Middle East crisis live: UN says aid work in Gaza disrupted after Israel orders evacuation of Deir al-Balah area | Israel-Gaza war

Lisa O’Carroll

The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised.

Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.

“Refusals of food and slow authorisation of passage, meaning fresh food perishes, is unconscionable and shameful,” the taoiseach said in a statement issued in the last few minutes ahead of his trip to Paris.

“We now have a widespread catastrophic risk of polio and other horrific diseases because of ongoing cancellation of humanitarian aid. The UN has rushed more than 600,000 polio vaccines to Gaza and the fact that this life-saving chain would be disrupted with evacuation orders should not be contemplated,” he added.

He called on all sides to abide by the International Court of Justice order on unhindered access for huminatarian aid and said the latest “troubling” pattern of disruption had to be “called out”.

Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 14 people, half of them children.

The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike.

Another strike late Monday hit a building in downtown Gaza City, killing a child, three women and a man, according to the Gaza health ministry, AP reported.

In southern Gaza, a strike on a home early Tuesday killed five people, including a man, his three children as young as 3 years old and a woman, according to a casualty list provided by Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies were taken.

Palestinian health officials do not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes are civilians or fighters.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider crisis in the Middle East.

The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers.

A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.

According to the official, the UN had relocated most of its personnel in operations to Deir al-Balah following a Rafah evacuation order several months ago.

The Israeli military said on Monday it was targeting “terror operatives” in Deir al-Balah and working to dismantle the remaining “infrastructure” of Hamas, whose 7 October attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza. The Israeli military has told people to evacuate immediately.

According to the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA), 15 premises hosting aid workers and four warehouses either in or near the area ordered to evacuate were affected.

After it appeared that the UN had shut down its Gaza operations, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for secretary-general António Guterres, clarified that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was continuing operations, although under restrictions.

More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main news:

• The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.

• The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.

• Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the occupied West Bank on Monday in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck a militant operations centre in the camp, and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the West Bank after reports of an abduction.

• Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports on the settler raid, it added.

• Some Israeli officials and media reacted with satisfaction on Monday after a long-expected missile attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement appeared to have been largely thwarted by pre-emptive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Hezbollah had suffered a “crushing blow” from the Israeli strikes but that a longer lasting solution was still needed.

• Benjamin Netanyahu faced a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.

• The United States continues to assess that the threat of attack against Israel by Iran and its proxy groups still exists, the Pentagon said on Monday, after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander. “I would point you to some of the public comments that have been made by Iranian leaders and others … we continue to assess that there is a threat of attack,” Pentagon spokesperson air force Maj Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters.

• The brother of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, has called for those responsible for his sister’s death to be prosecuted and punished. Frankcom, a 43-year-old from Melbourne who was working in Gaza with World Central Kitchen, was one of seven people killed in April when a convoy of cars was hit by an Israeli airstrike. Israel’s defence force conducted an investigation into the incident, which resulted in two officers being dismissed and three others being reprimanded. Mal Frankcom told the ABC he did not feel this was an adequate response.