Closing summary
It is 6pm in Gaza, Tel Aviv and Beirut. We will be closing this blog soon, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Israel-Gaza war coverage here and on the Middle East here.
Here is a recap of the latest developments:
The death toll from Friday’s Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has climbed to 37, the Lebanese health ministry said on Saturday. The number includes three children and seven women. Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad told reporters on Saturday that 68 people were also injured of whom 15 remain in hospital. Hezbollah-aligned transport minister Ali Hamieh told reporters at the scene of Friday’s strike that at least 23 people were still missing.
Hezbollah said overnight that those killed on Friday, in the deadliest strike in a year of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, included 16 of its members, and that senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another top commander, Ahmed Wahbi, were among the dead.
The Israeli army, in posts on X, said Friday’s strike in Beirut hit an underground gathering of Aqil and senior commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, and had “almost completely dismantled” Hezbollah’s military chain of command.
Heavy cross-border strikes continued on Saturday, with Israeli warplanes carrying some of its heaviest bombardment in 11 months of fighting across Lebanon’s south and Hezbollah claiming rocket attacks on military targets in Israel’s north. Hezbollah said it fired rockets at two military positions in northern Israel on Saturday, as the Israeli military said it was carrying out new strikes against Hezbollah targets. In separate statements, the Iran-backed group said it fired “a salvo of Katyusha rockets” each at two Israeli barracks “in response” to Israeli attacks “on steadfast southern villages and civilian houses”.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Saturday said he was worried about escalation between Israel and Lebanon. Sullivan, speaking with reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, said he still sees a path to a ceasefire in Gaza but that the US is “not at a point right now where we’re prepared to put something on the table”.
Cyprus’s president called for restraint over escalating tensions in the Middle East in separate telephone conversations with the Lebanese and Israeli prime ministers on Saturday, his spokesperson Konstantinos Letymbiotis said in a statement. Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides “expressed his strong concern” at the escalation of tension in the region said Letymbiotis.
Attacks on Lebanon this week showed that the Israeli government planned to spread the war to the region, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Saturday, calling on western countries to take “deterrent steps” against Israel’s actions. Erdoğan told a press conference on Saturday that Israel’s war in Gaza will top the agenda of his speech at the UN general assembly on Tuesday. “It is time for all countries with the mission of protecting world peace to come up with solutions that will stop Israel,” Erdoğan said.
Erdoğan also said he was prepared to meet with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, with whom Turkey severed relations in 2011, throwing its support behind rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. Erdoğan said he was waiting for a response from Damascus in order to proceed with normalising ties.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Israel is committing “shameless crimes” against children, not combatants. Khamenei said Israel was not even hiding its different forms of “shameless crimes” in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. It is not combating “fighting men, but ordinary people,” Khamenei told a group of envoys from Muslim countries in Tehran in remarks broadcast on state TV.
Also on Saturday, in a show of strength, Iran unveiled its “jihad” single-stage liquid-fuel ballistic missile with a high-explosive detachable warhead and a range of 1,000 km, according to state TV. The missiles were displayed, along with other military hardware, during a parade marking the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 war with Iraq.
The dead from an Israeli strike on Saturday on a school turned shelter in the Palestinian territory’s largest city included “13 children and six women”, one of whom was pregnant, said civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal. The Gaza health ministry said at least 22 had died as a result of the strike. Israel’s military said in a statement that the air force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control centre in Gaza City”. It said the target was “embedded inside” the Al Falah school, which is adjacent to the Al-Zaytoun school building which was hit.
At least 41,391 Palestinians have been killed and 95,760 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday. Gaza’s ministry of health does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, postponed his trip to the US by a day due to the security situation in the country’s north. Netanyahu was due to travel to New York on 24 September, during which he is expected to address the annual UN general assembly. He issued a short statement after the Beirut airstrike, saying: “Our goals are clear, and our actions speak for themselves.”
The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, denounced the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon, saying that they violated international law and could constitute a war crime. The UN’s political affairs chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, warned that if violence continues between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, then “we risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far”.
Israeli soldiers have been filmed pushing three apparently lifeless bodies from a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday. The incident took place in the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out large-scale raids since late August that the Palestinian health ministry says have killed dozens of people. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”
In the UK, several thousand people gathered in Liverpool city centre on Saturday to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for the government to cease arms trading with Israel. Sky News reported that protesters carrying Palestinian flags and banners planned to march through the city centre towards the docks where the Labour party’s political conference will begin on Sunday. Organisers claimed it was the first ever national march for Palestine to take place outside London.
Here are some of the latest images that have been shared on the newswires today:
