US and Israeli leaders speak a day after Netanyahu again rejected notion of Palestinian statehood, their first call in almost a month
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Welcome to our live coverage of the Middle East crisis – this is Adam Fulton with a rundown on all the latest news.
Israel continued its attacks in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US president, Joe Biden, discussed their differences over a post-war future for Palestinians which have suggested a rift between the two allies.
As Israeli forces have moved further into southern Gaza, airstrikes and close-combat fighting are approaching areas crowded with more than a million people seeking refuge from the destruction across the rest of the territory. The prospect of major operations taking place in territory with such a dense and vulnerable population is “deeply concerning”, say aid officials, who fear Gaza’s largest remaining hospital may have to be closed or evacuated.
The US central command said its forces conducted strikes against three Houthi anti-ship missiles that were aimed into the Southern Red Sea and were prepared to launch. The US has been launching strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, and this week returned the Iran-backed Yemen-based group to a list of “terrorist” groups. The Houthis said on Friday they did not intend to expand their attacks on shipping in and around the Red Sea, beyond their stated aims of blockading Israel and retaliating against the US and Britain for airstrikes.
Gaza’s main internet provider, Paltel, said communication services across the Palestinian territory were gradually returning after a nearly eight-day outage, the longest blackout since the war began. Paltel said two of its technical team members lost their lives as a result of “direct shelling” during recent repair operations, bringing the number of its employees killed to 14 since the start of the conflict.
A senior minister in the Israeli war cabinet has said that only a ceasefire deal can win the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, and that Israel is unlikely to achieve its aim of “total victory” over the militant Islamist group. Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, launched a blistering attack on Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the campaign against Hamas and failure to take responsibility for the failures that led to the Palestinian militant group’s bloody attack on Israel in October.
Health services in Gaza are “decimated”, with medical staff exhausted after three months of war forced to extract shrapnel without adequate pain relief, conduct amputations without anaesthetics and watch children die of cancers due to a lack of facilities and medicine, doctors say.
Pakistan’s political and military leaders have moved to de-escalate tensions with Iran after trading deadly airstrikes on militant targets in each other’s territory. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Jalil Abbas Jilani, spoke to his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and they agreed that “close coordination on counter-terrorism and other aspects of mutual concern should be strengthened”, according to a readout from Islamabad’s foreign ministry.
Hezbollah’s number two leader has warned Israel against expanding the conflict along the Lebanon-Israel border, where there have been near daily exchanges of cross-border fire between the Israeli army and the Iran-backed militant group. Naim Qassem said in a statement on Friday: “If Israel decides to expand its aggression, it will receive a real slap in the face in response.” Any restoration of stability on the border was contingent on “the end of the aggression in Gaza”, he added.