Middle East crisis live: six killed in Israeli strike on medical centre in central Beirut, Lebanon officials say

Here’s our full report on the latest developments:

Israeli strikes on a central Beirut medical centre have killed at least six people, after Israel’s military suffered its deadliest day on the Lebanese front in a year of clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Residents in Beirut heard a missile flying above the city before hearing the sound of the explosion. Videos showed the floor of an apartment building burning. Residents living in nearby areas began to flee, driving away quickly in scooters and cars.

The Israeli strike hit a medical centre belonging to the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Organisation in the early hours of Thursday. The attack was the second airstrike on central Beirut this week, with most strikes having previously been confined to suburbs in the city’s south.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was targeting Beirut and issued evacuation warnings for various locations throughout the night. Three missiles also hit the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed last week, and loud explosions were heard, Lebanese security officials said.

At least six people were killed and seven wounded, Lebanese health officials said, adding that a further 46 people had been killed in Israeli attacks on the city in the previous 24 hours.

A day after Iran fired more than 180 missiles into Israel, the wider region awaited Israel response to the attack, with US president Joe Biden saying he would not support an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites, as he attempted to contain a rapidly escalating regional conflict.

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories, has offered a full-throated defence of UN security general António Guterres, after Israel announced it was barring him from entering the country on Wednesday.

I express my solidarity to the UN Secretary General @antonioguterres, from the heart of his own country, Portugal - which I am visiting.

We would not be here today, with unrestrained hubris is in full display, had Israel, in 76 years of history, been held accountable at least once. Not once has Israel faced consequences of its intl wrongdoings. Time to act to restore the primacy of intl law is now. A distant tomorrow may be too late.

Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz declared the UN chief persona non grata and accused him of bias against the country and being an “anti-Israel secretary-general who lends support to terrorists”.

UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric later told reporters that Katz’s declaration was “one more attack on the United Nations staff that we’ve seen from the government of Israel”.

52m ago22.27 EDT

Emma Graham-Harrison

After a fortnight of military triumph, what is Israel’s endgame? Here’s a snippet from Emma Graham-Harrison’s earlier analysis:

The assassination of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a tactical achievement that will hobble the group for now, and may cripple it longer term, but not a strategic one that will eliminate the threat to Israel from inside Lebanon.

Israel has targeted generations of militant leaders, whose organisations survived or evolved after the assassinations. Both Nasrallah and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, killed earlier this year in Tehran, replaced leaders who had also been killed by Israel.

Attacks of the last few weeks have been particularly wide-ranging, taking out whole echelons of Hezbollah commanders. But even if the damage proved fatal to the group in its current form, its collapse would not offer any guarantee of greater security.

After the Palestine Liberation Organisation was forced out of Lebanon in the early 1980s, Hezbollah expanded there. Other conflicts offer grim examples.

Islamic State grew out of al-Qaida in Iraq. The US killed the Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, in 2016 with a drone, hoping to pave the way for a peace deal; five years later, Taliban fighters swept into Kabul and took control of the country.

Nor do Israel’s destructive opening salvoes against Hezbollah offer any guarantee it will win a longer war. In 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq swiftly toppled Saddam Hussein but paved the way for a bloody civil war and the rise of factions linked to Washington’s regional foe, Iran.

George W Bush’s declaration of victory under a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier was intended as an enduring image of American power, and became instead a icon of US hubris.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa has more details on the deaths of Palestinians on Wednesday in Gaza, as Israel continues its deadly onslaught on the devastated territory.

Citing figures from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Wafa reported that in addition to the massacre in Khan Younis, where at least 12 children were killed, another ten people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the Nuseirat and al-Bureij refugee camps in the central Strip.

In Gaza City, nine civilians were killed in Israeli strikes on Muscat school and the al-Amal orphanage, which were housing displaced people. At least 20 people were injured in the attacks, Wafa reported.

Another three people were killed in a raid on the town of Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis, Wafa said.

A child was killed and two other civilians injured when Israeli forces shelled a house belonging to the al-Helou family in the Tel Al-Hawa neighbourhood, south-west of Gaza City, on Wednesday evening, Wafa reported.

It is not possible to independently verify death tolls in Gaza as Israel has barred foreign media from entering.

More than 70 people have been killed in a series of intensive ground operations and airstrikes by the Israel Defense Forces in southern Gaza, Palestinian medical officials said on Wednesday.

Israel has continued to strike what it says are militant targets across Gaza nearly a year after Hamas’s 7 October attack triggered the war in the territory, and even as attention has shifted to Lebanon and Iran.

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The health ministry in Gaza said at least 51 people were killed and 82 wounded in the operation in Khan Younis that began early on Wednesday. Records at the European hospital show that seven women and 12 children, as young as 22 months old, were among those killed.

Another 23 people, including two children, were killed in separate strikes across Gaza, according to local hospitals.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment but has previously accused Hamas of exploiting civilian facilities for military purposes, a tactic the militant Islamist organisation denies using.

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A spokesperson for Nasser hospital said: “Yesterday, the Israeli army started a sudden ground operation in the eastern areas of Khan Younis. The areas were attacked with a very violent aerial bombardment … The martyrs and the wounded arrived at the European hospital and here.”

Residents said Israeli planes had carried out heavy airstrikes as its ground forces staged an incursion into three neighbourhoods in Khan Younis. Mahmoud al-Razd, who said four relatives were killed in the raids, described heavy destruction and said first responders had struggled to reach destroyed homes.

“The explosions and shelling were massive,” he said. “Many people are thought to be under the rubble, and no one can retrieve them.”

US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress and a fierce critic of US support for Israel, has also made an apparent comment on the death of Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a US resident who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon. In an Instagram post she said:

We should be saving lives no matter faith or ethnicity. We should have used our leverage to demand a ceasefire. We have already lost one American who was the father of four.

How many more have to die before our country stops sending more US bombs and funding this madness?

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If you’re just joining us, Israeli airstrikes are still being reported across Beirut and the Lebanese health ministry says at least six people have been killed and seven injured in an Israeli attack on a health centre in the central suburb of Bachoura. It is a war crime to target health workers.

The medical centre belonged to the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Organisation. It is the second time central Beirut has been targeted since Israel began its bombing campaign a couple of weeks ago. The area is home to the Lebanese parliament and the UN’s regional headquarters.

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The southern district of Dahiyeh, which is where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed last week, has also been repeatedly targeted. The IDF has issued warnings to people in several neighbourhoods but in some cases these are reportedly not coming in time for people to flee.

Israeli airstrikes have killed paramedics across Lebanon over the last two weeks, including airstrikes that killed 14 emergency health workers over the weekend. On Monday, six more paramedics were killed in the west Bekaa, all of them belonging to the Islamic Health Organisation.

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Israel has also been accused of targeting health workers in Gaza, including by killing them in airstrikes on hospitals and ambulances as well as arresting and torturing them. It denies targeting medics and claims Hamas uses civilians as human shields.

Al Jazeera has reported some comments from the head of Hezbollah’s media office, Mohammad Afif, in which he says the group is ready to “sacrifice our blood and soul for our homeland by the grace of God”.

Afif said the group had enough fighters, weapons and ammunition to push back against Israel, adding: “We assure you, the enemy, that this is only the first round.

“What happened in … Maroun al-Ras and other areas, including Odaisseh, was nothing but the tip of the iceberg,” he said, referring to villages in southern Lebanon where deadly clashes apparently took place between the two sides on Wednesday.

Afif also said Israel’s air superiority would “turn into losses on the ground”.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has reiterated its support for Lebanon and called for the implementation of a 2006 UN resolution that calls for Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers to be the only armed forces south of Lebanon’s Litani river.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah has ever fully respected the resolution, which helped to end their 2006 conflict.

In a statement issued after an extraordinary meeting in Doha, the GCC also noted it support for the 21-day ceasefire plan put forward by the US and France, shortly before Israel escalated the conflict further by launching a massive strike on Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The council, which is made up of countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, urged the international community to “fulfill its responsibilities to maintain security and stability in the region”.

It condemned “Israeli aggression” in Gaza and the West Bank and “reaffirmed the centrality of the Palestinian issue, the need to end Israeli occupation, and the support for the sovereignty of the Palestinian people over all Palestinian territories occupied since June 1967.”

The Israeli military says it has intercepted a “suspicious aerial target” off the coast of Tel Aviv.

The death toll in the Israeli attack on a medical centre in the Bashoura neighbourhood of central Beirut has risen to five, AFP reports citing Lebanese health officials.

BBC correspondent Nafiseh Kohnavard is reporting a further two Israeli airstrikes on the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh.