JERUSALEM: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said Friday one of its employees was killed during an Israeli operation in the occupied West Bank, where raids have escalated since last month.
The United Nations agency, UNRWA, said the employee was its first to be killed in the Palestinian territory in more than a decade.
But he is among dozens of Palestinians killed during the large-scale Israeli operation which began days ago and is ongoing, with several more Palestinians dead since Wednesday.
UNRWA identified the employee as Sufyan Jaber Abed Jawwad, who worked as a sanitation laborer. It said he was “shot and killed on the roof of his home by a sniper” in Faraa refugee camp.
His death is in addition to those of six other UNRWA staffers the UN said were killed in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday during a strike on a shool-turned-shelter. It was the highest single incident toll for the agency, UNRWA said.
Mourners on Friday carried Jawwad’s body through the streets of Faraa, with his blue UN vest resting atop the Palestinian flag that covered him.
In nearby Tubas, funerals also took place for other Palestinians, who were killed by an air strike.
A military statement on Friday said Israeli forces had “conducted a 48-hour counter-terrorism operation” in the areas of Tubas, Tamun and Faraa — northeast of Nablus — killing “five armed terrorists” in an air strike.
It added that a sixth militant was also killed.
Violence in the West Bank had already soared alongside the nearly 12-month-old war in Gaza but in late August Israel began its large-scale raids.
Major Israeli operations in the West Bank are sometimes occurring “at a scale not witnessed in the last two decades,” the United Nations human rights chief said this week.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the military withdrew from Tubas on Thursday evening, allowing the funerals there to go ahead, after the air strike which the Palestinian Red Crescent said killed them on Wednesday.
“I woke up in the morning to the sound of an explosion,” Ahmed Sawafta, father of one of the dead men, told AFP.
The fifth person killed was buried on Friday in Tamun, also in the northern West Bank.
Osaid Kharaz, who identified himself as a Hamas activist, told AFP at the funeral in Tubas that Israel “is attempting to impose a new reality and undermine the popular support for the resistance (to Israeli occupation) in the West Bank.”
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced on September 4 that the military would use its “full strength” to strike Palestinian militants in the West Bank.
He said he had ordered the military to carry out air strikes “wherever necessary” in order to “avoid endangering soldiers.”
Days later, the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said Israel aimed “to turn the West Bank into a new Gaza.”
Israeli forces this week also carried out operations around the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem.
A military statement on Friday reported four deaths “in the areas of Tulkarem and Nur Shams.”
It said “three of the terrorists were eliminated in an aerial strike on Wednesday, and the fourth terrorist was eliminated during close-quarters combat with the security forces.”
The armed wing of Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said that the strike killed three of its fighters.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and has ramped up deadly raids in the territory since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least 679 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military or settlers since October 7.
At least 24 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations in the territory during the same period, according to Israeli officials.
Rare death of UN worker as Israel pursues West Bank operation
https://arab.news/4y2dr
Rare death of UN worker as Israel pursues West Bank operation
- The United Nations agency, UNRWA, said the employee was its first to be killed in the Palestinian territory in more than a decade
- UNRWA identified the employee as Sufyan Jaber Abed Jawwad, who worked as a sanitation laborer
Israeli strike hits car factory in Syria: monitor
Israeli aircraft launched “air strikes with three missiles targeting... three trucks loaded with food and medical supplies inside an Iranian car factory... in southern Homs,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The attack destroyed the trucks and wounded three aid workers, said the British-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
“The trucks crossed over from Iraq to provide humanitarian aid to Lebanese people” affected by intensifying Israeli strikes, it added.
On Friday, Lebanon said an Israeli air strike on the Syrian border cut off the main international road linking the two countries.
Israel has repeatedly targeted the border area in recent days because it says Hezbollah is bringing in weapons across the border from ally Syria.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the start of country’s civil war in 2011, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters, including those of Hezbollah.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes but have said repeatedly they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.
Iran’s Khamenei decorates commander for Israel attack
- The decoration was bestowed because of “the brilliant ‘Honest Promise’ operation”
TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader has decorated the Revolutionary Guards aerospace commander for the Islamic republic’s missile attacks on arch-foe Israel, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s website said on Sunday.
“Ayatollah Khamenei presented the Order of Fath (“Conquest” in Farsi) to General Amirali Hajjizadeh, commander of the Guards Aerospace Force,” it said.
The decoration was bestowed because of “the brilliant ‘Honest Promise’ operation,” the website said.
Hajjizadeh, 62, has headed the Guards aerospace unit since its creation in 2009.
On Tuesday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired some 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli air strike that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and IRGC top general Abbas Nilforoushan in Beirut.
It was Iran’s second direct attack on Israel in six months, after a missile and drone assault in April in retaliation for a deadly strike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, which Tehran blamed on Israel.
Israel has vowed to respond after Tuesday’s Iranian missile attack.
One killed in Israel’s Beersheba, media reports after suspected shooting
- Seriously injured woman was being treated at the scene while eight other people were injured in the attack
JERUSALEM: A woman was killed in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba on Sunday, Israeli media outlets reported after police said that several people had been injured in a suspected shooting there.
The ambulance service earlier said a seriously injured woman was being treated at the scene while eight other people injured in the attack, including one in a moderate to serious condition, were receiving treatment in a nearby hospital.
The attacker had been killed, the ambulance service said.
Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon
Beirut: In a south Lebanon hospital, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert peered out of the window after bombardment near the Israeli border, four decades after he first worked in the country.
“It’s a horrible experience,” he said in a video call from the southern town of Nabatiyeh.
“It’s been 42 years and nothing has changed,” said Gilbert, who first saw war treating patients during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut.
Below the window paramedics were on standby next to parked ambulances at the hospital behind the front line.
The anaesthetist and emergency medicine specialist said he had seen just a few cases since arriving on Tuesday.
“Most of the cases have been south of us and they have not been able to evacuate them because the attacks have been so vicious,” Gilbert said.
Israel has increased its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since September 23, pounding the south of the country and later staging what it called “limited operations” across the border.
On Thursday the Israeli army warned residents to leave Nabatiyeh.
The escalation has killed more than 1,100 people and wounded at least another 3,600, and pushed upwards of a million people to flee their homes, according to government figures.
Official media have reported some Israeli strikes killing entire families, and AFP has spoken to two people who lost 17 relatives and 10 family members respectively.
Israel’s military “can do whatever they want to health care, to ambulances, to churches, to mosques, to universities, as they’ve been doing in Gaza,” said Gilbert, who has repeatedly volunteered in the Palestinian territory during past conflicts.
“And now we see the same repeat itself in Lebanon in 2024.”
A hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil closer to the border on Saturday said it was hit by heavy overnight Israeli strikes, wounding nine medical and nursing staff, most seriously.
At least four hospitals said they had suspended work amid ongoing Israeli bombardment on Friday, and Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics said 11 personnel were killed in Israeli raids in south Lebanon.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s health minister said more than 40 paramedics and firefighters had been killed by Israeli fire in three days.
UN official Imran Riza on X on Saturday spoke of “an alarming increase in attacks against health care in Lebanon.”
Britain said reports that Israeli strikes had hit “health facilities and support personnel” in Lebanon were “deeply disturbing.”
Israel has claimed Hezbollah uses ambulances for “terrorist purposes.”
In the capital Beirut, British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah said he also saw parallels with the conflict in Gaza.
Abu-Sittah has tirelessly campaigned for “justice” since spending weeks in the besieged Palestinian territory treating the wounded at the start of the war.
Now in Lebanon, the plastic and reconstructive surgeon described seeing “kids, families whose houses have been targeted” with blast injuries in the past few weeks.
There were “kids with blast injuries to the face, to the torso, amputated limbs,” he said outside the American University of Beirut’s Medical Center.
Abu-Sittah estimated that more than a quarter of the wounded he had seen in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were minors.
“I have a girl upstairs who is 13, who had a blast injury to the face, needed reconstruction of her jaw, will need several surgeries,” he said.
“Children who are injured in war need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re adult age.”
According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 690 children in Lebanon have been wounded in recent weeks.
It said doctors had reported most suffered from “concussions and traumatic brain injuries from the impact of blasts, shrapnel wounds and limb injuries.”
“It’s just so reminiscent of what was happening in Gaza,” said Abu-Sittah.
“The heartbreaking thing is that this could all have been stopped if they stopped the war in Gaza,” he added.
Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far
- Heavy strikes shake southern Beirut
- Israel says it made ‘targeted strikes’ on Hezbollah storage facilities, infrastructure
BEIRUT: Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group Hezbollah last month.
During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometers away.
It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.
On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.
“Last night was the most violence of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes — we couldn’t count them all — and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj Al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.
Israel said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in the area of Beirut.”
Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.
This weekend’s intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.
The target of Israel’s airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, Iran’s chief ally in the region. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.
For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh — considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees — killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27.
A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.
Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.
Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.
His loss would be another blow to the group and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership.
Gaza war
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 attacks and aimed at eliminating Hamas, another Iran-backed group, has killed nearly 42,000 people, Palestinian authorities say. The coastal enclave lies in ruins.
At least 26 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel a day after the Oct. 7 attacks and after Israel had begun bombing Gaza, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinian group.
Cross-border fire continued between Israel and Hezbollah for months, but were mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area before the recent upsurge.
Israel says it stepped up its assault on Hezbollah last month to enable the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to homes in northern Israel, bombarded by the group since last Oct. 8.
Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.
In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.
Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.
Israel has been weighing options for its response.
