Middle East crisis live: Israel accepts Biden’s Gaza plan but it ‘is not a good deal’, says Netanyahu aide | Israel-Gaza war

• An aide to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel had accepted a framework deal for winding down the Gaza war now being advanced by US president Joe Biden, though he described it as flawed and in need of much more work. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu, said Biden’s proposal was “a deal we agreed to … it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them”.

• Two Palestinian teenagers were killed by Israeli gunfire in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said on Sunday. The Israeli military did not confirm the deaths but said two suspects hurled explosives towards a local community, endangering civilians, and troops responded with live fire, Reuters reported. “Hits were identified,” the military said in a statement.

• Iran’s hard-line former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has registered as a possible candidate for the presidential election, seeking to regain the country’s top political position after a helicopter crash killed the nation’s president. The populist former leader’s registration puts pressure on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, AP reported. In office, Ahmadinejad openly challenged the 85-year-old cleric, and his attempt to run in 2021 was barred by authorities.

• US forces on Saturday destroyed one Iran-backed Houthi uncrewed aerial system in the southern Red Sea and saw two others crash into Red Sea, US Central Command said. The Central Command forces also destroyed two Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles fired in direction of the USS Gravely, it said. No injuries or damage were reported by US, coalition or commercial ships, it said.

• Two far-right Israeli ministers have threatened to quit prime minister Benjamin Netanyhau’s government if he goes ahead with a ceasefire and hostage-release deal outlined by Joe Biden. The US president said on Friday that Israel had offered a new roadmap towards a full ceasefire including the release of hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza.

• Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza strip has killed at least 36,439 Palestinians and wounded 82,627 since 7 October, the Palestinian health ministry said on Sunday. There have been 60 Palestinians killed and 220 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry statement added.

• United Arab Emirates president Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Qatar’s emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani discussed in Abu Dhabi proposals for a ceasefire deal in Gaza that were laid out on Friday by US president Joe Biden, the UAE state news agency (WAM) reported on Sunday. The two leaders expressed support for all “serious initiatives and efforts” toward a lasting peace in the region, it said.

• Dozens of students protesting Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza walked out of the University of Chicago’s commencement on Saturday as the school withheld the diplomas of four seniors over their involvement with a pro-Palestinian encampment. The disruption to the rainy two-hour outdoor ceremony was brief, with shouts, boos and calls to “stop genocide”. A crowd of students walked out in between speeches and a demonstration followed the official ceremony. Some chanted as they held Palestinian flags while others donned traditional keffiyehs, black-and-white checkered scarves that represent Palestinian solidarity, over their robes.

• Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday there could be no permanent ceasefire in Gaza until Hamas was destroyed, casting doubt on a key part of a truce proposal that Joe Biden said Israel itself had made. The US president said the previous day that Israel had proposed a deal involving an initial six-week truce with a partial Israeli military withdrawal and the release of some hostages while the two sides negotiated “a permanent end to hostilities”. However, the Israeli prime minister’s statement said any notion that Israel would agree a permanent ceasefire before “the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities” was “a non-starter”.

• The families of some Israeli hostages held by Hamas called for all parties to immediately accept the ceasefire proposal. Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, also said Netanyahu should accept the deal.

• Residents reported tank fire in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood in west Rafah, while witnesses in the east and centre of Gaza’s southernmost city described intense artillery shelling. “From the early hours of the night until this morning, the aerial and artillery bombardment has not stopped for a single moment,” a resident from west Rafah told Agence France-Presse.

Julian Borger

The latest peace plan for Gaza was given a launch worthy of a historic turning point, with the US president delivering remarks directly to camera from the White House state dining room, declaring it finally “time for this war to end”.

Yet even as Joe Biden spelled out the proposal – leading in theory to a permanent end to hostilities, large-scale food deliveries and the start of reconstruction, there was clearly something awry.

If this plan was an Israeli proposal as Biden claimed, why was it being launched by Biden in Washington? There had been no word from Israel. By the time Biden began his remarks, it was already Friday night in the Middle East, the sabbath was under way and government offices closed.

When the prime minister’s office did produce a statement in response, it exuded all the reluctance and irritation of a politician roused from sleep. Yes, Benjamin Netanyahu had “authorised the negotiating team to present a proposal” but it was one that would “enable Israel to continue the war until all its objectives are achieved”.

A second statement issued after daybreak was even blunter. Any plan that did not achieve Israel’s war aims, including the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capacity, was a “non-starter”.

Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza strip has killed at least 36,439 Palestinians and wounded 82,627 since 7 October, the Palestinian health ministry said on Sunday.

There have been 60 Palestinians killed and 220 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry statement added.

Two Palestinian teenagers were killed by Israeli gunfire in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said on Sunday.

The Israeli military did not confirm the deaths but said two suspects hurled explosives towards a local community, endangering civilians, and troops responded with live fire, Reuters reported.

“Hits were identified,” the military said in a statement.

The Palestinian health ministry said a 16- and a 17-year-old were killed west of Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Jericho.

Palestinian media said medicals teams were prevented from reaching one of the wounded and the other succumbed to his wounds on Sunday in a hospital in Jerusalem. One teen was shot in the head and the other in his chest, the Palestinian health ministry said.

An aide to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel had accepted a framework deal for winding down the Gaza war now being advanced by US president Joe Biden, though he described it as flawed and in need of much more work.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu, said Biden’s proposal was “a deal we agreed to … it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them”.

“There are a lot of details to be worked out,” he said, adding that Israeli conditions, including “the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organisation” have not changed.

Biden, whose initial lockstep support for Israel’s offensive has given way to open censure of the operation’s high civilian death toll, on Friday aired what he described as a three-phase plan submitted by the Netanyahu government to end the war.

Iran’s hard-line former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has registered as a possible candidate for the presidential election, seeking to regain the country’s top political position after a helicopter crash killed the nation’s president.

The populist former leader’s registration puts pressure on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, AP reported. In office, Ahmadinejad openly challenged the 85-year-old cleric, and his attempt to run in 2021 was barred by authorities.

AP reported:

The firebrand, Holocaust-questioning politician’s return comes at a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the West over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its arming of Russia in its war on Ukraine and its wide-reaching crackdowns on dissent.

Meanwhile, Iran’s support of militia proxy forces throughout the wider Mideast have been in increased focus as Yemen’s Houthi rebels attack ships in the Red Sea over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Ahmadinejad is the most prominent candidate to register so far. Speaking after his registration, he vowed to seek “constructive engagement” with the world and improved economic relations with all nations.

“The economic, political, cultural and security problems are beyond the situation in 2013,” Ahmadinejad said, referring to the year he left the presidency after two terms.

After speaking to journalists in front of a bank of 50-odd microphones, Ahmadinejad said, his finger in the air: “Long live the spring, long live Iran!”

Emma Graham-Harrison

Fayiz Abu Ataya was born into war and knew nothing else. Over his first and only spring, in a town stalked by hunger, he wasted away to a shadow of a child, skin stretched painfully over jutting bones.

In seven months of life, he had little time to make a mark beyond the family who loved him. But when his death from malnutrition was reported last week, it sounded a warning around the world about a rapidly deepening crisis in central and southern Gaza, triggered by the Israeli military operation in the southern town of Rafah.

At least 30 child victims of malnutrition have been recorded in Gaza, but almost all died in the north, until recently the area with the most extreme shortages of food and medical care, where a top US aid official said famine had taken hold in some areas.

The arrival of Israeli troops in Rafah in May shifted the grim calculus of threat in the strip.

“The ongoing situation in Rafah is a disaster for children,” said Jonathan Crickx, chief of communication for Unicef in Palestine. “If nutrition supplies, especially ready-to-use therapeutic food, used to address malnutrition among children, cannot be distributed, the treatment of more than 3,000 children with acute malnutrition will be interrupted.”

Welcome to our latest live blog covering the Israel-Gaza war and wider Middle East crisis – here’s an overview of where things stand.

Two far-right Israeli ministers have threatened to quit prime minister Benjamin Netanyhau’s government if he goes ahead with a ceasefire and hostage-release deal outlined by Joe Biden.

The US president said on Friday that Israel had offered a new roadmap towards a full ceasefire including the release of hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza.

But Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said on Saturday they would quit his government if the deal went ahead.

Ben-Gvir said his party would “dissolve the government” if the proposal went through and slammed the deal as “a victory for terrorism and a security risk to the state of Israel”.

“Agreeing to such a deal is not total victory, but total defeat,” he said. Smotrich said he would “not be part of a government that will agree to the proposed outline”.

Their comments came as Qatari, Egyptian and US mediators called on Israel and Hamas to “finalise” the truce deal Biden outlined.

In other news:

• Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday there could be no permanent ceasefire in Gaza until Hamas was destroyed, casting doubt on a key part of a truce proposal that Joe Biden said Israel itself had made. The US president said the previous day that Israel had proposed a deal involving an initial six-week truce with a partial Israeli military withdrawal and the release of some hostages while the two sides negotiated “a permanent end to hostilities”. However, the Israeli prime minister’s statement said any notion that Israel would agree a permanent ceasefire before “the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities” was “a non-starter”.

• The families of some Israeli hostages held by Hamas called for all parties to immediately accept the ceasefire proposal. Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, also said Netanyahu should accept the deal.

• Residents reported tank fire in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood in west Rafah, while witnesses in the east and centre of Gaza’s southernmost city described intense artillery shelling. “From the early hours of the night until this morning, the aerial and artillery bombardment has not stopped for a single moment,” a resident from west Rafah told Agence France-Presse.

• At least 36,379 Palestinian people have been killed and 82,407 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said. An estimated 95 Palestinians were killed and 350 injured over the past 24 hours, the ministry said on Saturday.

• Hezbollah said it launched a series of attacks on Israeli military positions on Saturday after state media reported Israel had stepped up its own strikes the night before. The Lebanese militant group said on Saturday it had carried out “an air assault using explosive drones against … the Yiftah barracks, targeting the positions of enemy officers and soldiers”. The attack was in retaliation for a drone strike on a motorcycle in Majdal Selm earlier in the day, it said. The Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee said two people were injured in the drone strike.

• Egyptian, US and Israeli officials would meet in Cairo over the weekend for talks about the Rafah crossing, Egypt’s state-run Al-Qahera News said. The crossing has been closed since Israel took over the Palestinian side in early May.

• The Chilean president said his country was joining South Africa in its case at the international court of justice accusing Israel of “genocide” in the war against Hamas. Speaking to the National Congress, Gabriel Boric on Saturday decried the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza and called for “a firm response from the international community”.

• Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted an invitation to address both houses of the US Congress, his office said on Saturday, adding that he would become the first foreign leader to make four such appearances there. The Israeli prime minister said he would be presenting “the truth about our righteous war against those who seek our destruction”.

• Tehran summoned Sweden’s temporary charge d’affaires over “baseless and spiteful accusations”, the Iranian foreign ministry said on Sunday, after Stockholm’s intelligence agency said Iran was “using criminal networks” inside the Scandinavian country to attack Israel and its interests.