GENEVA: A United Nations’ UNIFIL peacekeeping mission spokesperson on Friday said that the 10,000-strong mission would remain in Lebanon despite several direct attacks by Israeli forces in recent days which he described as deliberate.
“We need to stay, they asked us to move,” said UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti by video link from Beirut. “The devastation and destruction of many villages along the Blue Line, and even beyond, is shocking,” he said, referring to a UN-mapped line separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Asked about the downing of a drone near its ship off the Lebanese coast on Thursday, he said: “The drone was coming from the south but circling around the ship and getting very, very close, a few meters away from the ship.”
UNIFIL vows to stay in Lebanon despite several ‘deliberate’ Israeli attacks
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UNIFIL vows to stay in Lebanon despite several ‘deliberate’ Israeli attacks
- UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti: ‘We need to stay, they asked us to move’
Hamas official says group cannot be eliminated, does not confirm Sinwar’s death
“Hamas is a liberation movement led by people looking for freedom and dignity, and this cannot be eliminated,” Basem Naim, senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP.
In a statement, he listed several Hamas leaders killed in the past, and said their deaths had boosted the group’s popularity.
“It seems that Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement and the struggle of the Palestinian people,” Naim said.
“Hamas each time became stronger and more popular, and these leaders became an icon for future generations to continue the journey toward a free Palestine.”
What we know about the killing of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar
- Sinwar met his end at the hands of a routine patrol on Wednesday
Jerusalem: The Israeli military announced the death of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 attack, after a group of soldiers killed him in a surprise firefight in southern Gaza’s Rafah.
His death represents a massive blow to the Palestinian militant movement that has waged a war with Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip for more than a year now.
Here is what we know about the killing of Israel’s most wanted man.
According to the Israeli military, Sinwar met his end at the hands of a routine patrol on Wednesday.
It said a group of soldiers of the 828th Brigade (Bislach) was moving through the city of Rafah when it came across three Palestinian militants.
Israeli media and military officials said there was no prior intelligence pointing to Sinwar’s presence in the area.
“Sinwar hid in places that our forces have explored over a long period of time,” military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said during a briefing Thursday.
“The forces identified three terrorists who were going from home to home on the run,” Hagari said.
As the soldiers chased them, Sinwar split from the other two, public broadcaster Kan reported.
A tank fired at a building in which two of the militants hid, while Sinwar took cover in another house, it said.
“Sinwar ran away alone into one of the buildings and our forces scanned the area with a drone,” Hagari said.
Drone footage released by the military showed Sinwar covered in dust sitting in an armchair staring down a drone as the device entered the house devastated by strikes.
The grainy footage showed Sinwar alone with one hand severely injured and his head covered in a traditional scarf, throwing a stick at the approaching drone during his final moments.
“We identified him as a terrorist inside a building and we shot into the building and we entered to scan the area. We found him with a gun and 40 thousand shekels ($10,750),” said Hagari.
Unverified images circulating online showed Israeli soldiers circled around the mangled corpse of a man resembling Sinwar who appeared to have suffered a severe head wound.
The man was wearing a chunky watch and surrounded by rubble.
The military conducted immediate DNA testing along with dental examinations and other forensic enquiries that helped confirm Sinwar’s identity.
Later on Thursday, Sinwar’s body was brought to a laboratory in Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv.
The initial findings described Sinwar’s physical condition as “good even though he had spent a long time in tunnels,” Kan reported.
Sinwar had not been seen in public since the war erupted with the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
The Israeli military and media regularly claimed he was hiding deep in the warren of tunnels under Gaza, while images released by the army showed CCTV footage of a man exiting from a tunnel it claimed was Sinwar.
There were also reports that Sinwar had surrounded himself with several hostages who were seized by militants during the October 7 onslaught.
But when Sinwar was finally cornered and killed, there were no captives by his side.
“In the building where the terrorists were eliminated, there were no signs of the presence of hostages in the area,” a military statement said on Thursday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated the killing of Sinwar and said his death could be the “beginning of the end” to the conflict.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant remained defiant in the wake of the killing, saying Israel would “pursue every terrorist and eliminate them” and bring back the hostages still held in Gaza.
Families of hostages, however, expressed concern over the fate of their loved ones as they called for a deal to secure their release.
At a Tel Aviv rally just hours after Sinwar’s death was announced, El-Sisil, 60, who gave only her first name, told AFP the killing presented a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for “a hostage deal to end the war.”
Hamas, meanwhile, has not confirmed its leader’s death.
Experts say it the group may bid its time before acknowledging his death, while his body remains with the Israeli military.
His killing so soon after the death of his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, in July also begs the question of who might succeed him.
Israeli military kill two attackers crossing from Jordan’s Dead Sea area
- Two of them were killed after they opened fire on Israeli forces
DUBAI: The Israeli military identified what it called “a number of terrorists” crossing from Jordan into Israel south of the Dead Sea region and neutralized two of them after they opened fire on Israeli forces, the IDF said in a statement on Friday.
“IDF troops were dispatched to the scene and two terrorists who opened fire toward the troops were neutralized by the forces,” the military said.
“Additional forces have been dispatched to reinforce the area and are conducting searches on the ground and air for an additional terrorist who likely fled the scene.”
The latest incident follows a separate attack on Sept. 8 when a gunman from Jordan killed three Israeli civilians at the Allenby Bridge border crossing in the occupied West Bank before security forces shot him dead.
Anti-Israeli sentiment runs high in Jordan and the Allenby Bridge attack was the first of its kind along the border with Jordan since Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas carried out an assault on southern Israel, sparking the war in Gaza that has escalated throughout the region.
Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and have close security ties.
Dozens of trucks cross daily from Jordan, with goods from Jordan and the Gulf that supply both the West Bank and Israeli markets.
Lebanon issues rare rebuke to Iran over ‘interference’
- Speaker of Iran’s parliament said Tehran was ready to negotiate with France on implementing a UN resolution concerning southern Lebanon
- Prime Minister Najib Mikati: ‘We are surprised by this position, which constitutes a blatant interference in Lebanese affairs’
BEIRU: Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister on Friday made a rare rebuke to Iran and said Tehran’s envoy should be summoned over reported comments by a top Iranian official that it would be ready to help “negotiate” to implement a UN resolution on Lebanon.
Criticism of Iran by top Lebanese officials is unusual, particularly given Tehran’s sponsorship of powerful Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which is currently locked in battles against Israeli troops along Lebanon’s southern border.
In an interview published in France’s Le Figaro on Thursday, Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf was quoted as saying his country would be ready to “negotiate” with France to implement United Nations Resolution 1701.
That resolution, which ended the last round of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, calls for southern Lebanon to be free of any troops or weapons other than those of the Lebanese state.
Lebanese PM Najib Mikati said on Friday that he was “surprised” by the comments, calling them “a blatant interference in Lebanese affairs and an attempt to establish a rejected guardianship over Lebanon.”
Mikati said such a negotiation was the prerogative of the Lebanese state, and asked Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib to summon the Chargé d’Affaires of the Iranian embassy in Beirut over Ghalibaf’s comments.
Israeli drone video captures last minutes of Hamas leader Sinwar’s life
- Israeli troops were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy
JERUSALEM: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.
As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation.
After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gunbattle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.
Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where he could operate, the military said on Thursday, after dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death.
But unlike other militant leaders tracked down and killed by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the operation which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
Instead, officials said he was found by infantry soldiers from the Bislach Brigade, a unit that normally trains future unit commanders. The soldiers were searching an area in the Tal El Sultan area of southern Gaza on Wednesday, where they believed senior members of Hamas were located.
The troops saw three suspected militants moving between buildings and opened fire, leading to a gunfight during which Sinwar escaped into a ruined building.
According to accounts in Israeli media, tank shells and a missile were also fired at the building.
On Thursday, the military released footage from a mini drone that it said showed Sinwar, badly wounded in the hand, sitting on a chair, his face covered in a scarf. The film shows him attempting to throw a stick at the drone, in a futile effort to knock it down.
At this stage, Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, Sinwar was only identified as a fighter, but troops entered and found him with a weapon, a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels ($10,731.63).
“He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him,” he told reporters in a televised briefing.
Hamas has not made any comment itself, but sources within the group have said that the indications they have seen suggest Sinwar was indeed killed by Israeli troops.
“The dozens of operations carried out by the IDF and the ISA over the last year, and in recent weeks in the area where he was eliminated, restricted Yahya Sinwar’s operational movement as he was pursued by the forces and led to his elimination,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
In the last months of his life, Sinwar, the main architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, appears to have stopped using telephones and other communication equipment that would have allowed Israel’s powerful intelligence services to track him down.
Israeli officials said they believed he was hiding in one of the vast network of tunnels that Hamas dug beneath Gaza over the past two decades, but as more and more have been uncovered by Israeli troops, even the tunnels were no guarantee of escaping capture.
The head of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said Israel’s pursuit of Sinwar over the past year drove him “to act like a fugitive, causing him to change locations multiple times.”
Israeli officials, who knew Sinwar as a ruthless and committed enemy, were long concerned that he had surrounded himself with some of the 101 Israeli and foreign hostages still held in Gaza as a human shield to protect himself from Israeli attacks.
But no hostages were found nearby when he was finally trapped on Wednesday, although Hagari said samples of his DNA were located in a tunnel a few hundred meters from where six Israeli hostages were executed by Hamas at the end of August.
