Blinken meets Netanyahu during Middle East tour; Israel confirms killing of Hezbollah heir apparent

Israel’s military confirmed on Tuesday the killing of Hashem Safieddine of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, who is the apparent heir to Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli attack.

The UN Palestinian refugee agency called on Tuesday for a temporary truce to allow people to leave areas of northern Gaza as health officials said they were running out of supplies to treat patients injured in a three-week-old Israeli assault.

Netanyahu meets Blinken, urges political changes in Lebanon

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said there was a need for a security and political change in Lebanon that would allow displaced Israelis to return safely to their homes.

Netanyahu met with Blinken for 2½ hours on Tuesday and the meeting was friendly and productive, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office.

Netanyahu also said Israel was working hard to bring back hostages still held in Gaza and that the elimination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “may have a positive effect on the return of the hostages, the achievement of all the goals of the war, and the day after the war”.

Blinken told Netanyahu on Tuesday that Israel had taken insufficient steps to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza, and he asked it to work to improve the situation, a senior State Department official said.

Blinken held “extended conversations” about the humanitarian situation in Gaza with Netanyahu and other senior Israeli leaders, who committed to act upon the US requests, said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The top US diplomat is in Israel as part of a wider week-long Middle East tour. An Israeli readout on the meeting did not mention humanitarian issues.

This month, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote a letter to Israeli leaders, demanding they take more take steps in the next month to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face potential restrictions on US military aid. It was one of the strongest such warnings since Israel’s war with Hamas began a year ago.

“The steps that they have taken thus far have not been sufficient and we made that clear today that we do need to see more,” said the official.

"They committed to us that they are acting upon our requests and doing everything that they can to meet them. We take those commitments seriously but it is the results that matter," the official said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Blinken also pressed Netanyahu to capitalise on the killing of Hamas’ leader Yahya Sinwar by securing the release of the 7 October attack hostages and ending the war in Gaza.

The State Department said Blinken and Netanyahu also discussed ways of implementing a long moribund 2006 UN resolution passed after the last Israel-Hezbollah war that would restore security and calm along the Israeli-Lebanese border and allow civilians on both sides to return to their homes.

But as Blinken was huddled with Israeli leaders, Hezbollah ruled out negotiations while fighting continues with Israel, and it claimed responsibility for a drone attack targeting Netanyahu’s holiday home on Saturday.

Israel’s military confirms killing of Hezbollah’s Hashem Safieddine

Israel on Tuesday confirmed it had killed Hashem Safieddine, the heir apparent to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah who was previously killed in an Israeli attack last month on the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group.

The military said Safieddine was killed in a strike carried out three weeks ago in Beirut's southern suburbs, its first confirmation of his death. Earlier this month, Israel said he had probably been eliminated.

There was no immediate response from Hezbollah to Israel's statement that it had killed Safieddine.

Israel has been carrying out an escalating offensive after a year of border clashes with Hezbollah, which is reeling from a spate of killings of its senior commanders in Israeli airstrikes. The group is the most formidably armed of Iran's proxy forces across the Middle East and has been acting in support of Palestinian militants fighting Israel in Gaza.

A relative of Nasrallah, Safieddine was appointed to its Jihad Council - the body responsible for its military operations - and to its executive council, overseeing Hezbollah's financial and administrative affairs.

Safieddine assumed a prominent role speaking for Hezbollah during the last year of hostilities with Israel, addressing funerals and other events that Nasrallah had long been unable to attend for security reasons.

Israeli strikes have been pummelling Lebanon's south, eastern Bekaa Valley and southern suburbs of Beirut - all Hezbollah strongholds. The group's fighters have been trying to push back Israeli ground incursions.

Israel has so far shown no sign of relenting in its Gaza and Lebanon campaigns even after assassinating several leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, which lost Nasrallah, its powerful secretary-general, in a September 27 airstrike.

Diplomats say Israel aims to lock in a strong position before a new US administration takes over following the November 5 election between Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.

UN agency head calls for temporary truce in north Gaza

The UN Palestinian refugee agency called on Tuesday for a temporary truce to allow people to leave areas of northern Gaza as health officials said they were running out of supplies to treat patients injured in a three-week-old Israeli assault.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the Unrwa relief agency, said the humanitarian situation had reached a dire point, with bodies abandoned by roadsides or buried under rubble.

“In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die,” he said in a statement on X. “They feel deserted, hopeless and alone.

“I am calling for an immediate truce, even if for a few hours, to enable safe humanitarian passage for families who wish to leave the area & reach safer places.”

Washington has called on Israel to allow more humanitarian supplies into northern Gaza and Israel says aid has been delivered in scores of trucks as well as airdrops, but Gaza medics say the aid has not reached them.

Israel’s military humanitarian unit, Cogat, which oversees aid and commercial shipments to Gaza, said on Tuesday that 237 trucks containing humanitarian aid, including food, water, medical supplies, and shelter equipment from Jordan and the international community, were transferred to the northern Gaza Strip over the past eight days.

On Tuesday, Gaza health officials said more than 20 people had been killed by Israeli forces. The bodies of dozens of people were on roadsides and under rubble, inaccessible to rescue teams because of ongoing strikes, they said.

“Many wounded have died before our eyes and we couldn’t do anything for them,” said Munir Al-Bursh, the director of the Gaza health ministry, who is currently in northern Gaza.

“Hospitals also ran out of coffins to prepare the dead and we have asked people to donate any fabric they have at home.”

The Israeli military, which launched an assault against Hamas militants holding out in the northern town of Jabalia this month, says it is evacuating people along designated routes and has filtered out dozens of militants from civilians going south.

Israeli drones circled overhead, calling on Palestinians to evacuate areas around the town of Beit Lahiya, just north of Jabalia where the offensive began earlier this month.

Many Palestinians fear the evacuation orders are part of an Israeli plan to clear the area to create a buffer zone that will enable Israel to control Gaza after the war.

The Israeli military denies the evacuations are part of a wider plan, saying it is moving people to separate them from Hamas fighters.

The war in Gaza has devastated the Palestinian economy, which is now 35% smaller than it was at the start of Israel’s invasion a year ago, said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)  on Tuesday.

UNDP said quality of life indicators such as health and education had been knocked back 70 years to the 1950s.

In northern Gaza, residents said Israeli forces had besieged hospitals, schools, and other shelters housing displaced families and ordered them to leave and head south. They said forces detained dozens of men.

Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, said medical services had completely collapsed. “There are no blood units or tubes to drain bleeding from the chest. Most of the medical supplies are not available,” he said.

The overall death toll in Gaza was approaching 43,000, according to the latest health ministry figures, and most of the 2.3 million population is displaced, many in makeshift shelters.

The Israeli offensive was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken as hostages back into Gaza.

Lebanon needs $250m a month for displaced

Lebanon will need $250-million a month to help more than a million people displaced by Israeli attacks, its minister in charge of responding to the crisis said on Tuesday, ahead of a conference on Thursday in Paris to rally support for Lebanon.

Nasser Yassin told Reuters the government response, helped by local initiatives and international aid, only covered 20% of the needs of some 1.3 million people uprooted from their homes and sheltering in public buildings or with relatives.

Those needs were likely to grow, as daily waves of airstrikes pushed more people out of their homes and left Lebanon’s government scrambling to find ways to house them, said Yassin.

“We need $250-million a month” to cover basic food, water, sanitation and education services for the displaced, he said.

Schools, an old slaughterhouse, a fresh food market, an empty complex — all of them had been turned into collective shelters in recent days. “We’re transforming anything, any public building,” said Yassin. “There is a lot to be done.”

Yassin said he estimated the damage to Lebanon to be in the billions of dollars.

“Full villages on the border were blown up in the last few days, but also public institutions … water establishments, pumping stations, hospitals, you name it. All of these need to be rebuilt.”

Lebanese authorities have yet to put a firm estimate on the scale of destruction across Lebanon and how much money it will take to rebuild. Nasser Saidi, a former economy minister, told Reuters last week that Israel’s bombing campaign had caused damage that would cost $25-billion to repair.

Ireland seeks to limit trade with Israeli settlements in occupied territories

Ireland’s government is seeking to introduce a Bill restricting trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories after it said a UN court decision freed Dublin to make trade decisions independently of the European Union.

The Occupied Territories Bill was first tabled in 2018 by an independent legislator and despite receiving broad support in Ireland’s parliament, the government said it could not bring it forward because the European Union, not member nations, is responsible for the bloc’s trade policy.

However, Foreign Minister Michael Martin said on Tuesday that an advisory opinion by the United Nations’ highest court in July that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal had changed the context of how the government might move forward on the issue.

“Trade is an exclusive EU competence and so the government’s focus has been on achieving action at the EU level,” said Martin.

“The attorney-general has clarified that if this is not possible, there are grounds in EU law allowing states to take action at a national level. It is in that context that the government will now look again at the Occupied Territories Bill.”

In May, Ireland officially recognised a Palestinian state and said it would establish diplomatic relations, angering Israel.

At least 63 killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon

At least 63 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon over the last day, bringing the death toll to 2,530, said the Lebanese government on Tuesday.

It also said that more than 11,800 people had been wounded by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since October 2023. DM

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