We are now closing the live blog. Here is a summary of events today:
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, was due to arrive in the region on Sunday. He is expected to spend the week visiting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank, to discuss efforts to reach a deal to secure the freedom of at least 136 remaining hostages in Gaza, and a ceasefire intended to calm regional tensions particularly in the Red Sea. The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said humanitarian issues in Gaza would be a top priority for Blinken during the trip.
Separately, Jake Sullivan said there would be more steps in the American response to the Jordan drone attack that killed three soldiers last weekend. Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, he was quoted as saying: “We intend to take additional strikes, and additional action, to continue to send a clear message that the United States will respond when our forces are attacked, when our people are killed.” “What happened on Friday was the beginning, not the end, of our response, and there will be more steps – some seen, some perhaps unseen,” Sullivan told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I would not describe it as some open-ended military campaign,” he added.
Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the Wall Street Journal that the US president, Joe Biden, had not given Israel sufficient support to its war in Gaza. “Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel (to Gaza), which goes to Hamas,” Ben-Gvir told the newspaper in an article published on Sunday. “If (former US president Donald) Trump was in power, the US conduct would be completely different.”
France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné said he rejects the “forced displacement” of Palestinians into Egypt from the Gaza Strip, where Israeli bombardment has pushed hundreds of thousands against the border, AFP reports.
Israel’s army said on Sunday its forces had raided a Hamas training facility in Gaza where militants prepared for the 7 October attack on Israel. The facility in the Palestinian territory’s main southern city of Khan Younis contained models of Israeli military bases, armoured vehicles, as well as entry points to kibbutzim, the army said in a statement. Soldiers also raided the office of Mohammad Sinwar, a senior commander in Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, it added.
There has been reaction to the strikes launched by US and Britain late on Saturday. The two nations launched strikes against 36 Houthi targets in Yemen, hitting buried weapons storage facilities, missile systems, launchers and other capabilities the Houthis have used to attack Red Sea shipping, the Pentagon said. These attacks are “in clear contradiction with the repeated claims of Washington and London that they do not want the expansion of war and conflict in the region,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanani, said in a statement. Hamas warned the attacks would bring “further turmoil” to the Middle East. The Palestinian militant group called the bombing of Houthi rebel targets “a blatant assault on the sovereignty of a sister Arab country, and an escalation that will drag the region into further turmoil”. David Cameron, the UK’s foreign secretary, posted to X on Sunday morning that the Houthi attacks on international shipping “must stop”, saying “their reckless actions are putting innocent lives at risk”.
The head of Iraq’s pro-Iran Hashed al-Shaabi alliance demanded the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces from the country after deadly strikes, AFP reported. “They targeted administration offices, a (Hashed) hospital, they struck forces tasked with protecting the borders,” Faleh al-Fayyad said at a funeral ceremony for members of the group killed in the US strikes. “Targeting the Hashed al-Shaabi is playing with fire,” he warned. On Friday, US strikes in the west of Iraq struck positions staffed by pro-Iran groups, in response to an attack in January on a base in Jordan that killed three US soldiers.
A total of 27,365 Palestinians have been killed and 66,630 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said. An estimated 127 Palestinian people were killed and 178 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry added.
Updated
A 30-year-old Arab-Israeli woman married to a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip has recalled how she fled Israel’s bombardment of the territory with her 18-month-old and four-year-old children, terrified they would run out of fuel.
“We feared that the gas wouldn’t be enough,” she told AFP. “The road was deserted. All the way along, we saw devastated houses.”
Fatima, who was speaking under a pseudonym, left on the “very perilous” journey from al-Qarara in southern Gaza to the Rafah crossing with Egypt on 14 November.
She initially hesitated to leave her husband, but he encouraged her to go to protect their children.
After hours of waiting, a bus took them across the Sinai desert to the Egyptian town of Taba, before reaching Eilat, on Israel’s Red Sea coast.
The 48-hour trip was organised by the Israeli human rights organisations Gisha and HaMoked, which have evacuated 71 Arab Israelis so far.
She described a journey filled with anxiety and under bombardment. Once in Eilat, she and everyone else over the age of 16 spent hours being questioned and searched.
Fatima said she was interrogated about her relatives, the situation in the Gaza Strip and whether she knew anything about Hamas tunnels and headquarters in the territory.
“They questioned me about my view on 7 October, about my husband and his work,” she said. “They ordered me to open my phone to examine my photos, calls and messages.”
In Gaza, Fatima said she had endured “electricity cuts, water cuts and deserted businesses”.
She survived “36 days thanks to canned food and drinking salty water. The solar panels were barely enough to charge the phones.”
Fatima is now living in an Arab town in Israel, but said it was difficult starting a new life, with her children “scared by the sound of every plane or thunder”.
Updated
