Key events
Israeli police clashed with Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank as they dismantled an illegal settler outpost early on Wednesday.
Video seen by Reuters showed police excavators destroying makeshift structures at the outpost. Settlers sat down across a small road to block access for the police, but officers dragged them out of the way.
Haaretz, citing an Israeli civil administration official, reported that stone-throwing by the settlers damaged a vehicle. It reported “settlers set fire to tires and vehicles and threw stones at police, who used crowd dispersion means against demonstrators.”
The outpost, in a rural area, is illegal under Israeli and international law, but in many cases the police do not enforce the law.
Senior figures in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have backed the settlement of the occupied West Bank. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently told colleagues that he was “establish[ing] facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria [an Israeli term for the occupied West Bank] an integral part of the state of Israel”.
“We will establish sovereignty … first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalise the young settlements [illegal outposts],” Smotrich said in comments reported by Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
In January the Israeli military quietly handed over significant legal powers in the occupied West Bank to pro-settler civil servants working for Smotrich.
Palestinian news agency Wafa has reported that “a number of Palestinian were killed and injured at dawn” by Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Its correspondents reported “violent explosions, artillery shelling, and gunfire from military vehicles, quadcopter drones, and an Apache helicopter” in the Shejaiya area.
It reported that paramedics retreived the bodies of seven people from under the rubble of one building, and that search and rescue operations continue.
Al Jazeera is reporting that one of the people killed by Israeli attacks this morning was a doctor.
Here are the fuller quotes from Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, about the prospect for peace across the UN-drawn blue line that separates Israel and Lebanon.
He told Associated Press:
If there is a ceasefire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion. If the war stops, this military support [by Hezbollah for Palestinians in Gaza] will no longer exist.
If what happens in Gaza is a mix between ceasefire and no ceasefire, war and no war, we can’t answer now, because we don’t know its shape, its results, its impacts.
Israel can decide what it wants: limited war, total war, partial war. But it should expect that our response and our resistance will not be within a ceiling and rules of engagement set by Israel. If Israel wages the war, it means it doesn’t control its extent or who enters into it.
Overnight Israel’s military has claimed to have struck at multiple targets inside Lebanon. It says that “Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure sites”, “military structures” and “threats” were targeted in six different places.
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider crisis in the Middle East.
The Israeli prime minister and a top military chief have insisted that the war with Hamas would be a “long campaign”, rejecting reports that generals could wind down operation in Gaza before achieving all of their aims.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country would not give in to the “winds of defeatism”, after The New York Times quoted Israeli security officials as saying top generals see a truce as the best way to secure the release of remaining hostages, even if that means not achieving all of the war goals.
“I am here to make it unequivocally clear: This will not happen,” Netanyahu said, adding “we will not capitulate to the winds of defeatism, neither in The New York Times nor anywhere else. We are inspired by the spirit of victory.”
“This is a long campaign, with determination and perseverance we are accomplishing our missions and wearing down the other side,” a top army commander told troops after touring Israel’s operations in southern Gaza.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.
Hundreds of Palestinians were fleeing Khan Younis in southern Gaza after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) once again bombarded the largely ruined city and ordered a mass evacuation of residents. Witnesses reported strikes on Tuesday in and around the city, where eight people were killed and more than 30 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent and a medical source, Agence France-Presse said
The United Nations said that the order to evacuate was the largest such edict in the Gaza Strip since 1.1 million people were told to leave the north of the territory in October. UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said “an evacuation of such a massive scale will only heighten the suffering of civilians and drive humanitarian needs even higher.”
The deputy leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has said the only sure path to a ceasefire on the Lebanon-Israel border is a full ceasefire in Gaza. “If there is a ceasefire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said in an interview with The Associated Press. But, he said, if Israel scales back its military operations without a formal ceasefire agreement and full withdrawal from Gaza, the implications for the Lebanon-Israel border conflict are less clear.
French president Emmanuel Macron urged Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent a “conflagration” between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, during a telephone call between the two leaders. Macron “reiterated his serious concern over a deepening of tensions between Hezbollah and Israel … and underscored the absolute need to prevent a conflagration that would harm the interests of Lebanon as well as Israel,” the French presidency said in a statement.
Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich protested against an Israeli decision to increase the electricity supply to Gaza. Defense minister Yoav Gallant has described the work, which will enable a desalination plant in Gaza to produce more water, as “a basic humanitarian need” but Smotrich has called it a “folly”, asking prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to intervene
The mother of rescued hostage Noa Argamani died in Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv, Israeli media reports. Liora Argamani, who was 61, had been terminally ill, and was reunited with her daughter last month