Israeli strike kills senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon

Hezbollah has said one of its senior commanders was killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon, with the Iran-backed armed group retaliating with a barrage of rockets against Israel.

Mohammed Nimah Nasser is the latest senior member of Hezbollah to be targeted by Israel during almost nine months of cross-border violence which have raised fears of an all-out war.

Hezbollah said it had launched 100 rockets and missiles at Israeli military positions “as part of the response to the assassination”. The Israeli military said a number of projectiles which fell in open areas sparked fires, but no injuries were reported.

The military said Nasser commanded Hezbollah’s Aziz Unit, which is responsible for launching rockets from south-western Lebanon, and accused him of directing a “large number of terror attacks”.

It also described him as “the counterpart” of Taleb Sami Abdullah, the commander of another unit whose killing last month prompted Hezbollah to launch more than 200 rockets and missiles into northern Israel in a single day.

Since then, there has been a flurry of diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions, with the UN and US warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences of a war that could also draw in Iran and other allied groups.

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There have been almost daily exchanges of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the day after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza on 7 October.

Hezbollah has said it is acting in support of the Palestinian group that is also backed by Iran. Both groups are proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.

In recent weeks, Israeli officials have repeatedly warned that they will use military force to restore security along the northern border if diplomacy fails.

“We are striking Hezbollah very hard every day and we will also reach a state of full readiness to take any action required in Lebanon, or to reach an arrangement from a position of strength,” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday. “We prefer an arrangement, but if reality forces us we will know how to fight.”

Hezbollah, heavily armed and long seen as a significantly superior foe to Hamas, has said it does not want a full-out war with Israel and that it will observe in Lebanon any ceasefire in Gaza.

“Israel can decide what it wants: limited war, total war, partial war,” the group’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. “But it should expect that our response and our resistance will not be within a ceiling and rules of engagement set by Israel.”

So far, more than 400 people have been reported killed in Lebanon, the vast majority of them Hezbollah fighters, and 25 people in Israel, mostly soldiers.

Tens of thousands from communities on both sides of the border have also been displaced.

Israeli strike kills senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon

Biden vows to stay in US presidential race, governors offer support

United States President Joe Biden has pledged to continue his re-election campaign “to the end”, as the embattled Democrat fights to keep his candidacy alive amid growing alarm over his physical and mental fitness.

Biden, 81, on Wednesday insisted that he would keep running despite growing pressure from within his party to step aside following last week’s disastrous debate performance against his Republican challenger Donald Trump.

“Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can, as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running … no one’s pushing me out,” Biden said on a call with campaign staffers.

“I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end, and we’re going to win.”

Biden’s defiant remarks came after US media reports indicated that the president and his team have acknowledged that his candidacy is at risk of collapsing within days if he cannot convince the public of his fitness for office.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre denied those reports, insisting Biden was “clear-eyed, and he is staying in the race”.

Concerns about Biden’s age and condition have boiled over since last Thursday’s debate, when the president gave several answers that meandered into incoherence.

Heavy fighting rocks Gaza, thousands flee war zone

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Israeli forces bombed and battled Hamas in Gaza City on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled for a safe haven after the army issued an evacuation order for a vast swathe in the territory’s south.

Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City’s Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets, said AFP reporters.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a US media report saying his generals were urging a Gaza truce even with Hamas undefeated, stressing on Tuesday that “this will not happen.”

Military chief Herzi Halevi meanwhile said Israel is engaged in “a long campaign” to destroy Hamas over the October 7 attack and to bring home the hostages held by Palestinian militants.

The United Nations warned that the almost nine-months-old war had “unleashed a maelstrom of human misery” and that the latest evacuation order had plunged yet more Palestinians into “an abyss of suffering.”

Ten days after Netanyahu said the war’s “intense phase” was winding down, the Israeli military again rained down air strikes and artillery fire on militants in the Shujaiya district.

The air force struck “over 50 terror infrastructure sites” across Gaza in 24 hours while ground troops “eliminated terrorists,” located tunnels and found weapons including AK-47 assault rifles, the military said.

The Israeli army — which issued an evacuation order for Shujaiya a week ago — on Sunday did the same for a larger area near Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, raising fears of renewed heavy battles there.

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Tens of thousands of Palestinians have again taken to the road there, many bundling their scant belongings on top of cars or donkey carts as they sought safety elsewhere in the bombed-out wasteland.

The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 250,000 people had been impacted by the latest evacuation order that covers southern areas bordering Israel and Egypt.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the order covers 117 square kilometers (45 square miles), or “about a third of the Gaza Strip, making it the largest such order since October.”

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday that the war had now displaced 80 percent of Gaza’s population.

She also said not enough aid was reaching the besieged territory and that crossings must be reopened, particularly to southern Gaza, to avert a humanitarian disaster.

“Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering, their home lives shattered, their lives upended,” she said. “The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”

Amid the war, siege and mass displacement, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions, said the World Health Organization.

Wafaa Elwan, a Palestinian mother of seven who now lives in a tent city by the sea, said: “We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us.”

She said her five-year-old son, much of whose body was covered in rashes and welts, “can’t sleep through the night because he can’t stop scratching his body.”

The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive since then has killed at least 37,925 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

The Israeli military said Wednesday that “operational activities continue throughout the Gaza Strip.”

The Gaza civil defense agency said seven people were killed when a strike hit a family house north of Gaza City.

Another strike killed three people in a car at Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Deir Al-Balah area, said an AFP reporter.

Air strikes also hit homes in Rafah, according to Gaza’s government media office.

The New York Times has quoted Israeli security officials as saying top generals see a truce as the best way to secure the release of the remaining hostages, even if that meant not achieving all of the war goals.

Netanyahu, who heads a government including hard-line right-wing parties, strongly rejected this on Tuesday and vowed Israel would not give in to the “winds of defeatism.”

“The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives, including the destruction of Hamas and the release of all of our hostages,” he said.

Heavy fighting rocks Gaza, thousands flee war zone

ARAB NEWS