UN and WHO call for Israel to reverse decision to stop aid; new text put forward by non-permanent members of security council
It’s has just gone 9am in Gaza and Tel Aviv, welcome to our latest live blog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis. I am Martin Belam and I will be with you for the next while.
The UN security council is to vote Monday on another draft resolution for an “immediate” ceasefire in Gaza, after Russia and China vetoed an earlier text proposed by the US. The US itself had vetoed previous wordings.
Israeli forces besieged two more Gaza hospitals on Sunday, pinning down medical teams under heavy gunfire, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, while Israel said it had captured 480 militants in continued clashes at Gaza’s main al-Shifa hospital.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said one of its staff was killed when Israeli tanks suddenly pushed back into areas around Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in the southern city of Khan Younis, amid heavy bombardment and gunfire, Reuters reports. Israeli forces began operating around al-Amal, the military said, following “precise intelligence … which indicated that terrorists are using civilian infrastructure for terror activities in the area of al-Amal.” Reuters has been unable to access Gaza’s contested hospital areas and verify accounts by either side, the news agency says. Targeting civilian hospitals is considered a war crime, however, international law makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”.
Israel has reportedly barred the UN agency for Palestinian refugees from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest, the head of Unrwa has said.
The UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths has reacted to the reports saying on X “Now this – more impediments. Unrwa is the beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza. The decision to block its food convoys to the north only pushes thousands closer to famine. It must be revoked.”
Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has also reacted saying on X “Blocking Unrwa from delivering food is in fact denying starving people the ability to survive. This decision must be urgently reversed. The levels of hunger are acute.”
The only effective and efficient way to meet Gaza’s humanitarian needs is by road and includes an exponential increase in commercial deliveries, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said.
Senior US Democrats on Sunday increased pressure on Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon a planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering. Two days after a similar call by US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was rejected by the Israeli leader, vice-president Kamala Harris said that the Joe Biden White House was “ruling out nothing” in terms of consequences if Netanyahu moves ahead with the assault.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that any forced transfer of people from the southern Gaza city of Rafah would constitute “a war crime”, reports Agence France-Presse. In a telephone call between the two leaders, Macron also “strongly condemned” Israel’s announcement Friday of the seizure of 800 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank for new settlements, said his office. Activists say Israel’s declaration that the land in the northern Jordan Valley was now “state land” was the single largest such seizure in decades.
32,226 Palestinians have been killed and 74,518 injured since Israel’s military offensive on Gaza began on 7 October, according to the Gaza health ministry’s daily tally.
Four people were wounded by Israeli airstrikes near Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek overnight, one of which hit a two-storey building.
An Israeli strike on a car near the Syrian border killed a man on Sunday, a security source said.
