Summary of the day
Here is a summary of the key developments in the Middle East crisis today:
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.
Four people were wounded by Israeli air strikes 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.
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.
Hamas released a video on the death of an Israeli captive who allegedly died due to the lack of food and medicine, though the Guardian could not independently verify the claim.
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 Antonio Guterres said.
The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said that Israel informed the UN that they will no longer approve UNRWA food convoys to north of Gaza.
I’m closing the blog for the rest of the day, but we’ll be back tomorrow morning to keep you updated. Thanks for following today.
Israel will no longer approve UN food convoys to north of Gaza
The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) says that Israel informed the UN that they will no longer approve UNRWA food convoys to north of Gaza.
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said on social media platform X:
This is outrageous and makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man made famine. These restrictions must be lifted.
📍# Gaza: as of today, @UNRWA, the main lifeline for #Palestine Refugees, is denied from providing lifesaving assistance to northern Gaza.
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) March 24, 2024
Despite the tragedy unfolding under our watch, the Israeli Authorities informed the UN that they will no longer approve any @UNRWA food… pic.twitter.com/lfp9xRQuh1
Updated
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is travelling to the Middle East today to urge the Israeli government to open the border crossings to a lot more aid, she said in a statement.
Ahead of her trip to Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Baerbock said every aid crate sitting on trucks in front of Gaza’s border fences is one too many.
Since the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas, Baerbock has visited the region six times and said she would go again to do everything possible to find a solution.
She said in a statement:
Air drops or sea bridges are not a sustainable solution.
Hamas must lay down its arms and never again bring the terror of Oct. 7 to the people of Israel. But this goal cannot be achieved purely militarily.
Baerbock said only an immediate humanitarian ceasefire leading to a permanent cessation would keep hopes for peace alive and end suffering on all sides.
She said her discussions would focus on what the political horizon might look like. Only the prospect of a two-state solution with a reformed Palestinian Authority as a first step towards a democratic Palestinian state could offer people a life of security and dignity, she said.
Israeli strike near Syrian border kills one
An Israeli strike on a car near the Syrian border killed a man Sunday, a security source said, AFP reports.
Israel and Hezbollah, a militant group allied to Hamas, have been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire since the Gaza war erupted in October.
But fears have surged of an all-out conflict in recent weeks, with Israel launching air strikes deeper into eastern Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah strongholds in the Bekaa valley area several times.
A security source told AFP, requesting anonymity for security concerns:
Israeli fighter jets targeted a vehicle in the eastern Bekaa area of Suwairi, killing its Syrian driver.
Earlier on Sunday, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency had said a strike on a vehicle in Suwairi injured the driver, before reporting that he had been killed.
The NNA said he had been delivering food in a car that belonged to a supermarket owner.
Updated
The only effective and efficient way to deliver heavy goods to meet Gaza’s humanitarian needs is by road and includes an exponential increase in commercial deliveries, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday.
Speaking during a visit to Egypt, Guterres also warned of the impact the war in Gaza was having around the globe.
He said:
The daily assault on the human dignity of Palestinians is creating a crisis of credibility for the international community.
Looking at Gaza, it almost appears that the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest and death are galloping across it.
The whole world recognises that it’s past time to silence the guns and ensure an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
Palestinians in Gaza desperately need what has been promised - a flood of aid. Not trickles. Not drops.
He added that delivering the necessary aid to famine-threatened Gaza “requires Israel removing the remaining obstacles and chokepoints to relief”.
Guterres repeated his call for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” to alleviate “the plight of Palestinian children, women and men struggling to survive the nightmare in Gaza”, during a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.
He had visited on Saturday the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, where nearly six months of war and siege have displaced the vast majority of the territory’s 2.4 million people and destroyed its civilian infrastructure.
Guterres, who also met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, called the Rafah border crossing and Egypt’s El-Arish airport where assistance is sent “essential arteries for life-saving aid into Gaza”.
“But those arteries are clogged,” he said, with massive lines of trucks piled up on the Egyptian side, only trickling in as the humanitarian situation worsens.
Updated
Israeli forces besiege two Gaza hospitals
Israeli forces besieged two more Gaza hospitals on Sunday, pinning down medical teams under heavy gunfire, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, and Israel said it had captured 480 militants in continued clashes at Gaza’s main Al Shifa hospital.
Reuters reports:
Israeli forces say hospitals in the Palestinian enclave where war has been raging for over five months have frequently been used as strongholds of Hamas militants harbouring bases and weapons. Hamas and medical staff deny this.
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.
Israeli armoured forces sealed off Al-Amal Hospital and carried out extensive bulldozing operations in its vicinity, the Red Crescent said in a statement, adding: “All of our teams are in extreme danger at the moment and are completely immobilised.”
It said Israeli forces were now demanding the complete evacuation of staff, patients and displaced people from Al Amal’s premises and were firing smoke bombs into the area to force out its occupants.
The Israeli military said its forces were hitting “infrastructure” in Khan Younis used as gathering points for many militants. Hamas denies using hospitals for military ends and accuses Israel of war crimes against civilian targets.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said dozens of patients and medical staffers had been detained by Israeli forces at Al Shifa in Gaza City in the enclave’s north that has been under Israeli control for a week.
Al Shifa is one of the few healthcare facilities even partially operational in north Gaza, and - like others - had also been housing some of the nearly 2 million civilians - over 80% of Gaza’s population - displaced by the war.
Reuters has been unable to access Gaza’s contested hospital areas and verify accounts by either side.
Khan Younis residents said Israeli tanks also advanced in a western neighbourhood near Nasser Hospital under cover of heavy fire from the air and ground.
In Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost town on the Egyptian border town that has become the last refuge for half of Gaza’s uprooted population, an Israeli air strike on a house killed seven people, health officials said.
Updated
Four people wounded in Israeli air strikes in Lebanon
Four people were wounded by Israeli air strikes near Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek overnight, one of which hit a two-storey building, AFP reports.
In recent weeks Israel has been launching air strikes deeper into Lebanese territory, targeting the Baalbek area - a Hezbollah stronghold - several times.
The Israeli military said in a statement fighter jets “struck a Hezbollah manufacturing site containing weapons in the area of Baalbek”.
AFP’s correspondent said the Israeli strikes targeted a Hezbollah centre that had been deserted for some time, wounding four residents in nearby buildings.
The Israeli air force fired five missiles at a two-storey inhabited building in Al-Osseira, on the outskirts of Baalbek.
The Israeli military also said “approximately 50 launches were identified from Lebanon toward northern Israel, a number of launches were intercepted while the rest fell in open areas”.
Hezbollah said it fired “more than 60 Katyusha-type rockets” at two Israeli military positions in the occupied Golan Heights in response to the Israeli strikes.
The strike at Al-Osseira, some 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the Israeli-Lebanese border, ended a period of relative calm that had lasted around 10 days.
Hezbollah began launching near-daily attacks against Israel on 8 October in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas in Gaza and said on Saturday it had carried out several more strikes.
It says it will only end its attacks on Israel if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned in February that a possible truce in Gaza would not affect Israel’s “objective” of pushing Hezbollah back from its northern border, by force or diplomacy.
At least 323 people have been killed in Lebanon, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but also at least 56 civilians, according to an AFP count.
At least 10 soldiers and seven civilians have been killed in northern Israel, according to the military.
The exchange of fire, which was initially confined to areas close to the border, has also displaced tens of thousands in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
Hamas has released a video on the death of an Israeli captive who allegedly died due to the lack of food and medicine, writes Guardian correspondent Lorenzo Tondo in Israel.
The caption reads:
Although he survived the Israeli Defence Forces’ attacks, he did not escape the lack of food and medicine.
What the people of Gaza are suffering from the siege and the shortage of food and medicine, your prisoners will also suffer.
The Guardian could not independently verify the claim.
There has been sharp and widespread criticism of Israel, which is accused of obstructing aid with cumbersome bureaucracy, arbitrary denials of permission and a refusal to open major access points to Gaza that would allow rapid flows of assistance.
According to Sinai’s regional governor, Mohamed Shusha, 7,000 trucks were waiting in Egypt to deliver aid to Gaza, but inspection procedures demanded by Israel had held up the flow of relief.
Israel denies the charges, with spokespeople saying there are no limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment into Gaza.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who visited Egypt’s border with Gaza on Saturday, said it’s time to “truly flood Gaza with lifesaving aid” and called the starvation inside the enclave a “moral outrage.”
Here are the latest images coming out of Gaza:
32,226 Palestinians killed - Gaza health ministry
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.
There have been 84 Palestinians killed and 106 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry statement added.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
Hamas-run media has said 19 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Saturday and several others wounded at the Kuwait roundabout while they waited for aid trucks, Reuters reports.
“We survived death, they shot at us, there are many martyrs, there are many injured, we almost died to get our children a bite to eat,” said Alaa al-Khoudary, a resident of Gaza City who had just returned from the roundabout carrying a bag of aid.
The Israeli military said the incident was being investigated, but “preliminary findings have determined that there was no aerial strike against the convoy, nor were there incidents found of IDF forces firing at the people at the aid convoy.”
“The IDF facilitated an aid convoy to deliver food to people in Northern Gaza. Upon its approach to the designated distribution point, the convoy was intercepted and looted by hundreds of Gazans, north of the humanitarian corridor,” the Israeli military statement said.
More than 100 Palestinians were killed at the end of last month after Israeli forces opened fire as desperately hungry people crowded around an aid convoy near Gaza City.
More on that soonest. In other developments:
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant will leave on Sunday for talks in the United States, the Israeli government said, amid growing tensions between the allies over the war in Gaza. Gallant will meet with US counterpart Lloyd Austin, US secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan “and additional senior officials”, a statement said.
UN secretary general António Guterres called for an immediate ceasefire and for Gaza to be flooded with aid, during a visit to the Rafah border crossing on Saturday as part of his annual Ramadan solidarity visit to the region. Stood near a long line of waiting trucks, Guterres declared it was time to “truly flood Gaza with life-saving aid,” calling the starvation inside Gaza a “moral outrage”.
Guterres said it was time for Israel to give an “ironclad commitment” for unfettered access to humanitarian goods throughout Gaza. Speaking during a visit to the Rafah border crossing, he also called for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza and said the UN would continue to work with Egypt to “streamline” the flow of aid into Gaza.
During his visit to the Rafah border crossing on Saturday, Guterres also said there was a clear international consensus that any ground assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population has taken refuge, would cause a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel said on Friday it would send its troops to fight Hamas in the nearby city of Rafah, even without US support.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa), said on Saturday “for the second time this week, a food convoy has been denied to northern Gaza” in a post on X. He wrote: “Today, the Israeli authorities denied another Unrwa convoy with much needed food supplies from going to the north where people are on the verge of famine. The last time Unrwa was able to send food aid to the north was nearly month ago.”
Five of the injured Palestinians at the Gaza Strip’s al-Shifa hospital, which is being besieged by Israeli forces, have died, Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement on Saturday. The medical facility is under siege for the sixth day in a row with no water, food nor health services, the ministry added.
Hamas expressed gratitude for the stances taken by Russia, China, and Algeria in vetoing the US draft resolution that failed to pass during the recent UN security council vote on Friday. In a statement published on its Telegram channel, Hamas criticised the resolution for its “misleading language that aligns with the interests of Israel,” allowing Israeli forces to “sustain their aggression” and providing cover and validation for the “extermination campaign” against Palestinians in Gaza.
A vote at the UN security council on a new text calling for an “immediate” ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war was postponed to Monday, diplomatic sources told AFP.
Israeli forces said on Saturday that more than 170 gunmen were killed during a prolonged operation at al-Shifa hospital. However, according to Hamas representatives, the deceased individuals identified in Israeli reports were not combatants but rather patients and displaced individuals. Hamas have accused Israel of war crimes.
At least 72 Palestinians were killed and 144 injured in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, said the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas. According to the statement, at least 32,142 Palestinians have been killed and 74,412 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October.
Nearly 600 relatives of 81 hostages have appealed to US president Joe Biden to urge Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to negotiate a deal for their release. In a letter sent to the US president, families expressed their disappointment with the Israeli government’s perceived lack of commitment to finalising the agreement.
“Never before have so many of Gaza’s children needed medical care,” said Unicef spokesperson, James Elder, in a video posted on social media, which showed him visiting Nasser hospital in Khan Younis and reflecting on the children he met the last time he was there. Local and UN health officials said fighting, fuel shortages and Israeli raids put Nasser hospital completely out of service in February.
Tens of thousands of people have taken part in a major pro-Palestinian demonstration in Dublin. Organisers called for an end to Israel’s action in Gaza and for the Irish government to “take action to hold Israel accountable”. The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) said it was the fifth such national mobilisation.
Hezbollah claimed to have targeted an Iron Dome battery on Saturday, situated close to the northern village of Kfar Blum, in the Hula Valley in Israel, using two drones loaded with explosives, the Times of Israel reported. The Israeli publication said local authorities had confirmed that the impact ignited a fire but that no casualties or damage resulted from the attack. The incident could not be independently verified.
Israel conducted an air raid on Baalbek, Hezbollah’s stronghold in eastern Lebanon on Saturday, two security sources in Lebanon told Reuters. Hezbollah said in statement on Sunday that in response to the “bombing of a place in the city of Baalbek” it targeted an Israeli missile and artillery base in Yoav and the Kaila barracks with more than 60 Katyusha rockets.
