Middle East crisis live: Israel president calls deaths of 21 Israeli soldiers in single Gaza attack an ‘unbearably difficult morning’ | Israel

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has said Israeli bombardment is continuing in the vicinity of al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, with gunfire from Israeli drones targeting “anyone moving around” the hospital.

It said earlier on Tuesday in a post on X that its ambulances were unable to reach the injured, and said in a separate post that a civilian was killed by Israeli gunfire at the entrance of the hospital.

Israel says Hamas fighters operate in and around hospitals, which Hamas and medical staff deny.

A total of 25,490 Palestinians have been killed and 63,354 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said on Tuesday.

At least 195 Palestinians were killed and 354 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry added.

Most of the casualties have been women and children, the ministry has said, and thousands more bodies are likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.

Israel’s military said on Tuesday that its troops had encircled the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Reuters reports.

“Over the past day, IDF troops carried out an extensive operation during which they encircled Khan Younis and deepened the operation in the area. The area is a significant stronghold of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade,” the military said.

“Ground troops engaged in close-quarters combat, directed (air force) strikes, and used intelligence to coordinate fire, resulting in the elimination of dozens of terrorists,” it said.

Israel launched an offensive last week to capture Khan Younis, which it says is the principal headquarters of the Hamas militants responsible for the 7 October attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.

Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have lost their homes and the vast majority are now penned into small towns just north and south of Khan Younis, many sleeping rough in makeshift tents with food and medicine running out and no clean water.

Palestinians said Israeli blockades and the storming of hospitals since Monday had left the injured beyond the reach of rescuers.

Dead people were being buried inside the grounds of Khan Younis’s main Nasser hospital because it was unsafe to leave to reach the cemetery, according to Reuters.

Another Khan Younis hospital, al-Khair, was stormed by Israeli troops who arrested staff there, and a third, al-Amal, where Red Crescent rescuers are based, was cut off and unreachable, according to Palestinian officials.

A Houthi army spokesperson has said the latest US-UK strikes against the rebel group in Yemen will not go “unanswered” or “unpunished”.

The spokesperson said:

The American-British aggression aircraft launched 18 airstrikes during the past hours, distributed as follows: 12 raids on Amanat al-Asimah and Sana’a governorate, three raids on Hodeidah governorate, two raids on Taiz governorate (and) a raid on al-Bayda governorate.

These attacks will not go unanswered and unpunished.

The US and UK said they had conducted “an additional round of proportionate and necessary strikes” against eight Houthi targets on Monday, with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.

The number of targets is considerably lower than the 60 struck in the first air raids on Yemen made by the two countries 10 days earlier, while their effect and the number of casualties caused is uncertain.

The latest raid marks the eighth time the US has conducted strikes on Houthi targets this month and the second time that the UK has participated.

You can read more on who the Houthis are and the group’s relationship with the war in Gaza here:

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel would push on with fighting in Gaza until “absolute victory”, after the deadliest day for Israeli forces since the start of the ground offensive.

“Yesterday we experienced one of the most difficult days since the war erupted,” Netanyahu was quoted by Reuters as saying. “In the name of our heroes, for the sake of our lives, we will not stop fighting until absolute victory.”

He said the military was investigating the incident in which 21 soldiers were killed when buildings exploded in central Gaza, bringing the single-day Israeli death toll to 24.

Support for the war remains high among Israelis, but opinion polls show lagging support for Netanyahu and his far-right coalition.

Weekly Saturday night rallies demanding the release of hostages have been supplemented in recent weeks by growing calls for elections.

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said it had been an “unbearably difficult morning” after hearing of news of the deaths of the Israeli soldiers in Gaza (see post at 6.10am for more details on the updated death toll of 21).

He wrote on X:

An unbearably difficult morning, in which more and more names of the best of our sons – the silver tray in the full sense of the word – are added to the hero’s tombstone, in a war that has no justice.

Behind every name is a family whose world has fallen on one, a family that we take to our hearts with sorrow and pain, and at the same time with pride – for the heroism of the generation, for the missions and evils, for sticking to the goal and for the love of the people and the homeland.

Herzog said “intense battles” were taking place in “an extremely challenging space”.

The chief spokesperson for the IDF, Daniel Hagari, said the killed soldiers had been preparing explosives to demolish two buildings when a militant fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank nearby.

This reportedly set off an explosion prematurely and caused the buildings to collapse on the soldiers, all of whom were said to be reservists.

A medical evacuation team was deployed but it was a “complicated operation, which took place until the last hours,” Hagari said, indicating the difficulty in extracting bodies buried under the rubble.

Hagari was quoted as saying the incident took place in central Gaza, close to the kibbutz of Kissufim on the Israeli side of the border, at 4pm local time (2pm GMT) on Monday.

UN security council to meet on Tuesday to discuss Middle East crisis

Patrick Wintour

The UN security council will meet on Tuesday to discuss unprecedented violence spreading across the Middle East and hear calls for Israel to lift its restrictions on aid into Gaza and to accept that a future Palestinian state is necessary for its own security.

The US will resist renewed calls from the Arab League for the security council to demand that Israel accept an immediate ceasefire that would leave Hamas in power in Gaza.

The meeting is likely to hear calls from China for the UN to recognise Palestine fully as a step towards a two-state solution.

Before the meeting, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, met with his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in New York to urge Israel to agree to a ceasefire and warn the US not to spread the conflict.

The meeting comes against a backdrop of a second US-UK coordinated raid deep into Houthi strongholds in Yemen, as well as news of intensified fighting in southern Gaza.

The top Iranian diplomat said:

At the same time that America and England launched its attacks against Yemen, satellite images show that 230 commercial and oil ships were moving in the Red Sea, and this shows that they have understood the Yemeni message that they are only stopping the ships that go to the ports of the Zionist regime.

He added he had told the UK’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, last week in Davos: “Your action in escalating tension in the Red Sea and against Yemen is a strategic mistake.”

Turkey’s Hakan Fidan and France’s Stéphane Séjourné are among the foreign ministers who have flown to New York for the open debate, which is also likely to hear extended criticism that Israel has not acted on a UN security council resolution passed before Christmas demanding a big increase in aid.

The UK’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, said action to degrade Houthi military capabilities would continue after the UK and US launched a fresh wave of airstrikes against the rebel group on Monday.

“What we’ve done again is send the clearest possible message that we will continue to degrade their ability to carry out these attacks,” Cameron told broadcasters.

The former prime minister said there had been more than 12 Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea since the first joint US-UK strikes 10 days ago.

He was quoted by BBC News as saying that what the Houthis were doing was “unacceptable”, “illegal” and threatened “the freedom of navigation”, as the rebel group is indiscriminately attacking shipping in the Red Sea.

A joint US-UK statement yesterday said the two countries had conducted “an additional round of proportionate and necessary strikes” against eight Houthi targets, with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.

The number of targets is considerably lower than the 60 that were struck in the first air raids on Yemen made by the two countries 10 days earlier, while their effect and the number of casualties caused is uncertain.

Israel has given Hamas a proposal through Qatari and Egyptian mediators that includes up to a two-month pause in the fighting as part of a multi-phase deal to free all the hostages being held in Gaza, Axios reported on Monday.

The first phase would reportedly involve the release of women, men over 60 and those in critical medical condition. Subsequent phases would involve the release of female soldiers, younger civilian men, male soldiers and the bodies of dead hostages, according to the report, which cited two Israeli officials.

The officials – who said the deal was expected to take around two months to implement – added that the proposal also involved the release of an as yet undetermined number of the roughly 6,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel, but not all of them.

The proposal does not include promises to end the war, but it would involve Israeli troops reducing their presence in major cities in Gaza and gradually allowing residents to return to the territory’s devastated north.

The Guardian is yet to independently verify the claims in the report.

A total of 110 Israelis and other nationals were released in return for 240 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons as part of a week-long truce at the end of November. Several attempts at a ceasefire since have failed.

The families of the remaining 130 hostages appear to be turning to more drastic measures in pursuit of another release deal, including further demonstrations outside Benjamin Netanyahu’s private home.

It’s 9am in Gaza and Tel Aviv and 10am in Sana’a, Yemen. Here’s what we know so far:

• Israel’s army has revised up its death toll and says a total of 21 soldiers were killed in an attack in central Gaza in the last 24 hours. It makes it the largest single loss of life for the Israeli military since the war began. Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesperson, said the soldiers were preparing explosives to demolish two buildings on Monday when a militant fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank nearby, setting off the explosion prematurely. The buildings collapsed on the soldiers. The IDF had earlier put the death toll at 10.

• The Palestine Red Crescent Society says its headquarters is being targeted in Khan Younis. Posting on X, the group said: “Urgent – Israeli Occupation targets the PRCS’s headquarters in #KhanYounis with artillery shelling on the fourth floor, coinciding with intense gunfire from Israeli drones.”

• Concern has been expressed about the safety of hospital staff and patients in Gaza, with the World Health Organization’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posting on X that “continuous fighting in the vicinity of al-Amal hospital and today’s raid at Al-Kheir hospital in #Gaza are deeply worrisome.”

• The US national security council spokesperson John Kirby reacted to those reports on Monday, saying Israel had a right to defend itself but adding: “We expect them to do so in accordance with international law and to protect innocent people in hospitals, medical staff and patients as well, as much as possible.”

• The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) has released its latest update on the fighting in the Israel-Gaza war, saying hostilities have escalated in Khan Younis. “On 22 January, ground operations, fighting and attacks intensified in the Khan Younis area, destroying several residential houses, buildings, towers and residential squares, reportedly killing at least 45 Palestinians, including IDPs (internally displaced persons), women and children,” it reported.

• The US carried out its eighth round of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Monday at 11.59pm local time. A Pentagon statement said the bombing was proportionate and necessary.

• US military officials said the strikes were successful and had “good impacts” in all eight locations. US Central Command said the strikes were to “respond to increased Houthi destabilizing and illegal activities”.

• The UK joined the airstrikes for the second time in 10 days. The defence secretary, Grant Shapps, said the attacks were “in self-defence” and in the interests of degrading Houthi capabilities.

• The Pentagon said the operation targeted a Houthi underground storage site as well as missile and air surveillance sites. The UK Ministry of Defence said it was involved in hitting multiple targets at two military sites with guided precision bombs in the vicinity of Sana’a airfield.

• The action followed a call on Monday between Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden. The leaders discussed further “disrupting and degrading Houthi capabilities,” a US spokesperson said.

• A joint statement from both countries said they had conducted strikes against eight Houthi targets in Yemen, with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.

• The UK involvement on Monday appears to have been smaller than in 11 January’s strikes. Ten days ago, US and UK warships and jets hit more than 60 targets in 28 locations.

• Yemen’s official Saba news agency said “American-British forces are launching raids on the capital of Sana’a” and several other parts of Yemen, Agence France-Presse reports. Houthi TV outlet al-Masirah said four strikes targeted the Al-Dailami military base north of the capital, which is under rebel control.

• A Houthi spokesperson responded on X to say the airstrikes “will only increase the Yemeni people’s determination”. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti accused the UK and US of protecting perpetrators of “genocide” in Gaza.

• Mohammad Ali AlHouthi, who is with Yemen’s Houthi supreme revolutionary committee, also posted on X about the latest round of strikes. As part of his post he said: “Trust well that every operation and every aggression against our country will not be without a response.”

Israel’s army has revised up its death toll and says a total of 21 soldiers were killed in an attack in central Gaza in the last 24 hours.

It makes it the largest single loss of life for the Israeli military since the war began.

Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesperson, made the announcement on Tuesday, updating an earlier toll.

He said the soldiers were preparing explosives to demolish two buildings on Monday when a militant fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank nearby, setting off the explosion prematurely. The buildings collapsed on the soldiers.

It’s 7:56am in Tel Aviv where Israel’s Defence Forces (IDF) are reporting that 10 of its soldiers have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours.

It’s one of the deadliest single attacks on Israeli forces of the 3-month war against Hamas, says Reuters.

It’s currently 7:50 in Gaza where the Palestine Red Crescent Society says its headquarters is being targeted in Khan Younis.

Posting on X, the group says “Urgent – Israeli Occupation targets the PRCS’s headquarters in #KhanYounis with artillery shelling on the fourth floor, coinciding with intense gunfire from Israeli drones”.

It’s as concern has been expressed about the safety of hospital staff and patients in Gaza, with the World Health Organization’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posting on X that “continuous fighting in the vicinity of Al-Amal Hospital, and today’s raid at Al-Kheir Hospital in #Gaza are deeply worrisome.”

National security council spokesperson John Kirby reacted to those reports on Monday, saying Israel had a right to defend itself but added: “We expect them to do so in accordance with international law and to protect innocent people in hospitals, medical staff and patients as well, as much as possible.”

Meanwhile, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) posted on X earlier saying that “MSF staff in Nasser hospital report they can feel the ground shaking and that there is a sense of panic among staff, patients and displaced people sheltering inside the building.”