Middle East crisis live: UN agency pauses food deliveries to northern Gaza due to ‘collapse of civil order’
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The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has announced it is pausing deliveries of food aid to northern Gaza.
This comes after incidents on 18 and 19 February when WFP says convoys were unable to deliver aid as planned, largely due to a breakdown in civil order. It said a truck was looted and the driver beaten.
The UN has said between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these missions, the UN says “12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access, and nine were postponed.”
The pause in aid delivery comes as a UN-backed report found that one in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza were found to be “acutely malnourished”.
This image has been released by Syrian media showing a building damaged in an apparent Israeli missile attack on the Kafr Sousa district in Damascus.
A view shows a damaged building in the Kafr Sousa district in Damascus released by Syrian media. Photograph: SANA/Reuters
Reuters reports witnesses heard several back-to-back explosions, and that the blasts scared children at a nearby school and ambulances rushed to the area.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
The neighbourhood hosts residential buildings, schools and Iranian cultural centres, and lies near a large, heavily guarded complex used by security agencies.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has announced it is pausing deliveries of food aid to northern Gaza.
This comes after incidents on 18 and 19 February when WFP says convoys were unable to deliver aid as planned, largely due to a breakdown in civil order. It said a truck was looted and the driver beaten.
The UN has said between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these missions, the UN says “12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access, and nine were postponed.”
The pause in aid delivery comes as a UN-backed report found that one in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza were found to be “acutely malnourished”.
In its latest operational update, Israel’s military has claimed to be operating “in the area of Zaytun, south of Gaza City” and said it has “killed dozens of terrorists in ground encounters and targeted airstrikes”.
The IDF said it recovered “weapons including an RPG and AK-47 rifle” and has located dozens of “terror infrastructures, observation posts, weapon storage facilities, and underground targets”.
It also claims that the military “expanded activities in western Khan Younis, targeting and killing terrorists with precise sniper fire and striking terror infrastructure.”
The claims have not been independently verified.
In this morning’s First Edition newsletter, my colleague Archie Bland has spoken to our diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour about the shifting language around ceasefire calls, and what it tells us. Bland writes:
The daily details of the horror being visited on civilians in Gaza can make any conversation about the language of ceasefire proposals being put forward in foreign capitals seem absurd.
But the calls for a ceasefire, and the subtle ways that they’ve changed over time, do tell us something about Israel’s weakening position on the international stage. This week, in the UK and at the UN, rival propositions for what a ceasefire might look like have emerged. Behind the diplomatic wrangling, and a particular crisis today for the Labour party in Britain, is a complicated story about how the violence might end, and who might be able to influence it.
Several Israeli missiles hit the Kafr Soussa district in Syria’s capital Damascus on Wednesday, Syrian state media reported.
AP reports pro-government Sham FM radio station said the strike hit a building near an Iranian school and caused casualties. Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said the strike was “an assassination” but did not specify who might have been the target.
Reuters reports the neighbourhood houses senior security officials, security branches and intelligence headquarters and Iranian installations. It was previously targeted in what was believed to be an Israeli attack in February 2023 that killed up to 15 people.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years, and in December, an Israeli airstrike on a suburb of Damascus killed Iranian general Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria
This map shows the location of the suburb, and where the earlier February attack happened.
Iran’s oil Minister Javad Owji has said Israel was behind last week’s attack on Iranian gas pipelines Reuters reports, citing semi-official news agency Tasnim.
Two explosions hit Iran’s main south-north gas pipeline network on Feb. 14 and were initially described by Owji as a “terrorist act of sabotage”, without naming any suspects.
Owji said on Wednesday “The enemy intended to disrupt households’ gas supplies … but within two hours our colleagues worked to counter the Israeli plot which only damaged several pipes.”
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
It comes as UN agency Unicef has warned that Gaza could witness an increase in what an official said was “the already unbearable level of child deaths” due to a worsening food crisis.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main news.
The US has vetoed a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the third time, arguing that it would undermine negotiations over a hostage deal. The US was the lone vote against a ceasefire resolution put forward on Tuesday by Algeria.
China expressed “strong disappointment” over the veto, according to state media. “China expresses its strong disappointment at and dissatisfaction with the US veto,” Xinhua reported, citing UN representative Zhang Jun. “The US veto sends a wrong message, pushing the situation in Gaza into a more dangerous one,” said Zhang.
South Africa’s delegation to the ICJ in The Hague has said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is “an even more extreme form of the apartheid” than the one formerly in place in South Africa. The court is holding a second day of hearings asking it to give an advisory opinion on the Israeli occupation.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has accused Israel of impeding hospital rescue missions at the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza. The agency reported its staff said “the destruction around Nasser hospital was ‘indescribable’” and that it was concerned for “an estimated 130 sick and injured patients and at least 15 doctors and nurses” who remain at the medical complex, which has “no electricity or running water”.
The total number of Palestinians detained by Israeli security forces from theoccupied West Bank since 7 October has risen to 7,120 according to local sources.
Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy has condemned a UN report which said there were “credible allegations of egregious human rights violations” of Palestinian women and girls by Israeli security forces including rape and strip-searches as motivated by “hatred of Israel and the Jewish people”.
