Israel says soldier killed in West Bank truck-ramming attack

Israeli security and emergency personnel work at the scene of a ramming attack near Givat Assaf settlement, near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Sept. 11, 2024. (Reuters)
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Updated 11 September 2024
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Israel says soldier killed in West Bank truck-ramming attack

  • The suspected assailant was “neutralized” by Israeli forces “and an armed civilian” at the scene of the attack
  • It later identified the dead soldier as 24-year-old Staff Sergeant Geri Gideon Hanghal

JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said a soldier was killed Wednesday when the driver of “a Palestinian truck” rammed into “forces conducting operational activity” in the occupied West Bank.
The suspected assailant was “neutralized” by Israeli forces “and an armed civilian” at the scene of the attack near the Jewish settlement of Givat Assaf, north of Ramallah, an army statement said.
It later identified the dead soldier as 24-year-old Staff Sergeant Geri Gideon Hanghal.
The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967 and is separated from the Gaza Strip by Israeli territory, has seen a surge of violence during nearly a year of the Israel-Hamas war, though Palestinian car-ramming attacks have been rare.
The latest incident comes days after a Jordanian truck driver shot dead three Israeli guards at a West Bank crossing with Jordan.
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 24 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials.
The West Bank is home to some three million Palestinians as well as 490,000 Israelis who live in settlements that are illegal under international law.


Netanyahu told US Israel willing to strike Iranian military targets, Washington Post reports

Updated 10 sec ago
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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

Updated 59 min 21 sec ago
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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.

A Palestinian man looks on next to the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on tents sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, October 14, 2024. (REUTERS)

“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.

Paramedics with the Lebanese Red Cross transport a body unearthed from the rubble at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the northern Lebanese village of Aito on October 14, 2024. (AFP)

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.

A Palestinian boy gestures as people check the destruction following an Israeli army strike around tents for displaced people inside the walls of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on October 14, 2024 amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)

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.

The grandmother of Palestinian boy Yaman Al-Zaanin, who was born and killed amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict and lost his life in an Israeli strike on a school-turned shelter, according to medics, reacts while holding his body at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, October 14, 2024. (REUTERS)

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

Updated 21 min 35 sec ago
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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.

 


Hezbollah’s drones are a fierce and evasive threat to Israel

Updated 15 October 2024
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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.”
 

 


Netanyahu vows no mercy after deadly Hezbollah drone strike

Updated 14 October 2024
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Netanyahu vows no mercy after deadly Hezbollah drone strike

  • Hezbollah said on Monday around midday that it had launched rockets at a naval base near Haifa before a further “big rocket salvo” in the early evening at the northern Israeli town of Safed
  • Since Israel on September 23 escalated its bombing against targets in Lebanon the war has killed at least 1,315 people, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely to be higher

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday vowed to hit Hezbollah without mercy, a day after the Iran-backed Lebanese group’s deadliest strike on Israel since the start of the war in late September.
Hezbollah’s drone attack on an Israeli base killed four soldiers on Sunday, while volunteer rescuers said another 60 people were injured.
“We will continue to mercilessly strike Hezbollah in all parts of Lebanon — including Beirut,” Netanyahu said on a visit to the base near Binyamina, south of Haifa.
Hezbollah said it launched the “squadron of attack drones” in response to Israeli attacks, including one last week that Lebanon’s health ministry said killed at least 22 people in central Beirut.
Since Israel on September 23 escalated its bombing against targets in Lebanon the war has killed at least 1,315 people, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely to be higher.
Prior to Netanyahu’s comments, new air strikes had already occurred against targets around Lebanon, including one in a northern Christian-majority village which killed at least 21 people on Monday, according to the health ministry.
Hezbollah said on Monday around midday that it had launched rockets at a naval base near Haifa before a further “big rocket salvo” in the early evening at the northern Israeli town of Safed.
Its fighters were also “engaged in violent clashes” in the Lebanese frontier village of Aita Al-Shaab, and were fighting elsewhere as well, it said.
Air raid sirens sounded across central Israel in the early evening, including in the commercial hub of Tel Aviv, the military said, after it earlier reported the interception of two drones approaching from Syria.

After almost a year of tit-for-tat exchanges between Hezbollah and Israeli forces over the Lebanon border, Israel intensified its strikes against targets in Lebanon late last month before sending ground troops across the frontier.
Israel wants to push back Hezbollah in order to secure its northern boundary and allow tens of thousands of people displaced by rocket fire since last year to return home safely.
Hezbollah says its strikes are in support of Palestinian militants Hamas who attacked Israel on October 7 last year, triggering the ongoing war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.
The International Organization for Migration said last week it had verified 690,000 people displaced by the war in Lebanon.
Israel’s deadly air strike on the village of Aito in northern Lebanon on Monday marked a departure from the usual pattern, being located in a mostly Christian area and far from areas usually bombed.
Israel has focused its firepower mostly on Hezbollah strongholds in Shiite Muslim-majority areas, including in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
An AFP photographer in Aito said the strike levelled a residential building. Body parts were scattered in the rubble.
In the southern border town of Marjayoun, civil defense chief Anis Abla told AFP his rescue teams were exhausted.
“Our rescue missions are becoming more and more difficult, because the strikes are never-ending and target us,” he said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross’s regional director, Nicolas Von Arx, appealed for the protection of ambulances and other health facilities and personnel.
“Attacks on health facilities are deeply worrying,” he said.
Israel faced new criticism over injuries and damage sustained by the UN peacekeeping force which has been deployed in Lebanon since 1978 after a previous Israeli invasion.
Netanyahu on Monday said Israel’s military “is doing its utmost to prevent such incidents” and repeated his request that the peacekeepers “get out of harm’s way.”
UNIFIL has refused.

Prime Minister Simon Harris of Ireland, which has troops in the UNIFIL mission, on Monday told Israeli President Isaac Herzog in a phone call that UNIFIL has “a clear mandate from the Security Council, and that it must be allowed to carry out its functions unimpeded,” Harris’s office said.
The Hamas attack on Israel last year which triggered war in Gaza resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
The number includes hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, 42,289 people, the majority civilians. The UN has described the figures as reliable.
Since the Gaza war began hundreds of Palestinians have also been killed in the occupied West Bank. On Monday Palestinian officials said Israeli forces killed two more during a raid. Israel said it was “looking into the reports.”
In Gaza, despite escalating Israeli military operations in central and northern areas, the second round of a polio vaccination campaign for hundreds of thousands of children began on Monday.
With the war there, and in Lebanon, showing no sign of abating, fears of even wider regional conflict have seen Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas, engage in diplomatic efforts with allies and other powers.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met a senior official from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement in Oman, his latest stop on a regional diplomatic tour.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned of “a regional war that will be costly for everyone,” during a meeting with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Monday.
Israel is still weighing its response to an October 1 missile attack by Iran, the latest of two it has carried out against Israel this year.