Middle East crisis live: UN agency pauses food deliveries to northern Gaza due to ‘collapse of civil order’ | Middle East and north Africa

Several Israeli missiles hit the Kafr Soussa district in Syria’s capital Damascus on Wednesday, Syrian state media reported.

AP reports pro-government Sham FM radio station said the strike hit a building near an Iranian school and caused casualties. Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said the strike was “an assassination” but did not specify who might have been the target.

Reuters reports the neighbourhood houses senior security officials, security branches and intelligence headquarters and Iranian installations. It was previously targeted in what was believed to be an Israeli attack in February 2023 that killed up to 15 people.

Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years, and in December, an Israeli airstrike on a suburb of Damascus killed Iranian general Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria

This map shows the location of the suburb, and where the earlier February attack happened.

More details soon …

Iran’s oil Minister Javad Owji has said Israel was behind last week’s attack on Iranian gas pipelines Reuters reports, citing semi-official news agency Tasnim.

Two explosions hit Iran’s main south-north gas pipeline network on Feb. 14 and were initially described by Owji as a “terrorist act of sabotage”, without naming any suspects.

Owji said on Wednesday “The enemy intended to disrupt households’ gas supplies … but within two hours our colleagues worked to counter the Israeli plot which only damaged several pipes.”

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.

The UN World Food Programme has said it has paused deliveries of food to isolated northern Gaza across the territory, raising fears of potential starvation. On Monday, it said its convoy had “faced complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order”.

It comes as UN agency Unicef has warned that Gaza could witness an increase in what an official said was “the already unbearable level of child deaths” due to a worsening food crisis.

More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main news.

• The US has vetoed a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the third time, arguing that it would undermine negotiations over a hostage deal. The US was the lone vote against a ceasefire resolution put forward on Tuesday by Algeria.

• China expressed “strong disappointment” over the veto, according to state media. “China expresses its strong disappointment at and dissatisfaction with the US veto,” Xinhua reported, citing UN representative Zhang Jun. “The US veto sends a wrong message, pushing the situation in Gaza into a more dangerous one,” said Zhang.

• South Africa’s delegation to the ICJ in The Hague has said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is “an even more extreme form of the apartheid” than the one formerly in place in South Africa. The court is holding a second day of hearings asking it to give an advisory opinion on the Israeli occupation.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) has accused Israel of impeding hospital rescue missions at the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza. The agency reported its staff said “the destruction around Nasser hospital was ‘indescribable’” and that it was concerned for “an estimated 130 sick and injured patients and at least 15 doctors and nurses” who remain at the medical complex, which has “no electricity or running water”.

• The total number of Palestinians detained by Israeli security forces from the occupied West Bank since 7 October has risen to 7,120 according to local sources.

• Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy has condemned a UN report which said there were “credible allegations of egregious human rights violations” of Palestinian women and girls by Israeli security forces including rape and strip-searches as motivated by “hatred of Israel and the Jewish people”.