Updates: Israel kills at least 51 in Gaza, prepares to send more troops

If you’d like to learn more about the conditions and violence faced by Palestinians in Gaza, you can read an essay published by a Palestinian woman about the loss of a close friend.

As the death toll of Israeli attacks on Gaza passes 50,000, you can take a look at our breakdown of the war in maps and charts here.

And you can follow all of our coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza here.

We will be closing the live page soon. Here’s a brief recap of the day’s main events:

• Stories of suffering and destruction continue to pour out of Gaza, where Israeli strikes have killed at least 51 people in the last day. Israel killed Ismail Barhoum, a member of the political wing of Hamas, in a strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where he was receiving treatment.
• Israeli strikes in Lebanon killed at least eight people following an alleged rocket attack on Israel, which the armed group Hezbollah has denied carrying out. Israel has consistently carried out attacks in Lebanon and continued to occupy the south of the country in violation of a ceasefire reached with Hezbollah four months ago.
• Gaza’s Health Ministry says that the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Gaza has passed 50,000, a conservative figure that experts have said is a likely undercount given the collapse of Gaza’s health system and thousands of people buried beneath the rubble.
• The United States carried out new strikes on Yemen, where the Houthi rebel group has continued to target ships off the coast of Yemen in what the group says is an effort to pressure Israel to end the war on Gaza.

Violence intensifies in the Middle East as Israel bombs Lebanon again and the US carries out fresh attacks on Yemen’s Houthis.

This has all been happening while Israel resumes its genocide in Gaza.

With previous fragile ceasefires now shattered, what is the danger of a wider regional conflict?

Al Jazeera’s Inside Story covers the issue in this video:

After more than a year of being unable to contact my friend, one morning in January 2025, while in our shelter in Rafah, I received a call from an unknown number.

I was overjoyed when I heard Malak’s voice. She was happy and excited to speak to me, but she sounded exhausted.

Two days later, on January 8, I made plans with my mother to visit Malak. I called her to confirm. Malak’s younger sister Farah answered, crying bitterly. “Malak is gone,” she sobbed.

Read more here.

The earlier attack on the hospital, which killed a Hamas official and at least one other person, has put the surgery department completely out of service, the hospital said in a statement.

There are only three operational hospitals left in south Gaza, according to the statement.

Attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen have forced three-fourths of US-flagged ships to avoid the Red Sea and instead take the long and expensive detour around the southern tip of Africa, according to the US National Security adviser.

“Seventy-five percent of our US flag shipping now has to go around the southern coast of Africa rather than going through the Suez Canal,” Mike Waltz told CBS’s Face the Nation.

He added: “The last time one of our destroyers went through the straits there, it was attacked 23 times.”

Recent US air strikes against the Houthi rebels – the first since President Donald Trump took office in January – have “taken out key Houthi leadership”, including the head of their missile programme, Waltz said.

Today’s US strikes on Yemen, the Houthis say, killed one person, but since last week, more than 50 others have been killed by the strikes.

The Houthis say they have targeted ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians since the start of Israel’s Gaza war.

The Israeli military has carried out air strikes across southern Lebanon, killing at least eight people over two days.

A drone strike in Tahrir destroyed a residential flat, killing a man and a woman and damaging surrounding buildings.

Israel claims it targeted Hezbollah sites but the strike hit civilian areas, including a gym.

Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem reports from Tyre, Lebanon:

The State Department says the US secretary of state and the Israeli prime minister spoke in a phone call about Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

According to a statement by the State Department, Rubio emphasised US support for Israel in the conversation.

“The Secretary discussed Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza, and efforts to help release the hostages and bring them home,” the department said.

Israel had confirmed the phone call earlier.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), a Palestinian branch of the Red Cross, says that Israel is refusing to coordinate with the organisation after Israeli forces besieged a team of medical workers in Rafah.

Israeli forces have consistently targeted Palestinian medical and search and rescue workers throughout the war.

“Occupation forces refuse to coordinate the rescue of the Palestine Red Crescent trapped team in Rafah, with contact lost for approximately 15 hours,” PRCS said in a social media post.

“PRCS expresses deep concern for the safety of its emergency medical team, whose fate remains unknown after being besieged by occupation forces at dawn today in Rafah while on a mission to rescue the wounded.”

The Israeli NGO that opposes the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank has condemned the decision to recognise 13 new ones as “another nail in the coffin” for hopes of a two-state solution, which would see a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The move “exposes Israel’s long-standing lie that it does not establish new settlements, but only ‘neighbourhoods’ of existing settlements”, it said in a statement.

The 13 illegal settlements approved for development by the Israeli cabinet are located across the West Bank. Some are effectively part of bigger settlements, while others are practically separate.

Their recognition as distinct communities under Israeli law is not yet final.

This is not the first time that Israel has struck Nasser Hospital; it has been a frequent target of Israeli forces throughout the war in Gaza.

Israeli forces placed the medical complex under a devastating siege that lasted from February through April 2024. In early February 2024, medical staff said that Israeli snipers were attacking them inside the complex and that dozens of civilians outside the hospital had also been killed.

United Nations officials tasked with conducting evacuation missions at the time said that the Israeli operations had turned the hospital into a “place of death”, and a mass grave with more than 300 bodies was discovered after Israeli forces withdrew in April. A civil defence official said that some bodies showed signs of torture.

Among the dead were women, children and medical workers.

The Palestinian group says in a statement that Ismail Barhoum was “assassinated by the occupation in a strike on Nasser Hospital while receiving treatment”.

We reported earlier that at least two people were killed and eight wounded when the Israeli army bombed the hospital in Khan Younis.

“We condemn this latest crime, which adds to the occupation’s long record of terrorism, violating sanctities, lives, and medical facilities. It reaffirms its disregard for all international laws and conventions and its continued policy of systematic killing against our people and leadership,” the statement reads.

Al Jazeera correspondent Hamdah Salhut shared images of the damage caused after the Israeli army bombed the hospital in Khan Younis.

As we reported earlier, the Israeli army killed at least two people in the attack.

Images from the Israeli attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis tonight. pic.twitter.com/Ij2eXF7irW

— Hamdah Salhut (@hamdahsalhut) March 23, 2025

The Knesset will debate the last two readings of the 2025 budget on Monday night, according to The Times of Israel.

The paper reports that a final vote is expected on Tuesday afternoon, with the deadline for the passage of a budget looming on March 31.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry says in a statement that the Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee on Gaza met with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas to discuss Israel’s abandonment of the ceasefire with Hamas and the high civilian death toll of Israel’s renewed strikes on Gaza.

“The parties discussed recent developments in the occupied Palestinian territories and expressed their grave concern over the collapse of the ceasefire in Gaza and the resulting high number of civilian casualties resulting from recent airstrikes,” a joint statement reads.

“The parties condemned the resumption of hostilities and the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, and called for an immediate return to the full implementation of the ceasefire agreement and the release of hostages and detainees, which entered into force on January 19 and was sponsored by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States.”

The statement also expresses concern over Israeli raids and increased settlement activities in the occupied West Bank.

From rampaging through the occupied West Bank to setting their sights on colonising Gaza, Israel’s settlers wield more power now than ever before.

Once unthinkable to many Israelis, their calls to re-establish settlements in the Gaza Strip have entered the mainstream media discussion.

The Listening Post reports on how the Israeli media have helped catapult the settlers from the margins to the mainstream: