BEIRUT: Urgent calls for foreign nationals to leave Lebanon grew on Sunday with France warning of “a highly volatile” situation as Iran and its allies ready their response to high-profile killings blamed on Israel.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which has traded near-daily fire with Israeli forces since the Gaza war broke out in October, announced its fighters had fired a barrage of rockets at Israel’s north overnight.
The Israeli military said 30 projectiles were launched from Lebanon, with most of them intercepted.
With Israel on high alert anticipating major military action from Tehran-aligned armed groups including Hezbollah and Hamas, medics and police said two people were killed on Sunday in a stabbing attack in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The assailant, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank, was “neutralized” by police and taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Israeli forces meanwhile kept bombarding the Gaza Strip, witnesses and officials in the besieged Hamas-ruled territory said, with no end in sight to the nearly 10-month Israeli agression on Gaza.
France, Canada and Jordan were among the latest governments to issue calls for their citizens to leave Lebanon.
“In a highly volatile security context,” French nationals were “urgently asked” to avoid traveling to Lebanon, and those already in the country “to make their arrangements now to leave... as soon as possible,” the foreign ministry in Paris said.
The United States and Britain have issued similar warnings.
Several Western airlines have suspended flights to the region.
On Sunday Qatar Airways said that “in light of recent developments in Lebanon,” the Doha-Beirut route “will operate exclusively during daylight hours” at least until Monday.
The killing Wednesday of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, hours after the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah’s military chief in Beirut, has triggered vows of vengeance from Iran and the so-called “axis of resistance” of Tehran-backed armed groups.
Israel, accused by Hamas, Iran and others of carrying out the attack that killed Haniyeh, has not directly commented on it.
Israel’s agression on the Gaza strip has killed at least 39,550 people, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, was the group’s lead negotiator in efforts to end the war.
His killing raised questions about the continued viability of efforts by Qatari, Egyptian and US mediators to broker a truce and exchange of hostages and prisoners.
On the ground in Gaza, fighting continued on Sunday.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said eight bodies had been recovered from a residential building in north Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli air strike.
Medics at central Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital said at least five people were killed and 16 wounded in an Israeli drone strike on tents housing displaced Palestinians at the medical complex, with a separate attack on a house nearby in the same area killing three.
On Saturday, an Israeli strike on a school turned displacement shelter killed at least 17 people, the civil defense agency said. Israel claims the facility was used by militants.
An AFP correspondent reported Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling early Sunday in and around Gaza City, while witnesses said there was more shelling, gunfire and at least two air strikes on the territory’s south.
The Israeli military said its air forces had struck “approximately 50 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip” in the past 24 hours.
Israeli ally the United States said it would move warships and fighter jets to the region to protect US personnel and defend Israel.
Analysts have told AFP that a joint but measured action from Iran and its allies was likely, while Tehran said it expects Hezbollah to hit deeper inside Israel and no longer be confined to military targets.
US President Joe Biden, asked by reporters if he thought Iran would stand down, said: “I hope so. I don’t know.”
On Sunday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi will visit Tehran to meet his Iranian counterpart, his ministry said.
Haniyeh’s killing “has brought the Middle East to its moment of greatest peril in years,” the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank said in a report issued on Saturday.
“The risk of a spiralling conflagration is high,” with the potential for a miscalculation that would trigger a war “without constraints... likely greater now than it was in April,” it added.
On April 13, Iran launched its first ever direct attack on Israeli soil, firing a barrage of drones and missiles — most of which were intercepted — after a strike killed Revolutionary Guards at Tehran’s consulate in Damascus.
The ICG said that securing “a long overdue ceasefire” in Gaza was “the best way of meaningfully reducing tensions in the region.”
Hamas officials but also some analysts as well as protesters in Israel have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war to safeguard his ruling hard-right coalition.
On Sunday, Netanyahu told his cabinet he was “making every effort” to return the hostages and was prepared “to go a long way” to do so.
Foreign nationals told to leave Lebanon
https://arab.news/bmxnw
Foreign nationals told to leave Lebanon
- France, Canada and Jordan were among the latest governments to issue calls for their citizens to leave Lebanon
- Several Western airlines have suspended flights to the region
RSF paramilitaries kill 31 in Sudanese city of Sennar, activists say
DUBAI/CAIRO: At least 31 people have been killed and 100 wounded since the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces renewed an assault on the city of Sennar in southeastern Sudan on Sunday, a legal activist group said.
Several parts of the city including the main market have been targeted by RSF artillery fire, said Emergency Lawyers, which has monitored civilian deaths and other humanitarian violations.
The progress of the RSF, which already controls most of Sennar and at least half of the country, has slowed in the southeast as heavy rains have made movement difficult.
Its war with Sudan’s army has created the world’s largest hunger and internal displacement crises, killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying most of Sudan’s infrastructure and economy.
Emergency Lawyers said the army had killed at least four people in Al-Souki, a town near Sennar, during airstrikes. The RSF killed one person and wounded 17 in artillery strikes on el-Obeid, another town it has struggled to assert full control of.
Both sides in Sudan’s 18-month-old civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, a UN-mandated mission said on Friday, calling for peacekeepers and a country-wide arms embargo.
On Saturday, Sudan’s army-aligned foreign ministry rejected both recommendations, calling the idea of international peacekeepers “the wish of Sudan’s enemies and it will not be fulfilled.”
UN rights chief calls on states to challenge Israel over occupation
- Nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza
GENEVA: The UN human rights chief said on Monday that ending the nearly year-long war in Gaza is a priority and he asked countries to act on what he called Israel’s “blatant disregard” for international law in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials, since Israel unleashed a military campaign in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023 in which 1,200 people were killed and a further 250 taken hostage.
“Ending that war and averting a full-blown regional conflict is an absolute and urgent priority,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a speech at the opening of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“States must not – cannot – accept blatant disregard for international law, including binding decisions of the (UN) Security Council and orders of the International Court of Justice, neither in this nor any other situation.”
He cited an opinion released by the UN top court in July that called Israel’s occupation illegal and said this situation must be “comprehensively addressed.” Israel has rejected the opinion and called it one-sided.
Turk’s comments were given in a broad speech marking the mid-way point of his four-year term as UN rights chief where he described massive challenges around the world and a crisis of political leadership.
“In every region around the world, we see deep-seated power dynamics at play to grab or hold on to power, at the expense of universal human rights,” he said at the start of the five-week session where rights violations in Sudan, Afghanistan and Ukraine will also be debated.
Lebanon judge orders warrant of ex-central bank boss Salameh: judicial official
- Salameh was long feted as a financial wizard in Lebanon but left office with his reputation shredded by corruption charges at home and abroad
BEIRUT: A Lebanese judge on Monday issued a formal arrest warrant for former central bank governor Riad Salameh, days after he was taken into custody over alleged embezzlement, a judicial official said.
The investigating judge finished questioning Salameh and “issued an arrest warrant against him,” the official told AFP, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to brief the media.
Salameh ran the central bank for three decades until July 2023.
If the prosecution continues, it would mark a rare case of a serving or retired senior Lebanese official facing accountability in a system which critics say has long shielded the elite.
Salameh was long feted as a financial wizard in Lebanon but left office with his reputation shredded by corruption charges at home and abroad and the catastrophic collapse of Lebanon’s financial system in 2019.
Salameh’s media office has said he will not comment publicly on the case, in line with the law. It said in a statement he had cooperated in the past with more than 20 criminal probes in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, and was cooperating with the investigation after his detention.
Salameh has denied previous corruption charges.
Turkey says its air strikes hit PKK targets in northern Iraq
ISTANBUL: Turkish air strikes in northern Iraq destroyed 21 targets of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on Monday, Turkey's Defence Ministry said, adding many militants had been "neutralised" in the attack.
Ankara typically uses the term "neutralised" to mean killed.
The operations targeted PKK bases in Gara, Hakurk, Metina and Qandil, the ministry statement said.
Israeli strikes in central Syria kill seven — war monitor
- Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since 2011, targeting pro-Iranian groups
- Latest airstrikes targeted an area housing scientific research centers and weapons experts
DAMASCUS: Israeli strikes in central Syria killed at least seven people late Sunday, including three civilians, a war monitor reported.
Since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes there, targeting pro-Iranian groups in particular.
“The number of dead in the Israeli strikes on the Masyaf region stands at seven, namely three civilians, including a man and his son who were in a car, and four unidentified soldiers,” said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a vast network of sources inside the country.
The attack also wounded at least 15 others and destroyed military facilities in the area, the Observatory said.
“Thirteen violent explosions rang out in the zone housing scientific research centers in Masyaf where pro-Iranian groups and weapons development experts are present,” the group said in an earlier statement.
The Syrian state news agency Sana had previously reported five killed and 19 wounded near Masyaf, citing a medical source.
“Around 11:20 p.m. (2020 GMT) on Sunday, the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack from the northwest of Lebanon targeting a number of military sites in the central region,” Sana reported, citing a military source.
“Our air defense shot down some missiles.”
Israeli air raids in Syria have intensified since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes in Syria, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence there.
At the end of August, three pro-Iranian fighters were killed in the central region of Homs in strikes attributed to Israel, the Observatory said.
A few days later, the Israeli military said it had killed an unspecified number of fighters belonging to Hamas ally Islamic Jihad in a strike in Syria near the Lebanese border.
