Middle East crisis live: returning Palestinians ‘shocked’ by ‘complete scale of destruction’ of northern Gaza

Unrwa has provided education, health and other basic services to millions of Palestinian refugees across the region, including in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Israeli government has accused the UN agency of allowing Hamas militants to infiltrate its staff, an allegation the agency denies.

At the end of January, Israel formally banned Unrwa from operating on its territory but many operations are continuing, according to Hareetz. Here is an extract from its story published yesterday:

In contrast to concerns at Unrwa and among Palestinians, Israel has so far not taken any direct action aimed at preventing Unrwa operations in East Jerusalem. Schools in the Shoafat refugee camp and in other locations in the city, as well as Unrwa-run clinics, worked as usual last week, as did cleaning services provided by the agency at Shoafat. Officials in Unrwa say that they have not received any instructions from Israel to stop operating in East Jerusalem.

However, in the wake of these laws, the visas of 25 international employees who managed Unrwa operations in Jerusalem and the West Bank were revoked. These employees left Israel and are continuing to work from Jordan.

Local employees, who constitute the vast majority of the people working for Unrwa, continue to work as usual. The law is unclear with regard to whether Israeli banks and other organizations can continue maintaining their ties with Unrwa, but most employees are paid through Palestinian banks.

A few international employees still work in Gaza, and the agency continues to operate there on a large scale.

Welcome back to our live coverage of the latest news from the Middle East.

Displaced Palestinian families who have returned to northern Gaza since the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas came into effect last month have been “shocked” by the “complete scale of destruction” of their homes and neighbourhoods, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).

Tess Ingram, a spokesperson for Unicef, said children in particular have been traumatised by Israel’s war on the territory, which has left many communities without adequate healthcare, sanitation, shelter and water.

Israel’s campaign of intense aerial bombing and mass demolitions levelled large swathes of Gaza, and left whole neighbourhoods barely habitable. Nine in 10 homes in the territory have been destroyed or damaged, UN figures show. Schools, hospitals, mosques, cemeteries, shops and offices have been repeatedly hit.

About 700,000 northern Gaza residents fled to southern areas at the start of the war in October 2023, when the Israeli military issued mass evacuation orders.

In a post on X on Sunday, Ingram, who has been speaking to Palestinian people returning to the northern part of the strip this week, said in a video:

The families that I’ve spoken to this week here in the north of Gaza have been shocked by what they have returned to.

They’ve been shocked by the complete scale of this destruction. Even after seeing photos and videos from the south, they hoped that their homes, their neighborhoods, their communities, maybe had been spared.

And as they come back here and realise that’s not the case the hope that they’ve been holding on to for 15 months crashes into a deep heaviness, and this is particularly traumatic for children, children who have endured so much already and are now coming back to communities without water and without health care, without the basics that they need to survive.

More people are returning to northern Gaza now as the Israeli military has completed its withdrawal from the Netzarim Corridor, that bisects the northern and southern halves of the Gaza Strip.

In other developments:

• Egypt will host an Arab summit on 27 February to discuss what it said were “serious” developments for Palestinian people, according to the country’s foreign ministry. Egypt has rejected Donald Trump’s plans – condemned as ethnic cleansing – to move Palestinians out of their territories in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to neighbouring countries such as Egypt and Jordan.

• Speaking on Sunday, the US President repeated his pledge to take control of the Gaza Strip. “I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back. There’s nothing to move back into. The place is a demolition site. The remainder will be demolished,” he told reporters.

• A spokesperson for Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu said that an Israeli delegation arrived in Qatar on Sunday for further ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel. Reuters reports that indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas on the next stage of the ceasefire are set to begin this week.