Middle East crisis live: Damascus strike – four Iranian Revolutionary Guards confirmed dead | Israel-Gaza war

An Israeli strike on southern Lebanon on Saturday killed two members of the Palestinian militant group Hamas as they were traveling in a car, three security sources in Lebanon told Reuters.

Israel has been carrying out airstrikes on southern Lebanon against Palestinian militant groups based there as well as their Lebanese ally Hezbollah, a powerful armed group, which have fired rockets across the border at Israel.

The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, has described Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state when the war in the Middle East ends as “unacceptable”.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he echoed Keir Starmer’s reaction to Netanyahu’s stance. Lammy said: “We are committed to the recognition of a Palestinian state. We want to work with international partners to achieve that.”

He said the US president, Joe Biden, was right to have committed to working towards helping the Palestinians move towards statehood.

At least 22 Palestinians, including a woman and children, were arrested overnight in occupied West Bank by Israeli forces, Al Jazeera reports citing information from the Palestinian Prisoners Club. This brings the total number of arrested Palestinians since 7 October to at least 6,115.

The Palestinian Prisoners Club, which represents former and current prisoners, said the arrests were carried out in Hebron, Nablus, Tubas, Bethlehem, Jenin and Jerusalem and “were accompanied by widespread raids and abuse, in addition to widespread sabotage and destruction of citizens’ homes, the destruction of infrastructure, and the confiscation of money and vehicles”.

Dozens of protesters gathered outside the residence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Friday night, calling for the immediate release of all hostages kidnapped during the Hamas attack on 7 October, reports Israel’s left-leaning daily newspaper, Haaretz.

Protesters stood or sat in silence, while several held up pictures of relatives held in Gaza. According to Haaretz, police let the protesters approach within 100 metres of Netanyahu’s house, up to the security booth at the entrance.

Iran has confirmed that four members of its Revolutionary Guards have been killed in Saturday’s missile strike on Damascus. Several members of Syrian armed forces were also killed, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said in a statement, reported by Al Jazeera:

Once more the criminal Zionist regime has moved to violate the city of Damascus, the Syrian capital, and during an airstrike by the fighter jets of the invading and occupying regime a number of Syrian forces and four military advisers of the Islamic Republic of Iran were martyred.”

Al Jazeera added that Iranian state television had called it a “terrorist” attack by Israel. The news organisation also reports that one of the IRGC killed was believed to be the head of the intelligence department of the Quds force, the most elite unit of the IRGC.

The Iranian state-owned news network, Press TV, published footage that it said showed the “extensive devastation” caused by the strike in the Mazzah neighbourhood on Saturday:

A likely Israeli strike on Damascus killed five people in a building where “Iran-aligned leaders” were meeting on Saturday, a war monitor said, according to a report from the international news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“An Israeli missile strike targeted a four-storey building, killing five people … and destroying the whole building where Iran-aligned leaders were meeting,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

The British-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria said the targeted Mazzah neighbourhood is known to be a high-security zone home to leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards and pro-Iran Palestinian factions. The area is also home to the UN’s headquarters, embassies and restaurants.

“They were for sure targeting senior members,” of those groups, said Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of SOHR.

The mid-morning strike on Saturday, which caused a large plume of smoke to billow into the sky, was also reported by Syrian state media.

“An attack targeted a residential building in the Mazzeh neighbourhood in Damascus, resulting from an Israeli aggression,” the Syrian state news agency Sana reported. It did not say if there were any casualties.

An AFP correspondent at the scene said the destroyed building was cordoned off with ambulances, firefighters and Syrian Arab Red Crescent rescue teams all present at the site. Civil defence were busy searching for survivors under the rubble of the totally collapsed building, he added.

“I heard the explosion clearly in the western Mazzeh area, and I saw a large cloud of smoke,” a resident told AFP. “The sound was similar to a missile explosion and minutes later I heard the sound of ambulances.”

In December, an Israeli airstrike killed Razi Moussavi, a high-ranking Iranian general.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes targeting Syria, reports AFP, but it has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, which backs the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government, to expand its presence there.

The latest figures from the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said 165 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes and 280 injured in the past 24 hours.

Reuters reported that a total of 24,927 Palestinians had been killed and 62,388 had been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October.

The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

We have another update from Reuters on the breaking news that a likely Israeli attack had targeted a residential building in Damascus on Saturday.

A source in the regional pro-Syria alliance told Reuters that the strike had killed a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and wounded others.

The source said the multi storey building was used by Iranian advisers supporting Syria’s government and that it was entirely flattened. Citing Syrian state media, Reuters report it taking place in the Mazzeh neighbourhood. Other local media in Syria reported explosions heard across the capital.

Al Jazeera reports that at least 18 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli bombings since dawn. The information has come in via its journalists in the area – Al Jazeera is one of the few news organisations with a functioning bureau in Gaza.

The news organisation said two Palestinians were killed and several others injured in an Israeli bombing on al-Amal neighbourhood in the city of Khan Younis, bringing the number of victims of shelling on several areas in the city since dawn on Friday to 18 dead and dozens wounded.

An Al Jazeera correspondent reported that the vicinity of al-Shifa hospital, including residential complexes where a large number of civilians live, was subjected to Israeli air and artillery bombardment. They added that a number of the injured have not yet been recovered from the scene.

Al Jazeera also reported that Israeli forces blew up a residential square in the al-Balad area in the centre of Khan Younis city and that houses and facilities were also blown up in the Bani Suheila area in the east of the city. The news organisation cited footage that showed smoke rising from those areas as a result of the bombings carried out by the Israeli occupying forces.

Jason Burke

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 because of a lack of facilities and medicine.

Dozens of interviews with doctors and medical administrators in Gaza reveal a catastrophic and deteriorating situation as health services struggle to cope with tens of thousands of casualties of the continuing Israeli offensive in the territory and the effects of the acute humanitarian crisis.

Attention has focused on the direct casualties of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, but medical specialists are increasingly concerned about indirect victims of the war.

Tens of thousands in Gaza with chronic life-threatening illnesses have gone without treatment for months, and are now “without defences”, their bodies’ weakened by malnutrition, cold and fatigue, doctors say. In one incident described to the Guardian, a child with a brain condition died hours before a UN team arrived with vital medicine.

Cancer specialists said they had been unable to treat patients in desperate need, including children with leukaemia or tumours requiring immediate life-saving surgery.

Dr Subhi Sukeyk, the director general of oncology for Gaza, said:

We have nothing to give them. We cannot operate and we have no drugs at all.

Of the 36 hospitals in Gaza only 15 remain open, and only three are undamaged.

See the full story here:

Patrick Wintour

On Thursday morning the Iranian news website Entekhab ran, without irony, the headline: “Taliban call on Pakistan and Iran to show restraint and urge both sides to settle differences through diplomatic means”.

If proof were needed that a new, more dangerous world order may be upon us, the Taliban cast in the role of advocates for restraint seems conclusive.

Each day this week evidence mounted that the long-feared moment of escalation born out of the destabilising war in Gaza had arrived. The scenes in Gaza were too raw, and the geopolitical consequences for the conflict too vast, to remain confined within its borders.

Last weekend, four waves of US missile strikes, some involving the UK, hit the ports and inland strongholds of the Houthis in Yemen. On Monday, Iran fired 24 missiles at an alleged Israeli spy centre in Erbil, in Kurdish northern Iraq, and at the same time struck Islamic State sites in Idlib, northern Syria. By Tuesday, Iran had broken new ground by striking Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni separatist group operating in Pakistan close to Iran’s border.

Within 48 hours Pakistani forces said they “successfully struck hideouts used by terrorist organisations, namely Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front in Iran itself”.

All the while, Hezbollah and Israel exchanged now familiar rocket fire on the southern Lebanese border, so much so that the Israeli chief of staff admitted the possibility of all-out war was increasing.

For all of this analysis on pockets of war multiplying across the region and increasing the risk of the conflict becoming more intractable, see here:

Israel continued its strikes in the south of the Gaza Strip on Saturday after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US president, Joe Biden, discussed their differences over a post-war future for Palestinians which have suggested a rift between the two allies.

Agence France-Presse reports that witnesses said the Israeli bombardment was again focused overnight on Khan Younis, the largest city in Hamas-controlled Gaza’s south, although Palestinian media also reported intense fire around Jabalia in the north early on Saturday.

Biden and Netanyahu held their first call since 23 December, a day after the Israeli leader reiterated his rejection of any form of Palestinian sovereignty, deepening divisions with Israel’s key backer over the war.

While the two leaders spoke of what might come next, the reality of the war was all too clear in Khan Younis and elsewhere in the Hamas-controlled territory. A child with a bloodied face cried on a gurney at al-Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, while ambulances carrying the wounded and the dead arrived to the sound of automatic weapons in the distance.

However, Biden said after Friday’s call with Netanyahu that it was possible the Israeli leader might still come around, telling reporters:

There are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the UN that … don’t have their own militaries. And so, I think there’s ways in which this could work.

Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River”, which “contradicts the idea of (Palestinian) sovereignty”.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had said in Davos a day earlier that Israel could not achieve “genuine security” without a “pathway to a Palestinian state”.

Welcome to our live coverage of the Middle East crisis – this is Adam Fulton with a rundown on all the latest news.

Israel continued its attacks in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US president, Joe Biden, discussed their differences over a post-war future for Palestinians which have suggested a rift between the two allies.

Witnesses said the Israeli bombardment was again focused overnight on Khan Younis, southern Gaza’s largest city, while Palestinian media also reported intense fire around Jabalia in the north early on Saturday.

Biden and Netanyahu held their first call in nearly a month, a day after the Israeli leader reiterated his rejection of any form of Palestinian sovereignty.

But Biden said after Friday’s call that the creation of an independent state for Palestinians was not impossible while Netanyahu was still in office, saying he spoke with the Israeli prime minister about possible solutions for the creation of such a state, noting that not all countries have their own militaries.

“And so I think there’s ways in which this could work,” Biden said.

More on that story shortly. In other key developments as its turns 8.40am in Gaza City and Tel Aviv:

• 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 on Friday they did 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.

• Gaza’s main internet provider, Paltel, said communication services across the Palestinian territory were gradually returning after a nearly eight-day outage, the longest blackout since the war began. Paltel said two of its technical team members lost their lives as a result of “direct shelling” during recent repair operations, bringing the 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, doctors say.

• 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. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Jalil Abbas Jilani, spoke to his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and they agreed that “close coordination on counter-terrorism and other aspects of mutual concern should be strengthened”, according to a readout from 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 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 Tawfiq Ajaq, 17, was killed by Israeli security forces in Al-Mazraa Al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah, according to reports.

• Swiss prosecutors have confirmed that the Israeli 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 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.

• 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.