Hamas says it will hand over another hostage body as tensions over truce continue – as it happened

Iran has scrapped a cooperation deal that it signed with the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA in September, its Supreme National Security Council Secretary said on Monday, according to state media.

The statement came around three weeks after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said Tehran would scrap the agreement, which let the IAEA resume inspections of its nuclear sites, if Western powers reinstated UN sanctions.

Those were reinstated last month.

The confirmation will be a setback for the International Atomic Energy Agency which has been trying to rebuild cooperation with Tehran since Israel and the United States bombed the nuclear sites in June.

“The agreement has been cancelled,” Larijani said while meeting with his Iraqi counterpart in Tehran, according to state media.

At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned by Israel to Gaza had been held in a notorious detention centre already facing allegations of torture and unlawful deaths in custody, officials from Gaza’s health ministry told the Guardian.

The director general of the health ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, and the spokesperson for Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies are being examined, said a document found inside each body bag indicated the bodies all came from Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert, where, according to photos and testimonies published by the Guardian last year, Palestinian detainees were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds, and forced to wear nappies.

“The document tags inside the body bags are written in Hebrew and clearly indicate that the remains were held at Sde Teiman,” said Bursh. “The tags also showed that DNA tests had been carried out on some of them there.”

Last year, the Israeli army launched a criminal investigation, which is continuing, into the deaths of 36 prisoners detained at Sde Teiman.

As part of the US-brokered truce, Hamas has handed over the bodies of some of the hostages who died during the course of the war, and Israel has so far transferred the bodies of 150 Palestinians killed after the 7 October attack.

Some of the photographs of Palestinian bodies seen by the Guardian – which cannot be published due to the graphic nature of the images – show several of the victims blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs. One image shows a rope fastened around a man’s neck.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he will discuss regional challenges and opportunities with US vice-president JD Vance during his visit to Israel, which is expected to begin on Tuesday.

Addressing Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that together with US president Donald Trump, he expected to forge peace agreements in the region.

Patrick Wintour is diplomatic editor for the Guardian

A European and US-backed UN security council motion to give a planned international stabilisation force robust powers to control security inside Gaza is being prepared, with the strong expectation that Egypt will lead it, diplomats have said.

The US is pressing for the force to have a UN mandate without being a fully fledged UN peacekeeping force and will operate with the kind of powers given to international troops operating in Haiti to combat armed gangs.

Turkey, Indonesia and Azerbaijan are also being billed alongside Egypt as the main troop contributors. Egypt is still being consulted on whether the force should be a full UN-led operation.

It is not expected that European or British troops will be involved, but Britain has sent advisers to a small cell being operated by the US inside Israel that is working on implementing the second phase of the 20-point plan developed by Donald Trump, the US president.

You can read the full story here:

US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were in Israel on Monday to shore up the tenuous ceasefire that is holding in Gaza.

It comes a day after the fragile deal faced its first major flareup with Israel threatening to halt aid transfers after it said Hamas militants had killed two soldiers.

The US embassy said the two envoys had landed in Tel Aviv. The Israeli military later said it resumed enforcing the ceasefire, and the official confirmed that aid deliveries would resume on Monday.

By early afternoon, it was not immediately clear if the flow of aid had restarted.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels held a funeral Monday for their military chief of staff who was killed in a recent Israeli strike, with more than 1,000 people gathered for the ceremony in the rebel-held capital of Sana’a.

The Iranian-backed rebel group acknowledged last week that one of their senior officers, Muhammad Abdul Karim al-Ghamari, was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with other top rebel leaders.

The Houthis did not say when the strike took place but this death further escalating tensions between the rebels and Israel.

Israeli defence minister Israel Katz warned that any Hamas militants in areas of Gaza still under Israeli control must leave immediately and that anyone remaining beyond the yellow line would be targeted without warning.

Both Tehran and Paris have the necessary will to resolve the “issue” of prisoners, Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said on Monday, a week after an Iranian court gave heavy prison sentences to two French citizens.

“We are following the issue seriously. We believe both sides have the necessary will to resolve this issue,” Baghaei said when asked at a weekly press conference about the possibility of a prisoner swap.

Cecile Kohler and her partner Jacques Paris are the only two French citizens being held in Iran and have been detained since 2022.

Iran has accused France of arbitrarily detaining Mahdieh Esfandiari, an Iranian student living in the French city of Lyon who was arrested this year over anti-Israel social media posts.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected on Monday an assertion by US president Donald Trump that the United States has destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“The US president proudly says they bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, keep dreaming!” Khamenei said on X.

Unrwa has been the major distributor of aid in Gaza and has provided education, health and other basic services to millions of Palestinian refugees across the region.

But an Israeli ban on the agency in Gaza and the occupied West Bank took effect earlier this year after Israel accused it of being infiltrated by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. Unrwa denies this claim.

Palestinian Unrwa personnel in Gaza have continued to provide services and assistance to the civilian population and staff have done the same in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Under the terms of the first phase of Trump’s ceasefire deal, aid was meant to surge into Gaza, but humanitarian agencies have warned that aid remains scarce across the territory, with many Israeli restrictions having remained in place, throttling the supply of desperately needed assistance.

Sam Rose, acting director of Unrwa affairs in Gaza (at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees), tells BBC News that “bureaucratic constraints” are still preventing the delivery of vital supplies.

He said the volume of aid is still “way below what is needed”. At least 600 trucks are needed every day – at a minimum – to start addressing Gaza’s dire humanitarian crisis, according to the UN.

Rose said it is not just the “basics” Palestinian people need to “survive” but other forms of aid/assistance are also needed, but are not always being allowed in by Israel, including educational supplies and temporary accommodation.

“It’s not just the type of items but also the organisations that are permitted to bring those supplies in,” he told BBC News. “International NGOs – including many British NGOs – are not currently permitted to bring those supplies in.”

Here are some of the latest images being sent to us over the newswires from Gaza:

The Guardian’s global affairs correspondent, Andrew Roth, has written an interesting profile on Jared Kushner in which he explores his central role in the ceasefire negotiations and his extensive business dealings in the Middle East. Here is a snippet:

The soft-spoken heir to his father’s real estate empire has quietly become a key conduit for Trump’s outreach to the Middle East, leveraging his Rolodex of leaders in the region and positioning himself to win a lucrative windfall if the goal of redeveloping Gaza ever comes to fruition.

It has been a notable return to the political fold after Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, effectively swore off politics after the January 6 riots at the US Capitol that followed Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections.

Now, Kushner, who manages billions of dollars in investments including from Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in his investment company Affinity Partners, sits at the nexus of power in Washington DC.

“Of course there’s an enormous conflict of interest here,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, who described the influence-peddling in the administration as open corruption.

But, he added: “Part of what’s bizarre is that the Trump organisation is so deeply leveraged in the Middle East that the corruption could sustain the ceasefire. Because they all stand to make so much money there is an interest and an incentive to kind of stop the war.”

The administration has denied that there is a conflict of interest in Kushner’s diplomatic work while continuing to run an investment fund managing billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatari state funds.

Israeli troops are still occupying about 50% of Gaza, denoted on maps by a thick yellow line that indicates where civilians can go in the first phase of the ceasefire.

As my colleagues report in this story, civil defence officials said there was no way for people to know when they had crossed over the line.

The Israeli army says it opened fire on “several” people who crossed the yellow line – where the Israeli military agreed to withdraw to – earlier today.

Without offering evidence, the Israel Defense Forces claimed in a post on X that these people posed “an immediate threat” to soldiers operating in the Shejaiya area in northern Gaza.

It is not clear whether or not there were any casualties and we are unsure of the circumstances surrounding what happened.

At least 97 Palestinian people, according to Gaza’s government media office, have been killed by Israeli attacks across Gaza since the latest Hamas-Israel ceasefire came into effect on 10 October.

Two Palestinian people were killed by Israeli gunfire in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood east of Gaza City on Monday, Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting, citing a medical source.

Jared Kushner on Monday told CBS News that Israel must help the Palestinians succeed if it wants to integrate into the Middle East, and that Hamas is looking to fulfil its commitment.

Kushner, who has no formal role in the White House, but is working as president Donald Trump’s emissary to the Middle East sat alongside US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and said:

The biggest message that we’ve tried to convey to the Israeli leadership now is that, now that the war is over if you want to integrate Israel with the broader Middle East, you have to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better.

When asked how they were sending that message, he responded that they were “just getting started”.

He added that they have seen Hamas “looking to honour the agreement” in place.

As far as we’ve seen from what’s being conveyed to us from the mediators, they are so far [acting in good faith]. That could break down at any minute, but right now- we have seen them looking to honour their agreement.

An Israeli official and US official has said that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to travel to Israel on Monday.

Donald Trump said yesterday the ceasefire he brokered was still in place.

The US president told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that Hamas has been “quite rambunctious” and “they’ve been doing some shooting.” He suggested that the violence might be the fault of “rebels” within the organization rather than its leadership.

“It’s going to be handled toughly but properly,” he said.

Trump did not say whether he thought the Israeli strikes were justified, saying “it’s under review.”