At least 20 people were killed and 13 injured in Israeli airstrikes in the Mount Lebanon area, said the Lebanese health ministry on Tuesday.
President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was going to nominate former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be the US ambassador to Israel.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday told a senior Israeli official that the steps Israel has taken to better the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza must lead to actual improvement on the ground, said the State Department on Tuesday.
At least 20 killed in Israeli strikes on Mount Lebanon area
At least 20 people were killed and 13 injured in Israeli air strikes in the Mount Lebanon area, said the Lebanese health ministry on Tuesday.
One strike on Joun in the Chouf district of Mount Lebanon killed 12 people and injured eight, said the ministry.
Another, on the town of Baalchmay, killed eight and injured five, added the ministry.
Fighting between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-aligned Hezbollah was continuing in Lebanon as the Israeli military pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs with air strikes on Tuesday, mounting one of its heaviest daytime attacks yet on the Hezbollah-controlled area.
Smoke billowed over Beirut as around a dozen strikes hit the southern suburbs from mid-morning. After posting warnings to civilians on social media, the Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah targets in Beirut’s Dahiyeh area and later said it dismantled most of the group’s weapons and missile facilities.
It said it had taken steps to reduce harm to civilians and repeated its standing accusation that Hezbollah deliberately embeds itself into civilian areas to use residents as human shields, a charge Hezbollah rejects.
In northern Israel, two people were killed in the city of Nahariya when a residential building was struck, said Israeli police. Hezbollah later claimed responsibility for a drone attack that it said was aimed at a military base, east of Nahariya.
Israelis were forced to take shelter from drone attacks across the north, the military said. One hit the yard of a kindergarten in a Haifa suburb, where the children had been rushed into a shelter, rescue workers said. None were hurt.
An Israeli strike back across the border killed five people in the Lebanese village of Baalchmay southeast of Beirut, and five more were killed in a strike on the town of Tefahta in the south, said Lebanon’s health ministry. Another person was killed in a strike in Hermel in the northeast, it said.
Beirut residents have largely fled the southern suburbs since Israel began bombing it in September. Footage of one strike shared on social media showed two missiles slamming into a building of around 10 storeys, demolishing it and sending up clouds of debris.
Ignited by the Gaza war, the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah had been rumbling on for a year before Israel went on the offensive in September, pounding wide areas of Lebanon with airstrikes and sending troops into the south.
Israel has dealt Hezbollah heavy blows, killing many of its leaders including Hassan Nasrallah, flattening large areas of the southern suburbs, destroying border villages in the south, and striking more widely across Lebanon.
Since hostilities erupted a year ago, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,287 people in Lebanon, the majority in the last seven weeks, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Its figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Hezbollah attacks have killed about 100 civilians and soldiers in northern Israel, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon over the last year.
Israel’s new defence minister Israel Katz said on Monday there would be no ceasefire in Lebanon until Israel achieved its goals.
“Israel will not agree to any arrangement that does not guarantee Israel’s right to enforce and prevent terrorism on its own, and meet the goals of the war in Lebanon — disarming Hezbollah and its withdrawal beyond the Litani River and returning the residents of the north safely to their homes,” he said.
Hezbollah rocket fire into northern Israel has forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate the area over the last year.
Trump picks Mike Huckabee to be Israel ambassador
President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was going to nominate former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be the US ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, is a staunch supporter of Israel and defender of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, considered illegal by most of the international community.
“He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring about Peace in the Middle East!” said Trump in a statement.
Huckabee (69) has criticised President Joe Biden for pressuring Israel to moderate its conduct in the Gaza war.
“If a person is pro-Israel, how can you be pro-Biden because the Biden administration has made it very clear they will make concessions to Hamas,” Huckabee said in an interview in March on News Nation.
Huckabee served as Arkansas governor from 1996 to 2007. He fell short in bids for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 and 2016.
His daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor of Arkansas. She served as Trump’s White House press secretary from 2017 to 2019.
Blinken tells Israel to show improvement in Gaza humanitarian crisis
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday told a senior Israeli official that the steps Israel has taken to better the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza must lead to actual improvement on the ground, said the State Department on Tuesday.
Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote to their Israeli counterparts on 13 October with a checklist of specific steps to address the worsening situation in the Palestinian enclave amid a renewed Israeli offensive.
Washington gave Israel 30 days to comply and said results on the ground would determine whether or not enough had been done. Washington has not yet said whether it deems Israel to have complied.
In a meeting on Monday, Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer updated Blinken on the policy decisions the Israeli government has taken to address the requirements, along with operational changes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“The secretary emphasised the importance of ensuring those changes lead to an actual improvement in the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, including through the delivery of additional assistance to civilians throughout Gaza,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.
International aid groups said on Tuesday that Israel had not only failed to meet US demands but had taken steps that “dramatically worsened” the situation on the ground.
For more than a month, Israeli forces have been pushing deeper into north Gaza, surrounding hospitals and shelters and displacing new waves of people in an operation they say is designed to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping.
Dutch police detain six people defying Amsterdam protest ban
Dutch police detained several people in Amsterdam on Tuesday who were holding up white banners in front of city hall, defying a ban on protests imposed after violence between locals and Israeli soccer fans last week.
A police spokesperson confirmed media reports that six people had been detained.
Tensions remain high in Amsterdam since violent clashes before and after a soccer match between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and local team Ajax on Thursday.
Police have said visiting Israeli fans were targeted in hit-and-run attacks on Thursday night, adding that the fans, for their part, had burned a Palestinian flag and used sticks, pipes and rocks in clashes, as video footage verified by Reuters showed. Verified footage also showed the fans chanting anti-Arab slogans.
At least five people were injured in assaults that Dutch authorities and foreign leaders including Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced as anti-Semitic.
Following the violence, local authorities imposed a protest ban until Thursday morning.
France summons Israeli envoy over Jerusalem incident
France’s foreign ministry said it had summoned Israel’s ambassador on Tuesday to tell him that an incident in Jerusalem that saw armed Israeli security forces entering a property administered by France should never be repeated.
Two French security officials with diplomatic status were briefly detained on 7 November after Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was due to visit the compound of the Church of the Pater Noster on the Mount of Olives.
The site, one of four administered by France in Jerusalem, is under Paris’ responsibility and it was not the first time that problems have arisen over France’s historic holdings in the Holy City.
The French foreign ministry said in a statement the ambassador had been told the presence of armed Israeli security forces and the arrest of the French officials at the site were “unacceptable”, especially between allies with strong ties.
“Measures will be put in place to ensure that such acts do not recur”, it said without elaborating.
Israel’s foreign ministry has said that every visiting foreign leader is accompanied by its security personnel, a point that had been “clarified in advance in the preparatory dialogue with the French Embassy in Israel”.
Diplomatic relations between France and Israel have worsened since President Emmanuel Macron called for an end to the supply to Israel of offensive weapons used in Gaza.
The French government also attempted to ban Israeli weapons firms from exhibiting at a trade fair in Paris and has become increasingly uneasy over Israel’s conduct in the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
The relationship will be tested again this week. Separate pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel rallies are due to be held on Wednesday in Paris, while France’s soccer team hosts Israel on Thursday amid major security concerns a week after incidents following a match in Amsterdam.
Israel says it is pushing to get aid into Gaza before US deadline
The Israeli military said on Tuesday it had delivered hundreds of packets of food to cut-off areas of northern Gaza as fighting raged ahead of a US deadline for Israel to get more aid into the Palestinian enclave or face cuts in military assistance.
Palestinian medics said at least 37 people had been killed in Israeli strikes in several parts of the Gaza Strip overnight and into Tuesday, including 10 people killed in a house in Beit Hanoun and two others in the nearby town of Beit Lahiya.
Four Israeli soldiers were killed in northern Gaza, the military said.
Later on Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed 11 Palestinians in Rafah, said medics. A strike on a house in the Gaza City suburb of Sabra killed a Hamas leader in the city, Waleed Aweida, and his granddaughter. Three other people including his wife were still under the rubble.
For more than a month, Israeli troops have been laying siege to the northern end of Gaza in a push the military says is aimed at squeezing out Hamas militants reforming in the area around the town of Jabalia.
The military says it has killed or captured hundreds of fighters but Israel has faced growing international pressure over the disastrous humanitarian situation facing civilians who have been largely cut off from aid for weeks.
“We are witnessing alarming cases of malnutrition among both children and adults. We are struggling to provide even one meal a day for our hospital workers amidst severe food and medical supply shortages,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
“We are losing lives every day due to the lack of specialised care and resources,” he added.
This week, the outgoing U.S. administration is expected to judge whether Israel has done enough to meet a demand issued last month to get more aid flowing into Gaza.
Last week, a committee of global food security experts warned of a strong likelihood that famine was imminent in certain areas of northern Gaza, a claim that Israel rejected.
On Tuesday, the military said it had opened a fifth crossing into Gaza, one of the US demands, which it said would help get food, water, medical supplies, and shelter equipment to central and southern Gaza.
It said hundreds of food packages and thousands of litres of water had been delivered a day earlier to distribution centres for civilians in the area of Beit Hanoun, on Gaza’s northern edge.
It said 741 trucks of aid had been delivered into northern Gaza through the Erez crossing since October, while 244 patients had been evacuated for treatment. International aid groups said the effort fell short of what would be needed and Israel’s military operation in northern Gaza had worsened the situation.
Even as the military announced the deliveries, prospects of an agreement to halt the fighting appeared as distant as ever with the imminent return of Trump as US president giving a lift to hardliners in the Israeli government.
Outgoing President Joe Biden has offered strong backing to Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. But as the toll from Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza has mounted, relations with Netanyahu’s government have been increasingly fraught.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year and Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble where more than two million Gazans seek shelter as best they can.
Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fuelled accusations from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.
On Tuesday, residents said Israeli tanks advanced deeper in Beit Hanoun and besieged four displaced families before ordering them to leave towards Gaza City.
The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. Hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back.
Israel’s strategic affairs minister reportedly meets with Trump
Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Dermer met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, reported Axios on Monday, citing two Israeli officials and two US. officials.
The Sunday meeting at Trump’s Florida estate between the president-elect and Dermer, a close aide of Netanyahu, preceded a meeting between the Israeli minister and Blinken on Monday.
Axios reported that Dermer passed messages from Netanyahu to Trump. He also briefed Trump on Israel’s plans for Gaza, Lebanon and Iran for the next two months before Trump takes office, according to the report.
Axios said Dermer additionally met with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was a top adviser on the Middle East during Trump’s 2017-2021 administration.
Netanyahu said on Sunday he had spoken with Trump three times in the prior few days to tighten the alliance between Israel and the US. DM
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