Middle East crisis: Netanyahu tells new military chief Israel ‘determined’ to achieve victory – as it happened | World news

It is 3.45pm in Gaza City, Tel Aviv and Beirut. This blog will be closing shortly but you can keep you to date with the Guardian’s Middle East coverage here.

Here are the latest developments from today’s blog:

• South Africa on Wednesday denounced Israel’s restriction of aid into Gaza since the weekend, saying it amounted to using starvation as a weapon of war. “Preventing food from entering Gaza is a continuation of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war as part of the ongoing campaign of what the ICJ ruled to be plausible genocide against the Palestinian people,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, referring to South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ).

• The World Food Programme (WFP), the UN’s main food agency, says it has no major stockpile of food in Gaza because it focused on distributing all incoming food to hungry people during phase one of the deal. In a statement to the Associated Press (AP), it said existing stocks are enough to keep bakeries and kitchens running for under two weeks.

• Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told new military chief Lt Gen Eyal Zamir on Wednesday that Israel is “determined” to achieve victory in the multi-front war that began with Hamas’s October 2023 attack. “A very heavy responsibility rests on your shoulders, the results of the war will have significance for generations, we are determined to achieve … victory” Netanyahu told Zamir during his inauguration at the military’s headquarters in the commercial hub of Tel Aviv. Zamir replied: “Hamas has indeed suffered a severe blow, but it has not yet been defeated. The mission is not yet accomplished.”

• Arab leaders have endorsed a plan to rebuild the Gaza Strip under the future administration of the Palestinian Authority (PA), presenting an alternative to US president Donald Trump’s widely condemned proposal to take over the territory and displace its people. The prospect of the PA governing Gaza remains far from certain, however, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP). Israel has ruled out any future role for the body, and Trump closed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) liaison office in Washington during his first term while stepping up support for Israel.

• Qatar has dismissed claims by Israel’s Shin Bet that aid it supplied to Gaza went to Hamas. In a statement, Qatar said “aid was never provided to the political or military wing of Hamas,” and that “it is well known in Israel and around the world that all aid sent from Qatar to Gaza was delivered with the full knowledge, support and supervision of the Israeli government and its security agencies”.

• Lebanese official media said two people were injured on Wednesday when Israeli drones struck a vehicle in the south, a day after a deadly raid and despite an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire. “Israeli drones carried out more than one strike on a vehicle in Ras Naqura, near a rubbish dump” south of a United Nations peacekeeping position, the National News Agency (NNA) said. “Two siblings who were collecting scrap metal” were injured and taken to hospital, it added.

• The wife of French-Israeli national Ohad Yahalomi, who was killed in captivity in Gaza, spoke at his funeral on Wednesday in Israel. Haaretz reports that Batsheva Yahalomi said: “We were certain that if anyone could survive the harsh captivity, it is you, because there is no one as strong as you in body and in spirit.”

• A report has been published by the Shin Bet security agency that summarises its investigations into its failures in the lead-up to the Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. According to the Times of Israel, Shin Bet agency director Ronen Bar acknowledged on Tuesday that if the agency had acted differently “the massacre would have been avoided”.

• Amnesty International said on Wednesday that Israel’s attacks on ambulances, paramedics and health facilities during its recent war with Hezbollah should be investigated as war crimes. During the conflict, the Israeli military accused Hezbollah of using ambulances belonging to the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee for transporting fighters and weapons, accusations the group denied. According to Amnesty, “the Israeli military’s repeated unlawful attacks during the war in Lebanon on health facilities, ambulances and health workers, which are protected under international law, must be investigated as war crimes”.

• An Israeli rights group says Israel demolished a record number of Palestinian homes in annexed East Jerusalem last year. Ir Amim, which closely tracks settlement activity and demolitions in the city, said on Wednesday that 181 homes were destroyed last year, in addition to dozens of other structures. It said that more recently, Israel appears to have dropped a longstanding policy against demolishing homes during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began last weekend.

• A slow convoy of a dozen ambulances and buses brought 25 wounded and sick Palestinian children from Gaza and across Israel on Tuesday. The patients were among the 4,500 people in Gaza believed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be in urgent need of evacuation, and they were transferred to Jordan by a joint operation by the Jordanian army, the country’s health ministry and the WHO.

• The US state department has reinstated the “foreign terrorist organization” designation for Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi group, fulfilling an order announced by Donald Trump shortly after he took office. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced on Tuesday the department had restored the designation, which carries with it sanctions and penalties for anyone providing “material support” for the group.

• The Kremlin said on Wednesday that future talks between Russia and the United States would include discussions on Iran’s nuclear programme, a subject it said had been “touched upon” in an initial round of US-Russia talks last month. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Russia believed that problems around Iran’s nuclear programme needed to be resolved by diplomatic means.

• Jeremy Corbyn has urged the prime minister to set up an independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in Israel’s military assault on Gaza. In a letter to Keir Starmer, the independent MP warned “history is repeating itself” and demanded an independent inquiry over beliefs that the government has taken decisions “that have implicated officials in the gravest breaches of international law”. “Britain has played a highly influential role in Israel’s military operations,” the letter said.

South Africa on Wednesday denounced Israel’s restriction of aid into Gaza since the weekend, saying it amounted to using starvation as a weapon of war, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“Preventing food from entering Gaza is a continuation of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war as part of the ongoing campaign of what the ICJ ruled to be plausible genocide against the Palestinian people,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, referring to South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ).

Lebanese official media said two people were injured on Wednesday when Israeli drones struck a vehicle in the south, a day after a deadly raid and despite an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“Israeli drones carried out more than one strike on a vehicle in Ras Naqura, near a rubbish dump” south of a United Nations peacekeeping position, the National News Agency (NNA) said. “Two siblings who were collecting scrap metal” were injured and taken to hospital, it added.

The strikes come a day after Israel’s military said it killed a Hezbollah navy commander in the south, accusing the slain militant of violating the 27 November ceasefire.

The truce largely halted more than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, including two months of full-blown war during which Israel sent in ground troops. Israel has continued to carry out strikes on Lebanese territory since the agreement took effect.

Israel was due withdraw from Lebanon by 18 February after missing a January deadline, but it has kept troops at five locations it deems “strategic”.

The ceasefire also required Hezbollah to pull back north of the Litani River, about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the border, and to dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south.

Last week, Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz said Israeli forces would remain indefinitely in what he called a “buffer zone” in south Lebanon.

The US state department has reinstated the “foreign terrorist organization” designation for Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi group, fulfilling an order announced by Donald Trump shortly after he took office.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced on Tuesday the department had restored the designation, which carries with it sanctions and penalties for anyone providing “material support” for the group.

“Since 2023, the Houthis have launched hundreds of attacks against commercial vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, as well as US service members defending freedom of navigation and our regional partners,” Rubio said in a statement. “Most recently, the Houthis spared Chinese-flagged ships while targeting American and allied vessels.”

The Houthis have targeted more than 100 merchant vessels in the critical trade corridor with missiles and drones since the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip began in October 2023. In January, the group signaled that it will limit its attacks in the Red Sea corridor to only Israeli-affiliated ships after a ceasefire began in the Gaza Strip but warned that wider assaults could resume if needed.

Trump’s first Republican administration had similarly designated the Houthis in its waning days, but the designation had been revoked by Joe Biden’s Democratic administration over concerns it would badly affect the delivery of aid to Yemen, which was considered to be facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Rubio suggested in his statement that such a concern was not an issue any more, saying that the US would no longer “tolerate any country engaging with terrorist organizations like the Houthis in the name of practicing legitimate international business”.

Besides the “foreign terrorist organization” announcement, the state department’s “Rewards for Justice” program announced that it would pay up to $15m for information that leads to the disruption of Houthi financing.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told new military chief Lt Gen Eyal Zamir on Wednesday that Israel is “determined” to achieve victory in the multi-front war that began with Hamas’s October 2023 attack, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“A very heavy responsibility rests on your shoulders, the results of the war will have significance for generations, we are determined to achieve … victory” Netanyahu told Zamir during his inauguration at the military’s headquarters in the commercial hub of Tel Aviv.

Amnesty International said on Wednesday that Israel’s attacks on ambulances, paramedics and health facilities during its recent war with Hezbollah should be investigated as war crimes, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

A 27 November truce agreement largely halted more than a year of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, including two months of full-blown war in which Israel sent in ground troops. During the conflict, the Israeli military accused the group of using ambulances belonging to the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee for transporting fighters and weapons, accusations the group denied.

According to Amnesty, “the Israeli military’s repeated unlawful attacks during the war in Lebanon on health facilities, ambulances and health workers, which are protected under international law, must be investigated as war crimes”.

It urged the Lebanese government to provide the international criminal court with “jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute crimes within the Rome statute committed on Lebanese territory, and ensure victims’ right to remedy”.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment on Amnesty’s report.

In December, Lebanon’s then health minister Firass Abiad said that during the hostilities, there were “67 attacks on hospitals, including 40 hospitals that were directly targeted”, killing 16 people. “There were 238 attacks on emergency response organisations, with 206 dead,” he said, adding that 256 emergency vehicles including fire trucks and ambulances were also “targeted”.

According to AFP, Amnesty said it investigated four Israeli attacks on health facilities and vehicles in Beirut and south Lebanon from 3-9 October last year that killed 19 healthcare workers, injured 11 and “damaged or destroyed multiple ambulances and two medical facilities”. “Amnesty International did not find evidence that the facilities or vehicles were being used for military purposes at the time of the attacks,” the statement said.

The rights group said it wrote to the Israeli military in November with its findings but had not received a response by the time of publication. “The Israeli military has not provided sufficient justifications, or specific evidence of military targets being present at the strike locations” to account for the “repeated attacks, which weakened a fragile healthcare system and put lives at risk”, Amnesty said.

According to Lebanese authorities, more than 4,000 people were killed in the hostilities. Swathes of the south and east and parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs were heavily damaged in the Israeli bombardment, with reconstruction costs expected to top $10bn, Lebanese authorities have said.

Geneva Abdul

Jeremy Corbyn has urged the prime minister to set up an independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in Israel’s military assault on Gaza, as the ceasefire shows no movement towards a second phase that was due to start last weekend.

In a letter to Keir Starmer, the independent MP warned “history is repeating itself” and demanded an independent inquiry over beliefs that the government has taken decisions “that have implicated officials in the gravest breaches of international law”.

“Britain has played a highly influential role in Israel’s military operations,” the letter said, adding:

Many of us have repeatedly raised objections over the continued sale of F-35 components. We have repeatedly asked for the truth regarding the role of British military bases. And we have repeatedly requested the publication of legal advice behind the government’s (currently unknown) definition of genocide.”

Corbyn criticised the current Labour government, which is facing legal action over existing arms licenses to Israel, of meeting the calls from MPs with “evasion, obstruction and silence” and “leaving the public in the dark”. The Islington North MP said he will be working with other MPs to establish an independent, public inquiry into the UK’s involvement since October 2023.

The letter also drew parallels to the 2016 Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War, which after a series of delays, delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, including that peaceful options for disarmament had not been exhausted and that Blair had deliberated exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime.

“Published in 2016, the report found serious failings within the British government, which ignored the warnings of millions of ordinary people over its disastrous decision to go to war,” the letter said.

It added:

Many people believe that the government has taken decisions that have implicated officials in the gravest breaches of international law. These charges will not go away until there is a comprehensive inruity with the legal power to establish the truth.”

Julian Borger

A slow convoy of a dozen ambulances and buses brought 25 wounded and sick Palestinian children from Gaza and across Israel on Tuesday, past the heavily armed forces that bombarded the territory for 15 months, and that may be about to start again.

The patients were among the 4,500 people in Gaza believed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be in urgent need of evacuation, and they were transferred to Jordan by a joint operation by the Jordanian army, the country’s health ministry and the WHO.

The journey started at the Kerem Shalom crossing, which was the main portal of entry for humanitarian assistance through most of the war, and during the six-week ceasefire that followed.

Now that Benjamin Netanyahu has cut off all aid from entering Gaza, Kerem Shalom is all but deserted. The large car park, formerly full of aid trucks, was empty on Tuesday, except for a few soldiers and the Jordanian visitors.

Four Jordanian air force helicopters landed on an apron of asphalt, to fly four children in particularly critical condition to Amman for emergency care. The remaining 25 came out in large ambulances, including buses for their parents, guardians and young siblings.

They drove up from the southern tip where Gaza, Israel and Egypt meet, and through the area of kibbutzes and farmland where the war started on 7 October 2023 with a surprise and ferocious assault by Hamas on the rural community, in which Palestinian militants killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians.

The convoy headed north past lines of Merkava tanks and their troops, who have been ordered to take a heightened state of readiness for war as the ceasefire stalled at the end of its first six-week phase.

Arab leaders have endorsed a plan to rebuild the Gaza Strip under the future administration of the Palestinian Authority (PA), presenting an alternative to US president Donald Trump’s widely condemned proposal to take over the territory and displace its people.

The prospect of the PA governing Gaza remains far from certain, however, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP). Israel has ruled out any future role for the body, and Trump closed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) liaison office in Washington during his first term while stepping up support for Israel.

Trump triggered global outrage by suggesting the US “take over” the Gaza Strip and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, while forcing its Palestinian inhabitants to relocate to Egypt or Jordan.

Tuesday’s Arab League summit in Cairo – a day after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his support for Trump’s proposal – offered an alternative with the adoption of a “comprehensive Arab plan”. The Egyptian-devised reconstruction plan for Gaza would cost $53bn and avoid displacing Palestinians from the territory.

The White House said the plan adopted by Arab states did not address Gaza’s reality and that Trump stood by his proposal, Associated Press (AP) reported.

You can read our story on this here:

In other developments:

• A convoy of a dozen ambulances and buses brought 25 wounded and sick Palestinian children from Gaza and across Israel on Tuesday, past the heavily armed forces that bombarded the territory for 15 months. The patients were among the 4,500 people in Gaza believed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be in urgent need of evacuation, and they were transferred to Jordan by a joint operation by the Jordanian army, the country’s health ministry and the WHO.

• Israel’s cutoff of food, fuel, medicine and other supplies to Gaza’s 2 million people has sent prices soaring and humanitarian groups into overdrive trying to distribute dwindling stocks to the most vulnerable. The aid freeze has imperiled the tenuous progress aid workers say they have made to stave off famine over the past six weeks during phase one of the ceasefire deal Israel and Hamas agreed to in January.

• The US state department has reinstated the “foreign terrorist organization” designation for Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi group, fulfilling an order announced by Donald Trump shortly after he took office. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced on Tuesday the department had restored the designation, which carries with it sanctions and penalties for anyone providing “material support” for the group.

• More than 200 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Tuesday in front of Columbia University in New York to demonstrate against former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who was at the campus for a speaking engagement. After more than a year of protests at the campus by both supporters of Israel and opponents of the assault on Gaza after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, the appearance of the former leader of Israel’s far-right was met with expected pushback.