Middle East crisis live: Israel’s killing of three journalists is ‘war crime’, says Lebanese minister

The Israeli army said five soldiers were killed and two others seriously injured in fighting in southern Lebanon.

The soldiers “fell during combat in southern Lebanon” the previous day, the army said, bringing the total number of Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon to 32 since 30 September.

Lebanon’s transport minister, Ali Hamieh, has told AFP that Israeli bombing put a second border crossing between the country and Syria out of service – leaving one official passage between the two nations operational.

“The Qaa crossing has been put out of service after an Israeli strike on Syrian territory, hundreds of metres from Syrian border guards,” Hamieh said.

The UN said on 22 October that an airstrike on the main road at the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria left it “impassable”. The crossing was the main route for people in Lebanon to flee to Syria to escape Israeli bombardments (hundreds of thousands of people have done so).

Lebanon’s information minister, Ziad Makary, has described the Israeli attack – that reportedly killed at least three journalists as they slept in guesthouses used by media in Hasbaya, southern Lebanon – as a “war crime”.

In a post on X, he wrote:

The Israeli enemy waited for the journalists’ nighttime break to betray them in their sleep… This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions. This is a war crime.

Lebanese television channel Al Mayadeen said its cameraman Ghassan Najjar, as well as broadcast engineer Mohammad Reda, were killed in the Israeli airstrike on Hasbaya.

Al Mayadeen said Najjar “was a father who risked his life for a just cause, dedicated to revealing the truth, and was killed in cold blood”.

Another TV outlet, al-Manar, which is run by Hezbollah, said its photographer Wissam Qassem was also killed in the Israeli airstrike in Hasbaya.

There are reports of an Israeli airstrike hitting the southern city of Khan Younis this morning, killing at least 28 Palestinian civilians.

Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reported that the attack, which left dozens of people injured, targeted a residential home in the al-Manara neighbourhood of the city.

It was among a series of deadly attacks launched by the Israeli military across the Gaza Strip over the last day.

According to Al Jazeera, Israeli forces destroyed over 10 residential buildings in Jabalia, which has become the epicentre of a renewed assault on northern Gaza over the past few weeks. Israel claims to be trying to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping.

Al Jazeera said there were “massive casualties” from the attack that Gaza’s civil defence agency was reported to have described as a “major massacre”.

The outlet also reported that an “unspecified number of children” were killed after the Israeli military bombed the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. The Guardian has not independently verified the figures provided in either report.

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An Israeli airstrike early on Friday morning killed at least three media staff staying at a guesthouse in Lebanon where several other reporters were staying, Lebanese media reported.

Those killed were camera operator Ghassan Najjar and engineer Mohamed Reda of the Lebanese TV channel Al-Mayadeen and camera operator Wissam Qassem, who worked for Hezbollah’s Al-Manar, the outlets said in separate statements.

Other reporters at the scene, in Hasbaya in southern Lebanon, said the bungalow where members of those specific outlets were sleeping was directly targeted.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken is set to meet with Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati in London on Friday, as well as with the foreign ministers of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, two key US partners in a postwar plan for Gaza, the state department said.

Blinken said he hoped Iran was getting a clear message that any further attacks on Israel risked its own interests. Israel has vowed retaliation for an Iranian missile barrage on 1 October.

It comes as Israel said the chief of its Mossad intelligence agency David Barnea will travel to Doha on Sunday to meet with CIA director William Burns and Qatar’s prime minister as long-stalled efforts to end the Gaza war appeared to gain some precious, if tentative, momentum.

“The parties will discuss the various options for starting negotiations for the release of the hostages from Hamas captivity, against the backdrop of the latest developments,” the office of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Previous attempts to reach a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal have fallen short.

A senior Hamas official told AFP that a delegation from the group’s Doha-based leadership discussed “ideas and proposals” related to a Gaza truce with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Thursday.

“Hamas has expressed readiness to stop the fighting, but Israel must commit to a ceasefire, withdraw from the Gaza Strip, allow the return of displaced people, agree to a serious prisoner exchange deal and allow the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” the official said.

In other developments:

• At least 17 people, nearly all women and children, have been killed in Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, medics in the territory have said. Another 42 people were injured in the strike in the overcrowded camp, according to nearby al-Awda hospital. Among the dead were 13 children under the age of 18 and three women, it said. The strike marked the latest Israeli bombing of a school sheltering displaced people across Gaza. Israel’s military said the school was being used as a Hamas command and control centre.

• As it braces for an expected retaliatory strike from Israel, Iran has ordered the armed forces to be prepared for war but also to try to avoid it, having witnessed the decimation of its allies in Lebanon and Gaza, the New York Times is reporting. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered the military to devise multiple military plans for responding to an Israeli attack, the report says, citing four unnamed Iranian officials. The scope of any Iranian retaliation, they said, will largely depend on the severity of Israel’s attacks.

• Several Israeli strikes hit Beirut’s southern suburbs on Thursday, about half an hour after Israel issued evacuation warnings for the Hezbollah bastion after intense strikes the night before.

• In Beirut’s southern Choueifat Al-Amrousieh area, Israeli warplanes “destroyed two buildings and ignited a large fire, and black smoke covered the area,” according to the official national news agency. “The raid that targeted the Saint Therese area also caused the collapse of two buildings near the constitutional council.” Israel had earlier issued evacuation warnings for the Hezbollah bastion following intense assaults the night before.

• Israel’s military said it had killed a Hamas commander who took part in the 7 October 2023 assault on southern Israel and worked for the UN aid agency in the Gaza Strip. Unrwa confirmed the man, Mohammad Abu Itiwi, was a staff member and was killed on Wednesday. Unrwa said Itiwi’s name was included in a letter received from Israel in July that included a list of 100 staff members who were also allegedly members of armed groups, including Hamas, but that Israeli authorities had not provided more information supporting those allegations.

• France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, warned Benjamin Netanyahu that “civilisation is not best defended by sowing barbarism ourselves”. Macron also vowed to help train 6,000 extra Lebanese official forces, and called for a ceasefire and an end to Israeli attacks on UN peacekeepers, as a conference in Paris raised $200m (£154m) for Lebanon’s official military and $800m in humanitarian aid for the country.

• Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Thursday that more than 770 Palestinians have been killed in the north of the territory since Israel launched a new offensive in northern Gaza on 6 October. The agency also said it had been forced to suspend operations in northern Gaza after what it called threats from the Israeli military to “bomb and kill” rescue crews working in Jabalia camp. Gaza’s health ministry said on Thursday that 42,847 Palestinians have been killed and 100,544 injured since Israel launched its war last year.

• An Israeli airstrike struck the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on Thursday night, with Gaza’s civil defence agency estimating that 150 people – including women and children – were killed or injured, the Palestinian news agency, Wafa reported.