Live: Thousands return home as Lebanon ceasefire takes hold

Rights groups challenging the UK government over weapons sales to Israel say they are seeking a court order to halt all arms exports after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

In a letter sent on Monday, the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq and the UK-based Global Legal Action Network (Glan) warned the British government that it is "now arming suspected war criminals who have been indicted by the world’s pre-eminent criminal court". 

The groups highlighted that the ICC's three judge pre-trial panel found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that, amongst other alleged crimes, both men intentionally starved civilians in Gaza for at least eight months.

They also pointed to findings that the leaders had intentionally limited or prevented medical supplies from getting into the Gaza Strip, forcing doctors to operate and carry out amputations, including on children, without anaesthetics.

Read more: UK threatened with emergency ban of arms exports to Israel after ICC warrants 

Lebanon's foreign minister Abdallah Bou Habib said he hoped a ceasefire to end the Israeli war on Lebanon would be agreed later on Tuesday.

He said the Lebanese army would be ready to have at least 5,000 troops deployed in southern Lebanon as Israeli troops withdraw, and that the United States could play a role in rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by Israeli strikes.

Reporting by Reuters

Israeli forces have killed at least 14 Palestinians and wounded 108 in the last 24 hours, the Palestinian health ministry said on the 417th day of Israeli war on Gaza. 

This brings the death toll in the besieged enclave since 7 October 2023 to 44,249, with more than 104,746 wounded. At least 10,000 people are still missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.

The UN says nearly 70 percent of the victims are children and women. 

Israel demands effective UN enforcement of an eventual ceasefire deal with Lebanon and will show "zero tolerance" toward any infraction, Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday.

"Any house in southern Lebanon that is rebuilt and established as a terrorist base will be destroyed, every armament and terrorist regrouping will be struck, every attempt to smuggle weapons will be thwarted and any threat to our forces or to Israeli citizens will be destroyed immediately," Katz told the UN's special co-ordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis.

Reporting by Reuters

The European Union's foreign policy chief urged Israel on Tuesday to back a proposed ceasefire deal in Lebanon which he said has all the necessary security guarantees for Israel.

Speaking at a G7 Foreign Ministers meeting, Josep Borrell said there was no excuse for not implementing the deal with Hezbollah, adding pressure should be exerted on Israel to approve it today.

Reporting by Reuters

Israeli forces have committed more than 7,160 massacres in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, wiping out at least 1,410 Palestinian families from the civil registry, the Palestinian health ministry has said. 

In new data published on Tuesday, the ministry added that an additional 3,463 families lost all members except one, while 2,287 families were massacres but had more than one survivor. 

According to the ministry, the data is accurate as of 1 November 2024. 

Israel looks set to approve a US plan for a ceasefire with Hezbollah on Tuesday, a senior Israeli official said, according to Reuters.

Israel's security cabinet is expected to convene later on Tuesday to discuss and likely approve the text at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the official added.

Reporting by Reuters

Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called the ceasefire proposal with Lebanon a "historical mistake" ahead of a security cabinet meeting later on Tuesday to discuss the deal on the table, which many news outlets have said will come into effect in the coming hours. 

"We have a historic opportunity to act decisively in the south and north," Ben Gvir told Kan Radio on Tuesday. 

"It will be a historical missed opportunity if we stop everything and go backwards," he added. 

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, has said that displaced people in makeshift tents in Khan Younis "face heavy rains, rising sea levels, and ongoing Israeli strikes." 

On Monday, rainstorms flooded many camps, washing away some 10,000 tents, according to the Gaza-based government media office.

In Khan Younis, southern #Gaza, people retrieve their belongings from flooded tents.

As the winter weather intensifies, families in makeshift tents face heavy rains, rising sea levels, and ongoing Israeli strikes.#CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/mbQjO7yzwI

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) November 26, 2024

Good morning Middle East Eye readers, 

Here are the latest updates from the Israeli war on Gaza and Lebanon, now in its 417th day:

• Israeli strikes late on Monday and into Tuesday killed at least 11 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the official news agency Wafa. 

• In Israel, the security cabinet is set to vote on Tuesday on signing a ceasefire deal with Lebanon as several media outlets report the announcement could be made in the coming hours.

Good Evening Middle East Eye readers, 

Israel and Hezbollah have inched closer to a 60 day ceasefire that could be announced within hours.

According to reports, the deal has been brokered by the US and is expected to see an end to fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

The Lebanese armed forces will deploy into southern Lebanon and Israeli troops will pull out of the country.

Reuters reports that the US and France will unveil the ceasefire deal on Tuesday. 

Here are some of the day's other key developments:

• White House Middle East envoy Brett McGurk is set to visit Saudi Arabia on Tuesday in a bid to revive talks on a ceasefire in Gaza
• The death toll from an Israeli strike on a house in the Zarqa area on Monday in northern Gaza City has risen to six people, according to Al Jazeera
• A Palestinian child and young man were killed during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Ya'bad, located south of Jenin in the occupied West Bank
• At least 31 people were killed and 64 injured by Israeli strikes across Lebanon on Monday, the Lebanese health ministry said on Monday
• Half a million people in Gaza are displaced at flood-prone sites that could be at risk as winter approaches, according to the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (Unrwa)

White House Middle East envoy Brett McGurk is set to visit Saudi Arabia on Tuesday in a bid to revive talks on a ceasefire in Gaza. 

The White House said McGurk would travel to Saudi Arabia in the hope of using a potential ceasefire in Lebanon as a "catalyst" for a truce in Gaza. 

The death toll from an Israeli strike on a house in the Zarqa area on Monday in northern Gaza City has risen to six people, according to Al Jazeera. 

Several others were wounded in the strike. 

US President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official and media commentator, to return to the White House and serve in a senior national security role in the new administration.

The son of Hungarian parents who fled to the UK after the failed uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956, Gorka immigrated to the US and became a naturalised US citizen in 2012. His political and media career eventually led him to serve a brief stint in the first Trump administration.

He has previously implied that 98 percent of "terrorists" in the United States are Muslim, and in a Breitbart column in 2016 demonised Muslim immigrants coming to the United States, saying that Muslims are, in the best case, opposed to American values and in the worst case, "want to kill us".

Former US officials Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, who served in national security and counterterrorism roles in the US  government, previously said that Gorka believes that violence in the Middle East is inextricably linked to the "martial language" of the Quran.

Read More: Who is Sebastian Gorka, the Trump-appointee former US officials call an 'Islamophobic Huckster?'

US troops are set to oversee the deployment of Lebanon's army to southern Lebanon and Israel's withdrawal from the area as part of a looming ceasefire deal, according to a Monday report on Israel Hayom news. 

The US has been the top provider of aid and training to the non-sectarian Lebanese Armed Forces. 

Overseeing the implementation of the ceasefire would represent a deepening of the US's footprint in Lebanon.