Closing summary
It’s almost 4.30am in Gaza City and Tel Aviv and 5.30am in Sanaa, Yemen, and we’re about to shut this blog. Our live coverage of the Middle East crisis will resume later in the day. Here’s a summary of the latest developments. Thanks for reading.
The US has carried out a fifth strike against Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, even as Joe Biden acknowledged that bombing the rebels has yet to stop their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Late on Thursday US warplanes targeted anti-ship missiles that “were aimed into the southern Red Sea and prepared to launch”, according to US Central Command. The US president told reporters: “When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
Also on Thursday night, Houthis fired missiles at a US-owned tanker ship in the Gulf of Aden. The White House and the Houthis gave differing accounts of the launches at the Chem Ranger, with the rebels saying their naval forces had attacked “with several appropriate naval missiles, resulting in direct hits”. However, US Central Command said the Houthis launched two anti-ship ballistic missiles and that they hit the water near the ship, causing no damage or injuries. It said it was the third Houthi strike on a commercial shipping vessel in three days.
A total of 24,620 Palestinians have been killed and 61,830 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, according to the latest figures by the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry on Thursday. The figures include 172 killed and 326 injured in the past 24 hours. At least 16 people were reported killed by an Israeli airstrike on a house in Rafah, southern Gaza.
A new wave of violence has swept the West Bank, with a series of major raids launched by the Israeli military across much of the occupied territory. Israeli forces remained in Tulkarm, in the West Bank’s north, for a second day on Thursday after launching a raid on a refugee camp there. Eight people were killed on Thursday, the Israeli military said.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told the Biden White House that he rejects any moves to establish a Palestinian state when Israel ends its offensive against Gaza, and that all territory west of the Jordan River would be under Israeli security control. His public statement on Thursday represented his sharpest rebuttal of US foreign policy. The White House responded by saying the US would continue working towards a two-state solution and that there could be no Israeli reoccupation of Gaza when the war concluded.
Pakistan has launched retaliatory strikes against militants in Iran in response to attacks by Tehran that targeted sites within Pakistan’s borders, heightening fears of further instability across the Middle East and surrounding region. Ten people from one family were killed in the attacks, including six children, reportedly all “non Iranian nationals”.
Children in Gaza are suffering from “horrific conditions” and the Palestinian territory remains the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, the deputy chief of the UN children’s agency says. Ted Chaiban said at the end of a three-day visit to Gaza that since his last visit two months ago “the situation has gone from catastrophe to near collapse”. If the staggering decline in conditions persisted, “we could see deaths due to indiscriminate conflict compounded by deaths due to disease and hunger”, the Unicef deputy executive director said.
There was no word on Thursday on whether medicines that entered Gaza as part of a deal brokered by France and Qatar had been distributed to dozens of hostages with chronic illnesses who are being held by Hamas. Qatar confirmed late on Wednesday that the medicine had entered Gaza, but it was not yet clear if it had been distributed to the hostages, who are being held in secret locations.
The EU is set to adopt sanctions against Hamas on Monday that will “target individuals and ban money transfers”, according to the French foreign ministry. EU foreign ministers were also expected to discuss possible measures against violent Israeli settlers, a ministry spokesperson said. Meanwhile, the European parliament has voted to call for a “permanent ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip, but on condition that all Israeli hostages held in the territory are released and Hamas dismantled. The resolution on Thursday, which is non-binding, stopped short of calling for an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza.
Mexico and Chile have asked the international criminal court (ICC) to investigate possible crimes against civilians in Gaza. In a statement, Mexico’s foreign ministry said the action “is due to growing worry over the latest escalation of violence, particularly against civilian targets.” Any proceedings by the ICC would be separate from South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide at the UN’s international court of justice.
An airstrike on southern Syria early on Thursday killed at least nine people and was probably carried out by Jordan’s air force, Syrian opposition activists said, after the latest in a series of strikes in an area where cross-border drug smugglers have been active. There was no immediate confirmation from Jordan on the strike that hit the province of Sweida, and there was some confusion over the number of people killed.
Israel has joined a notorious band of authoritarian states with a history of imprisoning journalists by detaining Palestinian reporters without trial since the beginning of the latest war in Gaza. A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists released on Thursday said that for the first time, Israel figures in its list of “worst jailers of journalists”, putting it on a par with Iran.
Updated
Gaza situation goes from 'catastrophe to near collapse', says Unicef
Children in Gaza are suffering from “horrific conditions” and the Palestinian territory remains the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, the deputy chief of the UN children’s agency says.
Ted Chaiban said at the end of a three-day visit to Gaza on Thursday that since his last visit two months ago “the situation has gone from catastrophe to near collapse”.
If the staggering decline in conditions persists, “we could see deaths due to indiscriminate conflict compounded by deaths due to disease and hunger”, the Unicef deputy executive director said in a statement, Associated Press reports.
Chaiban said he met an 11-year-old girl named Sama on Tuesday at al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. She was skipping with friends when shrapnel from a bombing pierced her abdomen, leading to the loss of her spleen. Now, he said, her immune system was compromised “in a war zone full of disease and infection”.
Ten minutes later, he said, he met 13-year-old Ibrahim who had been in a shelter in a designated safe area when everything collapsed. His badly damaged hand went untreated, became gangrenous, and his arm had to be amputated.
Chaiban said:
A matter of hours after we left, many families fled al-Nasser hospital, as fighting closed in on the area.
The “war on children” must stop, he said, pointing to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that nearly 25,000 people have been killed since 7 October, with up to 70% of them reportedly women and children.
Updated
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