Region

GENEVA — Israeli forces are "systematically" blocking access to people in Gaza, complicating the task of delivering aid in what has become a lawless war zone, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

It has become nearly impossible to evacuate the sick or wounded and deliver aid in northern Gaza and increasingly difficult in the south, said Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.

All planned aid convoys into the north have been denied by Israeli authorities in recent weeks.

The last allowed in was on January 23, according to the World Health Organisation.

Even convoys cleared in advance with Israeli authorities have been blocked or come under fire.

Laerke pointed to an incident on Sunday, when a convoy to evacuate 24 patients from the besieged Al Amal hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis — jointly organised by the WHO and Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) — was blocked for seven hours and paramedics detained.

‘Unacceptable’ 

“Despite prior coordination for all staff members and vehicles with the Israeli side, the Israeli forces blocked the WHO-led convoy for many hours the moment it left the hospital,” Laerke told journalists in Geneva.

“The Israeli military forced patients and staff out of ambulances and stripped all paramedics of their clothes,” he said.

The convoy had to leave another 31 patients behind at Amal, which is no long functioning after suffering 40 attacks in the past month alone that have killed at least 25 people.

“Three PRCS paramedics were subsequently detained, although their personal details had been shared with the Israeli forces in advance,” Laerke said. Just one has been released.

“This is not an isolated incident,” he stressed.

“Aid convoys have come under fire and are systematically denied access to people in need [meaning] humanitarian workers are subject to unacceptable and preventable risk.”

The PRCS said it was suspending operations in Gaza for 48 hours because Israel has failed to ensure the safety of its emergency medical teams.

Laerke said the UN would continue to remind Israeli forces they had an obligation, at a minimum, to facilitate “safe, smooth and rapid passage” when alerted to aid missions.

Desperate people 

Israel’s relentless military retaliation has killed at least 29,878 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to its Hamas-run health ministry.

The situation in the densely populated Palestinian territory is increasingly desperate.

Laerke said UN aid trucks, which travel without armed guards, are often stopped as soon as they cross into Gaza by crowds of people desperate for food and other aid.

“Desperate people take what they can,” he said.

But gangs also appeared to be taking aid which later turned up on the black market, he added, warning of an “increasing breakdown of civil order inside Gaza”.

WASHINGTON — The United States and Britain announced fresh sanctions on Tuesday against an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) deputy commander, alongside a Houthi member.

Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis have been targeting shipping in the Red Sea area for months, persisting in attacks despite repeated US and British strikes aimed at degrading their ability to threaten the vital global trade route.

Brian Nelson, US Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said the latest sanctions underscore resolve in targeting efforts by the IRGC Quds Force and Houthis to evade sanctions and fund more attacks in the region.

The Quds Force is the IRGC branch responsible for foreign operations, with officials saying it supports militant groups across the region, including the Houthis, Hamas and Hizbollah.

As the Houthis "persistently threaten the security of peaceful international commerce, the United States and the United Kingdom will continue to disrupt the funding streams that enable these destabilising activities", Nelson said.

"The UK will also sanction a Houthi security minister for threatening the peace, security and stability of Yemen by supporting attacks against shipping in the Red Sea," British authorities said in a statement.

Among those targeted on Tuesday are Mohammad Reza Falahzadeh, current deputy commander of the IRGC Quds Force.

Houthi member Ibrahim Al Nashiri was also named by the United States over support of the group's militant efforts.

The US Treasury noted that the Quds Force and Houthis "engage in the sale of Iranian commodities to foreign buyers to generate revenue" for funding Houthi operations.

The Treasury also announced sanctions against the owner and operator of a vessel used to ship Iranian commodities — Hong Kong-based Cap Tees Shipping Co — to support both the Houthis and IRGC Quds Force.

“The revenue generated through these illicit networks enables the Houthis’ militant efforts, including numerous terrorist attacks in the region using advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles,” the US Treasury said.

In a separate statement, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron called the Houthis’ attacks “unacceptable, illegal and a threat to innocent lives and freedom of navigation”.

BAALBEK, Lebanon — Hizbollah on Monday fired a volley of rockets at an Israeli military base, the Lebanese group said after Israel’s first strikes on Lebanon’s east in months of hostilities linked to the Gaza war.

It was the first Israeli attack on Hizbollah outside Lebanon’s south since war erupted on October 7 between Israel and Palestinian fighter group Hamas, a Hizbollah ally.

Hizbollah and arch-foe Israel have exchanged near-daily fire, but strikes have been largely contained to the border area.

Two Hizbollah members were killed in the Israeli strikes in the eastern Baalbek area, two security officials in Lebanon and a source close to the Iran-backed group told AFP.

“In response to the Zionist aggression near the city of Baalbek,” fighters targeted an army base in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights “with 60 Katyusha rockets”, Hizbollah said in a statement.

Israeli forces told AFP that “dozens of rockets” had been launched from Lebanon. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

One of the Lebanese security sources said Israeli strikes hit a building used by Hizbollah in a Baalbek suburb, and a warehouse near Baalbek belonging to the group.

Both sources requested anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the press.

 ‘Determination’ 

Later Monday an Israeli strike on a car in southern Lebanon killed at least one person, local rescuers told AFP, without providing further details.

Hizbollah said a third fighter had been killed by Israeli fire.

The Israeli army said in a statement that the strike killed a Hizbollah fighter who “commanded recent terrorist activities... against Israeli civilians and soldiers”.

Hizbollah announced several other attacks on Israeli sites and troops on Monday, with local media also reporting Israeli strikes on south Lebanon villages.

During a funeral procession for one of the group’s fighters, Hizbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah lambasted the strikes on Baalbek, a bastion of the Shiite Muslim movement near the border with Syria.

“This Zionist encroachment will not push us to retreat, it will rather increase our determination,” Fadlallah said in a televised address.

The cross-border hostilities have killed at least 281 people on the Lebanese side, most of them Hizbollah fighters but also including 44 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and six civilians have been killed since October, according to Israeli forces.

Residents on both sides of the border have been displaced by the fighting, and Israeli officials have threatened military action to restore security in the country’s north.

On Sunday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said there would be no let up in Israeli action against Hizbollah even if a ceasefire were secured in Gaza.

Hizbollah has said it will stop launching attacks on Israel if the Israeli military ends its Gaza offensive.

In January a strike, which a United States defence official said Israel carried out, killed Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh Al Aruri and six militants in Hizbollah’s south Beirut stronghold — the most high-profile Hamas figure to be killed during the war.

WASHINGTON — American and British forces carried out a fresh wave of strikes Saturday against 18 Houthi targets in Yemen, a joint statement said, following weeks of unrelenting attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Iran-backed rebels.

The strikes “specifically targeted 18 Houthi targets across eight locations in Yemen associated with Houthi underground weapons storage facilities, missile storage facilities, one-way attack unmanned aerial systems, air defence systems, radars and a helicopter”, said the joint statement.

The statement was co-signed by Australia, Bahrain, Denmark, Canada, The Netherlands and New Zealand, who gave unspecified “support” to the new round of strikes, the second this month and fourth since the rebels began their attacks on ships in the region.

“The Houthis’ now more than 45 attacks on commercial and naval vessels since mid-November constitute a threat to the global economy, as well as regional security and stability, and demand an international response,” the statement said.

Saturday’s operation comes after several merchant vessels were struck this week in the region, including the fertiliser-filled Rubymar, whose crew had to abandon ship after it was hit Sunday and began taking on water.

Apart from the joint operations with Britain, the United States has also carried out repeated unilateral strikes against Houthi positions and weaponry in Yemen, claiming self-defence, and has downed air and sea-borne drones in the Red Sea.

“The United States will not hesitate to take action, as needed, to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most critical waterways,” Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said in a separate statement after the strikes.

“We will continue to make clear to the Houthis that they will bear the consequences if they do not stop their illegal attacks, which harm Middle Eastern economies, cause environmental damage, and disrupt the delivery of humanitarian aid to Yemen and other countries.”

The Houthis say they are targeting Israel-linked vessels in support of Palestinians in Gaza, which has been ravaged by the Hamas-Israel war.

Following previous US and UK strikes, the Houthis declared American and British interests to be legitimate targets as well.

Anger over Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza — which began after an unprecedented Hamas surprise attack on October 7 — has grown across the Middle East, stoking violence involving Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israel's prime minister said on Sunday a potential ceasefire in its war against Hamas fighters would only delay a ground invasion of Gaza's southern city Rafah that has sheltered more than half of the conflict-battered territory's population.

The United States said ongoing mediation efforts produced "an understanding" towards a ceasefire and hostage release, while dire food shortages in northern Gaza have sent Palestinians fleeing.

Egyptian, Qatari and US experts met in Doha for talks also attended by Israeli and Hamas representatives, state-linked Egyptian media said, in the latest effort to secure a truce before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the military operation into Rafah, on Gaza's southern border with Egypt, would put Israel within weeks of "total victory" over Hamas whose October 7 sudden attack triggered the war.

"If we have a deal, it will be delayed somewhat, but it will happen," he told CBS of the looming ground invasion feared to bring more mass civilian casualties in Rafah, where around 1.4 million Palestinians, most of them displaced from other areas, have converged.

"If we don't have a deal, we'll do it anyway," Netanyahu said.

"It has to be done because total victory is our goal and total victory is within reach — not months away, weeks away, once we begin the operation."

The Doha talks follow a weekend meeting in Paris, without Gaza rulers Hamas, where representatives "came to an understanding among the four of them about what the basic contours of a hostage deal for temporary ceasefire would look like", White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN.

More than four months into the war, desperate families in the north of the besieged Gaza Strip have been forced to scavenge for food as fighting and looting have stopped humanitarian deliveries.

Hundreds headed south whichever way they could, walking down garbage-strewn roads between the blackened shells of bombed-out buildings, said an AFP correspondent.

“I came on foot from north Gaza,” said Samir Abd Rabbo, 27, who arrived with his one-year-old daughter at the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

Without milk, he said, he had tried to feed his baby girl bread made from animal feed, which she was unable to digest. “Our only hope is God, there is nobody else to help.”

In northern Gaza’s Jabalia, displaced man Marwan Awadieh said the area “has become completely uninhabitable” and food was desperately scarce.

“Even the animal fodder that we had resorted to is now unavailable,” he said, and wild herbs have “now been depleted, people have gathered it all”.

Israeli forces continued striking targets across the Palestinian territory and battling Hamas militants in heavy urban combat centred on the southern city of Khan Yunis, near Rafah.

The war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented surprise attack on Israel on October 7.

Hamas fighters also took about 250 Israeli and foreign hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 31 presumed dead, according to Israel.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 29,692 people, mostly women and children, according to the latest tally issued Sunday by the health ministry in Gaza.

Talks have been held for weeks with the goal of reaching a temporary truce, to exchange Hamas’s hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, and to step up aid deliveries.

Mediators have voiced hope a deal can be reached before the start of Ramadan on March 10 or 11, depending on the lunar calendar.

Israeli warnings of a Rafah ground invasion have sparked deep concern and questions about where the Palestinians who have sought refuge there, many in makeshift camps, would flee to in the devastated territory.

Neighbouring Egypt has kept its border closed to a mass refugee flight, arguing it will not help facilitate any Israeli operation to push Palestinians out of Gaza.

Inside Israel, public pressure has grown on Netanyahu — both from the desperate families of hostages demanding swifter action, and from a resurgent anti-government protest movement.

Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has spiralled, with the UN World Food Programme reporting “unprecedented levels of desperation”.

Red Crescent volunteer Ezzedin Halaweh said food shortages in the north were “leading to severe health issues, especially among children”.

A Hamas official in northern Gaza told AFP that “killing our people by starvation... is a crime of genocide that threatens the entire process of negotiations”.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Overnight strikes on Gaza killed dozens, the Hamas-run territory's health ministry said on Saturday, as Israel's spy chief joined talks in Paris seeking to unblock negotiations on a truce.

The negotiations come after a plan for a post-war Gaza unveiled by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew criticism from key ally the United States, and was rejected by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.

They also come alongside deepening fears for Gaza's civilians. The United Nations' main aid body for Palestinians, UNWRA, said Gazans were "in extreme peril while the world watches".

Hamas said on Saturday morning that Israeli forces had launched more than 70 strikes on civilian homes in Deir Al-Balah, Khan Yunis and Rafah among other locations over the previous 24 hours. The health ministry said at least 92 people were killed.

AFPTV footage showed distraught Gazans queueing on Friday for food in Jabalia, also in the besieged Palestinian territory's devastated north, and protesting over dire living conditions.

"We have no water, no flour and we are very tired because of hunger. Our backs and eyes hurt because of fire and smoke," said one of them, Oum Wajdi Salha.

Gaza’s health ministry said a two-month-old baby identified as Mahmud Fatuh had died of “malnutrition”.

The UN humanitarian agency OCHA warned that “the elevated risk of famine in Gaza is projected to increase” without enough food and water, as well as health services.

Post-war plan 

The war began after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 surprise attack. Hamas fighters also took hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 30 presumed dead, according to Israel.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 29,606 people, mostly women and children, according to the latest count by Gaza’s health ministry.

An Israeli air strike Friday destroyed the Gaza home of well-known Palestinian comedian Mahmoud Zuaiter, killing at least 23 people and wounding dozens more, the health ministry said.

Netanyahu this week unveiled a plan for post-war Gaza that envisages civil affairs being run by Palestinian officials without links to Hamas.

The plan says that, even after the conflict, Israel’s army would have “indefinite freedom” to operate throughout Gaza to prevent any resurgence of terror activity, according to the proposals.

It also says Israel will move ahead with a plan, already under way, to establish a security buffer zone inside Gaza along the territory’s border.

A senior Hamas official dismissed the plan as unworkable.

“When it comes to the day after in the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu is presenting ideas which he knows fully well will never succeed,” Osama Hamdan told reporters in Beirut.

The plan also drew criticism from the United States. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Washington had been “consistently clear with our Israeli counterparts” about what was needed in post-war Gaza.

“The Palestinian people should have a voice and a vote... through a revitalised Palestinian Authority,” he said, adding the United States also did not “believe in a reduction of the size of Gaza”.

Paris delegation 

An Israeli delegation led by Mossad intelligence agency chief David Barnea was in Paris on Saturday for a fresh push towards a deal to return the remaining hostages.

Barnea would be joined by his counterpart at the domestic Shin Bet security agency, Ronen Bar, Israeli media reported.

The United States, Egypt and Qatar have all been deeply involved in past negotiations aimed at securing a truce and prisoner-hostage exchanges.

Pressure has been mounting on Netanyahu’s government to negotiate a ceasefire and secure the hostages’ release after more than four months of war. A group representing the captives’ families planned what it billed as a “huge rally” to demand swifter action, coinciding with the Paris talks on Saturday night.

White House envoy Brett McGurk held talks this week with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, after speaking to other mediators in Cairo who had met Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.

A Hamas source said the new plan proposes a six-week pause in the conflict and the release of between 200 and 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages being held by Hamas.

Barnea and his US counterpart from the CIA helped broker a week-long truce in November that saw the release of 80 Israeli hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

US National Security Council spokesman Kirby had said earlier that the discussions were “going well”, while Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz spoke of “the first signs that indicate the possibility of progress”.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — At the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, Abu Gibril was so desperate for food to feed his family that he slaughtered two of his horses.

"We had no other choice but to slaughter the horses to feed the children. Hunger is killing us," he told AFP.

Jabalia was the biggest camp in the Palestinian territories before the war, which began after Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel on October 7, leaving some 1,160 dead, based on Israeli figures.

Gibril, 60, fled there from nearby Beit Hanun when the conflict erupted. Home for him and his family is now a tent near what was a UN-run school.

Contaminated water, power cuts and overcrowding were already a problem in the densely populated camp, which was set up in 1948 and covers just 1.4 square kilometres.

Poverty, from high unemployment, was also an issue among its more than 100,000 people.

Now food is running out, with aid agencies unable to get in to the area because of the bombing — and the frenzied looting of the few trucks that try to get through.

The World Food Programme this week said its teams reported "unprecedented levels of desperation" while the United Nations warned that 2.2 million people were on the brink of famine.

On Friday, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said a two-month-old baby died of malnutrition in hospital in Gaza City, seven kilometres (just over four miles) away from Jabalia.

Overall, at least 29,606 people have been killed in Gaza in the war, the ministry said Saturday.

Scavenging and begging

In the camp, bedraggled children wait expectantly, holding plastic containers and battered cooking pots for what little food is available.

With supplies dwindling, costs are rising. A kilo of rice, for example, has shot up from seven shekels ($1.90) to 55 shekels, complains one man.

“We the grown-ups can still make it but these children who are four and five years old, what did they do wrong to sleep hungry and wake up hungry?” he said angrily.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF has warned that the alarming lack of food, surging malnutrition and disease could lead to an “explosion” in child deaths in Gaza.

One in six children aged under two in Gaza was acutely malnourished, it estimated on February 19.

Residents have taken to eating scavenged scraps of rotten corn, animal fodder unfit for human consumption and even leaves to try to stave off the growing hunger pangs.

“There is no food, no wheat, no drinking water,” said one woman.

“We have started begging neighbours for money. We don’t have one shekel at home. We knock on doors and no one is giving us money.”

‘Dying from hunger’ 

Tempers are rising in Jabalia about the lack of food and the consequences. On Friday, an impromptu protest was held involving dozens of people.

One child held up a sign reading: “We didn’t die from air strikes but we are dying from hunger.”

Another held aloft a placard warning “Famine eats away at our flesh”, while protesters chanted “No to starvation. No to genocide. No to blockade”.

In Beit Hanun, Gibril used two horses to harvest a parcel of land. But the conflict destroyed that, along with his house, leaving him with nothing.

Over the weeks and months, Israel’s relentless bombardment has left Gaza largely a place of shattered concrete and lives.

Gibril kept the radical decision to slaughter his horses to himself, boiling the meat with rice, and giving it to his unwitting family and neighbours.

Despite the necessity, he said he was still wary of their reaction. “No one knows they were in fact eating a horse.”

MAALE ADUMIM, Palestinian Territories — Three Palestinian fighters killed one person and wounded eight when they sprayed automatic weapons fire at vehicles in a “terror attack” on Thursday near a Zionist settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, police said.

The three shooters were “neutralised”, police said, and an AFP photographer later saw their bodies at the scene of the attack on a highway east of Jerusalem, where five cars were riddled with bullets.

“Two terrorists were neutralised on the spot,” police said. “In the searches conducted at the scene, another terrorist was located who tried to escape and he was also neutralised.”

The fighters were identified as Mohammed Zawahrah, Kathim Zawahrah, and Ahmed Al Wahsh by Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet.

Violence was already on the rise across the West Bank prior to the Gaza war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 sudden attack, but has escalated since then to levels unseen in nearly two decades, with hundreds killed in recent months.

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visited the site of Thursday’s attack where he told journalists: “The enemies... want to hurt us. They hate us.”

He argued that “we need to distribute more weapons” and that “our right to life is superior to the freedom of movement” of residents governed by the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmud Abbas.

“There should be more restrictions and we should put barriers around villages and limit the freedom of movement” of people from the West Bank, Ben Gvir added.

The attack came after two people were shot dead last Friday at a bus stop in southern Israel near the town of Kiryat Malakhi.

Escalating violence 

The West Bank has seen near-daily raids by the Israeli military that often turn deadly.

Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 400 Palestinians in the West Bank since the Gaza war broke out, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah.

Israel captured the West Bank — including East Jerusalem, which it later occupied — in the Juneof 1967.

Around 475,000 Jewish settlers currently live in the occupied West Bank, in settlements considered illegal by the United Nations and most of the international community.

The West Bank’s Palestinian population is about 2.9 million.

The Palestinians claim the territory as the heartland of a future independent state, a goal being discussed by the international community as the Gaza war rages into a fifth month.

Israel’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed a proposal by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposing any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.