Closing summary
Palestinian medics said Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killed at least 20 people overnight, including an airstrike on a tent encampment in the so-called humanitarian safe zone of al-Mawasi that killed eight people. Four people were reportedly killed in an Israeli attack on an area north of the al-Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
At least 45,317 Palestinian people have been killed and 107,713 injured in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said. Of those, 58 Palestinians were killed and 86 injured in the latest 24-hour reporting period, the ministry said.
Only 12 out of the 34 trucks of food and water allowed to enter north Gaza over the last 10 weeks have managed to distribute aid to starving Palestinian civilians because of “deliberate delays and systematic obstructions” by the Israeli military, Oxfam said.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock warned that a war by Turkey against the Kurdish groups in Syria “must not happen”, saying that in the end this could empower “the IS terrorists”. “That would be a security threat for Syria, but also for Turkey and for us in Europe,” Baerbock told public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.
Israel late last night reportedly ordered the closure and evacuation of one of the last hospitals still partly functioning in northern Gaza. The head of the Kamal Adwan hospital, Husam Abu Safiya, told Reuters that obeying the order to shut down was “next to impossible” because there were not enough ambulances to get patients out. An IDF spokesperson told the Washington Post forces had not conveyed any evacuation warnings to the hospital this weekend.
We are closing this blog now. Thanks for following along. You can find all of our latest Middle East coverage here.
A Palestinian officer has been killed during clashes with militants in the occupied West Bank, the security forces said. Here is a report from the Agence France-Presse news agency with more details:
Clashes between local militants and the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA) are uncommon, but Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp have experienced frequent gunfights for nearly two weeks, triggered by arrests earlier this month.
“The officer was killed after he was targeted by treacherous and cowardly gunfire from outlaws in the Jenin camp,” Anwar Rajab, spokesperson for the PA’s security force said in a statement.
Tensions in Jenin - also a frequent target of Israeli military raids - have escalated after Palestinian security forces arrested several activists and militants.
Palestinian rivals of the Fatah party, which dominates the PA, have condemned the arrests and accused the security forces of aiding Israel.
In addition to the two security personnel, three people have been killed since the clashes began on December 5: two civilians and a field commander of the Jenin armed battalion.
Jenin, in the northern West Bank, is a stronghold of armed Palestinian factions who view themselves as a more effective resistance to the Israeli occupation, in contrast to the PA which coordinates security matters with Israel.
In an earlier post, we reported that Oxfam said only 12 out of the 34 trucks of food and water allowed to enter north Gaza over the last 10 weeks have managed to distribute aid to starving Palestinian civilians because of “deliberate delays and systematic obstructions” by the Israeli military.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead in the occupied Palestinian territory, has spoken to Al Jazeera. Khalidi said:
After 14 months of relentless bombardment and starvation of the entire population, some people are acting out of desperation and there’s absolute chaos in Gaza right now.
Some people are asking their kids not to play, because they will get dizzy since they’re not eating and drinking enough. Imagine asking your five-year-old not to play while already there’s all this death and destruction around.
The Israeli military has warned residents of southern Lebanon that they could be killed if they return to their homes before they are given notice to.
“The IDF does not intend to target you and therefore at this stage you are prohibited from returning to your homes from this line south until further notice. Anyone who moves south of this line - exposes himself to danger,” Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-language spokesperson of the military, wrote in a post on X this afternoon.
Adraee regularly posts forced evacuation orders addressed to Lebanese residents on social media. Today’s post included a map naming 62 villages whose residents are prohibited from returning until “further notice”.
Helena Horton is an environment reporter for the Guardian
Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza are taking legal action against BP for running a pipeline that supplies much of Israel’s crude oil.
The claimants have sent the British oil company a letter before claim, alleging it is breaching its stated commitments to human rights under international law.
BP owns and operates the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, through which Azerbaijan supplies Israel with crude oil. The pipeline, which runs through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, from where the oil is then transported by ship, provides 28% of Israel’s crude oil supply.
Oil supplies are critical for Israel’s military operation, and it has been reported that oil from this pipeline is being sent to a refinery that produces jet fuel for military planes which are dropping munitions on Gaza.
You can read the full story here:
Jordan stands ready to help Syria rebuild, its foreign minister said after meeting Syria’s new de facto ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus on Monday, the highest-level contact by an Arab state with Syria’s new Islamist-led administration.
Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs Mohammed Al-Khulaifi also arrived in Damascus on Monday for meetings aboard the first Qatar Airways flight to land in the Syrian capital since former President Bashar al-Assad was toppled, the Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson said on X.
Sharaa, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, met Jordanian foreign minister Ayman al-Safadi. “Our talks were clear that we in the Kingdom are ready to provide support,” Safadi said after the meeting, adding that the new Syrian administration must have the opportunity to develop its plans. “I focused on reconstruction efforts and Jordan will provide aid,” he added.
Syria’s stability is a key security concern for Jordan, which borders the country to the south. Safadi said he agreed with Sharaa on cooperating to counter the smuggling of drugs and weapons from Syria to Jordan – a problem for years under Assad.
Safadi also noted that Islamic State, with which Sharaa’s group clashed earlier in the Syrian war, remained a threat. “Our brothers in Syria also realise that this is a threat. God willing, we will all cooperate, not just Jordan and Syria, but all Arab countries and the international community, in fighting this scourge that poses a threat to everyone,” he said.
There was no immediate statement from the Syrian side on the meeting. Sharaa, who met senior US diplomats last week, severed ties with al-Qaida in 2016. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.
Germany warns Turkey against increasing military action against Kurdish armed groups in north Syria
Germany on Monday warned Turkey against stepping up military action against Kurdish armed groups in the north of Syria, two weeks after Islamist-led rebels toppled Syria’s longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Friday it was time to destroy “terrorist” groups that posed a threat to Syria’s survival, namely the Islamic State group jihadists and Kurdish fighters.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock warned on Monday that a war by Turkey against the Kurdish groups “must not happen”, saying that in the end this could empower “the IS terrorists”.
“That would be a security threat for Syria, but also for Turkey and for us in Europe,” Baerbock told public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.
Turkey has maintained strong ties with Syria’s new leaders, and has continued military operations against Kurdish-held areas in northeastern Syria.
Turkey views the Syrian Defence Forces (SDF) as a terror group because it is dominated by the YPG, a Kurdish group it says is linked to PKK militants who have fought a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil.
But the US-backed force led the fight against the IS group in Syria in 2019, with the SDF seen by the United States as a “crucial” to prevent a jihadist resurgence in the area.
Baerbock also pointed out that “it was the Kurds in particular who pushed back the IS”, recalling the “terrible massacres committed by IS terrorists”.
The Syrian city of Kobane has become “a symbol of the courageous fight of the Kurds against IS”, said Baerbock.
She cautioned Nato ally Turkey that the current situation in Syria should “not be used to drive out the Kurds again, to cause renewed violence”.
“We all have a responsibility to ensure that there is no new violence, no new radical forces, but that people can finally live in safety after years of this terror,” she said, adding that “the unity of Syria must be preserved”.
Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 45,317 Palestinians and injured 107,713 since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said on Monday.
The ministry said 58 people were killed and 86 injured during the last 24-hour reporting period.
Updated
Mona Chalabi is data editor at Guardian US
Worldwide, 104 journalists and media workers were killed in 2024 – and more than half of them were in Palestine.
Journalists there have faced death more than their colleagues in any other country, according to the International Federation of Journalists.
Research by the IFJ, a non-partisan organization representing the rights of media workers, found that 55 journalists were killed in Palestine this year, compared with 49 in the rest of the world. Their figures do not include journalists who have been arrested (75 Palestinian journalists have been imprisoned since October 2023, and just 30 of them have been released) nor does it include those who are injured (approximately 49) or missing (at least two).
Since Israel has prohibited the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza, only Palestinians are able to report on violence and human rights abuses committed in the territory.
For those Palestinian journalists who have not been killed by the Israeli military, working conditions are still near-impossible. Over 90% said they had lost equipment essential for reporting and that they were without essential protective gear such as helmets according to a survey by ARIJ, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism.
You can read the full story here:
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, has begun a tour of military positions in the country’s south, almost a month after a ceasefire deal that ended Israel’s assault on the country.
The truce came into effect on 27 November and prohibits Israel from conducting offensive military operations in Lebanon, while requiring Lebanon to prevent armed groups including Hezbollah from launching attacks on Israel. It gives Israeli troops 60 days to withdraw from south Lebanon.
Mikati’s tour comes after the Lebanese government expressed its frustration over ongoing Israeli strikes and overflights in the country.
“We have many tasks ahead of us, the most important being the enemy’s (Israel’s) withdrawal from all the lands it encroached on during its recent aggression,” he said after meeting with army chief Joseph Aoun in a Lebanese military barracks in the southeastern town of Marjayoun. “Then the army can carry out its tasks in full.”
Updated
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza kill at least 20 people overnight, Palestinian medics say
Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip overnight killed at least 20 people, Palestinian medics have said. One of the airstrikes hit a tent camp in the so-called “humanitarian zone” of al-Mawasi which has been targeted by deadly Israeli airstrikes before and is reportedly overcrowded. The airstrike killed eight people, including two children, according to Nasser hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, which received the bodies.
Updated
Here are some of the latest images being sent to us over the newswires from Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip:
Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei has just said in a weekly press briefing: “Our principled position on Syria is very clear: preserving the sovereignty and integrity of Syria and for the people of Syria to decide on its future without destructive foreign interference.”
He added that the country should not “become a haven for terrorism”, saying such an outcome would have “repercussions” for countries in the region.
Iran spent billions of dollars propping up Assad during the war and deployed its Revolutionary Guards to Syria to keep its ally in power. Hours after Assad’s fall in early December, Iran said it expected relations with Damascus to continue based on the two countries’ “far-sighted and wise approach” and called for the establishment of an inclusive government representing all segments of Syrian society.
As we mentioned in the opening summary, Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi is meeting with Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Damascus today. We now have some pictures of his diplomatic visit to the Syrian capital.
Jordan, which borders Syria to the south, hosted a summit earlier this month where top Arab, Turkish, EU and US diplomats called for an inclusive and peaceful transition after years of civil war.
Sharaa, whose Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) spearheaded the offensive that toppled Bashar-al Assad on 8 December, has welcomed senior officials from a host of countries in the Middle East and beyond in recent days.
Jordanian government spokesperson Mohamed Momani told reporters yesterday that Amman “sides with the will of the brotherly Syrian people”, stressing the close ties between the two nations.
Momani said the kingdom would like to see security restored in Syria and supported “the unity of its territories”, adding that stability there would “ensure security on its borders”. Some Syrians who had fled the war since 2011 and sought refuge in Jordan have begun returning home (according to the UN, 680,000 Syrian refugees were registered with it in Jordan).
Updated
Israel 'relentlessly' using starvation as a 'weapon of war' in Gaza, Oxfam says
Only 12 out of the 34 trucks of food and water allowed to enter north Gaza over the last 10 weeks have managed to distribute aid to starving Palestinian civilians because of “deliberate delays and systematic obstructions” by the Israeli military, Oxfam has said.
“For three of these, once the food and water had been delivered to the school where people were sheltering, it was then cleared and shelled within hours,” Oxfam wrote in a press release.
Oxfam is among the many charities that have said that Israel has prevented them from delivering aid to north Gaza since early October, when the military launched a renewed assault on Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, claiming they were trying to stop Hamas fighters regrouping there.
When any trickle of aid is delivered (which includes ready-to-eat rations, wheat flour, water etc) , the civilians collecting it in north Gaza are at risk of being killed by Israeli airstrikes, which have hit schools-turned-shelters, refugee camps and hospitals. Oxfam says that about 130,000 people have now been forcibly displaced from the north Gaza governorate, with roughly 70% - 91,000 - being women and girls, who are trying to survive in abandoned buildings and overcrowded shelters in Gaza City.
Sally Abi-Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa director, said:
The situation in Gaza is apocalyptic and people are trapped, unable to find any kind of safety. The absolute desperation of having no food or shelter for your family in the biting cold of winter. It is abhorrent that despite international law being so publicly violated by Israel and starvation being used relentlessly as a weapon of war, world leaders continue to do nothing.
Gaza has been widely destroyed and the entire population is suffering. The public sector has collapsed and the humanitarian system is on its knees. We plead with the entire international community – stop this, now. You have the diplomatic and economic levers to make Israel stop. Every day that passes without a ceasefire is a death sentence for hundreds more civilians.
Last month, the independent Famine Review Committee (FRC), a committee of global food security experts, warned in a rare alert that there is a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas” of the northern Gaza Strip. The FRC said it could be “assumed that starvation, malnutrition, and excess mortality due to malnutrition and disease, are rapidly increasing” in north Gaza. “Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future,” the global hunger monitor said.
Updated
The Israeli parliament decided in late October to pass a law banning the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, from operating in the country. Unrwa said the new laws – due to come into effect within the next month – will cause the supply chain of aid to Gaza to “fall apart”, excepting an already dire humanitarian crisis, with widespread shortages of food, medicine and clean water across the Strip.
The UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, Unrwa, has been planning all year for winter in Gaza, but the aid it was able to get into the territory is “not even close to being enough for people,” Louise Wateridge, an agency spokesperson, said as many of the near 2 million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war struggle to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.
Unrwa distributed 6,000 tents over the past four weeks in northern Gaza but was unable to get them to other parts of the Strip, including areas where there has been fighting. About 22,000 tents have been stuck in Jordan and 600,000 blankets and 33 truckloads of mattresses have been sitting in Egypt since the summer because the agency doesn’t have Israeli approval or a safe route to bring them into Gaza and because it had to prioritise desperately needed food aid, Wateridge said.
Many of the mattresses and blankets have since been looted or destroyed by the weather and rodents, she said.
The International Rescue Committee is struggling to bring in children’s winter clothing because there “are a lot of approvals to get from relevant authorities,” Dionne Wong, the organisation’s deputy director of programs for the occupied Palestinian territories, said.
“The ability for Palestinians to prepare for winter is essentially very limited,” she added.
Updated
Reports of deadly Israeli airstrikes on al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza
As we mentioned in the opening summary, there have been reports this morning of deadly Israeli bombing on the al-Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Four people were reportedly killed in an Israeli attack on an area north of the camp. Here is a report from Al Jazeera, which says Israeli forces have surrounded a shelter in the camp for displaced civilians:
In the early hours of this morning, Israeli quadcopters and forces in armoured vehicles surrounded a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp that was filled with displaced civilians, impeding movement and preventing people from leaving the building.
They kept intermittently shooting using the quadcopters and heavy artillery. One person has already been killed there.
And just as a reminder, the vast majority of the displaced population is made up of civilians – women and children. They also make up the majority of casualties arriving at the hospitals.
Israel reportedly orders closure of one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza
Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and developments in the Middle East more widely.
Israel late last night reportedly ordered the closure and evacuation of one of the last hospitals still partly functioning in northern Gaza.
The head of the Kamal Adwan hospital, Husam Abu Safiya, told Reuters that obeying the order to shut down was “next to impossible” because there were not enough ambulances to get patients out.
He said:
We currently have nearly 400 civilians inside the hospital, including babies in the neonatal unit, whose lives depend on oxygen and incubators. We cannot evacuate these patients safely without assistance, equipment, and time.
We are sending this message under heavy bombardment and direct targeting of the fuel tanks, which if hit will cause a large explosion and mass casualties of the civilians inside.
Abu Safiya said the military had ordered patients and staff to be evacuated to another hospital where conditions are even worse. An IDF spokesperson told the Washington Post forces had not conveyed any evacuation warnings to the hospital this weekend. The Israeli military said that on Friday it had sent fuel and food to the hospital and helped evacuate more than 100 patients and caregivers to other Gaza hospitals.
Gaza’s health ministry has said the three main hospitals in northern Gaza – of which Kamal Adwan is one – are barely functioning and have been under repeated attack since Israel sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and nearby Beit Hanoun and Jabalia in October. The Israeli military claims the aim of the renewed assault on the north is to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping there. But the IDF has attacked hospitals and shelters, with many civilians being killed by Israeli forces amid relentless attacks.
In other developments:
Israeli forces have carried out three consecutive attacks overnight on the Gaza Strip, killing at least 11 Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera, which said the military killed four people in two separate air raids in the so-called designated “safe zone” of al-Mawasi. Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting that four Palestinian people were killed and three others injured after Israel bombed the new camp area northwest of the al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Phillipe Lazzarani, said there has been in “escalation” in attacks over the past day, with more civlians reported killed and injured. In a post on X, he wrote: “Attacks on schools and hospitals have been commonplace. The world must not become numb.”
Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi is due to meet with Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, and “several Syrian officials”, later today in Damascus, Jordan’s foreign ministry said. Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, led the Sunni Islamist rebels who swept into the Syrian capital earlier this month and forced Bashar-al Assad from power.
Updated
