Middle East crisis live: Israeli airstrikes kill 36 in Lebanon; family of nine reportedly killed in northern Gaza | Israel

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Middle East crisis.

Nine members of the same family have been killed in an Israeli strike on a residential building in the Shejaia neighbourhood of Gaza City, Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting, according to Reuters.

Israel ordered the evacuation of all of northern Gaza on Sunday and has stepped up attacks in the area. Al Jazeera reported early Wednesday that dozens of bodies lay in the streets of Jabalia refugee camp and that rescue workers could not reach the area because of the continuous bombardment.

The Lebanese health ministry said late on Tuesday that 36 people had been killed in Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours, as Israel launched new strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs. After repeated Israeli strikes near Beirut’s international airport, Lebanon’s transport minister Ali Hamieh said his country has received “assurances” that Israel will not target the Beirut airport but that those assurances fell short of guarantees.

Lebanese state media reported massive destruction, including the collapse of four adjacent residential buildings in the Burj al-Barajneh area in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed a week and a half ago.

It comes as the Israeli military said it was expanding its ground operation with the deployment of a fourth division.

At least seven people, including women and children, were meanwhile killed in an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Damascus on Tuesday, the Syrian defence ministry said.

The strike obliterated the first three floors of a building in the Mezzeh neighbourhood, east of Damascus, according to AP. Israel did not immediately comment on the attack.

More on that in a moment – first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.

• Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has cancelled plans for a visit to Washington scheduled for this week, according to a Pentagon spokesperson. The Israeli minister was expected to visit Washington and meet with his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, on Wednesday. The announcement came after reports that Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered Gallant not to travel to the Pentagon for talks on Iran until the Israeli prime minister receives a phone call with Joe Biden and until the Israeli security cabinet approves the response to Iran’s missile attack.

• Israel said it is expanding its ground operation in Lebanon with the deployment of a fourth division. The number of Israeli troops on the ground is now likely to number 15,000. The rapid deployment of four divisions operating across south Lebanon, alongside evacuation orders for Lebanese villages on the coast upwards of 20 miles from the blue line and the intensive bombing of the country’s south and east and the capital, suggests Israel is preparing for a wider push north against the Lebanese militia.

• Fighting also continues to rage in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes killed 17 people in a refugee camp in the centre of the Palestinian territory on Tuesday, medics said. At least 15 people, including two women and four children, were killed on Tuesday in ground fighting in the Jabaliya neighbourhood of Gaza City, the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital said, after new Israeli evacuation orders for the city were issued on Monday.

• The Israeli military also ordered the full evacuation of all three main hospitals in northern Gaza – Al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals, the territory’s health ministry said. Israeli forces shot at the administration office at the Kamal Adwan hospital, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which said that the complex was being besieged.

• Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces have taken out the would-be successors of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, without naming them. The Israeli prime minister also warned the people of Lebanon they could face “destruction and suffering” like the Palestinians in Gaza.

• Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, said that the question of who will succeed Nasrallah remains undecided. In a defiant speech on Tuesday, Qassem said the group’s military capabilities were still functional despite two weeks of heavy Israeli airstrikes.

• Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, warned Israel that any attack on Iran’s infrastructure will be met with retaliation, a week after Tehran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel. On Monday evening Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that Tehran’s military had prepared at least ten scenarios preparing for an expected Israeli attack.

• Hezbollah fired another barrage of rockets into Israel on Tuesday and warned that it would intensify attacks on Israel, including the northern port city of Haifa, if it continues to strike Lebanon. The IDF said Hezbollah launched more than 170 rockets across the border.

• Israel’s home front command tightened restrictions on civilians in the port city of Haifa on Tuesday in the wake of a barrage of rockets launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah said it had fired rockets towards the Haifa and Krayot area in northern Israel, having launched “a large salvo of missiles”. About seven people were injured in the attack, according to reports.

• Hezbollah said it killed and injured Israeli soldiers crossing the Lebanese border near a UN position near the al-Labouneh forest, in the western section of the border area. Hezbollah said that the attack forced Israeli soldiers to withdraw behind the border.

• Ireland’s prime minister, Simon Harris, said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrawal from a firing position next to Irish peacekeepers on the Lebanese border was “extremely welcome”. Harris said he had spoken to UN secretary general, António Guterres, about his deep concerns about their safety after the IDF requested them to vacate their positions to make way for their war on Hezbollah.

• António Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned that Lebanon is on the verge of “an all-out war” and Gaza is “in a death spiral.” Guterres, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, said that the Middle East “is a powder keg with many parties holding the match” and that the conflict is “getting worse by the hour”. He said he has written to Netanyahu warning him that draft Israeli legislation to prevent the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) from working in the occupied Palestinian territory would be a “catastrophe”.

• The World Food Programme country director in Lebanon voiced concern about the country’s food supply, saying thousands of hectares of farmland across the country’s south has burned or been abandoned. “Agriculture-wise, food production-wise, (there is) extraordinary concern for Lebanon’s ability to continue to feed itself,” Matthew Hollingworth told reporters on Tuesday.

• Joe Biden, the US president, pulled out of scheduled talks between the leaders of the US, UK, France and Germany on the Middle East and Ukraine on Saturday. Biden will no longer be travelling to Berlin in order to focus on the response to Hurricane Milton, expected to make landfall as an “extremely dangerous hurricane” in Florida on Wednesday night, local time, the White House said.

• US presidential candidate Donald Trump has claimed he visited Gaza despite no evidence of such a trip. When asked to clarify by the New York Times, a Trump spokesperson said “Gaza is in Israel. President Trump has been to Israel.”

• British foreign secretary David Lammy is to meet leaders in Bahrain and Jordan as part of efforts to prevent the conflict in the Middle East from escalating further, Reuters reports.

• Israeli forces detained at least 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, including a journalist, Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reports, citing updates from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been detained in Israeli raids across the occupied West Bank since last October, the groups have said.

• Prosecutors in the Netherlands are considering a request to open a criminal case against senior Israeli intelligence officials for allegedly interfering with an investigation by the international criminal court (ICC).