Closing summary
It is approaching 5pm in Gaza City and 6pm in Tel Aviv. This blog will be closing shortly but you can follow the Guardian’s Middle East coverage here.
Here is a summary of the latest updates from today’s live blog:
At least 29 Palestinians, including children, were killed on Wednesday from an Israeli strike in the Shujaiya area of Gaza City, local health authorities said. Medics said dozens of others were injured in the attack that hit a multi-floor residential building in the eastern suburb of Gaza City. They said many were still believed to be missing and trapped under the ruins of the building. The strike damaged several other houses nearby.
Local health authorities in Gaza added that nine other Palestinians were killed in separate Israeli military strikes in other parts of the territory, raising Wednesday’s death toll to 38. The Gaza health ministry said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed since Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846.
The Israeli military said in a statement it struck a senior Hamas militant responsible for planning and executing attacks from Shujaiya in northern Gaza, whom it did not identify. The military said several steps were taken before the attack to mitigate harm to civilians.
Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said on Wednesday that his country will offer temporary shelter to Palestinian medical evacuees and children orphaned by the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. He said Indonesia is ready to evacuate a first group of about 1,000 victims, who will stay in the country until they have fully recovered from their injuries and Gaza is safe enough to return to. Subianto said the move was not for permanent resettlement.
United Nations (UN) secretary general António Guterres said on Tuesday that Gaza had become “a killing field” because Israel has continued to block aid, an accusation an Israeli official quickly denied, saying there was “no shortage” of aid. “More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. No commercial supplies. As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have re-opened,” Guterres said in remarks to journalists.
Six weeks since Israel completely cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out. “All basic supplies are running out,” said Juliette Touma from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa). She said: “Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.” Israel accuses the Hamas militants who have run Gaza of exploiting aid but Hamas deny this and accuses Israel of using starvation as a military tactic.
The mother of an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that she fears that Israel’s renewed bombardment of the territory puts his life at even greater risk. “Our children are in danger,” Herut Nimrodi told AFP during an interview. Her son, Tamir, who turned 20 in captivity, is one of 24 hostages believed to be alive, though no proof of life has been sent since his abduction.
Suspected US airstrikes pounded the area around Yemen’s Red Sea port city of Hodeida on Tuesday night, killing at least 10 people and injuring 16 others, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels said. The strikes hit around Hodeida’s al-Hawak district, the rebels said, and injured 16 people.
President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Wednesday Iran has no objection to US investors doing business in the country but the country firmly opposes any attempts at regime change or foreign interference. “The leader has no objection to the presence of American investors in the country,” Pezeshkian said of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a speech broadcast on state television. “We oppose their flawed policies, such as conspiracies and attempts at regime change.”
Saudi Arabia’s top diplomat is in Washington to lay the groundwork for US president Donald Trump’s upcoming visit, the first foreign trip of his second term, a Saudi government source told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Wednesday. Last month, Trump said he may visit Saudi Arabia as early as April. The source, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said “developments in Gaza, Yemen and Syria” were some of the topics on the agenda of the Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan.
As calls for Lebanon’s Hezbollah to disarm gain momentum, a senior Hezbollah official told Reuters the group is ready to hold talks with the Lebanese president about its weapons if Israel withdraws from south Lebanon and stops its strikes. US-backed president Joseph Aoun, who vowed when he took office in January to establish a state monopoly on the control of arms, intends to open talks with Hezbollah over its arsenal soon, three Lebanese political sources told Reuters.
The Trump administration has reversed sweeping cuts in emergency food aid to several nations while maintaining them in Afghanistan and Yemen, two of the world’s poorest and most war-ravaged countries, officials said on Wednesday. Funding has been restored for programmes in Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Ecuador, according to the USAID official and one of the UN officials.
Almost 40 MPs and peers in the UK have signed a letter organised by politician Jeremy Corbyn calling for an independent inquiry into the government’s role in the war in Gaza. In the letter, they say the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 61,000 and that “Britain has played a highly influential role in Israel’s military operations, including the sale of weapons, the supply of intelligence and the use of Royal Air Force (RAF) bases in Cyprus”. They say an inquiry should establish what decisions were taken and what the consequences were.
The US state department said on Tuesday it was aware of the killing by Israeli forces of a Palestinian American teenager in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and was seeking more information about the incident. A state department spokesperson made the comments to reporters when asked about the killing of US citizen Omar Mohammad Rabea, 14, and the shooting of two other teenagers.
The death toll from suspected US airstrikes that pounded the area around Yemen’s Red Sea port city of Hodeida (see 9.44am BST) has risen to at least 10 people, according to the Houthis. The rebels also aired footage they said showed the debris left after shooting down yet-another American MQ-9 Reaper drone.
The strikes on Tuesday night hit around Hodeida’s al-Hawak district, the rebels said, and injured 16 people.
