The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Wednesday that at least 42,010 people have been killed in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants.
The toll includes 45 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry, which said 97,720 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
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Health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says war death toll at 42,010
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Health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says war death toll at 42,010
- The toll includes 45 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry
Two people killed in northern Israel by Hezbollah rocket fire, medics say
- Hezbollah fighters repel Israeli troops in skirmishes along length of the border
JERUSALEM/BEIRUT: Two people were killed in a town in northern Israel that was hit by rocket fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon on Wednesday, Israeli authorities said.
Israel’s ambulance service said that a man and a woman had been killed in the town of Kirya Shmona.
The military said about 20 projectiles had been launched from Lebanon in the barrage.
Hezbollah claimed on Wednesday its fighters had pushed back advancing Israeli troops in clashes along the length of the border, a day after Israel said it had killed two successors to the Iran-backed Lebanese militant movement’s slain leader.
Hezbollah has been launching rockets against Israel for a year in parallel with the Gaza war and is now fighting it in ground clashes that are spreading along Lebanon’s mountainous frontier with Israel.
The group said it had fired several rocket salvos at Israeli troops near the village of Labbouneh in the western part of the border area, close to the Mediterranean coast, and had managed to push them back.
Further east, it said it had attacked Israeli soldiers in the village of Maroun el-Ras and fired missile barrages at Israeli forces advancing toward the twin border villages of Mays Al-Jabal and Mouhaybib.
The Israeli military said Hezbollah fighters had fired around 40 projectiles across the frontier into Israeli territory on Wednesday, some of which had been shot down. Sirens sent Israelis rushing toward shelter.
Israel meanwhile launched airstrikes including at targets far from the border combat zone. The Lebanese health ministry said four people were killed and 10 wounded by a strike that hit the town of Wardaniyeh, north of Sidon along the coast.
The escalation in Lebanon, after a year of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, has raised fears of a wider Middle East conflict that could suck in Iran and Israel’s superpower ally the United States.
In recent weeks Israel has carried out a string of assassinations of top Hezbollah leaders and launched ground operations into southern Lebanon that expanded further this week.
Israel has said that troops from as many as four divisions have operated inside Lebanon since the first announcement of the ground operation on Oct. 1. It has not confirmed that they have established a permanent presence there.
Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon has killed more than 2,100 people, most of them in the last two weeks, and forced 1.2 million people from their homes. Israel says it has no choice but to strike Hezbollah so that tens of thousands of Israelis can return to homes they fled under Hezbollah rocket fire.
Burn victims from Israeli strikes are being treated at a specialized unit in Beirut’s Geitaoui hospital, the only one of its kind in the country. Reuters journalists saw nurses gently change the gauze on patients, some of whom were wrapped neck down because of the severity of burns.
Mahmoud Dhaiwi, a Lebanese soldier, told Reuters he was off duty and heading to the beach when his car was hit by an Israeli strike. His whole body was burned.
Overnight, Israel again bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs and said it had killed a figure responsible for budgeting and logistics for Hezbollah, Suhail Hussein Husseini.
The densely-populated and thriving suburban district has been abandoned by many residents following Israeli evacuation warnings. Some Lebanese draw parallels between the warnings and those seen in Gaza over the last year, prompting fears that Beirut could face the same scale of destruction.
BIDEN-NETANYAHU CALL
US President Joe Biden is expected to speak on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Middle East has been on edge awaiting Israel’s response to a missile attack from Iran last week that Tehran carried out in retaliation for Israel’s military escalation in Lebanon. The only fatality from the Iranian attack was a Palestinian hit by debris that fell in the West Bank.
Biden has said Israel should consider alternative targets to striking Iranian oil fields or nuclear sites. An attack on oil facilities could drive up global prices.
Iran’s foreign minister was visiting Gulf Arab states. Tehran has told them would be unacceptable if they allowed use of their airspace or military bases for attacks against Iran, a senior Iranian official said.
Netanyahu said on Tuesday Israeli airstrikes had killed two successors to Hezbollah’s slain leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, himself killed in an Israeli air attack on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sept. 27.
Netanyahu did not identify them, but Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Hashem Safieddine, the man expected to succeed Nasrallah, had probably been “eliminated.”
Safieddine has not been heard from since a huge Israeli airstrike late last week.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said the group endorsed efforts by Lebanon’s speaker of parliament to secure a ceasefire. He conspicuously left out an oft-repeated condition of the group — that a separate ceasefire would have to be reached in Gaza before Hezbollah would agree to a truce. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on Qassem’s remarks.
Israeli strike kills policeman in Syria: state media
- It comes after a strike in the Damascus neighborhood of Mazzeh late Tuesday
BEIRUT: Israeli bombardment on Wednesday killed a policeman in the south of Syria near the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, state media said, the day after a deadly air strike on the capital.
Israel has repeatedly struck Syria throughout the civil war that started in 2011, but it has ramped these up in recent weeks as it also pounds Lebanon.
Citing a police official, the official SANA news agency reported “the death of a security force member and wounding of another in an Israeli strike” on the outskirts of Quneitra city.
It comes after a strike in the Damascus neighborhood of Mazzeh late Tuesday, that a war monitor said targeted a building used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The Syrian government said it killed seven civilians.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor on Wednesday reported a higher toll of nine civilians, including four children.
The Britain-based organization said four others were also killed, including two members of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Last week, the Observatory said an Israeli strike on Mazzeh killed four people, including the son-in-law of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike on south Beirut last month.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes in Syria, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence.
Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have been among the Syrian government’s most important allies in the country’s more than decade-old civil war.
Six wounded in stabbing attack in Israel, police say
- At least two were in serious condition
JERUSALEM: At least six people were wounded, two of them seriously, in a stabbing attack in the Israeli city of Hadera on Wednesday, Israeli authorities said.
“The terrorist has been neutralized,” police said in a statement. “Four separate locations have been identified, resulting in six victims with stab wounds.”
The police did not immediately provide other details, but issued a brief video of the suspected attacker being apprehended.
Of the six people rushed to the hospital, at least two were in serious condition, according to medical officials.
Israel has been on high security alert since the Hamas assault a year ago sparked the war in Gaza, while a the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon continues to escalate.
Turkiye moves to evacuate nationals from Lebanon
- Turkiye is estimated to have 14,000 citizens registered with its consulate in Lebanon
ANKARA: Turkiye on Wednesday sent ships to evacuate around 2,000 of its citizens from Lebanon, with its Beirut envoy saying it would be “the biggest” evacuation of its type from the war-torn country.
A Turkish diplomatic source told AFP two naval ships carrying the evacuated nationals and their families would arrive at the southern Turkish port of Mersin “in the early hours” of Thursday morning.
The two ships set sail overnight for the Lebanese capital whose southern suburbs were hit overnight by fresh Israeli bombardments.
“These ships, with a capacity of around 2,000 people, will be ready to take those of our citizens who requested it from Lebanon to Mersin port,” Turkish ambassador Ali Baris Ulusoy told TRT Haber public television.
Turkiye, which is estimated to have 14,000 citizens registered with its consulate in Lebanon, announced the move on Tuesday because of the deteriorating security situation on the ground in Lebanon.
Images on TRT Haber showed a crowd of people at Beirut port waiting to board the boats.
The ambassador said the two ships were also bringing “approximately 300 tons of humanitarian aid” to show Turkiye’s support for the Lebanese people, including tents, bedding, hygiene kits and kitchenware.
Since September 23, Israel has intensified strikes on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, killing more than 1,100 people and forcing more than a million to flee, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Monday.
Hamas meets Fatah in Cairo to discuss Gaza war
- Hamas delegation led by Khalil Al-Hayya, the group’s chief negotiator and Hamas’ second-in-command, currently based in Qatar
CAIRO: Hamas said on Wednesday it had begun meetings with rival Palestinian faction Fatah in Cairo to discuss the year-long war in the Gaza Strip and efforts toward national unity.
“A meeting has just commenced in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, between the delegations of the Hamas movement... and the Fatah movement,” a Hamas statement read, adding that they were discussing “aggression on the Gaza Strip, the political and field developments, and to unify national efforts and ranks.”
The meeting was the first in months since the two groups held talks in the Chinese capital in July, agreeing on steps to form a unity government. Similar rounds in the past have so far failed to make progress.
Hamas and Fatah are long-term rivals and fought a brief but bloody war in 2007 in which the former seized control of Gaza.
Fatah continues to dominate the Palestinian Authority, which has limited administrative control over urban areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The issue of the post-war Gaza administration is one of the thorniest issues facing the Palestinians, and both factions have said it was an internal affair, rejecting any Israeli conditions.
Israel vowed it would not accept any role for Hamas in post-war Gaza. It says it doesn’t trust the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority to do the job either.
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