DOHA/GAZA: Israeli tanks and aircraft hit targets in southern and central Gaza on Sunday and there were fierce gunbattles in some areas as the war reached 100 days since the Oct. 7 attack led by gunmen from the Hamas movement.
Communications and Internet services were down for the third day running, complicating the work of emergency and ambulance crews trying to help people in areas hit by fighting.
Fighting was concentrated in the southern city of Khan Younis, where Hamas said its fighters hit an Israeli tank, as well as in Al-Bureij and Al Maghazi in central Gaza, where the military said several militants were killed.
The military also said its forces destroyed several rocket pits used by Hamas to fire missiles at Israel.
Over the past 24 hours, the Gaza health ministry said 125 people had been killed and 265 wounded, bringing the total number confirmed to have been killed since the start of the war to almost 24,000, with more than 60,000 wounded.
Speaking through video link to a conference in Istanbul, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh praised the Oct. 7 attack by the group’s fighters who rampaged through Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and seizing around 240 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
“We are not seekers of wars. We are seekers of freedom,” he said, saying the attack was, in part, a response to the years-long Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which Hamas has controlled since 2007.
The Israeli military says it has shifted to a new phase of the war, focused on the southern end of the territory, where almost 2 million people are now sheltering in tents and other temporary accommodation, after the initial phase centered on clearing the northern end including Gaza City.
In the northern Gaza Strip, health officials said an Israeli air strike killed a local journalist, raising the number of journalists killed in the Israeli offensive to more than 100, according to the Gaza government media office.
In a statement on Dec. 16, in response to the death of a journalist in Gaza, the Israeli army said “the IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brushed off calls for a cease-fire, saying Israel will keep going until it achieves complete victory over Hamas. The military says, though, the next phase of the war will see more targeted operations against the movement’s leaders and military positions.
On Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where there has been a constant, low-level exchange of fire between troops and fighters from the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, the military said it killed four armed militants trying to cross the border.
It said several anti-tank missiles were fired into northern Israel, one of which hit a house in the community of Kfar Yuval, killing one person and causing a number of other casualties.
The war in Gaza has also stoked violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Palestinian health officials said Israeli forces killed three Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, in two separate incidents in Hebron and Jericho in the West Bank.
The Israeli military said two Palestinians in a car rammed through one of its checkpoints near Hebron and opened fire on pursuing troops. They were killed by return fire, the military statement said. There was no immediate comment on the 14-year-old boy’s death in Jericho.
In Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Nana, a 17-year-old high school student displaced from northern Gaza, said 100 days of war “turned our life upside down.”
“We demand the occupation not only to end the war but also compensation for the psychological damage of displacement and the hardships endured,” she said.
Fierce fighting in Gaza as war hits 100 days
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Fierce fighting in Gaza as war hits 100 days
- Communications and Internet services were down for the third day running, complicating the work of emergency and ambulance crews
Israeli airstrike near Syrian capital kills 11, war monitor says
- Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike targeted a weapons depot that belonged to Assad’s forces near the industrial town of Adra
BEIRUT: An Israeli airstrike in the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday killed 11 people, according to a war monitor, as Israel continues to target Syrian weapons and military infrastructure even after the ouster of former President Bashar Assad.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike targeted a weapons depot that belonged to Assad’s forces near the industrial town of Adra, northeast of the capital. The observatory said at least 11 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
Beirut-based pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV also reported the airstrike but put the death toll at six. The Israeli military did not comment on the airstrike Sunday.
Israel, which has launched hundreds of airstrikes over Syria since the country’s uprising turned-civil war broke out in 2011, rarely acknowledges them. It says its targets are Iran-backed groups that backed Assad. Israel also wants to remove a threat posed by weapons in Syria, which is now governed by militants.
Syrian insurgents who ousted Assad in a lightning ofensive in early December have demanded that Israel cease its airstrikes.
Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
- Israeli forces instruct Beit Hanoun residents to leave, causing new displacements
- Palestinian officials say evacuations worsen Gaza’s humanitarian conditions
CAIRO: Israeli forces carrying out a weeks-long offensive in northern Gaza ordered any residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to quit the town on Sunday, pointing to Palestinian militant rocket fire from the area, residents said.
The instruction to residents to leave caused a new wave of displacement, although it was not immediately clear how many people were affected, the residents said.
Israel says its almost three-month-old campaign in northern Gaza is aimed at Hamas militants and preventing them from regrouping. Its instructions to civilians to evacuate are meant to keep them out of harm’s way, the military says.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say no place is safe in Gaza and that evacuations worsen humanitarian conditions of the population.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of people and razed, fueling speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
The Israeli military announced its new push into the Beit Hanoun area on Saturday.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said it had lost communication with people still trapped in the town, and it was unable to send teams into the area because of the raid.
On Friday, Israeli forces stormed the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. The military said it was being used by militants, which Hamas denies.
The raid on the hospital, one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of Gaza, put the last major health facility in the area out of service, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a post on X.
Some patients were evacuated from Kamal Adwan to the Indonesian Hospital, which is not in service, and medics were prevented from joining them there, the Health Ministry said. Other patients and staff were taken to other medical facilities.
On Sunday, health officials said an Israeli tank shell hit the upper floor of the Al-Ahly Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City near the X-ray division.
Meanwhile, Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 16 people on Sunday. One of those strikes killed seven people and wounded others at Al-WAFA Hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian civil emergency service said in a statement.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on hospital kills 7
- Strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza
- Military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant
GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said an air strike hit a hospital Sunday, killing at least seven people, while Israel said it had targeted militants at the no longer functioning facility.
“Seven martyrs and several injured people, including critical cases, have been recovered following the Israeli strike on the upper floor of Al-Wafaa Hospital in central Gaza City,” a civil defense agency statement said.
Israel’s military said it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting members of Hamas’s aerial defense unit operating from a “command and control center in a building that served in the past as the Al-Wafaa hospital.”
“The building does not currently serve as a hospital,” the military said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the hospital was still in use.
“The Al-Wafaa Hospital is partially operational, providing care to patients with physical disabilities,” the ministry’s director general, Munir Al-Barsh, told AFP.
“The hospital had been rehabilitated and was getting ready to receive patients. Had it not been targeted by Israeli shelling today, it would have been ready to fully reopen in the next few days,” he said.
The strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, an assault the World Health Organization reported left the facility empty of patients and staff.
The military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant.
Since October 6, Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territory have focused on northern Gaza, where it says its land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
However, the military has also carried out air strikes and shelling in other areas of Gaza as it presses on with its campaign against the militants.
Asma Assad barred from UK to seek cancer treatment
- UK foreign secretary says she is ‘not welcome’ in Britain
- Former Syrian first lady’s passport expired in 2020
LONDON: Asma Al-Assad is effectively barred from returning to the UK after her British passport expired, The Times newspaper reported.
The wife of former Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad will not be able to return to her birthplace, London, despite reports that she is critically ill with leukemia.
The 49-year-old has been given a 50-50 chance of surviving the illness, according to sources.
The news comes as her father, Fawaz Akhras, a renowned cardiologist, left his work at the privately run Cromwell Hospital in Kensington, west London, to care for his daughter in Moscow, where the Assad family was granted asylum this month.
Asma Assad’s British passport expired in September 2020, and it is unclear whether UK ministers have blocked renewal or if the former first lady simply allowed the document’s validity to lapse.
Yvette Cooper, the UK home secretary, said that Assad will be prevented from entering the UK to seek treatment.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that the former investment banker is “not welcome” in Britain.
Asma Assad became Syria’s first lady in 2000 after marrying the country’s new president.
Leaked emails show that she ordered luxury goods in London and Paris during the civil war in her country, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
She played a key role in supporting her husband’s brutal crackdown on opposition protests during the Arab Spring in 2011.
Asma Assad reportedly fled to Moscow weeks before her husband this month during a lighting offensive by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.
Her three children, Hafez, 23, Zein, 21, and Karim, 19, are also in Moscow, where the family own luxury properties.
Sources told The Telegraph last week that the former first lady was being kept in isolation during medical treatment.
“Asma is dying. She can’t be in the same room as anyone,” one source said.
Her father and his wife, Sahar, 75, were placed under US sanctions along with Asma’s younger brothers in 2020, although none of her family has been blacklisted by the UK.
Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents
- Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said
- Baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital
DEIR AL-BALAH: A fourth infant has died of hypothermia in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by nearly 15 months of war are huddled in tents along the rainy, windswept coast as winter arrives.
Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said. The baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Their father said the twins were born one month premature and spent just a day in the nursery at the hospital, which like other health centers in Gaza has been overwhelmed and is only partially functioning.
He said medics told their mother to keep the newborns warm, but it was impossible because they live in a tent and temperatures regularly drop below 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) at night.
“We are eight people, and we only have four blankets,” Al-Batran said as he cradled his son’s pale body. He described drops of dew seeping through the tent cover overnight. “Look at his color because the cold. Do you see how frozen he is?”
Children, some of them barefoot, stood outdoors and watched him mourn. The shrouded infant was laid at the feet of an imam, barely larger than his shoes. After prayers, the imam took off his ankle-length coat and wrapped it around the father.
At least three other babies have died from the cold in recent weeks, according to local health officials.
A Palestinian woman is killed at home in the West Bank
A Palestinian woman was shot and killed in her home in the volatile West Bank town of Jenin, where the Palestinian Authority is carrying out a rare campaign against militants.
The family of Shatha Al-Sabbagh, a 22-year-old journalism student, said she was killed by a sniper with the Palestinian security forces late Saturday while she was with her mother and two small children. They said there were no militants in the area at the time.
A statement from the Palestinian security forces said she was shot by “outlaws” — the term it uses for local militants battling Israeli forces in recent years. The security forces condemned the shooting and vowed to investigate it.
The Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, largely because it cooperates with Israel on security matters, even as Israel accuses it of incitement and of generally turning a blind eye to militancy.
In a statement, the Al-Sabbagh family accused the Palestinian security forces of having become “repressive tools that practice terrorism against their own people instead of protecting their dignity and standing up to the (Israeli) occupation.”
The Hamas militant group also blamed the security forces and noted that Al-Sabbagh was the sister of one of its fighters who was killed in a battle with Israeli troops last year.
Later on Sunday, hundreds of people took part in a demonstration in Jenin in support of the Palestinian security forces. The rally was organized by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian security forces launched a rare operation earlier this month in Jenin that they said was aimed at restoring law and order, while critics accuse the authority of aiding the occupation.
Violence has flared in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for a future state.
