Middle East crisis live: dozens injured in strike on Gaza hospital tent camp; Hezbollah drone attack kills four IDF soldiers
Video shows aftermath of Israeli airstrike on hospital tent camp
Here is video footage of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike hit near the grounds of al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, which caused a fire that engulfed several tents housing displaced Palestinians.
Footage from Deir al-Balah showed people desperately trying to extinguish the flames as explosions could be heard within the camp. According to reports, the strike hit while emergency services were receiving scores of injured people from an earlier bombardment in nearby Nuseirat
Key events
Here are the latest images coming out of Gaza:
Here’s a round up of the key events from overnight:
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On Sunday night, an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza killed at least 20 people including children at the Al-Mufti school, according to two local hospitals. The school in Nuseirat was sheltering some of the many Palestinians displaced by the war.
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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.
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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.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Monday urged other members of the European Union to respond to Madrid and Ireland’s request to suspend the bloc’s free trade agreement with Israel over its actions in Gaza and Lebanon.
For months, both Spain and Ireland have been in talks with other EU countries who want a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement on the basis that Israel may be breaching the agreement’s human rights clause.
Bethan McKernan
The Guardian’s middle east correspondent Bethan McKernan has interviewed Gazans and aid workers in the strip, who say “no one is talking about” the bloodshed there and ceasefire hopes are receding as focus shifts to Lebanon.
Mai al-Afifa, 24, was teaching a workshop about how to identify unexploded ordnance in a school turned shelter in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah on Thursday when an Israeli missile hit the next building in the compound. Twenty-eight people were killed and 54 injured, according to medics at the scene.
Through the smoke and rubble dust Afifa saw the body parts of two women and a male aid worker as she stumbled to safety. The Israeli military said it had used a precise strike to target Hamas fighters using the school as a command centre.
She said:
We are very sad about what is happening now in Lebanon … We have experienced this pain and loss.
But we also fear that Gaza will be forgotten: the massacres have increased here and no one is talking about it. All the TV channels are talking about the regional war, Iran, Israel and what is happening in Lebanon.
Kate Connolly
Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, and economics minister Robert Habeck, both of the Greens party, are said to have blocked German arms exports to Israel over concerns as to what the weapons would be used for, according to reports in German media.
No military exports to Israel have been approved since March according to the reports, which initially emerged in the tabloid Bild, citing government sources, and are now being reported more widely in German media.
According to these, the leading Greens are said to have insisted transports of weapons and spare parts could only go ahead once the Israeli government signed a guarantee that it would not use the weapons to commit acts of genocide.
If confirmed, this would effectively put the German government at odds with Washington. Despite its clear criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the US government has made clear it sees no indication that it has carried out genocide.
By even raising the question, via the Federal Security Council, observers say, Baerbock and Habeck are implicitly expressing a suspicion over Israel’s intentions which has not been voiced by the government of Olaf Scholz.
Germany’s government holds the belief that due to the Nazi-perpetrated crimes of the Holocaust, Israel’s security is Germany’s “reason of state”.
Military experts point out that Germany has no comparable conditions for sending arms to countries such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia, despite misgivings about the intended use of hundreds of millions of Euros worth of weapons that have recently been exported to them.
Some close to the weapons export process have reportedly described the position adopted by Baerbock and Habeck, as “absurd”, suggesting that it was questionable the extent to which any written guarantee would be either practical or legally-binding.
As recently as September the German economics ministry denied that there was an arms export boycott to Israel. Instead, a spokesman said that every application for weapons was examined on a “case by case basis”.
According to Bild, Israel gave Germany the required written agreement last week. Between 2019 and 2023, almost a third of weapons imports Israel has received have come from Germany, which after the USA is its most important supplier of arms.
In particular Israel has stressed the importance of submarines and warships built in Germany which it says it needs to defend itself from constant threats, especially from Iran.
The second round of a polio vaccination campaign has been launched in the Gaza strip.
The Health Ministry has said that a second does of the vaccine will be administered to children under 10 in the central part of the territory over the next three days before the campaign is expanded to the north and south.
The campaign began last month after the territory registered its first polio case in Gaza in 25 years — a 10-month-old boy, now paralysed in one leg.
Health workers succeeded in administering the first dose of the vaccine to around 560,000 children despite myriad challenges, including ongoing fighting, the breakdown of law and order and widespread damage to roads and infrastructure.
The World Health Organization said humanitarian pauses to facilitate the campaign last month were largely observed.
Death toll hits 42,289 – Palestinian health ministry
Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 42,289 Palestinians and wounded 98,684 since 7 October 2023 the, Palestinian enclave’s health ministry said on Monday.
Video shows aftermath of Israeli airstrike on hospital tent camp
Here is video footage of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike hit near the grounds of al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, which caused a fire that engulfed several tents housing displaced Palestinians.
Footage from Deir al-Balah showed people desperately trying to extinguish the flames as explosions could be heard within the camp. According to reports, the strike hit while emergency services were receiving scores of injured people from an earlier bombardment in nearby Nuseirat
A Reuters snap says that sirens sounded in central Israel due to a number of projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israeli territory, the Israeli military said
Meanwhile AFP is reporting that Hezbollah says it has targeted Israeli troops in a south Lebanon village.
AFP is also reporting that the Israeli army says it has intercepted projectiles from Lebanon over central Israel. One of its journalists has heard blasts over the Israel army base hit by a Hezbollah drone.
More to follow.
Hezbollah said it targeted an Israeli naval base near north Israel’s Haifa on Monday, a day after claiming a drone attack near the city that the Israeli military said killed four soldiers.
Hezbollah fighters launched “a rocket salvo” at the “Stella Maris” naval base near Haifa, the Lebanese group said in a statement, adding the attack was at the “service” of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s longtime leader who was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs last month.
Israeli attacks on UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon ‘unacceptable’
Attacks by Israel on the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, are “unacceptable” and contrary to UN rules, Spain’s Foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares said on Monday.
He told reporters ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers held in Luxembourg:
It is contrary to what we expect from any member state of the United Nations, which is ultimately an organisation that protects world peace.
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 UN to move the troops out of the combat zone. Albares said only the UN can order the withdrawal of UNIFIL.
