That’s all from me, Tom Ambrose, and indeed the Middle East crisis live blog for today. Thanks for following along.
To keep updated with all the latest developments, see here.
The British government said on Thursday it had imposed a travel ban on Mustafa Ayash, who it sanctioned earlier this year for promoting terrorism, and suspected Hezbollah financier Nazem Ahmad.
The pair, who were already subject to asset freezes under domestic counter-terrorism powers, now cannot enter Britain, it said.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has said in a statement today that “the EU urges immediate humanitarian pauses to enable the vaccination of all children in Gaza against the poliovirus.”
Two rounds of the campaign are expected to be rolled out in the Strip in the coming weeks in collaboration with the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, providing two drops of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 to more than 640 000 children under ten years of age.
The EU welcomes the delivery of more than 1.2 million oral polio vaccines as well as the cooperation by Israel in delivering the vaccines to Gaza, and underlines the importance of further cooperation by all sides with WHO, UNRWA and UNICEF to conduct the vaccination rollout.
Commitment to the humanitarian pauses by all parties will be crucial to allow the successful and timely implementation of these urgent campaigns. Protecting healthcare facilities and their workers and ensuring safe access for children and families to vaccination sites will be essential to this end.
The day so far
The Israeli military said it has killed five more militants in a large-scale operation in the occupied West Bank early Thursday, including a well-known local commander. There was no immediate Palestinian confirmation of the death of Mohammed Jaber, known as Abu Shujaa, a commander in the Islamic Jihad militant group in the Nur Shams refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Tulkarem.
The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has launched a process that could lead to sanctions on Israeli ministers he said were responsible for “unacceptable hate messages” against Palestinians. Arriving at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Borrell said he had begun consultations with the EU’s 27 member states on whether they consider it “appropriate including in our list of sanctions some Israeli ministers [who] have been launching unacceptable hate messages against the Palestinians” and made proposals that “go clearly against international law” and incite war crimes.
UN secretary general, António Guterres said Israel’s launch of a large-scale military operations in the West Bank on Wednesday was “deeply concerning.” In a tweet on Thursday, Guterres said he strongly condemned the “loss of lives, including of children, and I call for an immediate cessation of these operations.”
Yemen’s Houthi group has agreed to allow tugboats and rescue ships to access a damaged crude oil tanker in the Red Sea, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, after the Iranian-aligned militants attacked the Greek-flagged vessel last week. The Sounion tanker is carrying 150,000 tonnes, or 1m barrels, of crude oil and poses an environmental hazard, shipping officials said. Any spill has the potential to be among the largest from a ship in recorded history.
At least 40,602 Palestinians have been killed and 93,855 wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the health authorities said on Thursday.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested there could be partial suspension of military operations in Gaza to allow young children to be vaccinated against polio. In a statement, Netanyahu’s office denied an Israeli television report that there would be a general truce during the vaccination campaign which begins on the weekend, but said it had approved the “designation of specific places” in Gaza.
The United Nations World Food Programme temporarily suspended movement of its employees across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, saying at least 10 bullets struck one of its clearly marked vehicles as it approached an Israeli military checkpoint. WFP said in a statement that a convoy of two armoured vehicles received “multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach” the Wadi Gaza bridge checkpoint on Tuesday evening. Bullets hit one of the vehicles, but no one in it was hurt.
Palestinian health authorities said 10 people were killed in the Jenin and Tubas areas of the West Bank, and gun battles were reported to be continuing on Wednesday morning. The chief spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the escalation of Israeli military operations on the West Bank, at the same time as the war in Gaza, would “lead to dire and dangerous results”.
The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, cut short his visit to Saudi Arabia to return to Ramallah after the launch of the large scale Israeli military operation in the West Bank. Abbas began an official visit to Saudi Arabia on Monday where he held talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.
AP has a report about the recently freed hostage:
An Israeli hostage rescued from Gaza returned to a hero’s welcome tinged with a bitter reality: Much of the small village he calls home, Khirbet Karkur, is targeted for demolition.
Qaid Farhad Alkadi, 52, is one of Israel’s roughly 300,000 Bedouin Arabs, a poor and traditionally nomadic minority that has a complicated relationship with the government and often faces discrimination. While they are Israeli citizens and some serve in the army, about a third of Bedouins, including Alkadi, live in villages the government considers illegal and wants to tear down.
Since November, about 70% of Khirbet Karkur residents have been told the government plans to raze their homes because they were built without permits in a “protected forest” not zoned for housing, according to a lawyer representing them. Alkadi’s family hasn’t received a notice, but the looming mass displacement of this close-knit community has cast a pall on what has otherwise been a joyous 24 hours.
“It’s so exciting, we didn’t know if he’ll come back alive or not,” said Muhammad Abu Tailakh, the head of Khirbet Karkur’s local council and a public health lecturer at Ben Gurion University in nearby Beersheba. “But the good news is also a bit complicated, because of everything that’s going on.”
Alkadi was greeted by dozens of well-wishers Wednesday - and a crush of media. He was released from the hospital and returned home a day after his dramatic rescue, which he recounted in appreciative phone calls with Israel’s prime minister and president.
Zainab Barakat woke early on Sunday morning to the sound of bombs. During more than 10 months of fighting between Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) near her village of Zebqine, she had grown used to hearing the explosions that have devastated other nearby villages.
So far, Zebqine, almost 7km from the Lebanese-Israeli border, had been spared the worst of the shelling. But this time, she says, “it was right on top of us. It smashed the windows; the whole place shook. The children were panicking.”
It was the fiercest fighting since hostilities began in October. The IDF says that 100 jets took part in the bombardment, while Hezbollah fired more than 340 rockets at 11 military targets in Israel. It was finally enough to convince Barakat to leave Zebqine.
The following day, she travelled the 17km (10 miles) to the coastal city of Tyre with her husband, parents and two young children, checking into a shelter run by the local authority. They join the growing number of displaced people in Lebanon that has risen from less than 99,000 to 112,000 in the past month amid a rising number of airstrikes across the country.
Yet, even as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warns that this number is likely to rise with people fleeing new areas of the country, such as the eastern Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut, aid organisations report a slump in donations for relief activities.
At least 40,602 Palestinians have been killed and 93,855 wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the health authorities said on Thursday.
Yemen’s Houthi group has agreed to allow tugboats and rescue ships to access a damaged crude oil tanker in the Red Sea, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, after the Iranian-aligned militants attacked the Greek-flagged vessel last week.
The Sounion tanker is carrying 150,000 tonnes, or 1m barrels, of crude oil and poses an environmental hazard, shipping officials said. Any spill has the potential to be among the largest from a ship in recorded history.
“Several countries have reached out to … request a temporary truce for the entry of tugboats and rescue ships into the incident area,” Iran’s UN mission in New York said, adding that the Houthis had consented to the request, in consideration of “humanitarian and environmental concerns”.
Borrell asks EU members about possible sanctions on some Israeli ministers
The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has launched a process that could lead to sanctions on Israeli ministers he said were responsible for “unacceptable hate messages” against Palestinians.
Arriving at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Borrell said he had begun consultations with the EU’s 27 member states on whether they consider it “appropriate including in our list of sanctions some Israeli ministers [who] have been launching unacceptable hate messages against the Palestinians” and made proposals that “go clearly against international law” and incite war crimes.
The EU should have no taboos, Borrell added, to ensure humanitarian law was respected, while stressing it was for member states to decide.
Borrell did not name the ministers, but it is understood he will make the case for sanctioning Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two far-right ministers, who are widely assessed as critical to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future.
Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, has repeatedly called cutting off aid and fuel supply to Gaza. Smotrich, in charge of finance, has said it might be “justified and moral” to starve 2 million people in Gaza in order to free the remaining Israeli hostages, who were seized in the 7 October attacks by Hamas.
If the ministers were added to the sanctions list, they would be subject to EU travel ban and asset freezes, but the largest impact could be symbolic.
Updated
The United Nations World Food Programme temporarily suspended movement of its employees across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, saying at least 10 bullets struck one of its clearly marked vehicles as it approached an Israeli military checkpoint.
WFP said in a statement that a convoy of two armoured vehicles received “multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach” the Wadi Gaza bridge checkpoint on Tuesday evening. Bullets hit one of the vehicles, but no one in it was hurt.
“Though this is not the first security incident to occur during the war, it is the first time that a WFP vehicle has been directly shot at near a checkpoint, despite securing the necessary clearances,” WFP said.
It said the vehicle was a “few metres” from the Israeli checkpoint when it was hit.
The Israeli military said it has killed five more militants in a large-scale operation in the occupied West Bank early Thursday, including a well-known local commander.
There was no immediate Palestinian confirmation of the death of Mohammed Jaber, known as Abu Shujaa, a commander in the Islamic Jihad militant group in the Nur Shams refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Tulkarem.
AP reported:
He became a hero for many Palestinians earlier this year when he was reported killed in an Israeli operation, only to make a surprise appearance at the funeral of other militants, where he was hoisted on to the shoulders of a cheering crowd.
The military said he was killed along with four other militants in a shootout with Israeli forces early Thursday after the five had hidden inside a mosque. It said Abu Shujaa was linked to numerous attacks on Israelis, including a deadly shooting in June, and was planning more.
The military said another militant was arrested in the operation in Tulkarem, and that a member of Israel’s paramilitary Border Police was lightly wounded.
UN secretary general, António Guterres said Israel’s launch of a large-scale military operations in the West Bank on Wednesday was “deeply concerning.”
In a tweet on Thursday, Guterres said he strongly condemned the “loss of lives, including of children, and I call for an immediate cessation of these operations.”
Earlier, his spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said the UN secretary general called on Israel to protect civilians and urged its forces “to exercise maximum restraint and use lethal force only when it is strictly unavoidable to protect life.”
Netanyahu suggests there could be partial suspension of Gaza operations to allow polio vaccinations
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested there could be partial suspension of military operations in Gaza to allow young children to be vaccinated against polio.
In a statement, Netanyahu’s office denied an Israeli television report that there would be a general truce during the vaccination campaign which begins on the weekend, but said it had approved the “designation of specific places” in Gaza.
“This has been presented to the security cabinet and has received the support of the relevant professionals,” the statement said.
The terse statement may well have been deliberately vague. Far-right elements of the coalition are adamantly opposed to any form of truce or relief for Gaza’s Palestinian population, but aid agencies have made it clear that the polio outbreak, the first in Gaza for 25 years, would almost certainly spread to Israel if not contained immediately.
The Israeli media report said that a pause in operations was demanded by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, when he visited Israel last week.
The first of two rounds of vaccinations is due to begin on Saturday in an urgent effort to control the spread of the virus after it was found in a 10-month-old baby suffering from paralysis in one leg earlier this month.
More than 25,000 vials of vaccine, enough for over a million doses, have arrived in Gaza along with the equipment needed to keep them cool while they are being transported. But health experts have warned that it would be virtually impossible to carry out the vaccination drive successfully under bombardment.
To stop the spread of the disease, aid agencies must reach 90% of the estimated 640,000 children under the age of 10 in Gaza. That is already challenging as Palestinians have been subjected to an increasing number of evacuation orders by the Israeli military, crowding them into ever tighter, more remote spaces.
One possibility suggested by Netanyahu’s statement is that Israeli bombardment would be stopped in different areas of Gaza sequentially, to allow the aid workers with the vaccines to move from one to the other.
The uncertainty over humanitarian pauses and evacuation orders makes planning extremely difficult, Juliette Touma, spokesperson for the UN relief agency, Unrwa said.
“Plans are the bread and butter of any successful humanitarian operation. You have got to know how many people you are going to reach: where are they located? How are you going to reach them?” Touma said. “Planning is such an important element of the success of any operation, but in Gaza planning is almost nonexistent”.
IDF claims it killed five Palestinian militants at mosque in West Bank operation
Israeli troops have claimed to have killed five Palestinian militants at a mosque in the West Bank after “exchanges of fire during counterterrorism operations in Tulkarm,” the IDF said on Thursday.
Thursday’s violence comes after Israeli forces killed at least 10 Palestinians in the West Bank in overnight raids and airstrikes on Wednesday. The army said those operations were intended to contain attacks on Israelis using Iranian-supplied arms.
The IDF said that one of those killed was involved in a shooting attack on an Israeli civilian in June. The military described the four others who reportedly hid inside a mosque as “terrorists”.
On Wednesday, the chief spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the escalation of Israeli military operations on the West Bank, at the same time as the war in Gaza, would “lead to dire and dangerous results”.
Updated
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
Israeli troops have killed five Palestinians who were hiding inside a mosque in the occupied West Bank, after launching a huge operation across the region on Wednesday, the military reported early on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces killed at least 10 Palestinians in the West Bank in overnight raids and airstrikes that they said were intended to contain attacks on Israelis using Iranian-supplied arms.
Thursday’s raid occurred in Tulkarm – one of the areas targeted by the IDF over the previous 24 hours.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the West Bank operations, some of the most extensive in recent years, were likely to go on for some days, in what it described as a preventive campaign to forestall attacks on Israelis.
More on that in a moment – first here’s a summary of the day’s other main news.
Palestinian health authorities said 10 people were killed in the Jenin and Tubas areas of the West Bank, and gun battles were reported to be continuing on Wednesday morning. The chief spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the escalation of Israeli military operations on the West Bank, at the same time as the war in Gaza, would “lead to dire and dangerous results”.
The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, cut short his visit to Saudi Arabia to return to Ramallah after the launch of the large scale Israeli military operation in the West Bank. Abbas began an official visit to Saudi Arabia on Monday where he held talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.
UN secretary general, António Guterres said Israel’s launch of a large-scale military operations in the West Bank was “deeply concerning.” Guterres said he strongly condemned the “loss of lives, including of children, and I call for an immediate cessation of these operations.”
The US has announced new sanctions against extremist settlers in the West Bank who are funded by the Israeli government, as Washington steps up its attempt to rein in worsening settler violence. The sanctions target one organisation and one individual with long involvement in the intimidation of Palestinians with the aim of seizing their land. The targeted group was Hashomer Yosh, which provides security for illegal settler outposts, including some which have already been sanctioned by the US.
The new measures drew a sharp response from the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose office said it viewed them “with utmost severity” and that the issue was under “pointed discussion” with Washington.
At least 34 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday as Israeli forces sent tanks deeper into Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip and launched strikes, according to medics. Residents of Khan Younis said Israeli tanks made a surprise advance into the centre of the city, and the military ordered evacuations in the east, forcing many families to run for safety, while others were trapped at home.
An official investigation into the ill-fated aid pier off the coast of Gaza has found that Joe Biden declared the US intention to build the pier as a means of delivering food despite advice to the contrary from aid experts in his administration. The new report by the inspector general of the US Agency for International Development (USAid), which was responsible for delivering food to Gaza by the pier, paints a scathing picture of a failed project, in which political and security imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations.
Israeli, American, Egyptian and Qatari negotiators met in Doha on Wednesday for “technical/working level” talks on a ceasefire in Gaza. The deputy CIA director, David Cohen, said the fate of a ceasefire deal is “largely a question that is going to be answered” by the leader of the Palestinian militant group, but he did not refer to Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, by name.
Yemen’s Houthi group has agreed to allow tugboats and rescue ships to access a damaged crude oil tanker in the Red Sea, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, after the Iranian-aligned militants attacked the Greek-flagged vessel last week. The Sounion tanker is carrying 150,000 tonnes, or 1m barrels, of crude oil and poses an environmental hazard, shipping officials said. Any spill has the potential to be among the largest from a ship in recorded history.
Updated
