Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and wider crisis in the Middle East.

A new round of Israel-Gaza ceasefire talks are expected to begin today, although expectations of their success is low. Israel has hardened its position in recent weeks and Hamas has indicated it is unlikely to attend the talks in Qatar.

Yesterday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Qatar’s prime minister warned all sides not to undermine the talks, in a veiled warning to Iran, Hamas and Israel.

Blinken and Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in a telephone call stated that “no party in the region should take actions that would undermine efforts to reach a deal,” the US state department said in a statement.

Negotiations have also been complicated by the assassination of one of Hamas’ top negotiators, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran at the end of last month, which Tehran blames on Israel. Tehran has since been threatening retaliation for the killing although US and Iranian officials have both suggested significant progress towards a ceasefire in Gaza might bring immediate regional de-escalation.

Top Hamas official Osama Hamdan on Wednesday told the Associated Press the Palestinian militant group was losing faith in the US’ ability to mediate a ceasefire in Gaza and that it would only participate if the talks focused on implementing a proposal detailed by US President Joe Biden in May and endorsed internationally.

“We have informed the mediators that … any meeting should be based on talking about implementation mechanisms and setting deadlines rather than negotiating something new,” said Hamdan, who is a member of Hamas’ political bureau. “Otherwise, Hamas finds no reason to participate.”

Israel has confirmed its participation in the talks. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently blamed Hamas for the failure of the talks so far, saying earlier this month, “The fact is that it is Hamas which is preventing the release of our hostages, and which continues to oppose the [ceasefire] outline.”

In other developments:

• Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 39,965 Palestinians and wounded 92,294 since 7 October the Palestinian health ministry said on Wednesday. A total of 36 Palestinians have been killed and 54 wounded in the past 24 hours, the ministry said in a statement.

• One strike hit a family home late Tuesday in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing five children aged between 2 and 11, and their parents, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. In another strike on Tuesday four-day-old twins were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah while their father went to register their birth.

• Israeli soldiers are using Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza to enter and clear tunnels and buildings they suspect may have been booby-trapped, a leading Israeli NGO and newspaper reported. The practice was so widespread across different units fighting in Gaza that it could in effect be considered a “protocol”, said Nadav Weiman, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, a group founded by Israeli combat veterans to document military abuses.

• Israel has approved a new settlement on a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, its far-right finance minister said on Wednesday. Bezalel Smotrich, who also heads civil affairs at the defence ministry, said his office had “completed its work and published a plan for the new Nahal Heletz settlement in Gush Etzion”, a bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem. “We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground,” he said in a post on X.

• Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli strikes killed two people in the country’s south on Wednesday, with Hezbollah announcing the deaths of two of its fighters. Lebanon’s health ministry earlier reported that an “Israeli enemy” strike in Abbassiyeh, near the southern city of Tyre, wounded 17 people, including two teenagers and an eight-year-old girl, with four people in “critical” condition. Hezbollah said it launched “volleys of Katyusha rockets” at the city of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel in response to the Abbassiyeh strike.

• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday that Turkey would continue to support the Palestinian cause and push the international community to increase pressure on Israel, his office said. The two leaders discussed recent developments and the steps to be taken for a lasting ceasefire and peace in Gaza, Erdogan’s office said in a post on X.

• Israel said its forces had hit Palestinian militants in Tamoun in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday while Hamas said its fighters were engaged in fierce clashes with Israeli forces in nearby Tubas city after one was killed in an Israeli raid. The official Palestinian news agency Wafe reported that one man was killed in the Israeli raid in Tubas, while four others were killed in an Israeli drone strike in Tamoun, a few kilometres further south. It did not give their identities, but the al-Qassam Brigades – Hamas’s armed wing – later said one of its fighters, Fayyaz Fawaz Daraghmeh, was killed in the Tubas raid.

• A former hostage whose husband is still captive in Gaza said she does not expect to see him again unless Israel agrees a ceasefire deal. Aviva Siegel was freed after 51 days in captivity, under a week-long agreement last November. Her fears for her husband, Keith Siegel, were sharpened by her own ordeal of hunger, deprivation, violence, isolation and psychological torture, she said.

• Britain and Germany were among the countries joining condemnation of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s ultranationalist national security minister, who on Tuesday defied longstanding rules to lead hundreds of Israelis in singing Jewish hymns and performing religious rituals on the raised compound in Jerusalem’s Old City known as al-Haram al-Sharif to Muslims. Under a longstanding but fragile arrangement, Jews can visit the site but not pray there.