scale war, though tensions remain extremely high.
Updated
We mentioned in an earlier post that there have been reports that Egypt has said it will not accept the continued presence of Israeli forces along its border with the Gaza Strip. We now have some more detail on this.
Cairo, a key mediator in efforts to secure a ceasefire in the conflict, “reiterated to all parties that it will not accept any Israeli presence” along the strategic Philadelphi Corridor, state-linked Al-Qahera News said, citing a source.
The current sticking point in the negotiations is the insistence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that any peace agreement must allow an Israeli presence along the Philadelphi corridor, and on a road bisecting the Gaza Strip, the Netzarim corridor.
Hamas has rejected any such presence, saying it contravenes a three-stage peace plan announced by Joe Biden at the end of May, and later endorsed by the UN security council, which ultimately envisages a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
“Egypt is managing the mediation” between Israel and Hamas “in accordance with its national security”, the source told Al-Qahera News, which is linked to Egypt’s state intelligence service.
The White House insists that the peace plan outlined by Biden has been accepted by Israel, but Netanyahu has repeatedly called its terms into question, vowing his government would continue the war until Hamas is completely destroyed.
Key event
The UN’s Palestine relief agency, Unrwa, has described life for Palestinians amid Israel’s war in Gaza as a “never-ending tragedy”.
“This is a complete stripping of humanity,” Unrwa wrote in a post on X a day after the Israeli army ordered Palestinians to evacuate an area east of Deir el-Balah which was previously classified as a “humanitarian area”.
“Families across the Gaza Strip continue to be forced to flee, forced to leave their homes and belongings behind. All they can now do is try to stay alive,” Unrwa added as it reiterated its call for an immediate ceasefire.
This is a complete stripping of humanity. A never-ending tragedy.
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) August 26, 2024
Families across the #GazaStrip continue to be forced to flee, forced to leave their homes and belongings behind. All they can now do is try to stay alive.
People have lost absolutely everything. #CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/qL22oawYPM
The UN estimates the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been internally displaced since last October, with many left with nowhere safe to escape Israeli bombardments. There are severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine across the devastated enclave.
Updated
Patients forced to flee al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza after Israeli evacuation order
We reported in an earlier post that one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals – the al-Aqsa martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah – has been emptying out in recent days as Israel has ordered the evacuation of nearby areas.
The military has not ordered the evacuation of the hospital, located in central Gaza, but patients and people sheltering there fear that it may be engulfed in fighting or become the target of an Israeli raid.
Gaza’s health ministry has called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who had remained to care for them, to be protected.
Associated Press reporters saw people fleeing the hospital and surrounding areas on Monday, many of them on foot. Some could be seen pushing patients on stretchers or carrying sick children, while others held bags of clothes, mattresses and blankets. Four schools in the area are also being evacuated.
“Where will we get medicine?” Adliyeh al-Najjar told the Associated Press. “Where will patients like me go?”
Fatimah al-Attar fought back tears as she left the hospital compound heading in the direction of the tent camps. “Our fate is to die,” she said. “There is no place for us to go. There is no safe place.”
The Israeli military said it was operating against Hamas in Deir al-Balah and working to dismantle its remaining infrastructure there. Medical staff have denied allegations there are militant fighters hiding in hospitals.
Only 16 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially functioning, according to the World Health Organization.
Updated
Egypt has reiterated that it has not accepted an Israeli presence in the Rafah border crossing or Philadelphi corridor, according to a source quoted on state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV and reported by Reuters.
A key sticking points in Gaza ceasefire talks mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar has been Israel’s insistence on a presence in the so-called Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow 14.5-km-long (9-mile-long) stretch of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
World Food programme operations 'severely hampered by intensifying conflict'
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders, as desperate Palestinians are squeezed into an “ever-shrinking space”.
In a press release, the WFP said:
WFP’s operations are severely hampered by intensifying conflict, the limited number of border crossings and damaged roads. In the last two months, amid continuing catastrophic hunger, WFP has had to reduce the contents of food parcels in Gaza as inflows of aid dipped and supplies dwindled.
With two, or occasionally three, border crossings open, roughly half of the required food assistance entered Gaza in July. August is set to end with a similar result.
WFP is also warning about the state of the war-scarred roads it uses to transport food assistance around Gaza. The shell craters and debris make driving slow and challenging for truck drivers even in dry weather. In two months, when rain and flooding is expected, most roads will become unusable.
🚨News alert 🚨
— WFP Media (@WFP_Media) August 26, 2024
WFP’s operations in #Gaza are severely hampered by intensifying conflict, limited number of border crossings and damaged roads.
Read on 👇🏽https://t.co/8GBiqx9GDa
The WFP Palestine country director, Antoine Renard, said the agency won’t be able to bring food to Palestinians in Gaza unless “urgent repairs” are done on these roads, which are critical for the safe transportation of food, water, medicine and hygiene equipment.
Israel imposed a complete siege on the territory at the start of the war and has only gradually eased it under pressure from Washington. The war has destroyed most of Gaza’s capacity to produce its own food and damaged much of its infrastructure.
In recent days, Israel has issued several evacuation orders across Gaza, the most since the beginning of the war, which broke out in October, prompting an outcry from the UN and relief officials over the reduction of humanitarian zones and the absence of safe areas (see post at 09.59 for more on the latest evacuation orders).
An Israeli strike on a tent on the coast in Gaza City killed six Palestinians and injured several other people, medics have told Reuters.
Israeli forces have arrested at least 15 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank during raids since last night.
Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reports that the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said the detentions took place in the areas of Nablus, Qalqilya, Hebron, Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
The occupied West Bank, which Palestinians want as the core of a future independent state along with Gaza, has seen a surge in violence since the start of the war last year, and a major crackdown by Israeli security forces, which have made thousands of arrests.
Updated
Death toll in Gaza reaches 40,435, says health ministry
At least 40,435 Palestinian people have been killed and 93,534 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday.
The ministry has said thousands of other dead people are most likely lost in the rubble of the enclave.
The ministry amended the number of Palestinians it reported as having been killed in the enclave in the last 24 hours to 30. Earlier, it said the toll was 33. The number of people injured over the last 24 hour reporting period remained at 66.
Updated
As we mentioned in the opening summary, Israeli evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital, the main medical facility in Deir Al-Balah, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of bombardments.
The hospital is close to the area covered by the evacuation notice.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said yesterday that an explosion approximately 250 meters (820ft) away from the MSF-supported al-Aqsa hospital triggered panic.
“As a result, MSF is considering whether to suspend wound care for the time being, while trying to maintain life-saving treatment.”
From around 650 patients, only 100 remain in the hospital, with seven in intensive care unit, it said, citing Gaza’s health ministry.
Witnesses report deadly airstrikes and shelling in Gaza overnight
Witnesses and Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondents have reported airstrikes and shelling in Gaza overnight.
Medics said an airstrike on a Gaza City house killed at least five people, with two rescuers telling AFP more victims may be buried in the ruins in Al-Rimal neighbourhood.
“There are still martyrs and body parts under the rubble, most of them women, men and elderly people who were sleeping” when the building was hit, ambulance driver Hussein Muhaysen said.
More than 40,000 Palestinian people have been killed in the war, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
Updated
The brother of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, has called for those responsible for his sister’s death to be prosecuted and punished.
Frankcom, a 43-year-old from Melbourne who was working in Gaza with World Central Kitchen, was one of seven people killed in April when a convoy of cars was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
Israel’s defence force conducted an investigation into the incident, which resulted in two officers being dismissed and three others being reprimanded.
Mal Frankcom told the ABC he did not feel this was an adequate response.
“[I’d like] to see them go to court and to be tried and convicted and punished,” he said.
You can read the full story by Kate Lyons, a reporter for Guardian Australia, here:
Israel has lost its deterrent power as it was unable to anticipate the time and place of Hezbollah’s “limited and managed attack”, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, wrote in a post on X.
He wrote:
The myth of the invincibility of the Israeli army has long become an empty slogan. The Israeli terrorist army has lost its effective offensive and deterrent power and now has to defend itself against strategic strikes.
Kanaani added that Israel “now has to defend itself within its occupied territories” and that “strategic balances have undergone fundamental changes” to the detriment of Israel.
The Israel Defense Forces used 100 jet fighters that hit more than 40 target sites inside Lebanon in sorties over a period of seven hours on Sunday. Hezbollah, the Iran backed Lebanese militant group, launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel.
The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, downplayed the impact of Israeli airstrikes and portrayed Hezbollah’s aerial attack, intended to avenge the killing of a senior commander last month, as a success.
Nasrallah said that Hezbollah had used its Katyusha rockets (320 of them according to its official statements) to distract Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system from a mass drone attacks. He added that all the drones involved had been successfully launched and had entered Israeli airspace, but did not say how many, if any, had reached their intended target. You can read more on this story here.
With three deaths confirmed in Lebanon and one in Israel after Sunday’s exchanges, both sides indicated they were happy to avoid further escalation for now, but warned that there could be more strikes to come.
Updated
Israeli military strikes killed at least seven Palestinians on Monday, medics said. Two people were killed in Deir Al-Balah, two people at a school in the Al-Nuseirat camp and three people in the southern city of Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
Israel issued new evacuation orders for Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday evening, forcing more families to flee. Israel says Hamas fighters are operating in the area. The Deir Al-Balah municipality said Israeli evacuation orders have displaced about 250,000 people.
Sawsan Abu Afesh said she and her children had now been displaced 11 times.
She told Reuters:
I left half of my children behind me near my furniture and I am now with my little ones and my daughter, only God can help us...
I have no money for transportation I will go to area 17 where my family is staying on my foot. I took my kids and three are left behind. No idea where.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced multiple times since the start of the war. Even in areas designated safe zones, there have been regular reports of Palestinian people being killed by Israeli strikes.
Aid agencies say the remaining humanitarian zones, which comprise a small percentage of the strip’s total area, are already too full to accommodate new arrivals.
Updated
The waters on parts of Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline have started turning brown, according to satellite images analysed by BBC Arabic which show a large discharge of sewage spill off the coast of of the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.
“It is because of the increase in the number of displaced people and many are connecting their own pipes to the rainwater drainage system,” Abu Yazan Ismael Sarsour, head of the Deir al-Balah emergency committee, told BBC Arabic.
Frequent Israeli airstrikes have resulted in the collapse of Gaza’s waste water management infrastructure, the UN has said, with aid agencies warning that flows of untreated sewage pose a serious threat to health.
Updated
We mentioned in the opening summary that about 60 media and rights organisations have urged the EU to suspend a co-operation accord with Israel and impose sanctions, accusing it of “massacring journalists” in Gaza.
In a statement, the groups said:
In response to the unprecedented number of journalists killed and other repeated press freedom violations by the Israeli authorities since the start of the war with Hamas, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and 59 other organisations are calling on the European Union to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel and to adopt targeted sanctions against those responsible.
More than 130 Palestinian journalists and media professionals have been killed by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza since 7 October. At least 30 of them were killed in the course of their work, three Lebanese journalists and an Israeli journalist have also been (killed) during the same period.
The targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, whether committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime.
EU’s association agreements with non-member countries are treaties that govern bilateral relations, including trade.
The agreement’s Article 2 stipulates “respect for human rights and democratic principles”, Julie Majerczak, the head of RSF’s Brussels office, said. She said “the Israeli government is clearly trampling on this article”.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, an American press freedom charity, describes the war as the deadliest period for media workers since it began collating its figures three decades ago. Foreign media are banned by Israel and Egypt from entering Gaza to cover the war. Palestinian reporters are the only journalists reporting from the ground.
Updated
The Israel Defense Forces have reportedly given residents of the southern Golan Heights the all-clear after drone alert sirens rang out in communities near the Sea of Galilee. It is not entirely clear why the drone alert sirens were activated.
“The incident has ended,” it said in a short statement, according to the Times of Israel.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and later annexed it, saying it needed the strategic plateau for its security.
The US is the only country to recognise the annexation, while the rest of the international community considers the area to be occupied Syrian territory.
Most Hezbollah attacks since 8 October 2023 have hit northern Israel, with fewer strikes on the Golan Heights.
Updated
Iran's response to the killing of Hamas chief in Tehran will be 'definite and calculated', foreign minister says
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, has spoken with his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. He was reported to have told Tajani that Iran’s response to the killing of the Hamas chief in Tehran would be “definite and calculated”.
Iran blames Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on 31 July, which Araqchi was quoted by Iran’s state media as saying was “an unforgivable violation of Iran’s security and sovereignty”.
The Israeli government officially declined to comment on Haniyeh’s death, but the strike was widely acknowledged as an Israeli operation both inside the country and beyond.
“Iran does not seek to increase tensions. However it is not afraid of it,” Araqchi told his Italian counterpart on the phone. He said that Iran’s response would be “definite, calculated and accurate”, according to the statement.
Israel vowed to kill all Hamas leaders after the 7 October attacks, and its intelligence services have a history of carrying out covert killings inside Iran, mostly targeting scientists working on the country’s nuclear programme.
Updated
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis.
Ceasefire talks in Cairo have ended with no agreement, several sources have told media, though lower level negotiations were set to continue and the US said it was still “feverishly” pursuing a deal.
The news came hours after Israel and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah launched their heaviest exchange of fire since the war began, with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing that the Israeli air raids were “not the end of the story”.
Months of on-off talks have failed to produce an agreement to end Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza or free the remaining hostages seized by Hamas in the militant group’s 7 October attack on Israel which triggered the war.
Key sticking points in ongoing talks mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar include an Israeli presence in the so-called Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow 14.5-km-long (9-mile-long) stretch of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
Mediators put forward a number of alternatives to the presence of Israeli forces on the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor which cuts across the middle of the Gaza Strip, but none were accepted by the parties, Egyptian sources told Reuters.
Speaking at a news conference in Halifax, Canada, US national security advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington was still “feverishly” working in Cairo with Egyptian and Qatari mediators as well as the Israelis to get a ceasefire and a hostage deal.
In other developments:
In central Gaza meanwhile the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said an Israeli order to evacuate the area around al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah had caused chaos and called the situation “unacceptable”. “MSF is considering whether to suspend wound care for the time being, while trying to maintain life-saving treatment. From around 650 patients, only 100 remain in the hospital, with 7 in intensive care unit according to the Ministry of Health,” it said on X.
About 60 media and rights organisations on Monday urged the European Union to suspend a co-operation accord with Israel and impose sanctions, accusing it of “massacring journalists” in Gaza.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said his country will respond to the assassination of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. “Iran’s reaction to Israeli terrorist attack in Tehran is definitive, and will be measured & well calculated,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X. “We do not fear escalation, yet do not seek it – unlike Israel.”
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered two aircraft carrier strike groups to remain in the Middle East, Reuters reports, citing the Pentagon.
Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a public address after Sunday’s exchange of fire, saying that the group’s response to the Israeli assassination of a senior commander in Beirut had been delayed for several reasons including mass Israeli and US military mobilisation. He added: “We will assess the impact of today’s operation. If results are not seen to be enough, we will respond another time.”
Jordan has warned that heightened escalation between Israel and Hezbollah could lead to a “regional war”, echoing comments made by Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, earlier. Foreign ministry spokesperson Sufain Qudah said that Israel’s relentless “aggression” in Gaza and the failure to reach a ceasefire was exposing the region to the dangers of an expansion of the conflict, Jordanian state media reported.
The UN’s Palestine relief agency, Unrwa, has said it will launch a polio vaccination campaign with the World Health Organization, Unicef, and other partners for more than 600,000 children under 10 years old, over the coming days. The UN is appealing to Israel and Hamas for a humanitarian ceasefire to allow humanitarian workers to carry out the immunisation campaign.
Europe’s most senior diplomat will call for sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers, as the EU battles to rescue its credibility on the Middle East. At a meeting of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers on Thursday, Josep Borrell will make the case for sanctions against Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose inflammatory statements and behaviour have drawn international condemnation.
At least 40,405 Palestinian people have been killed and 93,468 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels praised attacks by Hezbollah on Israel on Sunday and renewed threats to launch their own assault in response to Israeli strikes on a port in Yemen. “We congratulate Hezbollah and its secretary-general on the great and courageous attack carried out by the resistance this morning against the Israeli enemy,” the Houthis said in a statement.
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