Israel’s army said it killed five gunmen at their hideout in a West Bank mosque, adding to the death toll from an unusually large military operation in the Palestinian territory.
Israel would allow for partial humanitarian pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip for the United Nations to carry out a vaccination campaign against polio, said a senior UN official.
Iran’s nuclear fuel levels rose over the last three months, the United Nations watchdog said, potentially ratcheting up tensions that have threatened to spill into a regional war.
Israel kills Palestinian gunmen in extended West Bank push
Israel’s army said it killed five gunmen at their hideout in a West Bank mosque, adding to the death toll from an unusually large military operation in the Palestinian territory.
The campaign that kicked off with a series of attacks in northern West Bank towns on Wednesday has been mounted in parallel to the almost 11-month-old war with Hamas in Gaza, raising concerns internationally about the spread of violence.
Read more: Israel carries out deadly West Bank raids as tensions rise
“The Israeli major military operation in the occupied West Bank must not constitute the premises of a war extension from Gaza,” Josep Borrell, the top European Union diplomat, said on X.
He was responding to Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who said some West Bank operations could require the evacuation of Palestinian civilians. The military actions were in response to an Iranian effort to “establish an eastern terror front” by funding and smuggling arms to combatants, he said. Iran is in favour of arming the West Bank, according to the website of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
Israel has already ordered hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to make way for military operations in Gaza, another Palestinian territory, many of whom remain displaced as their homes have been destroyed.
While standing by its ally Israel in the campaign against Hamas, the US has sought to rein in the practice of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, which is partly controlled by the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority. On Wednesday, the State Department announced new sanctions related to violence by settlers that forced some Palestinians off their land.
The US measures angered Israel’s religious-nationalist government, which leans on settler support.
“Israel views with utmost severity the imposition of sanctions on citizens of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement, adding that a “pointed discussion with the US” was under way.
The US misgivings were echoed in Berlin, where a spokesperson for Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he had spoken to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi about the issue. The two leaders were “united in their rejection of illegal settlement construction and their clear condemnation of extremist settler violence and any attempt to expel people from the Palestinian territories”, the spokesperson said.
Israel regards the West Bank as a security bulwark as well as the Jewish biblical heartland. Having been blindsided by the deadly 7 October invasion by Hamas that triggered the Gaza war, Israelis worry that Iran-backed fighters are similarly building up capabilities in the West Bank for future attacks. The territory is close to the greater Tel Aviv area.
Meanwhile, Israel remains in a tense standoff with Lebanon-based Hezbollah, the most powerful of Iran’s allied militia groups. Near daily cross-border exchanges of fire have driven out tens of thousands of civilians on both sides, and last Sunday a wide-scale Israeli bombing sortie to take out Hezbollah rocket launchers threatened to escalate the situation.
Read more: Israel bombs southern Lebanon to thwart Hezbollah revenge attack
“It is not the end of the story,” Netanyahu told troops on the Lebanese border on Wednesday. “When will that be? Only when we are able to restore security and the residents to their homes.”
As the Gaza and Lebanon fighting has ground on, the West Bank has seen a steady increase in Israeli raids on Palestinian towns.
The latest began early on Wednesday, with a focus on Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm, which are close to the northern boundary with Israel. The Palestinian health ministry said 16 Palestinians had been killed, with Israeli forces remaining in Jenin and Tulkarm, though they had withdrawn from Tubas.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa told all local authorities to “strengthen their emergency interventions to confront the ongoing aggression,” according to a statement.
In Tulkarm, troops killed five Palestinian gunmen, one of them a local commander named Muhhamad Jaber, in a clash at a mosque where they had been hiding, the military said on Thursday. The Palestinian health ministry tally didn’t immediately include those five fatalities.
One Israeli soldier was wounded in the exchange of fire, the military added.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said more than 650 West Bank Palestinians had been killed since October and 5,400 injured before this week’s operation. Movement restrictions have further exacerbated problems in the territory, limiting access to essential health services.
The economic situation in the West Bank has deteriorated dramatically since last October. More than 178,000 Palestinian workers have lost their jobs after being banned from entering Israel for security reasons. Many worked on Israeli construction sites.
Israel to allow polio vaccination campaign during war, says UN
Israel would allow for partial humanitarian pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip for the United Nations to carry out a vaccination campaign against polio, said a senior UN official.
Israeli officials had agreed to a three-day pause in central Gaza starting on 1 September, the day the UN will begin its inoculation campaign in Gaza, Rik Peeperkorn, who oversees Gaza operations for the World Health Organization, told reporters on Thursday.
That should be followed by a three-day pause in the south of Gaza and then another in the north, he said. The truce would cover only limited hours, from 6am local time into the afternoon.
Humanitarian groups have been working to start inoculations after traces of a polio virus variant were found in local water sources last month. A 10-month-old baby was diagnosed with the paralysing disease last week in Gaza, which the WHO said has been polio-free for at least 25 years.
Israel’s liaison agency for Palestinian civilians, Cogat, described the pauses as consistent with past, localised halts to operations aimed at facilitating humanitarian relief. Its statement didn’t elaborate on the timing or duration of the pauses.
The WHO has a goal of vaccinating 90% of Gaza’s young children — 640,000 in all — by the end of the campaign. If that goal isn’t met in the first nine days, the UN has been in touch with Israel about extending the pause for another day in each region, said Peeperkorn. A second round of vaccinations will be needed four weeks after the first doses.
Iran’s nuclear stockpile grows amid simmering Israel tension
Iran’s nuclear fuel levels rose over the past three months, the United Nations watchdog said, potentially ratcheting up tensions that have threatened to spill into a regional war.
Monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported on Thursday that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium increased by 16% between June and August, according to a 13-page restricted report circulated among diplomats and seen by Bloomberg. That’s enough to fuel a handful of warheads, should Iran make a political decision to pursue weapons.
“The continued production and accumulation of high enriched uranium by Iran, the only non-nuclear weapon state to do so, adds to the agency’s concerns” said IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi in the report, also noting that the country continued to stonewall monitoring.
The IAEA’s safeguards report was the first since new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was elected in July. The reformist leader has said he’s keen to revive diplomacy over the country’s nuclear work, even as Middle East observers voice concern over a potential military clash with Israel.
Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and tit-for-tat missile strikes with Tehran-backed Hezbollah have added urgency to the IAEA’s years-long search to uncover the scope of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Concerns of a regional war grew after the Islamic Republic blamed Israel for the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July, vowing to retaliate. Israel hasn’t taken responsibility for the assassination.
While the IAEA carries out daily inspections of declared atomic facilities, suspicions linger over whether Iranian engineers could be concealing work used for military purposes. Tehran has blocked the agency’s investigation into uranium particles detected at undeclared locations.
Threat of war with Israel redefines ‘normal’ life in Beirut
The glass panels shuddered as the two explosions reverberated through the shopping mall. A few people started running to the exit, but most stayed put. It was only Israeli planes breaking the sound barrier, they said to each other. Barely anyone reacted when there was a third.
“We thought this was it, the war had started,” Leila, who owns a beauty parlour next to the mall on the outskirts of Beirut, recalled as she filed the nails of a customer. But any dip in business would be short-lived, she said. “You’ll see, Lebanese people will be back out and everything will go back to normal.”
Beirut is used to living with the threat of war, and this was a couple of weeks ago. That threat is now getting more acute after Israel launched a preemptive attack on southern Lebanon. But for many in the city, recent events have just been the latest version of normality.
Lebanon has been waiting for war since October, when Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah began firing at Israel because of the war in Gaza, itself a response to Hamas’ assault on the Jewish state. The two sides have been trading fire along the border, exchanges that could spiral into a bigger, broader conflict involving global as well as regional powers.
That prospect became more real last Sunday when Israel dispatched 100 warplanes to take out Hezbollah missile launchers and, officials said, thwart a planned assault by the group to avenge an earlier attack.
Israel struck Beirut’s southern suburbs at the end of July and killed the military chief of Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organisation by the US and UK. Hours later, Iran blamed Israel for killing Hamas’s political head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Since the assassinations, the world has been bracing for the repercussions. Flights were suspended in and out of Lebanon and countries including the US, UK, France and Gulf states told their citizens to leave.
But for Leila and others in Beirut, it was a case of adding it all to the list of worries. Their economy is still reeling from a financial meltdown in 2019 and then a massive explosion at Beirut’s port a year later. The currency is shaky, unemployment hit almost 50% and infrastructure is crumbling.
On 17 August, state-run power firm Électricité du Liban said it had run out of fuel. An ensuing blackout hit Beirut airport, ports and prisons.
Lebanese make fun of themselves and their definition of “normal” on social media. A meme circulating online summed up their way of living, showing the branded bottle of Absolut Vodka with the words “Absolut denial” instead.
You have to be in your 40s to have much memory of the civil war that made Beirut a byword for Middle East conflict, but the country remained a tinderbox. There was tension with Syria and regular exchanges with Israel, as well as the sporadic sectarian strife that has defined the country for decades.
George Beshara, a contractor who lives in the district of Matn, dropped out of school during the civil war and also remembers dodging parts of the city in 2006 when Israel hit the airport and port in response to a Hezbollah attack over the border.
“Lebanon has always been like that,” said Beshara. “If Israel goes for war, it’d be for a couple of days and then it’ll be over.”
That sanguine attitude, though, contrasts with people who had more of a choice. Days after the Israeli strike, barely anything changed as the Lebanese diaspora, one of the largest in the world, flocked for the summer season.
Tourist arrivals were up by more than 100% in June compared with the same month last year. The lights emanating from Sky Bar, one of the most popular nightclubs in the Middle East, lit up the Beirut night. Many others had to turn people away. Cars lined up to get into clubs a few kilometres down the coast from Beirut. Scheduled concerts went ahead.
Then the threat of all-out war and travel warnings snuffed out any hope that tourist income would exceed the $5-billion to $7-billion recorded last year, according to the minister responsible for the economy.
“Welcome to the Lebanese expatriate, the backbone of the economy,” read posters glued to several buildings along a highway leading to downtown Beirut. Visitors would have passed them as they joined long queues at the airport, with stories of skyrocketing prices for tickets back to Europe and the US.
Ali, a staunch 50-year-old supporter of Amal Movement, Hezbollah’s main ally, drives his taxi through Beirut’s southern suburbs, one of Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.
When he passed through after the Israeli missiles hit, Ali saw barely any traffic for the first time in years. “People got scared and moved out,” he said. A picture of his brother in military fatigues is fixed on the blades of his car’s air conditioning. He died in an airstrike in southern Lebanon earlier this year.
Israeli assaults on that region near the border and elsewhere have so far killed at least 500 people, mostly Hezbollah fighters, based on local estimates. In Israel, roughly 30 soldiers and 18 civilians have been killed by Hezbollah attacks, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
Entering Beirut, a billboard shows an image of a child with torn clothes looking at a destroyed building and reads “Enough, we’re exhausted,” with a hashtag “Lebanon does not want war.”
Bashir, a 43-year-old father of two, belongs to a significant portion of society that believes the problem is Hezbollah, which holds great sway over political life in Lebanon and is better armed than the Lebanese military.
Leader Hassan Nasrallah said that his group, whose ultimate goal is to destroy Israel, has contained the conflict on the border for the sake of the Lebanese against calls from Palestinians to escalate further.
“Who is he to make a decision to go to war on my behalf?” said Bashir, who, like Leila, declined to be identified by his full name. “I didn’t ask for this.”
Bashir still makes his way 120km from Beirut to south Lebanon every week to check on his house near the border. Many people in that area have grown used to the sounds of the strikes. They’re now normal, he said. DM
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