Middle East crisis live: Blinken due in Saudi Arabia; Israel launches deadly strikes on former ‘safe’ Gaza city of Rafah | Middle East and north Africa

At least 20 Palestinians were killed over the weekend in Israeli strikes on Rafah, the Gaza city previously designated a safe zone by the Israeli military and to where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled, according to the UN agency humanitarian agency OCHA.

In its latest report on the conflict and citing data from Gaza’s health ministry, OCHA said 234 Palestinians were killed over the weekend bringing the total death toll in Gaza since 7 October to 27,365.

Thousands more people are thought to be buried under rubble and almost 67,000 have been wounded. The majority of those killed are women and children.

The deadliest incidents over the weekend included at least 11 Palestinians killed in a strike on a residential building near An Najjar hospital, in eastern Rafah early Saturday, OCHA said.

Another five Palestinians including one child were killed in an attack on another residential building in eastern Rafah on Saturday afternoon and a further four Palestinians were killed in another attack on a residential building in eastern Rafah in the early hours of Saturday.

Thousands of Palestinians continue to flee to Rafah from Khan Younis, further north, where Israel is now concentrating its attacks. However last week defence minister Yoav Gallant said the military would now turn its focus to Rafah.

The Israeli attacks will leave an already traumatised population struggling to find food, water, shelter and medical treatment in an even more desperate situation.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken is set to arrive in Saudi Arabia on his fifth visit to the region since October in the coming hours.

His visit comes comes after the US carried out retaliatory strikes against Iranian-linked targets in Iraq and Syria, and on Houthi rebel sites in Yemen, in the latest escalation of the conflict that is spreading across the Middle East.

The trip also comes as the Biden administration gradually shows some frustration with Israel, with sanctions imposed Thursday on extremist settlers, although the US has brushed aside international calls on Israel to end its military campaign.

A ceasefire proposal under discussion – drafted during talks a week ago in Paris involving the CIA chief and Israeli, Qatari and Egyptian officials – would pause fighting for an initial six weeks as Hamas frees hostages seized on 7 October in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, according to a Hamas source. AFP reports further:

Blinken on his trip will visit Israel as well as Egypt and Qatar, the key go-between with Hamas which controls the Gaza Strip and maintains an office in Doha.

Blinken, speaking Monday after meeting in Washington with Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said there was “real hope” for success of the “good, strong [ceasefire] proposal.”

Qatar has also voiced optimism, although Hamas has said that there is no agreement and there is also division in Israel with hawks opposing perceived concessions to Hamas.

Hundreds rallied Saturday night in Tel Aviv to demand swift action to free the hostages as well as early elections as they denounced the inability of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government to win their freedom.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, acknowledged on Sunday the debate within Israel but said, in reference to the deal, that the “ball is in Hamas’s court at this time.”

Sullivan, speaking to “Face the Nation” on CBS, said Blinken would press Israel to allow more food, water, medicine and shelter in Gaza, which has been left in rubble by nearly four months of bombardment.

“This will be a top priority of his when he sees the Israeli government – that the needs of the Palestinian people are something that are going to be front and centre in the US approach,” said Sullivan.

Blinken is expected to begin his trip on Monday in Saudi Arabia, which before the 7 October attack had been mulling steps to establish relations with Israel, a potentially historic step for the country that is the guardian of Islam’s two holiest sites.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Middle East crisis with me, Helen Livingstone.

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, is due to arrive in Saudi Arabia on his fifth visit to the region since October. He is also expected to travel to Egypt, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank this week, focusing on advancing talks on the return of hostages taken from Israel by Hamas in exchange for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza.

The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said humanitarian issues in Gaza would also be a top priority for Blinken.

Israel has meanwhile struck residential buildings in Rafah over the weekend, killing at least 20 people and injuring dozens more, according to the UN agency OCHA. The city had formerly been designated a safe zone by the Israeli military, which ordered Palestinians to flee there. It is now sheltering more than half of the occupied territory’s 2.3 million people.

More on these stories soonest. In other key developments:

• The total death toll in Gaza since 7 October has risen to 27,365. A kindergarten in Rafah sheltering displaced families was among the places hit by Israel over the weekend.

• US national security advisor Jake Sullivan said there would be more steps in the American response to last weekend’s deadly drone attack on US soldiers in Jordan. Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, he said the retaliatory strikes launched on Iran-linked targets in Iraq and Syria on Friday were “the beginning, not the end, of our response”.

• Later, the US military said it had struck a Houthi land attack cruise missile early on Sunday and four anti-ship cruise missiles hours later “all of which were prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea”. It was the third batch of US strikes against Iran-backed militias in the Middle East in as many days.

• The head of Iraq’s pro-Iran Hashed al-Shaabi alliance demanded the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces from the country after the deadly strikes, warning that the US was “playing with fire”. “They targeted administration offices, a (Hashed) hospital, they struck forces tasked with protecting the borders,” Faleh al-Fayyad said at a funeral ceremony for members of the group killed in the US strikes.

• Iran warned the US against any move against the Iranian-flagged ship Behshad, which is stationed in the Red Sea and suspected by the US of providing surveillance information to help direct Houthi onshore cruise-missile attacks on commercial shipping in the area. Any attack on the ship would be at the risk of those taking such steps, Tehran said.

• A Houthi military spokesman warned that US and British strikes on Yemen on Saturday would not go “unanswered”. “These attacks will not discourage Yemeni forces and the nation from maintaining their support for Palestinians in the face of the Zionist occupation and crimes,” Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said.

• Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanani, also warned that these attacks are “in clear contradiction with the repeated claims of Washington and London that they do not want the expansion of war and conflict in the region,” while Hamas said the strikes would bring “further turmoil” to the Middle East.

• Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the Wall Street Journal that the US president, Joe Biden, had not given Israel sufficient support to its war in Gaza. “Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel [to Gaza], which goes to Hamas,” Ben-Gvir told the newspaper in an article published on Sunday. “If [former US president Donald] Trump was in power, the US conduct would be completely different.”

• France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné said he rejected the “forced displacement” of Palestinians into Egypt from the Gaza Strip, where Israeli bombardment has pushed hundreds of thousands against the border. Séjourné was on his first Middle East tour, and met his counterparts in Egypt and Jordan.

• Israel’s army said on Sunday its forces had raided a Hamas training facility in Gaza where militants prepared for the 7 October attack on Israel. The facility in the Palestinian territory’s main southern city of Khan Younis contained models of Israeli military bases, armoured vehicles, as well as entry points to kibbutzim, the army said in a statement.