JERUSALEM: A senior UN official said Saturday that teachers and other UN staff working in Gaza fear they are now targets after an Israeli air strike hit a school-turned-shelter in the territory this week.
Wednesday’s strike on the UN-run Al-Jawni School in central Gaza, which is housing displaced Palestinians, killed 18 people. including six employees of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
It was the deadliest single incident for the agency in more than 11 months of war and drew international condemnation.
“One colleague said that they’re not wearing the UNRWA vest anymore because they feel that that turns them into a target,” UNRWA senior deputy director Sam Rose told AFP on Saturday after visiting the shelter in Nuseirat.
“Another one said that that morning, their children had stopped them from coming into the shelter,” he said in an online interview from Gaza.
The colleagues were gathering for a post-work meal in a classroom when the strike flattened part of the building, leaving only a charred heap of rebar and concrete.
“A son of one of the staff had brought a meal into the building,” Rose said, adding the group then debated whether to eat it in the principal’s office before settling on what appeared to be a classroom decorated with pictures of scientists.
“They were eating when the bomb hit.”
The Israeli military said it had conducted a “precise strike” on Hamas militants within the school grounds and had taken steps to reduce the risk to civilians.
The Israeli military published what it said was a list of nine militants killed in the Nuseirat strike, including three it said were employees of UNRWA.
An Israeli government spokesman said the school had become “a legitimate target” because it was used by Hamas to launch attacks.
Rose said such statements further battered morale among UN staffers still at the school, where thousands have sought shelter from a war that has displaced nearly all of Gaza’s 2.4 million population at least once.
“They were particularly angry by the allegations that had been made as to the involvement of their colleagues in extremist and terrorist activities,” Rose said.
“They felt that this really was a stain on the memory of dear colleagues, dear friends,” he added, describing the mood as “bereft” and “desperate.”
UNRWA has said at least 220 members of the agency’s staff have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 97 of whom are still in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliation has killed at least 41,182 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
On Friday, UNRWA announced one of its employees was killed during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank, the first such death in the territory in more than a decade.
UNRWA has more than 30,000 employees in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere.
It has been in crisis since Israel accused a dozen of its employees of being involved in the October 7 attack.
The UN immediately fired the implicated staff members, and a probe found some “neutrality related issues” but stressed Israel had not provided evidence for its main allegations.
UN official says staff fear they are ‘a target’ as Israel hits Gaza shelters
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UN official says staff fear they are ‘a target’ as Israel hits Gaza shelters
- The Israeli military said it had conducted a “precise strike” on Hamas militants within the school grounds and had taken steps to reduce the risk to civilians
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.
