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Deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell warns situation could look like those ‘we found ourselves in after 9/11 … the insurrections continue’
- Israel deepens offensive in Rafah and re-enters northern areas of Gaza
- ‘Total outrage’: White House condemns Israeli settlers’ attack on Gaza aid trucks
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.
The Biden administration does not see it likely or possible that Israel will achieve “total victory” in defeating Hamas in Gaza, US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell has said.
Residents said Israeli tanks pushed further into Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, with tank shells landing at the centre of the city’s refugee camp and airstrikes destroying clusters of houses. Palestinian health officials said Monday they had recovered at least 20 bodies of Palestinian people killed in overnight Israeli airstrikes on Jabaliya, while dozens of people were reported injured. Israeli forces fired on ambulances trying to reach injured people as air raids hit crowded residential areas within the sprawling refugee camp, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.
In the far south of the devastated territory on Monday, witnesses reported helicopter strikes and street battles in Rafah as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) consolidated their hold on neighbourhoods east of the strategic Salah al-Din road, which bisects the city. An unknown number of people were killed in an airstrike on a house in the Brazil neighbourhood.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Monday that the health system across the devastated enclave could collapse shortly. “A few hours separate us from the collapse of the health system in the Gaza Strip as a result of the failure to bring in the fuel necessary to operate electricity generators in hospitals, ambulances, and transport employees,” the ministry said in a post on social media.
Rafah residents received more evacuation orders through phone calls and text messages, causing more desperate people to start packing and leave, witnesses told Agence France-Presse (AFP). Up to 500,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah in the past week after Israeli warnings to evacuate before an imminent military assault. With the evacuation order and arrival of fighting, hospitals swiftly shut and meagre aid supplies vanished. Residents say they have no idea where they will go now, or how they will get there.
The White House has condemned an attack on an aid convoy heading to Gaza by Israeli settlers who threw packages of food into the road and set fire to the vehicles. Video of the incident on Monday at Tarqumiya checkpoint, west of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, showed settlers blocking the trucks and throwing boxes of much-needed supplies on the ground.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday that President Joe Biden’s administration does not view the killings of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel in its war with Hamas as genocide. “We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. We have been firmly on record rejecting that proposition,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House.
At least 35,173 Palestinians have died and 79,061 have been wounded in the Israel-Gaza war since 7 October according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. Reuters reported the new figures from a ministry statement on Tuesday. There have been 82 Palestinians killed and 234 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry statement added.
A foreign UN security staff member was killed on Monday when a UN-marked vehicle travelling to a hospital in Rafah was struck – the first international UN fatality in the Gaza war, a UN spokesperson said, bringing the total death toll of UN personnel to around 190.
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