As we reported in an earlier post, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has met with the Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, in London, as efforts to bring about a diplomatic resolution to Israel’s war continue. Blinken also met with Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, who brought up the devastating Israeli offensive in northern Gaza, where many civilians have been killed and infrastructure levelled in an intense military siege by the Israeli military over recent weeks. Safadi told Blinken: “We do see ethnic cleansing taking place, and that has got to stop.”

Blinken is in the UK meeting Arab leaders, following a diplomatic tour of the Middle East earlier this week, his first to the region since Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, suspected mastermind of the 7 October attack last year.

“We have a sense of real urgency in getting to a diplomatic resolution and the full implementation of UN security council resolution 1701, such that there can be real security along border between Israel and Lebanon,” Blinken said. He was referring to the resolution that ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and has since been the framework that governs security dynamics on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

“Meanwhile, we want to make sure we want to see civilians protected. We want to make sure that Lebanese armed forces are not caught in the crossfire,” Blinken added.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, has told reporters that over 163 rescuers and health workers had been killed and 272 injured in Israeli airstrikes during more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, the Iranian backed Lebanese militant group, began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 7 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed.

More than 2,500 people are reported to have been killed in Lebanon since then, many of whom were civilians, including 1,900 in the past five weeks. Israel unleashed its assault on Lebanon last month, claiming its aim was to return tens of thousands of people evacuated from homes in northern Israel due to the cross-border hostilities.

US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has met with Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati in London.

The US – Israel’s biggest arms supplier – has stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s month of bombing of Lebanon, but is instead calling for a diplomatic resolution.

Speaking in Doha, the Qatari capital, Blinken said yesterday:

We have been very clear that this cannot lead – should not lead – to a protracted campaign and that Israel must take the necessary steps to avoid civilian casualties and not endanger UN peacekeepers or the Lebanese armed forces.

The US has called for Lebanon’s central government to take charge of security and for the disarmament of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite movement that effectively has its own military.

Northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, along with the nearby Indonesian and al-Awda hospitals, have reported dire shortages of fuel and other supplies amid relentless Israeli attacks in the area over recent weeks.

Sweeping evacuation orders for the hundreds of thousands people estimated to be still living in the northern third of the territory, the blockage of aid and food deliveries and the targeting of civilian infrastructure have led to accusations that Israel is committing the war crime of seeking to forcibly displace the remaining population.

Al Jazeera reports that the Kamal Adwan hospital has now run out of medical supplies and its warehouse is empty. Hussam Abu Safia, director of the hospital, told Al Jazeera yesterday that most of the surgeons have been arrested by Israeli troops, meaning urgent surgeries cannot be performed.

The outlet reports:

Last night, the Israeli military surrounded the hospital and directly fired shells at the building causing severe damage to the ICU and the emergency department.

The bombing also damaged the oxygen station and disrupted the flow of oxygen supplies to the incubators and the ICU, threatening the lives of 150 wounded people and 14 newborns.

We can confirm that the Israeli military is conducting mass arrests of men inside Kamal Adwan Hospital and leading them to an unknown area for interrogation.

The Israeli military targeted a group of homes on al-Hawaja Street in Jabalia refugee camp, killing and wounding many Palestinians.

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). Israel’s war has displaced upwards of one million people, according to Lebanese officials.

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.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

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.