Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
On Sunday night, an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza killed at least 20 people including children at a school, according to two local hospitals. The school in Nuseirat was sheltering some of the many Palestinians displaced by the war.
Meanwhile, explosions hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire, and residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into the hospital.
The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon known as UNIFIL said Israeli tanks forcibly entered the gates of one position early Sunday and destroyed the main gate. They later fired smoke rounds near peacekeepers, causing skin irritation. UNIFIL called the incident a “further flagrant violation of international law.”
US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has said Israel must “urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need” in northern Gaza.
Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.”
In recent days Israeli forces have widened their raid into northern Gaza forcing many families to leave their homes. The territory’s ministry of health appealed on Friday for medical teams to be allowed access to the northern half of the strip to evacuate the wounded, and for fuel deliveries to the north’s struggling hospitals, warning that civilians caught up in the intense shelling and airstrikes are running out of food and water.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli shelling late on Sunday had killed at least 15 people at a school serving as a shelter for displaced Palestinians in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp.
The Al-Mufti school was bombarded with a large volley of Israeli artillery, resulting in an initial death toll of 15 martyrs, including children, women and entire families, and 50 wounded,” the officials said. The Israeli military said it was “looking into the reports”.
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A Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in central Israel killed four soldiers and severely wounded seven others on Sunday, the Israeli military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago. Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It later said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defence systems during the assault by “squadrons” of drones.
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The US will send an antimissile system to Israel as well as a crew of US military personnel to operate the system. In a statement released on Sunday, Pentagon press secretary Maj Gen Pat Ryder said that the US will also send an “associated crew of US military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel’s air defenses”.
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Sixteen people have been killed during Israel’s raid on Al Ma’asara in Lebanon’s Keserwan district. In a post on Sunday updating the death toll from yesterday’s attacks, the Lebanese health ministry said that in addition to the 16 people killed, 21 people were injured.
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United Nations secretary general António Guterres warned on Sunday that any attacks against peacekeepers “may constitute a war crime”, his spokesperson said, after Israeli tanks burst through the gates of a peacekeeping base in southern Lebanon. Reuters reports it was the latest accusation of Israeli violations and attacks against the UN peacekeeping mission, known as Unifil, in recent days.
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In a statement released late on Sunday, the Israeli military said a Merkava tank had been trying to evacuate injured soldiers and had backed into the Unifil post accidentally while under fire amid a smokescreen.
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In a videoed statement addressed to Guterres on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reiterated Israeli calls for Unifil troops to evacuate. “The time has come for you to withdraw Unifil from Hezbollah strongholds and from the combat zones,” he said. “The IDF has requested this repeatedly and has met with repeated refusal, which has the effect of providing Hezbollah terrorists with human shields.”
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French president Emmanuel Macron urged his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian to support a “general de-escalation” in the Middle East during a phone conversation on Sunday, the presidential office said. Reuters reports that in a separate discussion, Macron reiterated to Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati the “absolute necessity” of obtaining a ceasefire in Lebanon without further delay.
Key events
Here are the latest images coming out of Gaza:
An Israeli attack on a school used to shelter displaced Palestinians has killed at least 20 people in central Gaza, officials say.
BBC News reports:
Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence Agency said the site in Nuseirat camp was struck by a volley of artillery on Sunday, killing entire families and wounding dozens more.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was looking into the reports.
Earlier, five children were reportedly killed by a drone strike while playing on a street corner in northern Gaza.
A civil defence spokesman said the attack on al-Mufti school, where hundreds of displaced people from around Gaza were sheltering, had injured at least 50 people and more than a dozen were killed.
The five children in northern Gaza were reportedly killed in an Israeli air strike while playing on a street corner in al-Shati camp.
Graphic images from the scene in the aftermath show the bloodied bodies of what appeared to be young teenage boys. One of them looked to be clutching several glass marbles in his hand.
According to a report from the scene, told to a BBC correspondent, a drone strike hit a person walking down the street, which killed the children and injured seven other people.
Later images showed the bodies of the five boys wrapped in white shrouds and laid out on the floor side-by-side.
An aunt of one of the boys, named Rami, wrote a moving tribute to him on social media. She said the family had moved to al-Shati after being forced to leave their homes in Jabalia to a “safer area” because of the war.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has met with Mohammed Abdelsalam, a senior official from Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi movement, in Muscat, according to his office.
The foreign ministry released pictures of the pair holding talks during Araghchi’s visit to the Omani capital, the latest in a series of diplomatic trips in the region following Israel’s vow to retaliate against an Iranian missile attack.
At least 10 killed in Jabalia refugee camp, say Palestinian medics
Palestinian medics have said that at least 10 people were killed and at least 30 injured in Israeli airstrikes on a food distribution center in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, with casualties including women and children.
The European Union’s member states have taken too long to condemn Israel’s attacks on UNIFIL soldiers in Lebanon, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday, describing the attacks as “completely unacceptable”.
Speaking at an EU ministerial meeting in Luxembourg, he said:
We should be against Israeli attacks against UNIFIL. Our soldiers are there, many soldiers are there.
EU countries, led by Italy, France and Spain, have thousands of troops in the 10,000-strong peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, which has said it has repeatedly come under attack from Israeli forces in recent days. Israel has called on the United Nations to move the troops out of the combat zone.
The European Union has condemned all attacks against United Nations missions, the union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a response to targeting of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, by the Israel Defence Forces.
Borrell said in a statement on behalf of the EU published on Sunday night:
Such attacks against UN peacekeepers constitute a grave violation of international law and are totally unacceptable.
The EU condemns all attacks against UN missions.
It expresses particularly grave concern regarding the attacks by the Israeli Defence Forces against UNIFIL, which left several peacekeepers wounded.
We urgently await explanations and a thorough investigation from the Israeli authorities about the attacks against UNIFIL, which plays a fundamental role in the stability of South Lebanon.
Israel’s army chief has described a Hezbollah drone strike on a military training base that killed at least four soldiers at the weekend as “difficult and painful”.
Lieutenant Geneal Herzi Halevi told soldiers during a visit to the Golani Brigade training base that was hit Sunday night in the area of Binyamina, south of the city of Haifa:
We are at war, and an attack on a training base on the home front is difficult and the results are painful.
Airstrike on Gaza hospital kills at least four
An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and sent flames sweeping through a packed tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns, according to Palestinian medics.
Associated Press reports:
The Israeli military said it targeted militants hiding out among civilians, without providing evidence. In recent months it has repeatedly struck crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas fighters were using them as staging grounds for attacks.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of wounded people from an earlier strike on a school-turned-shelter nearby that killed at least 20 people when the early morning airstrike hit and fire engulfed many of the tents.
Associated Press footage showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed hospital.
Hospital records showed that four people were killed and 40 wounded. Twenty-five people were transferred to the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
On Sunday night, an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza killed at least 20 people including children at a school, according to two local hospitals. The school in Nuseirat was sheltering some of the many Palestinians displaced by the war.
Meanwhile, explosions hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire, and residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into the hospital.
The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon known as UNIFIL said Israeli tanks forcibly entered the gates of one position early Sunday and destroyed the main gate. They later fired smoke rounds near peacekeepers, causing skin irritation. UNIFIL called the incident a “further flagrant violation of international law.”
US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has said Israel must “urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need” in northern Gaza.
Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.”
In recent days Israeli forces have widened their raid into northern Gaza forcing many families to leave their homes. The territory’s ministry of health appealed on Friday for medical teams to be allowed access to the northern half of the strip to evacuate the wounded, and for fuel deliveries to the north’s struggling hospitals, warning that civilians caught up in the intense shelling and airstrikes are running out of food and water.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli shelling late on Sunday had killed at least 15 people at a school serving as a shelter for displaced Palestinians in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp.
The Al-Mufti school was bombarded with a large volley of Israeli artillery, resulting in an initial death toll of 15 martyrs, including children, women and entire families, and 50 wounded,” the officials said. The Israeli military said it was “looking into the reports”.
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A Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in central Israel killed four soldiers and severely wounded seven others on Sunday, the Israeli military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago. Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It later said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defence systems during the assault by “squadrons” of drones.
-
The US will send an antimissile system to Israel as well as a crew of US military personnel to operate the system. In a statement released on Sunday, Pentagon press secretary Maj Gen Pat Ryder said that the US will also send an “associated crew of US military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel’s air defenses”.
-
Sixteen people have been killed during Israel’s raid on Al Ma’asara in Lebanon’s Keserwan district. In a post on Sunday updating the death toll from yesterday’s attacks, the Lebanese health ministry said that in addition to the 16 people killed, 21 people were injured.
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United Nations secretary general António Guterres warned on Sunday that any attacks against peacekeepers “may constitute a war crime”, his spokesperson said, after Israeli tanks burst through the gates of a peacekeeping base in southern Lebanon. Reuters reports it was the latest accusation of Israeli violations and attacks against the UN peacekeeping mission, known as Unifil, in recent days.
-
In a statement released late on Sunday, the Israeli military said a Merkava tank had been trying to evacuate injured soldiers and had backed into the Unifil post accidentally while under fire amid a smokescreen.
-
In a videoed statement addressed to Guterres on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reiterated Israeli calls for Unifil troops to evacuate. “The time has come for you to withdraw Unifil from Hezbollah strongholds and from the combat zones,” he said. “The IDF has requested this repeatedly and has met with repeated refusal, which has the effect of providing Hezbollah terrorists with human shields.”
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French president Emmanuel Macron urged his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian to support a “general de-escalation” in the Middle East during a phone conversation on Sunday, the presidential office said. Reuters reports that in a separate discussion, Macron reiterated to Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati the “absolute necessity” of obtaining a ceasefire in Lebanon without further delay.