Middle East crisis live: Syrian TV says ‘at least two killed in Israeli airstrike on Damascus’ | Middle East and north Africa

Geneva Abdul

In UK domestic politics, the precise wording of how to call for a halt in fighting has become a contentious issue. Geneva Abdul reports:

Lisa Nandy has said opposition party Labour’s amendment to the Scottish National party’s motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment to “lift our debate up” away from party politics and “speak with one voice”, ahead of what is likely to be a tense Commons vote in London on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Labour explicitly called for a ceasefire in the region for the first time since fighting broke out in October, in an attempt to defuse a fresh crisis over leader Keir Starmer’s stance that had led to some of the party’s MPs rebelling in a vote over a ceasefire in November.

The Labour party currently lead opinion polls in the UK by a large margin, and the country must by law have a general election before January 2025, leading to a widespread expectation that Starmer will be the next prime minister of the UK.

“We hope that this is a moment where we can lift our debate up away from the party politics … and the whole house can speak with one voice alongside our international partners about the need for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire right now,” Nandy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

In a carefully caveated 237-word amendment to the SNP motion calling for an immediate end to violence, Labour also calls for Israel not the invade the city of Rafah, for aid to be allowed to flow to Gaza and for the international community to work towards a two-state solution. It stresses that Israel cannot be expected to abide by a ceasefire if Hamas continues to threaten further violence.

Read more of Geneva Abdul’s report here: Labour’s Gaza amendment is chance to ‘speak with one voice’, says Nandy

Syria’s state TV says an Israeli strike that hit a residential area in the country’s capital of Damascus has killed two people.

AP reports the strike damaged the fourth floor of a ten-story building, shattered window glass on nearby buildings and also damaged dozens of cars parked in the area. An empty parked bus for the nearby Al-Bawader private school was also damaged and people were seen rushing to the school to take their children.

There has been no comment from the Israeli military, which rarely acknowledges attacking targets inside Syria.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has announced it is pausing deliveries of food aid to northern Gaza.

This comes after incidents on 18 and 19 February when WFP says convoys were unable to deliver aid as planned, largely due to a breakdown in civil order. It said a truck was looted and the driver beaten.

The UN has said between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these missions, the UN says “12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access, and nine were postponed.”

The pause in aid delivery comes as a UN-backed report found that one in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza were found to be “acutely malnourished”.

In its latest operational update, Israel’s military has claimed to be operating “in the area of Zaytun, south of Gaza City” and said it has “killed dozens of terrorists in ground encounters and targeted airstrikes”.

The IDF said it recovered “weapons including an RPG and AK-47 rifle” and has located dozens of “terror infrastructures, observation posts, weapon storage facilities, and underground targets”.

It also claims that the military “expanded activities in western Khan Younis, targeting and killing terrorists with precise sniper fire and striking terror infrastructure.”

The claims have not been independently verified.

Archie Bland

In this morning’s First Edition newsletter, my colleague Archie Bland has spoken to our diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour about the shifting language around ceasefire calls, and what it tells us. Bland writes:

The daily details of the horror being visited on civilians in Gaza can make any conversation about the language of ceasefire proposals being put forward in foreign capitals seem absurd.

A massive majority at the UN general assembly backed a ceasefire in December; so did the pope. A few days later, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer backed a “sustainable” ceasefire. Twenty-six of 27 EU states again called for a ceasefire on Monday. Benjamin Netanyahu has not yet been persuaded by any of them.

But the calls for a ceasefire, and the subtle ways that they’ve changed over time, do tell us something about Israel’s weakening position on the international stage. This week, in the UK and at the UN, rival propositions for what a ceasefire might look like have emerged. Behind the diplomatic wrangling, and a particular crisis today for the Labour party in Britain, is a complicated story about how the violence might end, and who might be able to influence it.

Read more here: Wednesday briefing – Everyone claims to back a ceasefire in Gaza. But what are they really saying?

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”.