Israel hits Gaza targets in response to missile fire

Smoke rises above buildings in Gaza City as Israel launched air strikes on the Palestinian enclave early on April 5, 2023. (AFP)
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Updated 05 April 2023
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Israel hits Gaza targets in response to missile fire

  • The escalation came after Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and assaulted worshipers inside
  • Videos on social media showed Israeli police assaulting Palestinians inside the mosque

GAZA CITY: Israeli warplanes bombed Hamas and Islamic Jihad military sites across the Gaza Strip early on Wednesday in response to missile attacks on Israeli towns.

The Israeli attacks targeted sites in the south, center and north of the Gaza Strip. No casualties were recorded but the strikes caused material damage in and around the targeted areas.

Earlier, Palestinian factions fired several rockets targeting the town of Sderot, adjacent to the northern Gaza Strip, most of which were intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome defense system.

Following the Israeli attacks, the factions also fired a second round of rockets.

The escalation came after Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and assaulted worshipers inside.

Videos on social media showed Israeli police assaulting Palestinians inside the mosque and beating them with batons. As the news reached Gaza, mosques in the strip began inviting Palestinians to march in solidarity and pray for fellow Muslims in Al-Aqsa.

The Israeli military said fighter jets attacked a weapons production site and another site for the production and storage of weapons for Hamas in the central Gaza Strip. It warned that in response to the rocket fire from Gaza, Hamas bears responsibility for return strikes and will pay the price for any violation.

Gaza Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem, said: “The bombing of the Gaza Strip this morning is a failed attempt to prevent Gaza from continuing its support by all means for our people in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

“Our people and their valiant resistance in the Gaza Strip and all of Palestine will remain like a sword and shield for Jerusalem, and the bombing will not intimidate us, but will increase our adherence to exercising our right to support the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Hamas official Saleh Arouri said in a statement: “The Israeli occupation forces’ attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque and peaceful Palestinian worshipers is a serious crime to which the Palestinian people and resistance will respond.

“We call on the Palestinian people across Palestine who have been subjected to the brutality of the Israeli occupation to respond to the despicable attack against them.”

Islamic Jihad said in a statement that the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was a “warning message.”

Tariq Selmi, spokesman for the group in Gaza, said: “The position on the occupation’s aggression against Al-Aqsa was expressed by the resistance with missiles, which were only a preliminary warning message to the occupation against its aggression at Al-Aqsa.

“That this message came at the same time as shooting operations in the West Bank indicates that the battle to defend Al-Aqsa will include all areas of the West Bank.”

During the evening, Palestinian youths along the borders set tires on fire, causing loud explosions in an attempt to confuse Israeli forces.

Local Palestinian websites, quoting private sources, said contact was being made by Egypt and the UN with Palestinian factions to restore calm in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Israeli websites said that talks took place between “Egypt, Jordan, the UN peace process envoy and the US administration to try to restore calm.”


Gaza rescuers say 3 aid workers killed in Israel strike

Updated 3 sec ago
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Gaza rescuers say 3 aid workers killed in Israel strike

The agency said the aid workers killed were Palestinian employees of World Central Kitchen The US aid group did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment

GAZA: Gaza’s civil defense agency said three aid workers were killed in an Israeli air strike in the Hamas-run territory on Saturday but the Israeli army said it killed a “terrorist.”
The agency said the aid workers killed were Palestinian employees of World Central Kitchen. The US aid group did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment.
The Israeli army said it had “struck a vehicle with a terrorist that took part in the murderous October 7 massacre,” referring to militant group Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel last year.
“The claim that the terrorist was simultaneously a WCK worker is being examined,” it added in a statement.
Civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the bodies of “at least five dead were transported (to hospital), including (those of) the three employees of World Central Kitchen.”
“All three men worked for WCK and they were hit while driving in a WCK jeep in Khan Yunis,” Bassal said, adding that the vehicle had been “marked with its logo clearly visible.”
The Israeli army insisted its strike in the main southern city hit “a civilian unmarked vehicle and its movement on the route was not coordinated for transporting of aid.”
In April, an Israeli air strike killed seven WCK staff — an Australian, three Britons, a North American, a Palestinian and a Pole.
Israel said it had been targeting a “Hamas gunman” in that strike but the military admitted a series of “grave mistakes” and violations of its own rules of engagement.
The October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,207 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed 44,382 people in Gaza, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

Lebanon says Israeli strike on south wounds 3 people including a child

Updated 35 min 25 sec ago
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Lebanon says Israeli strike on south wounds 3 people including a child

  • An Israeli enemy strike on a car in Majdal Zoun wounded three people

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on a vehicle in south Lebanon on Saturday wounded three people, including a child, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah after two months of all-out war.
“An Israeli enemy strike on a car in Majdal Zoun wounded three people including a seven-year-old child,” the health ministry said in a statement.


West faces ‘reckoning’ over Middle East radicalization: UK spy chief

Updated 30 November 2024
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West faces ‘reckoning’ over Middle East radicalization: UK spy chief

  • MI6 head Richard Moore cites ‘terrible loss of innocent life’
  • ‘In 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state’

LONDON: The West has “yet to have a full reckoning with the radicalizing impact of the fighting, the terrible loss of innocent life in the Middle East and the horrors of Oct. 7,” the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6 has warned.

Richard Moore made the comments in a speech delivered to the British Embassy in Paris, and was joined by his French counterpart Nicolas Lerner.

Moore said: “In 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state. And the impact on Europe, our shared European home, could hardly be more serious.”

Daesh is expanding its reach and staging deadly attacks in Iran and Russia despite suffering significant territorial setbacks, he added, warning that “the menace of terrorism has not gone away.”

In October last year, Ken McCallum, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, said his agency was monitoring for increased terror risks in the UK due to the Gaza war. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in over a year of fighting.

In Lebanon, a 60-day truce agreed this week between Hezbollah and Israel brought an end to a conflict that has killed thousands of Lebanese civilians.


Israel military strikes kill 32 Palestinians in Gaza, medics say

Updated 30 November 2024
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Israel military strikes kill 32 Palestinians in Gaza, medics say

  • Among the 32 killed, at least seven died in an Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza City

The Israeli military said it killed a Palestinian it accused of involvement in Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel in a vehicle strike in Gaza, and is investigating claims that the individual was an employee of aid group World Central Kitchen.
At least 32 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes across Gaza overnight and into Saturday, with most casualties reported in northern areas, medics told Reuters.
Later on Saturday medics said seven people were killed when an Israeli air strike targeted a vehicle near a gathering of Palestinians receiving aid in the southern area of Khan Younis south of the enclave.
According to residents and a Hamas source, the vehicle targeted near a crowd receiving flour belonged to security personnel responsible for overseeing the delivery of aid shipments into Gaza.
Among the 32 killed, at least seven died in an Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza City, according to a statement from the Gaza Civil Defense and the official Palestinian news agency WAFA early on Saturday.
The Gaza Civil Defense also reported that one of its officers was killed in attacks in northern Gaza’s Jabalia, bringing the total number of civil defense workers killed since October 7, 2023, to 88.
Earlier on Saturday, WAFA reported that three employees of the World Central Kitchen, a US-based, non-governmental humanitarian agency, were killed when a civilian vehicle was targeted in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
The World Central Kitchen has not yet commented on the incident.


Syria’s military ‘temporarily’ withdraws from Aleppo to prepare for counteroffensive

Updated 30 November 2024
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Syria’s military ‘temporarily’ withdraws from Aleppo to prepare for counteroffensive

  • Syrian military confirms militants enter Aleppo, says dozens of soldiers killed

AMMAN: The Syrian military said on Saturday that dozens of its troops had been killed during a militant attack in northwestern Syria and that militants had managed to enter large parts of Aleppo city, forcing the army to redeploy.

The Syrian military statement was the first public acknowledgement by the army that insurgents led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham had entered the government-held city of Aleppo in a surprise attack that began earlier this week.

“The large numbers of terrorists and the multiplicity of battlefronts prompted our armed forces to carry out a redeployment operation aimed at strengthening the defense lines in order to absorb the attack, preserve the lives of civilians and soldiers, and prepare for a counterattack,” the army said.

The insurgent attack marks the most significant challenge in years to President Bashar Assad, jolting the frontlines of the Syrian civil war that have largely been frozen since 2020.

The Syrian military statement said that the insurgents had not been able to establish fixed positions in Aleppo city due to the army’s continued bombardment of their positions.

Two Syrian military sources said earlier that Russian and Syrian warplanes targeted insurgents in an Aleppo suburb on Saturday. Russia deployed its air force to Syria in 2015 to aid Assad in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011.

The insurgent force began its surprise offensive earlier this week, sweeping through government-held towns and reaching Aleppo nearly a decade after government forces backed by Russia and Iran drove militants from the city.

Speaking on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow regarded the militant attack as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty. “We are in favor of the Syrian authorities bringing order to the area and restoring constitutional order as soon as possible,” he said.