GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip: Israeli airstrikes targeting Hamas in Gaza hit a mosque and a center for the disabled where two women were killed Saturday, raising the Palestinian death toll from the offensive to more than 120, Palestinian officials said.
The Israeli military said the mosque concealed rockets like those used in the barrage of nearly 700 fired by Gaza militants at Israel over the five-day offensive, while saying it was investigating claims about the other sites hit. However, the strikes in the densely populated Gaza Strip show the challenge facing Israel as it considers a ground operation in the region and potential further dangers posed to civilians.
While there have been no fatalities in Israel from the continued rocket fire, Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Kidra said overnight Israeli strikes raised the death toll there to over 120, with more than 920 wounded.
Hamas militants have been hit hard. Though the exact breakdown of casualties remains unclear, dozens of the dead also have been civilians.
The offensive showed no signs of slowing down Saturday as Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said his country should ready itself for several more days of fighting.
“We have accumulated achievements as far as the price Hamas is paying and we are continuing to destroy significant targets of it and other terror organizations,” Yaalon said after a meeting with top security officials. “We will continue to punish it until quiet and security returns to southern Israel and the rest of the country.”
Hamas said Israel hit a pair of mosques in its offensive. The competing claims could not be immediately reconciled, though Hamas said it hoped the mosque attack would galvanize support in the Muslim world.
“The bombing of two mosques in Gaza overnight shows how barbaric this enemy is and how much is it hostile to Islam,” said Husam Badran, a Hamas spokesman in Doha, Qatar. “This terrorism gives us the right to broaden our response to deter this occupier.”
The Israeli military released an aerial photo of the mosque it said it hit, saying Hamas hid rockets in it right next to another religious site and civilian homes. It said Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Gaza militant groups use this tactic of abusing religious sites to conceal weapons and establish underground tunnel networks, deliberately endangering its own civilians.
“Hamas terrorists systematically exploit and choose to put Palestinians in Gaza in harm’s way and continue to locate their positions among civilian areas and mosques, proving once more their disregard for human life and holy sites,” said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman.
Israel’s military says it has struck more than 1,100 targets, including rocket launchers, command centers and weapon manufacturing and storage facilities. However, Gaza officials said the strikes also hit affiliated charities and banks, as well as the home for the disabled and the mosques.
Gaza militants’ barrage of rockets appeared to tail off somewhat Saturday morning before a new round resumed that afternoon. The “Iron Dome,” a US-funded, Israel-developed rocket defense system, has intercepted more than 130 incoming rockets, preventing any Israeli fatalities so far. A handful of Israelis have been wounded by rockets that slipped through.
The most serious strike was from a rocket that struck a gas station Friday in the southern city of Ashdod. A house in Beersheba suffered a direct hit though the family living there was not home.
As a precaution, the US Embassy in Tel Aviv relocated its personnel assigned to Beersheba. However, militant rockets have reached further into Israel than ever before, with air raid sirens sounding even in the northern city of Haifa, 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.
The frequent rocket fire has disrupted daily life in Israel, particularly in southern communities that have absorbed the brunt of the rocket fire. Israelis mostly have stayed close to home. Television channels air non-stop coverage of the violence and radio broadcasts are interrupted live with every air raid siren warning of incoming rockets.
The offensive is the heaviest fighting since a similar eight-day campaign in November 2012 to stop Gaza rocket fire. The outbreak of violence follows the kidnappings and killings of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, and the kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian teenager in an apparent revenge attack.
Israel has pummeled Gaza at twice the rate of the 2012 operation and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to press on with the campaign until there is a complete halt to rocket attacks from the seaside Palestinian territory. Israel has massed thousands of troops along the border in preparation for a possible ground invasion, with soldiers atop vehicles mobilized and ready to move into Gaza if the order arrives.
After days of little criticism, Israel has begun coming under more international pressure as Palestinian casualties have grown. The United States and European leaders have stressed Israel’s right to defend itself. But the United Nations has expressed its concern over civilian deaths in Gaza and anti-Israel protests have taken place in Europe. In the West Bank, Hamas supporters clashed with Israeli troops over the Gaza offensive.
A senior Arab league official said Arab foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting in Cairo on Monday to discuss the continued Israeli offensive and measures to urge the international community to pressure Israel.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas requested the meeting, which was approved by several Arab foreign ministers in coordination with the Arab League. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief journalists.
Israel strikes Gaza mosque as death toll tops 120
Israel strikes Gaza mosque as death toll tops 120
Iran president accuses Israel of seeking conflict, says opposes war
- “It is Israel that seeks to create this wider conflict,” Pezeshkian said
- Foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani called the Israeli strikes “insane”
TEHRAN: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Monday accused Israel of seeking a wider conflict, insisting that Tehran has been deliberately holding back in the hope of securing regional peace.
“We know more than anyone else that if a larger war were to erupt in the Middle East, it will not benefit anyone throughout the world. It is Israel that seeks to create this wider conflict,” Pezeshkian told a roundtable with journalists as he attended the UN General Assembly in New York.
Pezeshkian, inaugurated in July as a reformist within the cleric-run state, was making his UN debut as Israel strikes Lebanon following a wave of attacks on handheld communications devices targeting Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah.
Tensions soared immediately after his inauguration as the visiting political chief of Hamas, the Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on October 7 last year, was assassinated in an operation in Tehran widely attributed to Israel.
Pezeshkian alluded to appeals from the West for Iran not to retaliate so as not to jeopardize US efforts for a ceasefire in the Gaza war.
“We tried to not respond. They kept telling us we are within reach of peace, perhaps in a week or so,” he said.
“But we never reached that elusive peace. Every day Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people — old, young, men, women, children, hospitals, other facilities,” he said.
He did not reply directly when asked if Iran would now respond more directly to Israel.
“We always keep hearing, well, Hezbollah fired a rocket. If Hezbollah didn’t even do that minimum, who would defend them?” he said.
“Curiously enough, we keep being labeled as the perpetrator of insecurity. But look at the situation for where it is.”
Iran’s foreign ministry warned Israel of “dangerous consequences” following Monday’s deadly strikes.
Foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani called the Israeli strikes “insane,” and warned of “the dangerous consequences of the Zionists’ new adventure.”
Kanani said Israel’s “crimes” in Palestinian territories and their “expansion to Lebanon are a clear example of a serious threat to regional and international peace.”
He strongly criticized US support for Israel called upon the United Nations Security Council “to take immediate action to stop these crimes.”
British troops in Lebanon training its army as Israeli strikes kill over 100
- Lebanese envoy to UK: Armed forces will not ‘stand idly’ by if Israel invades
LONDON: Dozens of British troops are in Lebanon to train and advise the country’s armed forces as part of a sensitive mission, The Times reported on Monday.
The report comes as the Israeli military said it struck 300 Hezbollah targets on Monday in Lebanon in one of the most intense barrages of airstrikes in nearly a year of fighting against the group.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said 182 people were killed and more than 700 wounded in what would be the deadliest day in Lebanon since the Gaza war started last October.
There have been no changes to the scale of the program in recent days despite the risk of all-out war, The Times reported, citing UK defense sources.
The Lebanese ambassador to the UK, Rami Mortada, said: “The British Army is a very close partner to the Lebanese armed forces. They have been very active on training, providing equipment and technical advice.
“Specifically on the situation in south Lebanon, the UK was also very proactive in trying to play its role in what we refer to as the de-escalation scheme.”
The scheme is led by the US and considers how to prevent an escalation of skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah near the Israel-Lebanon border, Mortada said.
Lebanon’s armed forces have been trained by the UK for years, although little is known about the program.
The British government has long hoped that by building up the capacity of the armed forces, they would be in a stronger position to maintain security than Hezbollah.
Mortada has said the armed forces would not “stand idly” by if Israel carries out a ground war on Lebanese territory or mounts an extensive aerial attack.
A conflict between Israel and Lebanon would put British diplomats in an extremely difficult position because the UK has tried to maintain a positive relationship with both countries.
UK officials are understood to be considering whether they would assist Israel and help protect its skies should it come under attack as a result of an invasion of Lebanon.
Protecting Israel against a defensive attack carried out by the Lebanese armed forces would be more complicated than responding to an attack by Iran.
Highlighting the deep Lebanese-British relationship, Mortada said the UK has also offered to help his country replicate a “watchtower” scheme along its southern border with Israel — a program that is currently in place along Lebanon’s eastern border to keep watch on Daesh militants.
Under the old watchtower scheme, the UK helped to ship 9 meter towers to Lebanon. Lebanese soldiers, mentored by British veterans, were using the positions to catch or kill hundreds of terrorists trying to cross the border from Syria every month.
Mortada said another option under review with the British is whether they could help train and empower new Lebanese armed forces border regiments that could be sent to the south of the country.
He added that they are currently “over-stretched” and want a more visible and active presence in the south, where clashes with Israel have intensified since the war in Gaza started.
“All the ingredients are coming together for having such a de-escalation scheme, except the Israelis seem to be heading towards the exact opposite direction,” Mortada said.
Syria’s Assad appoints a new cabinet
- The new cabinet sees new appointments in the ministries of foreign affairs, finance and electricity among others
- Another decree appointed ex-foreign minister Faisal Mekdad as Syria’s Vice President
DAMASCUS: Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a decree forming a new government under Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi Al-Jalali, the Syrian state news agency (SANA) reported on Monday.
The new cabinet sees new appointments in the ministries of foreign affairs, finance and electricity among others, and replaces an outgoing administration which has been serving in a caretaker role since parliamentary elections in mid-July.
Another decree appointed ex-foreign minister Faisal Mekdad as Syria’s Vice President.
Al-Jalali served as communications minister from 2014-2016. He has been subject to EU sanctions since 2014 for what the bloc called his “responsibility for the regime’s violent repression of the civilian population.”
According to UN figures, at least 350,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011 from an uprising against Assad’s rule.
UN ‘extremely concerned’ as Mideast conflict moves to new level
GENEVA: The United Nations voiced alarm Monday at the escalating violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, warning that actions and rhetoric was catapulting the Mideast conflict “to another level.”
“We are extremely concerned, deeply worried about the escalation in Lebanon,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN rights office, told AFP.
“The attacks that we saw on the communication devices, the pagers, followed by rocket attacks and rocket fire being exchanged on both sides ... marks a real escalation,” she said.
“What we’ve been warning about all along, the regional spillover of the conflict, it appears that both the actions and the rhetoric of the parties to the conflict is taking the conflict to another level.”
After nearly a year of tit-for-tat cross-border fire between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, the strikes since the weekend are the most intense since the outbreak of war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last October 7.
Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli strikes on the south killed 100 people and wounded more than 400 others on Monday, while Lebanese official media said people were receiving Israeli phone warnings telling them to move away from Hezbollah targets.
Israel meanwhile said more than 300 Hezbollah sites had been targeted on Monday in dozens of strikes.
That came after at least 39 people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded last week when hand-held communications devices used by Hezbollah operatives detonated across Lebanon. Hezbollah has blamed Israel, which has not commented.
On Friday the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told the Security Council the attack on Hezbollah communications devices violated international law and could constitute a war crime.
Without attributing the attack on the communications devices, Shamdasani stressed that “it is a war crime to commit violence that is intended to spread terror among civilians.”
“The simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether they are civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge of where these people will be ... this is not acceptable under international law.”
Shamdasani highlighted the calls from across the international community “pleading for a deescalation.”
“But instead of a deescalation, what we have seen ... is further rhetoric with further plans of an escalation,” she said. “This needs to stop.”
Iran ready for nuclear talks at UN ‘if other parties willing’, foreign minister says
- Indirect talks between Washington and Tehran to revive the deal have stalled
TEHRAN: Iran is ready to start nuclear negotiations on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York if “other parties are willing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Monday in a video published on his Telegram channel.
The US, under then-President Donald Trump, withdrew in 2018 from a nuclear accord signed in 2015 by Iran and six world powers under which Tehran curbed its disputed nuclear program in return for a lifting of international sanctions.
Indirect talks between Washington and Tehran to revive the deal have stalled. Iran is still formally part of the deal but has scaled back commitments to honor it due to US sanctions reimposed on the Islamic Republic.
“I will stay in New York for a few more days than the president and will have more meetings with various foreign ministers. We will focus our efforts on starting a new round of talks regarding the nuclear pact,” Araqchi said.
He added that messages have been exchanged via Switzerland and a “general declaration of readiness” issued, but cautioned that “current international conditions make the resumption of talks more complicated and difficult than before.”
Araqchi said he would not meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “I do not believe it would be expedient to hold such a dialogue. There were such meetings before but there is currently no suitable ground for that. We are still a long way from holding direct talks.”
Since the renewal of US sanctions during the Trump administration, Tehran has refused to directly negotiate with Washington and worked mainly through European or Arab intermediaries.
Iranian leaders want to see an easing of US sanctions that have significantly harmed its economy. But Iran’s relations with the West have worsened since the Iranian-backed Palestinian Hamas militant group attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, and as Tehran has increased its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has said the United States is not ready to resume nuclear talks with Iran.
