Middle East crisis live: Israel warns it will hit back if Iran strikes as US issues travel restrictions for diplomats
It has gone 8am in Gaza and 9am in Tel Aviv. This is our latest Guardian live blog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis.
Israel’s defence minister has said the country will respond directly to any attack on Israel by Iran, as concerns mount of Iranian retaliation over a deadly Israeli strike in Syria.
“A direct Iranian attack will require an appropriate Israeli response against Iran,” Yoav Gallant told the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, on Thursday, according to Gallant’s office.
Iran has vowed retaliation after Israel destroyed an Iranian consular building in Damascus on 1 April, killing seven Revolutionary Guards including two generals.
The US is seeking to deter Iran from carrying out a retaliatory strike with concerted declarations of commitment to Israeli security, while at the same time trying to prevent the outbreak of a major regional war, officials in Washington have said.
The US on Thursday restricted the movements of its diplomats in Israel over security fears, the US embassy said, with personal travel outside the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Beersheeva areas barred “until further notice”.
In other key developments:
The US president, Joe Biden, has pledged that Washington’s commitment to defend Israel against Iran is “ironclad”, amid rising US concerns that a “significant” Iranian strike could happen within days. The UK prime minister, meanwhile, said Iran’s threats of an attack were “unacceptable”. Rishi Sunak’s office said he reaffirmed British support for Tel Aviv’s right to defend itself.
Germany’s foreign minister called her Iranian counterpart to urge “maximum restraint” to avoid further escalation. The US envoy to the Middle East reportedly called the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Iraq asking them to deliver a message to Tehran to lower tensions with Israel. The Kremlin urged all Middle East countries to show restraint and prevent the region slipping into chaos.
The top US commander for the Middle East, Gen Erik Kurilla, is in Israel for security talks with Israeli military officials, the Pentagon has said.
Iran has signalled to Washington that it will respond to the Israeli attack in a way that aims to avoid major escalation and it will not act hastily, Iranian sources told Reuters. Tehran’s message to Washington was conveyed by Iran’s foreign minister during a visit to Oman, the sources said.
A promised surge in aid into Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu promised Joe Biden a week ago has so far failed to materialise, aid workers say, as the US’s aid chief confirmed that famine was beginning to take hold in parts of the Palestinian territory. The increase in the number of truck crossing into Gaza claimed by Israel conflicts with UN records and already appears to be faltering. Several countries including France and Jordan airdropped about 110 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the French president and military said.
A video has surfaced of a senior official at Israel’s cyber intelligence agency, Unit 8200, talking last year about the use of machine-learning “magic powder” to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza. The footage raises questions about the Israel Defense Forces’ recent statement that it “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist”.
Israeli forces killed three sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an airstrike in Gaza without consulting senior Israeli commanders or political leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israeli media reports. Quoting senior Israeli officials, Walla news agency said on Thursday that neither Netanyahu, the prime minister, nor Yoav Gallant had been told in advance of the strike, which was coordinated by the Israeli military and the Shin Bet intelligence service.
Haniyeh said the Israeli attack, which also killed at least two of his grandchildren, would not change Hamas’s demands for a permanent ceasefire and return of displaced Palestinians from their homes in ongoing negotiations mediated by Qatar and the US. “All our people and all the families of Gaza have paid a heavy price in blood, and I am one of them,” the militant group’s exiled political chief said from his base in Doha, the Qatari capital. The Israeli military confirmed it had targeted Haniyeh’s sons, who it described as “three Hamas operatives”. The Turkish president offered his condolences in a phone call to Haniyeh, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s office said.
At least 33,545 Palestinians have been killed and 76,094 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday. The Hamas-run ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
Hamas has indicated it does not have 40 captives who are still alive who meet the “humanitarian” criteria for a proposed hostages-for-prisoners ceasefire agreement with Israel. Ceasefire talks in Cairo have focused on a US-backed proposal of a phased exchange of hostages including women, children and elderly or sick people. An Israeli official confirmed claims made by Hamas in Cairo that it does not have 40 hostages in Gaza who meet the exchange criteria.
An Israeli minister has said that after Hamas’s 7 October attack there is no longer a “moral” justification to exempt ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from army service, breaking a longstanding taboo within his community. The interior minister, Moshe Arbel, is from the ultra-Orthodox party Shas. Israel’s ruling coalition has been scrambling to find a compromise on drafting the cohort after the country’s top court effectively struck down the decades-old exemption as of 1 April.
Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu “played” him during the early months of the war in Gaza but “that ain’t going to happen any more”, according to US senator Tim Kaine. The Democratic party’s leading foreign policy voice told the Guardian that the Israeli prime minister had made Israel “dramatically less safe” and hurt its longstanding relationship with the US.
Israeli jets hit military targets of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the areas of Meiss el Jabal, Yarine and Khiam, as well as a Hezbollah observation post in the area of Marwahin and another compound in Al-Dahira in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military said on Thursday.
The US destroyed an anti-ship ballistic missile launched from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen as well as 11 Houthi drones, the military said on Thursday, after the Iran-backed group claimed it had targeted Israeli and US ships off the Gulf of Aden. US central command said no injuries or damage to vessels were reported.
Israel’s foreign ministry denounced Ireland’s new prime minister, Simon Harris, for not mentioning the hostages held by militants in Gaza during a speech to the Irish parliament.