Middle East crisis live: US wants Gaza fighting pause, Blinken says, but will not limit arms transfers despite Israel missing aid deadline

Lebanon’s health ministry has issued updated casualty figures, stating that in the last 24 hours 78 people have been killed and 122 wounded by Israeli airstrikes in the country.

It takes the total number killed since Israel stepped up its military campaign to 3,365 according to the official figures, with 14,344 wounded.

Earlier Gaza’s Hamas-led health ministry claimed that at least 43,712 Palestinians have been killed and 103,258 injured in Israel’s offensive on Gaza since 7 October 2023.

It has not been possible for journalists to independently verify the casualty figures being issued during the conflict.

My colleague Richard Luscombe has this report on a US intelligence official being charged with espionage relating to Israel:

A US intelligence official has been charged with espionage offenses following an investigation into the leak last month of highly classified documents detailing Israel’s plans for military attacks on Iran.

Asif W Rahman, who works for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), will appear in court in Guam on Thursday charged with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The newspaper said FBI agents arrested Rahman in Cambodia on Tuesday following his indictment last week in federal court in Virginia.

In October, the White House said it was “deeply concerned” by the unauthorized release of the papers, attributed to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and National Security Agency, which were published on the Telegram messaging app.

Read more here: US intelligence official charged after Israel’s plan to attack Iran leaked

Israel’s recently appointed defense minister, making his first visit to the IDF Northern Command since taking up the role, has said Israel “will not make any cease-fires, we will not take our foot off the pedal” in its battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Reuters quotes Israel Katz, who replaced Yoav Gallant last week, saying:

We will not make any cease-fires, we will not take our foot off the pedal, and we will not allow any arrangement that does not include the achievement of the war’s objectives – and above all Israel’s right to enforce and act on its own against any terrorist activity. Terrorist infrastructure is collapsing in Beirut – we will continue to hurt Hezbollah everywhere.

It is approaching 5pm in Gaza City, Tel Aviv and Beirut. Here is a summary of the key developments so far today:

• The US wants “real and extended pauses” in fighting in Gaza so assistance can get to people who need it, but the best way to help people would be to end the war, US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Wednesday. “Israel, by the standards it set itself, has accomplished the goals that it set for itself,” Blinken told reporters during a visit to Brussels. Blinken added: “This should be a time to end the war.”

• Senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said Blinken’s comments showed: “We are facing one enemy and that the US enmity against the Palestinian people is no less than that of the occupation.”

• On Tuesday, after the expiry of a 30-day US deadline for Israel to take steps to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza, Washington said Israel was not blocking aid to Gaza and therefore not violating US law. However, eight international aid groups said Israel had failed to meet the US demands to improve access for assistance.

• The Biden administration said on Tuesday that Israel has made some good but limited progress in increasing the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza and will not limit arms transfers to Israel as it had threatened to a month ago if the situation had not improved. Relief groups say conditions are worse than at any point in the 13-month-old war.

• Donald Trump has chosen the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as the next US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has a track record of hardline, occasionally provocative, pro-Israel rhetoric and previously said Israel has a rightful claim to the West Bank, which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria. Posting on his Truth Social network, Trump predicted Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, would “work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East”.

• Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north. Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.

• Lebanese state media reported on Wednesday a third wave of Israeli raids on Hezbollah’s south Beirut bastion in 24 hours, after the health ministry said another strike south of the capital killed six people. Earlier on Wednesday, an Israeli strike on Aramoun, south of Beirut, killed six people, Lebanon’s health ministry said giving a preliminary toll for the attack on the densely packed area which is located outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds. The Israeli army on Wednesday told residents of parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs to leave, the third such warning in 24 hours/

• Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he hopes US president-elect Donald Trump would take a different approach on the Middle East during his term, but that some of the messages coming from his side were concerning, broadcaster NTV reported on Wednesday. “It seems too early to me to make observations about this,” Erdoğan told reporters on a return flight from Baku, Azerbaijan. “Our hope is that Trump takes very different steps toward the region this term because the messages being given from time to time concern us,” he was cited as saying. Asked about Turkey’s decision to halt all trade with Israel in May, Erdoğan said Ankara had no trade ties with Israel at the moment and no desire to develop them

• Israel’s plan to close the UN Palestinian relief agency, Unrwa, within three months is impossible and unrealistic without causing further untold suffering to the Palestinian people, its director of operations in Gaza has warned. Just returned from Gaza, where he said he had seen levels of suffering unprecedented since the war started, Sam Rose warned that Unrwa could collapse, with severe implications for schools and hospitals not just in Gaza but in the West Bank if Israel went ahead with its plan.

• The mother of Sasha Troufanov, who was taken hostage during Hamas’s 7 October attack into Israel, has called for his immediate release after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group released a new video showing him speaking, likely under duress. “I am relieved to see my son alive, but I am very worried to hear what he is saying,” said Lena Trufanov, in comments reported by the Times of Israel. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said, in response to the video: “The hostages have no time left – a deal for their release is the only way to bring them all back to us.”

• Palestinian medics say an Israeli strike on a home in northern Gaza killed three siblings that were six years old or younger. They were among at least six people killed in Israeli strikes on Tuesday in the territory. The Gaza health ministry’s emergency service said the three children were killed in a strike on a home near a clinic in the Jabaliya refugee camp, where Israel has been waging an offensive for over a month. In the central city of Deir al-Balah, a strike hit a tent in the western side of the city, killing at least two people, including a 15-year-old boy, al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital said. Another strike on a tent in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp killed a man, the hospital said. An AP journalist counted the three bodies at the hospital.

• A man who worked for the US government has been charged with leaking classified information assessing Israel’s earlier plans to attack Iran, according to court papers filed on Wednesday. The man, identified as Asif William Rahman, was arrested by the FBI this week in Cambodia and was to due to make his first court appearance in Guam. The charges stem from the documents, attributed to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, appearing last month on a channel of the Telegram messaging app.

• Iran’s top diplomat has said that communication channels with the US were still open, a week after Donald Trump was elected president. “The communication channels between us and the Americans still exist,” Abbas Araghchi said on the sidelines of a weekly cabinet meeting.

• At least 43,712 Palestinians have been killed and 103,258 injured in Israel’s offensive on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said on Wednesday. The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

• Russia has asked Israel to avoid launching aerial strikes as part of its war against Hezbollah near one of Moscow’s bases in Syria, a top official said on Wednesday.

• The US military said on Tuesday it had conducted strikes against an Iranian-backed militia group’s weapons storage facility in Syria. “These strikes were in response to a rocket attack on US personnel at Patrol Base Shaddadi. There was no damage to US facilities and no injuries to US or partner forces during the attack,” the US military said in a statement.

• The Israeli military said its forces had killed hundreds of Hamas militants in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun during its new military offensive, which began more than a month ago. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad armed wing claimed killing several Israeli soldiers during ambushes and anti-tank rocket fire.

• The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, resisted pressure from an independent MP during prime minister’s questions (PMQs) to describe the war in Gaza as “genocide”. When asked for his definition of the word, Starmer told the House of Commons he was “well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I have never described this as, and referred to it as, genocide”.

A man who worked for the US government has been charged with leaking classified information assessing Israel’s earlier plans to attack Iran, according to court papers filed on Wednesday, reports the Associated Press (AP).

The man, identified as Asif William Rahman, was arrested by the FBI this week in Cambodia and was to due to make his first court appearance in Guam.

It was not immediately clear whether he had a lawyer or which federal agency employed him, reports Reuters. The New York Times was first to report his arrest.

Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave, reports Reuters.

Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.

Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue towards Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said, according to Reuters.

Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fueled claims from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.

The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. Hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back, reports Reuters.

“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” Saed, 48, a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.

“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.

Patrick Wintour is the Guardian’s diplomatic editor. He writes:

Israel’s plan to close the UN Palestinian relief agency, Unrwa, within three months is impossible and unrealistic without causing further untold suffering to the Palestinian people, its director of operations in Gaza has warned.

Just returned from Gaza, where he said he had seen levels of suffering unprecedented since the war started, Sam Rose warned that Unrwa could collapse, with severe implications for schools and hospitals not just in Gaza but in the West Bank if Israel went ahead with its plan.

He was speaking the day after the US government stepped back from taking any action against Israel for failing to meet most of its demands to improve the supply of humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Biden administration said the humanitarian aid operation into Gaza was “not pristine” but Israel was taking steps to meet the US demands, set out in a letter, including opening new crossings.