GAZA: Israel launched devastating air strikes on Gaza early Thursday while also saying it is ready to resume stalled talks on a truce and hostage release deal with Hamas to pause the war raging since October 7.
The Gaza Strip’s civil defense agency said two pre-dawn air strikes had killed 26 people, including 15 children, in Gaza City alone.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said one strike hit a family house, killing 16 people, in the Al-Daraj area, and another killed 10 people inside a mosque compound.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Fierce street battles also raged in Gaza’s Jabalia and Rafah where the armed wings of Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad said they had fired mortar barrages at Israeli troops.
International pressure for a ceasefire has mounted on Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as three European countries said Wednesday they would recognize a Palestinian state.
The week started with the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor seeking arrest warrants on war crimes charges against Netanyahu and his defense minister as well as three Hamas leaders.
Israel has angrily rejected those moves, voicing “disgust” over the ICC request and labelling any recognition of Palestinian statehood a “reward for terrorism.”
But domestic pressure has also risen as supporters of hostages trapped in Gaza again rallied outside Netanyahu’s office, passionately demanding a deal to bring them home.
A newly released video showed five female Israeli soldiers, tied up and some with bloodied faces, in the hands of Palestinian militants during the attack more than seven months ago.
The three-minute clip, taken from a militant’s body camera footage, was released by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum on Wednesday after the Israeli army lifted censorship on it.
“The footage reveals the violent, humiliating and traumatising treatment the girls endured on the day of their abduction, their eyes filled with raw terror,” the forum said.
Netanyahu vowed to continue fighting Hamas to “ensure what we have seen tonight never happens again.”
But his office also said that the war cabinet had asked the Israeli negotiating team “to continue negotiations for the return of the hostages.”
The previous round of truce talks, involving US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators, ended shortly after Israel launched its attack on Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah early this month.
Israel went ahead with the assault on the last city in Gaza to be entered by its ground troops in defiance of global opposition, including from top ally the United States.
Washington voiced concerns that about 1.4 million Palestinians who had been trapped in the city would be caught in the line of fire.
Israel has since ordered mass evacuations from the city, and the UN says more than 800,000 people have fled.
US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the Rafah operation “has been more targeted and limited” than feared and “has not involved major military operations into the heart of dense urban areas.”
But he stopped short of saying that Israel had addressed US concerns, adding that Washington was closely watching ongoing Israeli actions.
Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi has meanwhile given a bleak assessment of the war to a meeting of parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, according to a report by Israel’s Channel 13.
He reportedly said that Israel has “not achieved any of the strategic aims of the war — not conditions for a hostage deal; we haven’t toppled Hamas; and we haven’t allowed residents of the (Gaza) periphery to safely return home.”
The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,800 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Heavy fighting raged again in Gaza, where the military said troops in Rafah had “dismantled a number of tunnel shafts and launchers in the area, and eliminated several terrorists during close-quarters encounters.”
Urban combat has also flared again in northern areas, including Jabalia, which Israeli forces first entered several months ago.
Israeli forces there “targeted several Hamas terrorists during strikes on military compounds” and located AK-47 rifles, grenades and other weaponry, the military said.
Israel has also imposed a siege that has deprived Gaza’s 2.4 million people of most clean water, food, medicines and fuel.
The sporadic arrival of aid by truck slowed further after Israeli forces took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
Jordan and others have airdropped relief goods into Gaza and some aid has been shipped in via a US-built pier, but many trucks have been quickly swarmed by desperate crowds.
Israel has faced ever greater opposition to the bloody war from around the world, and pro-Palestinian protests have swept university campuses.
Israel reacted with fury after Ireland, Norway and Spain said they would recognize a Palestinian state on May 28, a move praised by Palestinians and across the Arab world.
Israel recalled its envoys to Dublin, Oslo and Madrid and summoned the three ambassadors for a rebuke.
Most Western governments say they are willing to recognize Palestinian statehood one day, but not before thorny issues such as final borders and the status of Jerusalem are settled.
The White House said Biden opposed unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, saying it should be realized “through direct negotiations.”
Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris called the October 7 attack “barbaric” but stressed that “a two-state solution is the only way out of the generational cycles of violence.”
Israel launches deadly Gaza strikes, says ready for new truce talks
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Israel launches deadly Gaza strikes, says ready for new truce talks
- Gaza Strip’s civil defense agency said two pre-dawn air strikes had killed 26 people, including 15 children, in Gaza City alone
- Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said one strike hit a family house, killing 16 people, in the Al-Daraj area, and another killed 10 people inside a mosque compound
Netanyahu told US Israel willing to strike Iranian military targets, Washington Post reports
WASHINGTON: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the United States that Israel is willing to strike Iranian military targets and not nuclear or oil ones, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing two officials familiar with the matter.
Sending a THAAD air defense system to Israel adds to strain on US Army forces
- “Everybody wants US Army air defense forces,” Gen. Randy George, Army chief of staff, said Monday as he and Wormuth took questions from journalists at the Association of the US Army’s annual conference. “This is our most deployed formation”
WASHINGTON: The deployment of a US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery to Israel and roughly 100 soldiers to operate it will add to already difficult strains on the Army’s air defense forces and potential delays in modernizing its missile defense systems, Army leaders said Monday.
The service’s top two leaders declined to provide details on the deployment ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin over the weekend. But they spoke broadly about their concerns as the demand for THAAD and Patriot missile batteries grows because of the war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas militants.
“The air defense, artillery community is the most stressed. They have the highest ‘optempo’ really of any part of the Army,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said, using a phrase meaning the pace of operations. “We’re just constantly trying to be as disciplined as we can, and give Secretary Austin the information he needs to accurately assess the strain on the force when he’s considering future operational deployments.”
Wormuth said the Army has to be careful about “what we take on. But of course, in a world this volatile, you know, sometimes we have to do what we have to do.”
The Pentagon announced the THAAD deployment Sunday, saying it was authorized at the direction of President Joe Biden. US officials said the system will be moved from a location in the continental United States to Israel and that it will take a number of days for it and the soldiers to arrive. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of troop movements.
The move adds to what have been growing tensions within the Defense Department about what weapons the US can afford to send to Ukraine, Israel or elsewhere and the resulting risks to America’s military readiness and its ability to protect the nation.
“Everybody wants US Army air defense forces,” Gen. Randy George, Army chief of staff, said Monday as he and Wormuth took questions from journalists at the Association of the US Army’s annual conference. “This is our most deployed formation.”
The decision to send the THAAD came as Israel is widely believed to be preparing a military response to Iran’s Oct. 1 attack, when it fired roughly 180 missiles into Israel. Israel already has a multilayered air defense system, but a Hezbollah drone attack on an army base Sunday killed four soldiers and severely wounded seven others, underscoring the potential need for greater protection.
Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon have been clashing since Oct. 8, 2023, when the Lebanese militant group began firing rockets over the border in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza. The Sunday drone attack was Hezbollah’s deadliest strike since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago.
Since the THAAD deployment only involves about 100 soldiers, it won’t add a tremendous amount of additional strain on air defense forces, Wormuth said at the conference.
But it adds to the pace of their deployments. Since the frenetic pace of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has subsided, the military has tried to ensure that service members have sufficient time at home to train and reset between deployments.
Shrinking that so-called dwell time can have an impact on the Army’s ability to keep good soldiers in the force.
“They’re very good, but obviously deploying for a year and coming back for a year and deploying for a year — it’s tough to do for anybody,” George said.
He said the Army is looking at a range of ways to limit the impact on recruiting and retention, including growing the force and modernizing the systems so that it takes fewer soldiers to operate them.
But the repeated deployments makes it difficult to get the systems into the depots where they can be upgraded.
As a result, Wormuth said, Army leaders are trying to make their arguments as clear as possible when combatant commanders go to Austin and ask for another Patriot system in the Middle East or another one for Ukraine.
“We need to be able to bring these units home to be able to go through that modernization process,” she said. “So we’re trying to lay that out for Secretary Austin so that he can weigh those risks — essentially current versus future risks — as he makes recommendations to the president about whether to send the Patriot here or there.”
The UN says over 400,000 children in Lebanon have been displaced in 3 weeks by war
- More than 2,300 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli strikes, nearly 75 percent of them over the last month, according to the Health Ministry
BEIRUT: More than 400,000 children in Lebanon have been displaced in the past three weeks, a top official with the UN children’s agency said Monday, warning of a “lost generation” in the small country grappling with multiple crises and now in the middle of war.
Israel has escalated its campaign against the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militant group, including launching a ground invasion, after a year of exchanges of fire during its war with Hamas in Gaza.
The fighting in Lebanon has driven 1.2 million people from their homes, most of them fleeing to Beirut and elsewhere in the north over the past three weeks since the escalation.
Ted Chaiban, UNICEF’s deputy executive director for humanitarian actions, has visited schools that have been turned into shelters to host displaced families.
“What struck me is that this war is three weeks old and so many children have been affected,” Chaiban told The Associated Press in Beirut.
“As we sit here today, 1.2 million children are deprived of education. Their public schools have either been rendered inaccessible, have been damaged by the war or are being used as shelters. The last thing this country needs, in addition to everything else it has gone through, is the risk of a lost generation.”
While some Lebanese private schools are still operating, the public school system has been badly affected by the war, along with the country’s most vulnerable people such as Palestinian and Syrian refugees.
″What I’m worried about is that we have hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian children that are at risk of losing their learning,” Chaiban said.
More than 2,300 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli strikes, nearly 75 percent of them over the last month, according to the Health Ministry. In the last three weeks, more than 100 children were killed and over 800 were wounded, Chaiban said.
He said displaced children are crammed into overcrowded shelters where three or four families can live in a classroom separated by a plastic sheet, and where 1,000 people can share 12 toilets. Not all of them work.
Many displaced families found have set up tents along roads or on public beaches.
Most displaced children have experienced so much violence, including the sounds of shelling or gunshots, that they cower at any loud noise, Chaiban said.
Then there is “evacuation orders upon evacuation orders. We’re at the beginning, and already there’s been a profound impact,” he said.
The escalation has also put over 100 primary health care facilities out of service, while 12 hospitals are either no longer working or partially functional.
Water infrastructure has also come under attack. In the last three weeks, 26 water stations providing water to almost 350,000 people have been damaged, Chaiban said. UNICEF is working with local authorities to repair them.
He called for civilian infrastructure to be protected. And he appealed for a ceasefire in Lebanon and in Gaza, saying there needs to be political will and a realization that the conflict cannot be resolved through military means.
“What we must do is make sure that this stops, that this madness stops, that there’s a ceasefire before we get to the kind of destruction and pain and suffering and death that we’ve seen in Gaza,” Chaiban said.
With so many needs, he said, the emergency response appeal for $108 million in Lebanon has only been 8 percent funded three weeks into the escalation.
Funeral service held in Iraq for Iranian general killed with Hezbollah chief
- Israel said it carried out the Beirut strike but did not comment on Haniyeh’s death in Tehran, where he had attended the inauguration of the Islamic republic’s new president
KARBALA, Iraq: The funeral procession for Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Abbas Nilforoushan, who was killed in an Israeli air strike alongside Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, began in Iraq on Monday, an AFP photographer saw.
Nilforoushan, a top commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force foreign operations arm, was killed on September 27 alongside Nasrallah in the strike on south Beirut.
The Guard Corps said on Friday that Nilforoushan’s body had been recovered from the site of the strike on the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
His body was taken from Beirut to the central Iraqi city of Karbala, considered holy by Shia Muslims.
There it was taken to the shrine of Imam Husayn where a representative of Iraq’s top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, led funeral prayers before a massive crowd.
Mourners chanted “death to Israel” and brandished the flags of Iran, Hezbollah and the Iraqi Shia Kataib Hezbollah armed group.
The funeral cortege then moved on to the nearby Al-Abbas shrine before leaving for another Shia holy city, Najaf.
Nilforoushan’s body is due to be sent to the Iranian holy city of Mashhad, according to Sepah news agency, which is affiliated to the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Another funeral ceremony is due to take place in Tehran’s Imam Hossein Square on Tuesday, while Nilforoushan then will be buried in his home town of Isfahan in central Iran, Sepah said.
On October 1, Iran fired some 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the killings of Nasrallah, Nilforoushan and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in late July.
Israel said it carried out the Beirut strike but did not comment on Haniyeh’s death in Tehran, where he had attended the inauguration of the Islamic republic’s new president.
Israel has vowed to retaliate for the Iranian missile attack, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying the response would be “deadly, precise, and surprising.”
Hezbollah’s drones are a fierce and evasive threat to Israel
- The video shows drones on launchers and at the end displays a caption that reads: “Our capabilities are intact”
TEL AVIV, Israel: One of the worst mass casualty strikes on Israel in a year of war came not from dozens of Iranian ballistic missiles nor the repeated barrages of rocket fire launched by Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, it was a single drone.
The unmanned aerial vehicle, laden with explosives, evaded Israel’s multilayered air-defense system and slammed into a mess hall at a military training camp deep inside Israel, killing four soldiers and wounding dozens.
It’s the latest achievement for Hezbollah’s drone fleet and has shined a light on Israel’s struggle over the past year of war to knock down unmanned aircraft incoming from as far away as Yemen, Iraq and Iran.
Over the years, Israel has built up its aerial defense array to provide broad protection against short-range rocket fire and medium- and long-range missiles, although experts caution it is not airtight. While the system has taken down drones repeatedly, many have penetrated Israel’s airspace and sidestepped its defenses, in some cases with deadly results.
The drone traversed Israeli airspace unimpeded
On Sunday evening, reports emerged of a mass casualty event about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from the Lebanese border. A drone had slammed into a mess hall filled with troops eating dinner, according to Israeli media, killing four soldiers and wounding 67 people.
Minutes earlier, air raid sirens had blared in northern Israel as the aircraft flew overhead. But no sirens sounded at the base, giving the soldiers no advance warning and indicating that the drone may have fallen off Israel’s radar.
An Israeli security official said Israel was still investigating how the drone made it through Israel’s air defenses. A pair of drones initially entered Israeli airspace, but while one was shot down, the other one continued to its target.
Hezbollah, which said the attack was in response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon, said the drone was “able to penetrate the Israeli air defense radars without being detected” and reach its target. It claimed it had outsmarted Israel’s air defenses by simultaneously launching dozens of missiles and “squadrons” of drones simultaneously.
It was the second deadly drone strike in just two weeks. Earlier this month, a drone launched from Iraq killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded roughly two dozen, according to Israeli media. On Friday, during a major Jewish holiday, a Hezbollah drone slammed into a nursing home in central Israel, causing damage.
“We already have six dead in the past 10 days from drones. That’s too much,” said Ran Kochav, a former head of the Israeli military’s aerial defense command.
Drones, he said, “have become a real threat.”
Drones are harder to detect and track than rockets or missiles
Drones, or UAVs, are unmanned aircraft that can be operated from afar. Drones can enter, surveil and attack enemy territory more discreetly than missiles and rockets. Israel has a formidable arsenal of drones, capable of carrying out spy missions and attacks. It has developed a drone capable of reaching archenemy Iran, some 1500 kilometers (1,000 miles) away.
But Israel’s enemies have caught Israel off-guard on a number of occasions over the past year, often with deadly consequences. In July, a drone launched from Yemen traveled some 270 kilometers (160 miles) from Israel’s southern tip, all the way to Tel Aviv, slamming into a downtown building and killing one person without it having been intercepted.
The Israeli security official said drones are harder to detect for a number of reasons: They fly slowly and often include plastic components, having a weaker thermal footprint with radar systems than powerful rockets and missiles. The trajectory is also harder to track. Drones can have roundabout flight paths, can come from any direction, fly lower to the ground and — because they are much smaller than rockets — can be mistaken for birds.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation into the mess hall strike was still underway.
Kochav said that Israel spent years focusing on strengthening its air defense systems to improve protection against rockets and missiles. But drones were not seen as a top priority. During the current fighting, that has meant Israel’s ability to detect and intercept drones is not as successful as its capabilities in the face of rockets and missiles, Kochav said.
Hezbollah’s drone program receives support from Iran
Hezbollah began using Iranian-made drones after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and sent the first reconnaissance Mirsad drone over Israel’s airspace in 2004. Hezbollah’s drone program still receives substantial assistance from Iran, and the UAVs are believed to be assembled by experts of the militant group in Lebanon.
Drones have become an “Iranian-inspired, strategic system” for Hezbollah, according to Tal Beeri, the director of research for The Alma Research and Education Center, a think tank that studies Hezbollah and Israel’s north. The militant group has launched roughly 1,500 surveillance and attack drones since it began striking Israel in October 2023, according to the group’s count.
The attack drones, which Beeri said often hit civilian targets, have a payload of 10 kilograms (22 lbs) of explosives and can fly hundreds of kilometers (miles). He said Hezbollah in May used for the first and only time a drone that was able to fire an anti-tank missile and that it may possess more.
Hezbollah has also used drones to erode Israel’s air-defense capabilities by slamming them into the very batteries and infrastructure meant to take them down. Earlier this year, Hezbollah said it used an Ababil explosive drone to down Israel’s Sky Dew observation balloon, a component of its aerial defense.
On Monday evening, Hezbollah released a video showing some of its militants in a warehouse full of drones. The video shows drones on launchers and at the end displays a caption that reads: “Our capabilities are intact.”
Israel says it is working to tackle the threat
On Monday, on a visit to the training camp hit by the drone, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pledged to learn from the strike and said Israel was “concentrating significant efforts in developing solutions” to tackle the drone threat, without elaborating.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also visited the base and soldiers injured in the attack, noting that Israel had paid “a painful price.”
Kochav said there were ways to combat the drones that could be considered. Detection capabilities could be expanded to include acoustic radars to pick up on the sound of the drone’s engine or electro-optics, which could allow Israeli surveillance to better identify them. He said rockets, fighter jets and helicopters could be deployed for interception, and that electronic warfare could be used to overtake the drones and divert them.
“We were busy in recent years ... and unmanned (aerial vehicles) was not a top priority,” he said. “The results unfortunately are not good.”
