Middle East crisis live: explosions heard in Beirut as Hamas says commander killed in refugee camp | Israel

• A series of explosions were heard over Beirut’s southern suburbs early on Saturday after the Israeli military demanded evacuations for some areas while Hezbollah said it was engaged in continued clashes with Israeli troops in the Lebanon border area. Israel said on Friday it had targeted the intelligence headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut and was assessing the damage after a series of strikes on senior figures in the militant group that Iran’s supreme leader condemned as counterproductive.

• Israel has launched fresh airstrikes on Beirut overnight, with a series of loud blasts and huge plumes of smoke reported in the south of the capital in the early hours of Saturday. The Israeli military had earlier demanded the evacuation of parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs.
  The attacks, part of a wider assault that has driven more than 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes, followed intense bombardment on Thursday night that reportedly targeted Hashem Safieddine, the most likely candidate to replace Hassan Nasrallah as leader of Hezbollah. His fate remains unclear.

• At least 41,825 Palestinians have been killed and 96,910 wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the territory’s health authorities said on Saturday.

• Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has arrived in Damascus to discuss regional developments and bilateral relations with Syrian officials, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson said on Saturday.
  This comes after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a rare public sermon in Tehran on Friday, vowing that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will re-emerge strongly with new leaders, and defending the “legal and legitimate” ballistic missile attack on Israel this week.

• A new flight has been chartered by the UK government for British nationals to leave Lebanon on Sunday, amid the spiralling conflict in the region. More than 250 UK citizens have left Lebanon on government-chartered flights amid the conflict, the Foreign Office said. The UK chartered a fourth flight to leave Beirut-Rafic Hariri airport in Beirut on Sunday.

• Hamas said an Israeli strike killed one of its commanders, his wife and two daughters, in a refugee camp in north Lebanon – an area not previously hit by the current conflict. Hamas said Saeed Atallah Ali, his wife, Shaymaa Azzam, and their two daughters, Zeinab and Fatima, were killed in a “Zionist bombardment of his house in the Beddawi camp” near the northern city of Tripoli. The daughters were described as children.

• A South Korean military transport aircraft returned 97 citizens and family members from Lebanon on Saturday as Middle East tensions rise, the foreign ministry said. A KC-330 aircraft left Beirut on Friday afternoon with the evacuees, who include Lebanese family members, and arrived at a military airfield on the south of Seoul, the ministry said.

• The UN says that its peacekeepers, including an Irish post operating on the “blue line” between Israel and the Golan Heights, remain in all place despite a request by the Israeli Defence Force that they “relocate”. The United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon said Saturday it would not leave positions. “On 30 September, the IDF (Israeli military) notified Unifil of their intention to undertake limited ground incursions into Lebanon. They also requested we relocate from some of our positions,” the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said.

• Up to 500 Australians and their close relatives are due to be boarded on to two charter flights out of Beirut on Saturday, amid increased government efforts to expatriate citizens after Israel’s ground incursion into Lebanon’s south. The first flight was expected to fly out of the Lebanese capital and land in Cyprus at about 11.30am local time (6.30pm AEST). From there, two Qantas flights can take passengers to Sydney on Tuesday and Wednesday.

• Media affiliated with Hamas reported on Saturday that a leader of the group’s armed wing was killed with three family members in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. It named the al-Qassam Brigades leader as Saeed Atallah. Israel did not immediately comment on the strike.

• At least four hospitals in Lebanon announced the suspension of work amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment. Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged the international community to pressure Israel “to allow rescue and relief teams to reach bombed sites and allow them to move” casualties.

• Israel cut off a key road near to Lebanon’s Masnaa border crossing with Syria that has been used by hundreds of thousands of people to flee Israeli bombardments in recent days. Israel has accused Hezbollah of using border crossings with Syria to bring in weapons. More than 300,000 people – a vast majority of them Syrian – have crossed from Lebanon into Syria over the past 10 days to escape escalating Israeli bombardment, according to Lebanon’s government.

• More than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in nearly a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, according to figures by the Lebanese government. Most have been killed in the past two weeks.

Lisa O’Carroll

The UN says that its peacekeepers, including an Irish post operating on the “blue line” between Israel and the Golan Heights, remain in all place despite a request by the Israeli Defence Force that they “relocate”.

The United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon said Saturday it would not leave positions.

“On 30 September, the IDF (Israeli military) notified UNIFIL of their intention to undertake limited ground incursions into Lebanon. They also requested we relocate from some of our positions,” the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said.

“Peacekeepers remain in all positions and the UN flag continues to fly. Ireland has separately told Israel that the single Irish platoon manning post 6-52 on the blue line would remain in the place as any request to move was a matter for the UN’s force commander on the ground.

The UN peacekeeping operation composes of 10,000 troops from 46 nations and is mandated to protect the south of the country from unauthorised military activity.

Israel said earlier this week that it would start carrying out limited ground incursions into south Lebanon with some of the fighting taking place less than 2 km from the Irish post.

“We continue to urge Lebanon and Israel to recommit to Security Council Resolution 1701 – in actions, not just word – as the only viable solution to bring back stability in the region,” Unifil said.

It added that it had “contingency plans ready to activate if absolutely necessary”.

Israel has intensified its campaign against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since 23 September, killing more than 1,110 people and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes in a country already mired in economic crisis.

The Princess 2010 yacht is an impressive specimen of a boat. Before the war, its gleaming white hull could be seen cruising Lebanon’s coastline, revellers making sure they enjoyed every inch of the 24-metre-long vessel they each paid $600 to ride.

Since Israel started an intense bombing campaign across wide swathes of Lebanon on 23 September, the Princess has been making a very different type of journey. The $1.3m craft has been ferrying families from Beirut to Cyprus, bottles of champagne replaced by hastily packed suitcases.

“The trips are fully booked, we have done about 30 trips on our two boats since the bombing started [on 23 September],” said Khailil Bechara, a broker who works with ship captains to transport people to Cyprus.

At $1,800 a head, a seat on a boat bound for Cyprus is not cheap. But demand is high as people desperately try to find any route out of Lebanon.

Bethan McKernan

The artist Maisara Baroud never found living in Gaza easy. The Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed in 2007 after Hamas’s violent takeover of the territory, was suffocating, and Rimal, his middle-class neighbourhood in Gaza City, had not been spared from airstrikes in the previous wars with Israel.

Despite everything, he said, his family worked hard to establish a simple, quiet existence after being expelled from their village in what is now Israel in 1948. Baroud, 48, was a lecturer in the fine arts department at Al-Aqsa University, and he, his wife, Khansa, 47, and children Rita, 21, Ilya, 18, and Maria, 14, lived in a flat in the large family building shared with his mother, his siblings and their children. A docile cat and several songbirds completed their home life.

A restless sleeper, he liked to draw late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.

On 7 October 2023, that world collapsed. Following the Hamas attacks in Israel, the war arrived like “an earthquake that ravaged everything … Since that date, our sole mission has become trying to survive,” he said.

Over the past year, Baroud and his family have been displaced 12 times. Nowhere in Gaza is safe from airstrikes, but encroaching Israeli ground forces have forced them to flee again and again. Each move is more difficult than the last, as options and space in already overcrowded areas dwindle.

Raja Shehadeh

At the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, when the intensive bombing of civilians began, the thought in my mind was: how will we Palestinians live with the Israelis after this?

Twelve months later, with no relenting in the killings and the destruction of Gaza, with Israel spreading the conflict to the West Bank, where more than 700 Palestinians have been killed, and its escalatory attacks in Lebanon and Iran, the question has only become more pertinent.

In the course of these past 12 months many atrocities have been committed, starting with the killing by Palestinians of 1,200 Israeli soldiers and civilians, followed by the Israeli army killing more than 41,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 women and children, 287 aid workers and 138 journalists and media workers.

This does not include those unaccounted for who remain under the rubble of the two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings that have been damaged or destroyed. Here is just one detail from this 12-month war: On 25 September, Israel returned a truck containing 88 bodies with no identifying details to Gaza.

Israel has been under the misguided belief that it could hide these atrocities from the world by limiting access to journalists. It has not allowed outsiders to do independent reporting in Gaza, which has made it easier to dispute Palestinian versions of events and the figures of those killed, and the extent of the damage caused.

To shed further doubt, the tremendous number of lives lost is usually accompanied by the caveat “claims the Hamas-run health ministry”.

Hamas said an Israeli strike killed one of its commanders, his wife and two daughters, in a refugee camp in north Lebanon – an area not previously hit by the current conflict.

Hamas said Saeed Atallah Ali, his wife, Shaymaa Azzam, and their two daughters, Zeinab and Fatima, were killed in a “Zionist bombardment of his house in the Beddawi camp” near the northern city of Tripoli. The daughters were described as children.

Ali was a leader of al-Qassam Brigades, the group’s armed wing. His death had been reported by Hamas-affiliated media earlier today.

Caitlin Cassidy

Up to 500 Australians and their close relatives are due to be boarded on to two charter flights out of Beirut on Saturday, amid increased government efforts to expatriate citizens after Israel’s ground incursion into Lebanon’s south.

The first flight was expected to fly out of the Lebanese capital and land in Cyprus at about 11.30am local time (6.30pm AEST). From there, two Qantas flights can take passengers to Sydney on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Guardian Australia understands that seats were still available for the flights as of Saturday afternoon (Australian time).

Speaking to reporters on Saturday, the federal infrastructure minister, Catherine King, said the government’s message to Australians in Lebanon was “do not wait”, adding it could not be guaranteed that everyone would be evacuated.

Here is the Guardian’s latest report on the crisis in the Middle East, including the series of explosions that shook Beirut’s southern suburbs early on Saturday.

A series of explosions were heard over Beirut’s southern suburbs early on Saturday after the Israeli military demanded evacuations for some areas while Hezbollah said it was engaged in continued clashes with Israeli troops in the Lebanon border area.

Israel said on Friday it had targeted the intelligence headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut and was assessing the damage after a series of strikes on senior figures in the militant group that Iran’s supreme leader condemned as counterproductive.

Media affiliated with Hamas, meanwhile, reported on Saturday that a leader of its armed wing was killed with three family members in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. It named the al-Qassam Brigades leader as Saeed Atallah. Israel did not immediately comment on the strike.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs, a blast was heard and smoke seen early on Saturday, Reuters witnesses said, as the Israeli military issued three warnings for residents of the area to immediately evacuate. The first alert warned residents in a building in the Burj al-Barajneh neighbourhood and the second in a building in Choueifat district, while the third alert mentioned buildings in Haret Hreik as well as Burj al-Barajneh.

Iran-backed Hezbollah said the Israeli army was trying to infiltrate the southern Lebanese town of Odaisseh, where clashes continued.

Hello and welcome to our continuing live coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. Here’s a recap of the latest developments.

Israel has launched fresh airstrikes on Beirut overnight, with a series of loud blasts and huge plumes of smoke reported in the south of the capital in the early hours of Saturday. The Israeli military had earlier demanded the evacuation of parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The attacks, part of a wider assault that has driven more than 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes, followed intense bombardment on Thursday night that reportedly targeted Hashem Safieddine, the most likely candidate to replace Hassan Nasrallah as leader of Hezbollah. His fate remains unclear.

Separately, Hezbollah said it was engaged in ongoing clashes with Israeli soldiers near to Lebanon’s southern border, saying Israeli soldiers had renewed an attempt to advance towards the village of Adaysseh.

In other news:

• Media affiliated with Hamas reported on Saturday that a leader of the group’s armed wing was killed with three family members in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. It named the al-Qassam Brigades leader as Saeed Atallah. Israel did not immediately comment on the strike.

• At least four hospitals in Lebanon announced the suspension of work amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment. Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged the international community to pressure Israel “to allow rescue and relief teams to reach bombed sites and allow them to move” casualties.

• Israel cut off a key road near to Lebanon’s Masnaa border crossing with Syria that has been used by hundreds of thousands of people to flee Israeli bombardments in recent days. Israel has accused Hezbollah of using border crossings with Syria to bring in weapons. More than 300,000 people – a vast majority of them Syrian – have crossed from Lebanon into Syria over the past 10 days to escape escalating Israeli bombardment, according to Lebanon’s government.

• More than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in nearly a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, according to figures by the Lebanese government. Most have been killed in the past two weeks.

• Gaza’s health ministry said at least 41,802 people have been killed and 96,844 injured in Israeli military attacks on Gaza since last October in its latest update on Friday. The ministry has said thousands are most likely lost in the rubble.

• At least 29 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip on Friday, according to medics. Israeli attacks continued across Gaza on Friday, including in the city of Deir al-Balah, where an Israeli strike on a home has killed at least four people, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. The military also launched bombs that ignited fires in homes in the Nuseirat refugee camp, while Israeli warplanes struck several sites in the southern city of Khan Younis, “resulting in further casualties and injuries”, Wafa reported.

• The northern regions of Israel were targeted by Hezbollah rockets almost continuously throughout Friday. The Israel Defense Forces said Hezbollah had launched about 100 rockets into Israel on Friday.

• Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza would re-emerge strongly with new leaders. In a rare public sermon in front of tens of thousands in Tehran on Friday, Khamenei defended the “legal and legitimate” ballistic missile attack on Israel this week that Iran has said was in retaliation for the deaths of the Hezbollah secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

• The US president, Joe Biden, said he didn’t know whether the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was holding up a peace deal in the Middle East in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election. Biden earlier urged Israel against striking Iran’s oil facilities.

• Israeli soldiers conducted widespread raids in the Hebron province in the occupied West Bank on Friday morning, resulting in the detention of more than 24 people, including “minors”, the Palestinian news agency reported. The majority of those detained were reportedly taken from the town of Beit Ummar. Human rights groups and international organisations have alleged widespread abuse of inmates detained by Israel in raids in the occupied West Bank.

• Funerals were held on Friday for some of the 18 people killed in the occupied West Bank in an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in Tulkarm. Among the dead, according to Palestinan reports, was a family of four including two children. A spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, described the attack as a “heinous crime” and a “massacre”. The attack was condemned by the UN rights office. Hamas’ armed wing, the al–Qassam Brigades, confirmed that one of its commanders, Zahi Yaser Abd al-Razeq Oufi, and seven other fighters were killed in the Israeli strike.

• US forces carried out strikes on 15 targets in areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthi rebels on Friday, the US military confirmed. The media in Yemen reported a new round of airstrikes, including on the capital, Sana’a, and near the airport at the port of Hodeidah, and Israeli strikes continued in Gaza and Lebanon. The strikes were targeted at weapons systems, bases and other equipment belonging to the Iran-backed group, US officials said. The Guardian understands there was no UK involvement in the airstrikes on Friday.

• The last UK-government chartered flight for British nationals to leave Lebanon will depart from Beirut on Sunday. More than 250 British nationals have left Lebanon on flights chartered by government, the UK Foreign Office said on Friday. A South Korean military transport aircraft evacuated 97 citizens and family members on Friday.