Middle East crisis live: US concerned by ‘horrifying’ Israeli airstrike in Gaza that has killed many women and children

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The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has sent a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu protesting new Israeli legislation banning the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), his spokesperson said.

Guterres outlined in his letter “the issues of international law that have been raised by this law,” they said, adding that it would have a “devastating impact on the humanitarian situation of Palestinians in the occupied territory” if implemented.

CNN has apologised to its viewers after a panellist on its NewsNight programme made derogatory remarks implying that a fellow guest on the show, the broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, was a terrorist.

Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative commentator, told Hasan, a Guardian US columnist and former host on MSNBC, who is Muslim, that he hoped his “beeper doesn’t go off”, in an apparent reference to Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon with exploding pagers last month. The wave of coordinated explosions killed 12 and injured thousands.

“Did your guest just say I should be killed on live TV?” Hasan asked the show’s anchor, Abby Phillip.

After a commercial break, Phillip issued an on-air apology to Hasan and viewers and said Girdusky had been removed from the show.

In a statement, CNN said there was “zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air” and that Girdusky “will not be welcomed back at our network”. Hasan retweeted the statement on X.

Austria’s chancellor Karl Nehammer condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the “very serious” rocket attack on UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, which led to eight injured Austrian soldiers on Tuesday.

Posting to X, Nehammer said his thoughts were with the injured soldiers, adding that their efforts are “essential for international stability, in crisis hotspots.”

His foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, said he was “outraged” by the attack, adding that:

Attacks on UN peacekeepers are a grave violation of international law and totally unacceptable.

The Israeli military has said that Hezbollah was responsible for a rocket attack on a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (Unifil) on Tuesday, which resulted in eight wounded Austrian soldiers.

According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the rocket was launched “from the Hallousiyyeh El Faouqa area which hit the Unifil headquarters” in Naqoura, southern Lebanon.

Number of people killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon rises to 2,792, says health ministry

Lebanon’s health ministry has issued an updated death toll from Israeli attacks in the country to 2,792, with 12,772 additional people wounded.

In the last 24 hours, 82 people were killed, and 180 others wounded, the report added.

The number of people killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon has risen to 2,787, with 12,772 additional people wounded since October 2023, according to the latest figures from Lebanon’s health ministry on Tuesday.

In the last 24 hours, 77 people were killed and 180 others were wounded, it said.

Separately, the ministry said at least five people were killed and another 33 injured on Tuesday in an Israeli strike on a town near the main southern city of Sidon.

Rescuers were still looking for survivors under the rubble, it added.

Tuesday’s strike was the second deadly attack on Sidon since Sunday, after nine people were killed and 38 others wounded in an Israeli strike on the town, the ministry said.

Here’s more from Matthew Miller, the US state department spokesperson, during his briefing with reporters.

Washington is “deeply troubled” by legislation passed by Israel yesterday banning the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Miller said.

The Knesset vote on Monday came after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, warned Israel in a letter that the US could withhold weapons transfers if Israel did not take immediate action to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Blinken “made clear that we were opposed to the passage of this legislation, and he made clear that there could be legal and policy implications to the implementation of that legislation”, Miller said.

The US state department spokesperson said that Washington will engage with the Israeli government “in the days ahead about how they plan to implement” the ban.

Miller noted that the legislation “poses risks for millions of Palestinians who rely on Unrwa”, specifically those in Gaza.

The UN agency undertakes a role that “cannot be filled by anyone else”, he added.

Here are some of the latest images sent from the newswires from the Gaza Strip.

As we reported earlier, the latest figures from the Palestinian territory’s health ministry on Tuesday show at least 43,061 Palestinian people have been killed and 101,223 injured in Israeli airstrikes since last October.

The latest death toll does not include the dozens of people killed in an Israeli airstrike on a crowded block of flats in Beit Lahiya earlier today.

Israel’s recent offensive in northern Gaza has killed more than 700 people in a little over three weeks, with nearly 300 of those people, mainly in the north, being killed in the past nine days alone.

US says it is concerned by 'horrifying incident' where 'two dozen children killed' in Israeli strike in north Gaza residential block

The US is “deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life” in an Israeli strike on a residential building in northern Gaza that killed at least 93 people, including a large number of children, a US state department spokesperson has said.

As we reported earlier, at least 93 Palestinians were killed or missing and dozens wounded in the attack on a building in Beit Lahiya on Tuesday, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Among the dead were at least 20 children, medics said.

Al Jazeera is reporting that 109 people were killed by the Israeli strike on the five-story building housing displaced families.

US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters:

We are deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life in this incident. This was a horrifying incident with a horrifying result.

He said he could not speak to the total death toll, but noted:

There are reports of two dozen children killed in this incident. No doubt a number of them are children who have been fleeing the effects of this war for more than a year now.

US officials have reached out to Israel’s government “to ask what happened here”, he added.

Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins, has called on EU and UN member states to make clear their support for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), urging that it is “time to stop this horror of history” after Israel’s parliament banned the agency from operating in Israeli-controlled lands.

More than 100,000 people in northern Gaza, mostly women and children, are effectively “trapped with no safe place to go to”, Higgins said in a statement on Tuesday:

Given the circumstances of people starving to death, the placing under attack of the United Nations agency that is responsible for keeping them alive constitutes an appalling failure of diplomacy and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. It is time to stop this horror of history. Palestine and Israel will ultimately have to live together in spaces adjacent to each other.

Irish taoiseach Simon Harris, also on Tuesday, said Europe needed to find the “moral courage” to act on this issue. He said:

More people will die, more children will starve, there is no alternative to Unrwa … The actions we have seen in the Knesset really are absolutely shameful.

Israel warns Iran not to retaliate against airstrikes last week

Israel’s military chief warned Iran on Tuesday to refrain from retaliating against its airstrikes last week.

“If Iran makes the mistake of launching another missile barrage at Israel, we will once again know how to reach Iran, with capabilities that we did not even use this time,” Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff, told air and ground crews last Saturday.

Summary of the day so far

An Israeli attack on a residential building sheltering displaced civilians in northern Gaza’s town of Beit Lahiya is reported to have killed 93 people, including 20 children, according to medics. Dozens of people are reported missing and 150 others are estimated to be injured. The Israeli military is yet to comment on the deadly airstrike. Nearby Kamal Adwan hospital is struggling to treat people injured in the attack as it reportedly has run out of medical supplies and only has two paediatric doctors, with no surgeons.

The attack came a day after Israel’s parliament passed a law to ban the UN Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from operating inside the country, alarming many of Israel’s allies who fear it will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. The Turkish foreign ministry said earlier today that the move aimed to disrupt efforts to reach a two-state solution. Jordan’s foreign ministry said Monday’s vote was “part of the systematic targeting” of Unrwa and a “continuation of Israel’s frantic efforts to assassinate the UN agency politically, in addition to its aggressive war on the Palestinian people”.

Hezbollah said it had chosen Naim Qassem, deputy secretary general, to succeed Hassan Nasrallah as leader of the Lebanese militant group after Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on south Beirut last month.

Lebanese state media reported that Israeli tanks have rolled into the outskirts of the village of Khiam, in what is thought to be their deepest incursion yet into south Lebanon in the ground assault launched last month.

Famine is imminent in Gaza, says a report. Gaza is facing crisis levels of food insecurity or worse, according to the new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report released on Tuesday. “People in Gaza are starving to death right now. The speed at which this manmade hunger and malnutrition crisis has ripped through Gaza is terrifying,” said World Food Programme (WFP) executive director Cindy McCain.

Banning Unrwa is an act of genocide, says UK Green party co-leader Carla Denyer. Responding to the ban by the Israeli government, Denyer said: “Gaza is experiencing a severe, ongoing humanitarian crisis. Banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population, is an act of genocide.”

Unifil, the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, has warned Hezbollah that any deliberate attack on them “is a grave violation of international humanitarian law”, after a rocket hit its headquarters in Naqoura earlier on Tuesday.

The director of Unrwa in Gaza says it will be “impossible” to operate if Israel goes ahead with a ban on the agency.

Sam Rose, Unrwa’s Gaza deputy director, told the BBC: “There are hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in buildings under the safety of a UN flag and if that protective status of the buildings is taken away then of course we can’t in any way pretend to guarantee that safety.”

“We’re not just distributing aid or providing water – we’re running a health system, we’re running an education system,” he said.

“Other UN agencies work on policy, they work on normative issues, they provide support to member states or government. They are not in the business of running health services, or education services.”

Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s envoy to the UN, demands the Security Council protects civilians from Israel’s attacks.

“Israel has crossed every red line, broken every rule, defied every prohibition. When is enough really enough? When are you going to act? You are the Security Council. You have to reach every single one who is in pain among the Palestinians. That is your duty,” the envoy said at a council meeting.

Mansour says people in Gaza have been “enduring unspeakable pain,” and called on the council to stop “this genocide or forever remain silent”.

Israel’s recent offensive in northern Gaza has killed more than 700 people in a little over three weeks, with nearly 300 of those deaths, mainly in the north, occurring in the past nine days alone. While it has attempted to justify its renewed focus on the north by claiming it is targeting regrouped Hamas fighters, the intensity of the fighting has caused heavy losses among the 100,000 civilians still living there. Many of them are families who, exhausted by Israel’s multiple forced displacement orders, have chosen to stay in the north…

The UK’s Middle East minister says the vote in Israel’s parliament on Unrwa “clearly jeopardises the entire international humanitarian response in Gaza”.

Speaking to the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme, Hamish Falconer says the UK would “press on the Israelis to change the approach” and “do everything we can both publicly and privately”.

Falconer says the UK does not “accept the premise that Unrwa is broken and needs to be replaced”.

Hezbollah appoints Naim Qassem as its new leader

Qassem replaces the late Hassan Nasrallah as secretary-general of the Lebanese militant group.

An Israeli strike killed Nasrallah in Beirut in late September.

In a statement, Hezbollah said Qassem was elected to take up the position due to his “adherence to the principles and goals of Hezbollah”.

It added that the group would “[ask] God Almighty to guide him in this noble mission in leading Hezbollah and its Islamic resistance”.