Middle East crisis: WHO chief at Yemen airport during Israeli airstrikes; Netanyahu says attack ongoing ‘until we complete the job’ – as it happened

Here’s a recap of the latest developments:

• At least three people were killed and nearly a dozen injured after Israel airstrikes struck multiple targets controlled by the Houthi movement, also known as Ansar Allah, in Yemen on Thursday, according to Houthi media. Two people were killed in strikes on the international airport in the capital of Sana’a and one person was killed in Ras Issa port, Houthi-run Al Masirah TV said.

• Israel’s military said it struck the Sana’a international airport as well as military infrastructure at the ports of Hodeidah, Salif and Ras Kanatib on Yemen’s west coast. It also attacked the country’s Hezyaz and Ras Kanatib power stations. The Israeli military said its “fighter jets conducted intelligence-based strikes on military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime”.

• The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was at the airport when it came under attack. The WHO chief and his team were in Yemen to seek the release of detained UN staff and assess the war-torn country’s humanitarian situation and were about to board a flight when “the airport came under aerial bombardment”. A crew member on the plane was injured, he said.

• Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli strikes would continue “until our job is done”. “We are determined to cut this branch of terrorism from the Iranian axis of evil,” the Israeli prime minister said in a video statement after the attacks. His defence minister, Israel Katz, said Israel would “hunt down all the Houthi leaders … No one will be able to escape us.”

• The latest strikes came after recent attacks on Israel by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. On Saturday, at least 14 people were wounded by a Houthi attack in Tel Aviv. The UN security council is due to meet on Monday over Houthi attacks against Israel, Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said on Wednesday. Iran’s foreign ministry condemned the Israeli strikes in Yemen as a “violation” of peace and security.

• Five Palestinian journalists were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their vehicle in central Gaza, their employer, Al-Quds Today, a television channel affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said. The journalists were sleeping in their press-marked truck when it was targeted in a direct strike by the Israeli military, witnesses told Palestinian media. The Israeli army said its air force attacked the vehicle in a “targeted manner” and that members of the Islamic Jihad militant group were inside. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said 195 journalists had been killed in the Israel-Hamas war, and at least 400 have been injured over the past 14 months.

• An infant died in Gaza on Thursday due to extreme cold and falling temperatures, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, marking the fourth baby to have reportedly died from the cold in Gaza’s tent camps in recent days. The deaths underscore the squalid conditions there, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crammed into often ramshackle tents after fleeing Israeli offensives.

• Five people were killed and 20 wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood early on Thursday, medics with the Gaza health authorities reported. They warned the death toll could rise as many people remained trapped under the rubble. The strikes came as the latest death toll by the Palestinian health ministry said Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 45,399 Palestinians and wounded 107,940 since 7 October 2023.

• A report warning of imminent famine in the northern Gaza Strip under Israel’s “near-total blockade” was withdrawn after the US asked for its retraction, according to the Associated Press, citing US officials. The withdrawn report by the Famine Early Warning System Network said unless Israel changes its policy, it expects to see between two and 15 people dying each day of starvation and related ailments in Gaza sometime between January and March. A declaration of famine would have been a great embarrassment for Israel.

• Fourteen security personnel from Syria’s new authorities and three armed men were killed in clashes in Tartus province after forces tried to arrest an officer linked to the notorious Sednaya prison, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The UK-based monitoring group said the clash broke out in Tartus, a stronghold of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority, on Wednesday, and was sparked by the attempted arrest of the former prison official.

• The United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon expressed concern at the “continuing” damage done by Israeli forces in the country’s south despite a ceasefire in the war with Hezbollah. Lebanon’s army on Thursday condemned Israel’s “violation of the ceasefire agreement by attacking Lebanese sovereignty and destroying southern towns and villages”.

An infant died in Gaza on Thursday due to extreme cold and falling temperatures, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, marking the fourth baby to have reportedly died this week from the cold.

The latest death comes after a three-week-old girl, Sila al-Faseeh, was brought to the emergency room of a southern Gaza hospital “with a severe temperature drop, which led to her death”, according to the hospital’s chief paediatric doctor.

The girl’s father, Mahmoud al-Faseeh, said he had taken her to hospital after seeing that she had “bitten her tongue and was bleeding”, which a doctor said was “due to the cold, and there have been several cases with similar symptoms”.

Dr Ahmed al-Farra of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis told AFP that his team had handled two other cases on Tuesday involving “a three-day-old baby and another baby, less than a month old”, both of whom died “after a severe temperature drop”.

“This is due to the fact that they live in tents”, which “do not protect from the cold”, he said. It had been “extremely cold, and the tent is not suitable for living. The children are always sick,” he said.

The risk to newborns was particularly acute, he added, as many mothers suffer malnutrition, affecting the quality of the milk their babies feed on.

Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will continue striking the Houthis in Yemen “until the job is done”, after several people were reportedly killed in Israeli strikes targeting the Iran-aligned movement, including the Sana’a international airport and three ports along the western coast.

The Israeli prime minister, in a video statement released after the Israeli strikes, said:

We are determined to cut this branch of terrorism from the Iranian axis of evil. We will continue until we complete the job.

According to his office, Netanyahu oversaw the Israeli strikes from the Israeli air force’s command centre in Tel Aviv, alongside his defence minister Israel Katz, IDF chief of staff Lt Gen Herzi Halevi and IAF commander Maj Gen Tomer Bar.

The director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was in the Sana’a international airport when it was targeted by an aerial attack.

Posting to X on Thursday, he wrote:

As we were about to board our flight from Sana’a, about two hours ago, the airport came under aerial bombardment. One of our plane’s crew members was injured. At least two people were reported killed at the airport. The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge – just a few meters from where we were – and the runway were damaged.

He said his UN and WHO colleagues are safe, and that they will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before they can leave. He added:

Our heartfelt condolences to the families whose loved ones lost their lives in the attack.

At least three people have been killed and nearly a dozen injured in Israeli strikes on Yemen, according to Houthi TV reports.

Two people were killed in strikes on the Sana’a international airport in the capital and another person was killed in Ras Issa port, Reuters is reporting, citing Houthi al Masirah TV.

Eleven others were injured as a result of the strikes, according to reports.

Here is a summary of events so far:

• Israel confirmed attacks on Thursday on Houthi targets in Yemen. Airstrikes targeted “military infrastructure” used by Houthis at the Sana’a international airport; the Hezyaz and Ras Kanatib power stations and military infrastructure in the Al-Hudaydah, Salif and Ras Kanatib ports on the western coast. The IDF said it was in response to Houthi attacks against Israel.

• Five journalists were killed when their van, marked as a press vehicle, was struck in the vicinity of Al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat in central Gaza, health authorities said. The journalists worked for the Al-Quds Al-Youm television channel. The Israeli army said its air force attacked the vehicle in a “targeted manner” and that members of the Islamic Jihad militant group were inside.

• In a separate incident, five people were killed and 20 wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood early on Thursday, medics with the Gaza health authorities reported. They warned the death toll could rise as many people remained trapped under the rubble.

• Fourteen security personnel from Syria’s new authorities and three “armed men” were killed in clashes in Tartous province when forces attempted to arrest an officer linked to the notorious Sednaya prison, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

• A baby girl froze to death in Gaza, the third to die from the cold, in Gaza’s tent camps in recent days, doctors said.

• Syria’s new authorities on Thursday launched a security crackdown in a coastal region where 14 policemen were killed a day before, vowing to pursue “remnants” of the ousted Bashar al-Assad government accused of the attack, state media reported.

• Jordanian authorities said 18,000 Syrians returned home since Assad’s fall.

• The United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon expressed concern on Thursday at the “continuing” damage done by Israeli forces in the country’s south despite a ceasefire in the war with Hezbollah, Reuters reports.

• Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 45,399 Palestinians and wounded 107,940 since 7 October 2023, the Palestinian health ministry said on Thursday. The number of fatalities includes 38 people killed in the territory in the past 24 hours, it said.

• An Iraqi delegation met with Syria’s new rulers in Damascus on Thursday, an Iraqi government spokesperson said.

• Lebanon said on Thursday it was looking forward to having the “best neighbourly relations” with Syria, in its first official message to the new administration in Damascus, Reuters reported.

A statement posted on X from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said IAF fighter jets “conducted intelligence-based strikes on military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime on the western coast and inland Yemen”.

It said the targets that were struck by the IDF “include military infrastructure used by the Houthi terrorist regime for its military activities in both the Sana’a International Airport and the Hezyaz and Ras Kanatib power stations”.

The IDF also said it struck “military infrastructure in the Al-Hudaydah, Salif and Ras Kanatib ports on the western coast”.

The statement said the targets “were used by the Houthi terrorist regime to smuggle Iranian weapons into the region and for the entry of senior Iranian officials.”

The statement continued:

The Houthi terrorist regime has repeatedly attacked the State of Israel and its citizens, including in UAV and surface-to-surface missile attacks on Israeli territory.

It added:

The Houthi terrorist regime is a central part of the Iranian axis of terror, and their attacks on international shipping vessels and routes continue to destabilize the region and the wider world.

The Houthi terrorist regime operates as an autonomous terrorist group while relying on Iranian cooperation and funding to carry out its attacks.

The IDF will not hesitate to operate at any distance against any threat to the State of Israel and its citizens.

Multiple airstrikes targeted an airport, military airbase and a power station in Yemen on Thursday, witnesses and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels said.

Agence France-Presse reports that Sana’a airport and the adjacent Al-Dailami base were targeted along with a power station in Hodeida, in attacks that the Houthis’ Al-Masirah TV channel called “Israeli aggression”.

Haaretz newspaper said Israel struck Sana’a airport in Yemen on Thursday, citing an Israeli official.

The United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon expressed concern on Thursday at the “continuing” damage done by Israeli forces in the country’s south despite a ceasefire in the war with Hezbollah, Reuters reports.

The truce came into effect on 27 November, about two months after Israel stepped up its bombing campaign and later sent troops into Lebanon following nearly a year of exchanges of cross-border fire initiated by Hezbollah over the war in Gaza.

The warring sides have since traded accusations of violating the truce.

Lebanon’s army on Thursday condemned Israel’s “violation of the ceasefire agreement by attacking Lebanese sovereignty and destroying southern towns and villages”.

Under the ceasefire agreement, Unifil peacekeepers and the Lebanese army were to redeploy in south Lebanon, near the Israeli border, as Israeli forces withdrew over 60 days.

Unifil said in a statement on Thursday that “there is concern at continuing destruction by the IDF (army) in residential areas, agricultural land and road networks in south Lebanon”.

The statement added that “this is in violation of Resolution 1701”, which was adopted by the UN security council and ended the last Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006.

The UN force also reiterated its call for “the timely withdrawal” of Israeli troops from Lebanon, and “the full implementation of Resolution 1701”.

The resolution states that Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers should be the only forces in south Lebanon, where Hezbollah exerts control, and also calls for Israeli troops to pull out of Lebanese territory.

“Any actions that risk the fragile cessation of hostilities must cease,” UNIFIL said.

The Lebanese army said on Thursday that it was reinforcing its presence in several areas of the south where “Israeli forces have penetrated”.

One of those areas is Qantara, where Lebanon’s official National news agency (NNA) reported on Thursday “extensive” Israeli operations, sending residents fleeing.

Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayad said the operations were an “extremely dangerous” development posing “a serious risk” to the implementation of Resolution 1701.

On Wednesday the NNA said Israeli aircraft struck the eastern Baalbek region, far from the border.

‘It was like I was reborn’: Sednaya prison’s former inmates adapt to a new Syria

Bethan McKernan

Of all the horrors Mohammed Ammar Hamami remembers from his time in the Assad regime’s notorious Sednaya prison, the most vivid is the clanging of metal execution tables being moved around on the floor below.

About once every 40 days, prison guards would drag the tables away from under the feet of condemned men. Nooses around their necks and hands tied behind their backs, they would die by hanging. Most of the bodies were burned in Sednaya’s crematorium.

“This is the noise we used to hear,” the 31-year-old said, picking up the edge of one of the tables and letting the smash of metal on metal echo around the large room. “When we hear this noise, it means they are executing people … Imagine sitting upstairs and knowing prisoners are being executed downstairs.”

Hamami was freed from Sednaya after five hellish years on 8 December, when Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country in the face of a lightning-fast Islamist rebel offensive. Along with the 20 other men held in his dirty, dark and unfurnished cell, he heard shouting in the corridor before collapsing in astonishment when his father’s face appeared in the cell door’s small window.

A week later, the mechanic wanted to return to Sednaya, on the outskirts of Damascus, to retrieve clothes left behind in the chaos – but also, he said, to try to understand that what he had lived through in what he called “the killing machine” was real. On release, he was very thin after experiencing complications from diabetes which was not treated properly during his imprisonment. He is missing teeth from beatings and is still suffering from three broken ribs.

“I wanted to revisualise the life we lived here,” Hamami said. “After I went out and breathed fresh air, now I can tell the difference … We were the living dead.

“It was like I was reborn. Today I am not 31, I am seven days old,” he said.

Read the full report here.

About 18,000 Syrians have crossed into their country from Jordan since the government of Bashar al-Assad was toppled earlier this month, Jordanian authorities said on Thursday.

Interior minister Mazen al-Faraya told state TV channel Al-Mamlaka that “around 18,000 Syrians have returned to their country between the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad on 8 December 2024 until Thursday”.

He said the returnees included 2,300 refugees registered with the United Nations, Agence France-Presse reports.

Amman says it has hosted about 1.3 million Syrians who fled their country since civil war broke out in 2011, with 650,000 formally registered with the United Nations.

Bethan McKernan

Here is the Guardian’s Bethan McKernan’s full report on the earlier Israeli airstrike which killed five Palestinian journalists.

Five Palestinian journalists have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on their vehicle in central Gaza, their employer has said, as renewed ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel have reportedly reached an impasse.

Faisal Abu al-Qumsan, Ayman al-Jadi, Ibrahim al-Sheikh Khalil, Fadi Hassouna and Mohammed al-Lada’a were sleeping in their broadcasting truck, marked as press, when it was targeted in a direct strike by the Israeli military, witnesses told Palestinian media. Another 16 people were killed in other Israeli pre-dawn strikes across the territory, the local health ministry said.

The five men, who worked at Al-Quds Today, a television channel affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group that fights alongside Hamas, were buried on Thursday morning.

Israel’s military said in a statement it had conducted “a precise strike on a vehicle with an Islamic Jihad terrorist cell inside in the area of Nuseirat”, adding: “Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.”

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said 195 journalists have been killed, including those who died in this attack, and at least 400 have been injured since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, when Hamas launched its attack on Israel.

Read the full report here.