JERUSALEM: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is to visit Washington in the coming week, the government said Wednesday, as pressure mounts to call off a planned offensive in Gaza’s Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office also announced that a delegation would visit Washington at “the request of US President Joe Biden” to discuss the planned assault, which the United States opposes.
During his first visit to Washington since war erupted in response to Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack, Gallant is due to meet Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin — but no date was announced.
They will discuss “developments in the war against the Hamas terrorist organization, force build-up, humanitarian issues and areas of bilateral military cooperation,” the defense ministry said.
Netanyahu has said an operation in Rafah is necessary to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, but the presence of 1.5 million civilians in the city, many of them displaced from other parts of Gaza, has sparked fears of mass civilian casualties and a further deepening of the humanitarian crisis in the territory.
Biden said Monday he had told Netanyahu to send a team to Washington to discuss how to avoid a full-scale military operation in Rafah.
Netanyahu’s office said Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi would hold the requested talks but did not say when the delegation would leave for Washington.
Israel defense chief to visit US as Rafah pressure builds
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Israel defense chief to visit US as Rafah pressure builds
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office also announced that a delegation would visit Washingto
A man detonates explosive belt during arrest attempt in Iraq, injuring 2 security members
- The raid was being conducted in the Al-Khaseem area in Qaim district that borders Syria
- No members of the security forces were killed
BAGHDAD: A man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up Friday while a security force was trying to arrest him in western Iraq near the Syrian border, killing himself and wounding two security members, an Iraqi security official said.
The raid was being conducted in the Al-Khaseem area in Qaim district that borders Syria, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
The official added that “preliminary information” confirms that no members of the security forces were killed, while two personnel were injured and transferred for medical treatment.
Iraq’s National Security Agency said in a statement that its members besieged a hideout of a Daesh group security official and two of his bodyguards. One bodyguard ignited his explosives belt, killing him. It gave no further details.
Daesh once controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate in 2014. The extremist group was defeated on the battlefield in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria in 2019 but its sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries.
In December, two US service members and an American civilian were killed in an attack in Syria that the United States blamed on Daesh. The US carried out strikes on Syria days later in retaliation.
US and Iraqi authorities in January began transferring hundreds of the nearly 9,000 Daesh members held in jails run by the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria to Iraq, where Iraqi authorities plan to prosecute them.
