Middle East crisis LIVE updates: US launches fresh wave of strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen

Israeli strikes killed dozens more people overnight, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Thursday (Jan 18), including in the territory's south where Israel has intensified operations.

The ministry said 93 people had been killed, including 16 in a single strike on a house in the southern city of Rafah, where many people have fled.

"The strike left 16 killed, among them women and children, and 20 injured," the ministry said.

As a new wave of violence continues to grip the West Bank, ten people were reported killed in Israeli operations, Palestinian Authority said.

This remains one of the highest single daily death tolls in the West Bank for many months.

The US forces targeted 14 missiles that were ready to launch in Yemen, the US military said Wednesday, after Washington re-designated the Iran-backed Houthi rebels as a "terrorist" entity for their attacks on merchant vessels.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza's Khan Younis on Wednesday was the most intense in over two months, The Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project said.

The two also said that a senior Hamas official has called for Palestinians from other armed groups to escalate their attacks on Israeli forces in the West Bank.

Following a Qatar and France-brokered deal, humanitarian relief, including medicines were delivered to civilians in Gaza’s “most affected and vulnerable areas”.

In exchange, medication will be delivered to 45 Israelis held hostage by Hamas.

Qatari officials old Al-Jazeera that the medication and aid left Doha for Egypt yesterday and have been transported into Gaza by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly rejected a proposal from the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that would have seen Saudi Arabia normalise relations with Israel in exchange for providing the Palestinians with a pathway toward statehood.

Netanyahu told Blinken during his visit to Israel last week that he was not prepared to make a deal that allows for a Palestinian state, NBC News reported, citing three unnamed senior US officials.

Blinken responded that Hamas cannot be removed through military means alone and that a failure by Israeli leaders to recognise this will lead to history repeating itself, a US official told The Times of Israel.

Houthis have vowed to continue targeting Red Sea shipping soon after they said the United States and Britain have carried out a new round of strikes in Yemen.

“We will continue to target Israeli ships heading to the ports of occupied Palestine, no matter how the American-British aggression tries to prevent us from doing so,” a Houthi military official tells the rebels’ Al-Masirah TV.

The United States has conducted another round of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, US officials told Reuters.

The United States on Wednesday (Jan 17) re-listed Yemen's Houthis, an Iran-backed group comprising individuals of the Zaydi sect within Shi'ite Islam, as a specially designated global terrorist group. The White House cited "unprecedented attacks against United States military forces and international maritime vessels operating in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden", one of the world's most crucial shipping routes for global trade. 

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