Middle East crisis live: Hamas ‘ready’ for Gaza ceasefire, says senior official | Middle East and north Africa

Twenty-one civil defence rescuers have been killed in two Israeli strikes on Lebanon, marking one of the deadliest days for rescue workers since the fighting began between Israel and Hezbollah 13 months ago.

Thursday night’s airstrikes brought the total number of emergency workers killed by Israel in Lebanon to more than 200, most of them during the last two months.

In Douris, a small town on the outskirts of the ancient city of Baalbek in the Bekaa valley, 15 paramedics and five bystanders were killed when an airstrike hit a state civil defence centre.

Members of the civil defence were still searching for the remains of their colleagues on Friday afternoon, turning over the shattered concrete and sifting through rubble to find whatever pieces of flesh they could salvage. Though 15 bodies had been found, at least five were unrecognisable due to the force of the blast. Funerals were put on hold until the remains could be taken for DNA testing.

“Most of the people that were here yesterday were new, they were volunteers. We were always joking around, we were like brothers … I wish I had been with them,” said Haidar al-Afi, who has worked with the civil defence in Douris since 2006, as he searched the rubble.

Thaslima Begum

It was the morning of 8 June when Ahmed Damoo got the call that his home, a small concrete building in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, had been hit by an IDF rocket. When he returned to what was left of his house, he learned his family had been buried beneath the rubble.

One by one, his neighbours had dragged the bodies from the debris. Among the dead were Damoo’s in-laws and his two children, Hala, 13, and Mohannad, 10, who had been playing in the living room when they were killed. His wife, Areej, and toddler, Tala, had sustained serious injuries but were still alive.

His last child, 12-year-old Mazyouna, could not be located. When Damoo eventually found her, he almost passed out.

“Her face was ripped off and her jaw was literally hanging,” he recalls. “My beautiful little girl was completely unrecognisable.”

At al-Aqsa hospital, doctors used what little resources they had to stitch Mazyouna’s face back together and hold the remaining structure in place.

Mohammed Tahir, a British doctor who is volunteering in Gaza, saw her during his ward rounds. “It was one of the most shocking cases I’ve seen,” he says. “Half of her cheek was missing and her bones were exposed.

“The doctors tried their best but the extensive reconstructive work she requires cannot be provided here in Gaza.”

• Ali Larijani, an advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, said Iran will back any decision taken by Lebanon in talks to secure a ceasefire with Israel. He has been speaking with Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri and Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, in Beiurt.

• An Israeli airstrike flattened a building near one of Beirut’s busiest traffic junctions, Tayouneh. The targeted building was located in an area where the southern suburbs meet other parts of the city, a more central target than most that Israel has hit in its deadly bombing campaign. It came after the Israeli military issued a warning identifying buildings in the southern suburbs of the capital and telling residents to evacuate, saying they were near Hezbollah facilities.

• At least 43,764 Palestinian people have been killed and 103,490 injured in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said. Of those, 28 Palestinians were killed in the latest 24-hour reporting period. Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reported that two Palestinian people were killed in an Israeli artillery attack in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza today. Three other Palestinians were reportedly killed in a separate Israeli airstrike near the general security junction in western Gaza City.

• A senior Hamas official said the Palestinian militant group is “ready for a ceasefire” in Gaza and urged US president-elect Donald Trump to “pressure” Israel to “end the aggression”. It came as the UN warned that aid access in Gaza is at a low point with deliveries to parts of the north of the territory all but impossible.

David Smith

David Smith is the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief

Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive voice in the US Senate, has denounced the Biden administration’s failure to punish Israel over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and endorsed a joint resolution of disapproval in Congress.

The amount of aid reaching the territory has dropped to the lowest level in 11 months, official Israeli figures show. The White House last month gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to improve conditions or risk losing military support. As the deadline expired on Tuesday, international aid groups said Israel had fallen far short.

But the US state department announced it would not take any punitive action, insisting that Israel was making limited progress and was not blocking aid and therefore not violating US law.

Warren condemned the Biden administration’s decision to continue supplying arms to its ally.

“On October 13, the Biden administration told Prime Minister Netanyahu that his government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza or face the consequences under US law, which would include cutting off military assistance,” the Massachusetts senator said in a statement shared with the Guardian.

“Thirty days later, the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel’s actions had not significantly expanded food, water and basic necessities for desperate Palestinian civilians. Despite Netanyahu’s failure to meet the United States’ demands, the Biden administration has taken no action to restrict the flow of offensive weapons.”

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Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, has told journalists that aid access in Gaza is at a low point with deliveries to parts of the north of the territory all but impossible.

“From our perspective, on all indicators you can possibly think of in a humanitarian response, all of them are going in the wrong direction,” Laerke told a press briefing.

“Access is at a low point. Chaos, suffering, despair, death, destruction, displacement are at a high point,” he said.

Laerke voiced particular concern about north Gaza where residents have been ordered to head south amid the Israeli military’s renewed assault on northern Gaza, launched early last month.

Laerke said:

We have seen and been particularly concerned about the situation in the north of Gaza, which is now effectively under siege and it is near impossible to deliver aid in there. So the operation is being stifled.

One of my colleagues described it as, for humanitarian work… you want to jump. You want to jump up and do something. But what he added was: but our legs are broken. So we are being asked to jump while our legs are broken.

The US said earlier this week that Israel had not breached American laws on blocking aid supplies, after a month-long deadline it gave Israel on 13 October to increase aid access in Gaza or risk punishment – such as the potential stopping of US weapons transfers – lapsed.

Aid groups, however, say Israel has failed to meet the demands, with a committee of global food security experts recently warning that there is a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas” of the northern Gaza Strip.

The US has said it is watching to ensure that its ally’s actions on the ground show it does not have a “policy of starvation” in the north, parts of which Israel has placed under a tight siege as part of what it claims is a military push against Hamas.

However, Palestinians as well as Israeli human rights groups and some Israel Defence Forces soldiers say Israel is putting into practice a blueprint known as the “generals’ plan”, a “surrender or starve” campaign aimed at depopulating northern Gaza.

A senior Hamas official has said the Palestinian militant group is “ready for a ceasefire” in Gaza and urged US president-elect Donald Trump to “pressure” Israel to “end the aggression”.

“Hamas is ready to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip if a ceasefire proposal is presented and on the condition that it is respected” by Israel, Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “We call on the US administration and Trump to pressure the Israeli government to end the aggression,” he said.

Naim added:

Hamas informed the mediators that it is in favour of any proposal submitted to it that would lead to a definitive ceasefire and military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, allowing the return of displaced people, a serious deal for a prisoner exchange, the entry of humanitarian aid and reconstruction.

The latest round of talks in mid-October failed to produce a deal, with Hamas rejecting a short-term ceasefire proposal, according to Reuters. Israel has previously rejected some proposals for longer truces. Disagreements have centred on the long-term future of Hamas and Israel’s presence in Gaza.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s newly reinforced position now Trump has won the US presidency could lead to further intensification of Israel’s wars in both Gaza and Lebanon – although Trump has said he wants to swiftly end both conflicts.

At least 43,764 Palestinian people have been killed and 103,490 injured in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Friday.

Of those, 28 Palestinians were killed in the latest 24-hour reporting period, the ministry said.

Gaza’s health ministry has said in the past that thousands of other dead people are most likely lost in the rubble of the territory.