Closing summary
It’s 4.20 in Gaza City and Tel Aviv and we’re about to close this blog. Our live coverage of the Middle East crisis will resume later in the day. Here’s a rundown on the latest key developments. Thanks for reading.
The US president, Joe Biden, has said the creation of an independent state for Palestinians is not impossible while Benjamin Netanyahu is still in office, following a call with the Israeli prime minister on Friday. The US president said he spoke with Netanyahu about possible solutions for the creation of such a state, noting that not all countries have their own militaries. Biden said Netanyahu was not opposed to all two-state solutions, and there were a number of types possible.
The US central command said its forces conducted strikes against three Houthi anti-ship missiles that were aimed into the Southern Red Sea and were prepared to launch. The US has been launching strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, and this week returned the Iran-backed Yemen-based group to a list of “terrorist” groups. The Houthis said earlier today that they do not intend to expand their attacks on shipping in and around the Red Sea, beyond their stated aims of blockading Israel and retaliating against the US and Britain for airstrikes.
As Israeli forces have moved further into southern Gaza, airstrikes and close-combat fighting are approaching areas crowded with more than a million people seeking refuge from the destruction across the rest of the territory. The prospect of major operations taking place in territory with such a dense and vulnerable population is “deeply concerning”, say aid officials, who fear Gaza’s largest remaining hospital may have to be closed or evacuated.
Gaza’s main internet provider, Paltel, has announced that communication services across the Palestinian territory are gradually returning after a nearly eight-day outage, the longest blackout since the war began. In a statement, Paltel said two of its technical team members lost their lives as a result of “direct shelling” during recent repair operations, bringing the total number of its employees killed to 14 since the start of the conflict.
A senior minister in the Israeli war cabinet has said that only a ceasefire deal can win the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, and that Israel is unlikely to achieve its aim of “total victory” over the militant Islamist group. Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, launched a blistering attack on Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the campaign against Hamas and failure to take responsibility for the failures that led to the Palestinian militant group’s bloody attack on Israel in October.
Health services in Gaza are “decimated”, with medical staff exhausted after three months of war forced to extract shrapnel without adequate pain relief, conduct amputations without anaesthetics and watch children die of cancers due to a lack of facilities and medicine.
Pakistan’s political and military leaders have moved to de-escalate tensions with Iran, after trading deadly airstrikes on militant targets in each other’s territory this week. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Jalil Abbas Jilani, spoke to his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, by phone where they agreed “close coordination on counter-terrorism and other aspects of mutual concern should be strengthened”, according to a readout by Islamabad’s foreign ministry.
Hezbollah’s number two leader has warned Israel against expanding the conflict along the Lebanon-Israel border, where there have been near daily exchanges of cross-border fire between the Israeli army and the Iran-backed militant group. Naim Qassem said in a statement on Friday: “If Israel decides to expand its aggression, it will receive a real slap in the face in response.” Any restoration of stability on the border was contingent on “the end of the aggression in Gaza”, he added.
Leading progressive and Jewish members of Congress have criticised the US’s “unconditional support” for Israel after Benjamin Netanyahu declared bluntly that he was opposed to a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza and directly rejected American policy. Meanwhile, 60 of President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats have signed a letter urging his administration to reaffirm that the US strongly opposes “the forced and permanent displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza.
The White House has said it was “seriously concerned” about reports that a Palestinian-American teenager had been killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank. US-born 17-year-old Tawfiq Ajaq was killed by Israeli security forces in Al-Mazraa Al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah, according to reports.
Palestinian detainees in Gaza described being “beaten, humiliated, subjected to ill-treatment, and to what may amount to torture” said the spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights, Ravina Shamdasani. Shamdasani said what detainees told her was consistent with reports her office has been gathering of the detention of Palestinians on a broad scale.
The European Union has added six individuals to an asset freeze and visa ban blacklist for financing Hamas. The new EU sanctions framework targets “any individual or entity who supports, facilitates or enables violent actions by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad”, a statement said.
EU foreign ministers will hold a series of meetings on Monday with counterparts from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and key Arab nations about the war in Gaza and prospects for a future peace settlement. The Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, and his Palestinian counterpart, Riyad al-Maliki, are not expected to meet each other.
Swiss prosecutors have confirmed that Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, is the subject of “criminal complaints” filed during his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos. A statement allegedly issued by the people behind the complaint said the plaintiffs were seeking a criminal prosecution in parallel to a case brought before the UN’s international court of justice (ICJ) by South Africa, which accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has accused the Israeli government of financing Hamas in an effort to weaken the Palestinian Authority. Benjamin Netanyahu has denied accusations by his opponents in Israel and some global media who have accused his government of spending years actively boosting Hamas, including by allowing Qatari financing of Gaza.
Updated
Here’s more on the White House saying Israel will allow shipments of flour for Palestinians through the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza.
The move comes after the US president, Joe Biden, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke for the first time in nearly a month and follows the UN calling on Israel to allow access to the port for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid for besieged Gaza, Agence France-Presse reports.
Biden welcomed the Israeli decision on the port, the White House said, adding that US teams would “separately work on options for more direct maritime delivery of assistance into Gaza”.
Three UN agencies – the World Food Programme (WFP), Unicef and the World Health Organisation – pushed for the opening of Ashdod in a joint statement on Monday.
The use of Ashdod, about 40km (25 miles) north of the Gaza border, was “critically needed by aid agencies”, they said, while calling for a “fundamental step change in the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza”.
The Israel-Hamas war has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe for Gaza’s 2.4 million people, who are struggling to get food, water, fuel and medical care.
Opening the Ashdod port would reduce the time it took to transport food from the north to Palestinians in Gaza, WFP’s regional director for the Middle East, Corinne Fleischer, said this month.
