Summary of the day so far
It’s 9.30pm in Tel Aviv, Gaza and Beirut. Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
Senior US officials have held talks in Israel aimed at brokering a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Two senior US envoys, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, met Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday to talk about a ceasefire proposal for Lebanon. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said negotiators made “good progress” toward a deal. “We’re hopeful that we will see things transition in Lebanon in a not too distant future,” US defense secretary Lloyd Austin said.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, who had expressed optimism of a speedy settlement “in hours or days” earlier on Thursday, said that Israel’s “ongoing escalation” in his country “does not inspire optimism”. Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister “made it clear that the main point is not this or that agreement on paper but Israel’s ability and determination to enforce the agreement and thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon, in a manner that will return our residents securely to their homes”.
Thursday marked a day when more civilians in both Israel and Lebanon were killed since October 2023. The Lebanese health ministry said that Israeli attacks had killed 45 people in the previous 24 hours, amid bombing in the north-east Bekaa valley and infantry battles in the south. In one Bekaa village, eight people were killed from the same family. In northern Israel, seven people were killed by rocket fire from Lebanon, including four Thai agricultural workers.
The Israeli army’s evacuation call for several areas of south Lebanon on Thursday included a Palestinian refugee camp. Among the areas listed was Rashidieh camp, which houses thousands of Palestinian refugees. Israel issued its second evacuation order for the city of Baalbek and two surrounding villages in the Bekaa valley on Thursday afternoon, carrying out a series of airstrikes on the village of Durous a few hours later. The evacuation orders had prompted a mass exodus of residents from the city, which is home to a Unesco world heritage site.
Israeli attacks killed at least one child in Lebanon each day and injured 10 others, the UN children’s agency (Unicef) said. Citing the Lebanese health ministry, Unicef said 166 children have been killed since October 2023, while at least 1,168 have been injured. It awrned that the war in Lebanon is “inflicting severe physical wounds and deep emotional scars” on many of the country’s children. Six Lebanese health workers were killed and four wounded in Israeli strikes across south Lebanon on Thursday, the health ministry said in a statement.
Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 43,204 Palestinians and injured 101,641 since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday. The toll includes 41 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry.
Palestinian authorities said three people had been killed in an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday. The Israeli army said it was targeting militants in the Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank city of Tulkarem, and had killed a Hamas militant who was involved in planning attacks.
Israeli strikes killed five civilians on Syria’s Qusayr region near the border with Lebanon, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Britain-based war monitor said the strikes targeted Qusayr, a town where Hezbollah operate. One strike targeted “a weapons depot and a fuel storage facility for Hezbollah in the industrial city of Qusayr”, killing five civilians, the Observatory said.
A senior Hamas official said the group rejects any proposal for a temporary halt to more than a year of fighting in Gaza and insists on a lasting ceasefire. Mediators seeking to broker a Gaza ceasefire are expected to propose a truce of “less than a month” to Hamas, a source with knowledge of the talks told AFP on Wednesday.
The UN should consider suspending Israel as a member state due to its continuing “genocide” against the Palestinians, the divisive special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, has said. The comments on Thursday came a day after she published her latest report alleging that Israel was not just committing war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza, but a genocide.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres warned Israel could carry out the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza if the international community does not make a determined stand to prevent it. “The intention might be for the Palestinians to leave Gaza, for others to occupy it,” Guterres told the Guardian. “But there has been – and I pay tribute to the courage and the resilience of the Palestinian people and to the determination of the Arab world – [an effort] to avoid the ethnic cleansing becoming a reality.”
A Palestinian student who was stripped of her UK student visa after remarks she made about the Israel-Gaza war has won a human rights appeal against the Home Office’s decision.
Israeli intelligence suggests that Iran is preparing to attack Israel from Iraqi territory in the coming days, according to an Axios report.
The attack may take place before the US presidential election on 5 November, the outlet said, citing two Israeli sources.
The attack is expected to be carried out from Iraq using a large number of drones and ballistic missiles, the sources said.
