Israeli officials were insisting on maintaining a capacity to strike Lebanon at any moment as part of conditions to secure a ceasefire with Iran-backed Hezbollah, said France’s foreign minister on Wednesday.
An Israeli attack targeted the area of Qusayr in the southern countryside of Homs province in central Syria, said Syria’s state media on Wednesday.
Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave
Israel ‘wants freedom to strike Lebanon even after ceasefire’ - French minister
Israeli officials were insisting on maintaining a capacity to strike Lebanon at any moment as part of conditions to secure a ceasefire with Iran-backed Hezbollah, said France’s foreign minister on Wednesday.
Speaking to a parliamentary hearing after holding talks in Israel last week in Jerusalem, Jean-Noel Barrot said it was a condition increasingly voiced among Israeli officials.
“Today we hear in Israel voices calling for it to keep a capacity to strike at any moment or even enter Lebanon, as is the case with its neighbour Syria,” said Barrot, who held talks with Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and new Defense Minister Israel Katz last week.
“That is not compatible with the sovereignty of a strong country,” said Barrot, referring to broader efforts to help strengthen Lebanon’s governance.
Several diplomats said that it would be all but impossible to get Hezbollah or Lebanon to accept any proposal that included this demand.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the remarks. Katz said earlier: “We will not allow any arrangement that does not include the achievement of the war’s objectives — and above all Israel’s right to enforce and act on its own against any terrorist activity.”
France, which has historical ties with Lebanon, has sought to play a role in trying to secure a ceasefire in the Middle Eastern country.
It has worked with the US to try to implement a temporary ceasefire, but those talks stalled at the end of September.
Israeli attack targets Syria’s Homs countryside
An Israeli attack targeted the area of Qusayr in the southern countryside of Homs province in central Syria, said Syria’s state media on Wednesday.
Israel says it has been carrying out strikes to reduce the transfer of weapons from Iran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which it said had spread to the town of Al-Qusayr, near the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Syrian media said that air defences intercepted “hostile” targets over the Homs countryside.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has ramped up such raids since the 7 October 2023 attack by the militant group Hamas on Israel.
Israeli forces kill 22 people in Gaza, force new displacement
Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave.
Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.
Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue towards Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said.
Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fuelled claims from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.
“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” said Saed (48), a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.
“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.
Saed was referring to the 1948 Middle East Arab-Israeli war which gave birth to the state of Israel and saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their hometowns and villages in what is now Israel.
The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and Prime Minister Benjamin 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 said its forces had killed hundreds of Hamas militants in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun during its new military offensive, which began more than a month ago. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad armed wing claimed killing several Israeli soldiers during ambushes and anti-tank rocket fire.
Speaking on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel “has accomplished the goals that it set for itself” by taking out Hamas’ leadership and ensuring the group was unable to launch another massive attack. “This should be a time to end the war,” he said.
“We also need to make sure we have a plan for what follows,” he said, “so that if Israel decides to end the war and we find a way to get the hostages out, we also have a clear plan so that Israel can get out of Gaza and we make sure that Hamas is not going back in.”
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Blinken’s comments showed: “We are facing one enemy and that the US enmity against the Palestinian people is no less than that of the occupation.”
Medics said five people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit a group of people outside Kamal Adwan Hospital near Beit Lahiya, while five others were killed in two separate strikes in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip where the army began a limited raid two days ago.
In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, one man was killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike, while three Palestinians were killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes in the Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, added medics.
Later on Wednesday, an Israeli strike on a house in western Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip killed eight people, said medics.
Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, say Palestinian health officials, and Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble, where more than two million Gazans are seeking shelter in makeshift tents and facing shortages of food and medicines.
Israel ups airstrikes as Beirut awaits truce ideas
Israeli airstrikes pounded Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs for a second consecutive day on Wednesday, as Lebanon waited to hear Washington’s latest ceasefire proposals after a US official expressed hope a truce could be reached.
More than seven weeks since Israel went on the offensive against Iran-backed Hezbollah, midmorning airstrikes levelled half a dozen buildings in the Beirut suburb known as Dahiyeh and killed eight people in Dawhit Aramoun, a village south of the capital. The dead included three women and three children, said Lebanon’s health ministry.
“They used to hit Dahiyeh at night, now they are doing it in daytime. Things are intensifying day after day,” said Hassan Moussa (40), speaking in Beirut, adding that Israeli airstrikes had also widened to areas such as Aramoun.
Israel launched a major air and ground offensive against the heavily armed Hezbollah in late September after nearly a year of cross-border conflict fought in parallel with the Gaza war.
The Israeli military said its air force had destroyed nine Hezbollah weapons storage facilities and command centres in strikes in the Beirut area, and that Hezbollah fired 40 projectiles into Israel on Wednesday.
It said later that a heavy barrage of rockets was fired from Lebanon at Israel, where sirens sounded in the central areas. There were no immediate reports of any damage or casualties.
White House envoy Amos Hochstein, the US official who has led several fruitless attempts to broker a ceasefire over the last year, told Axios that he thought “there is a shot” at a truce in Lebanon soon. “I am hopeful we can get it.”
There were no immediate reports of casualties in Wednesday’s Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, which residents have been largely evacuated.
The Israeli military earlier issued a statement on social media saying it would act soon against targets in the area, warning residents they were located near Hezbollah facilities.
Israel questions ICC judge’s impartiality in Netanyahu arrest warrant case
Israel has questioned the impartiality of an International Criminal Court (ICC) judge appointed to a panel deciding whether an arrest warrant should be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The move could further delay a decision in the case, in which the ICC chief prosecutor filed a request in May for arrest warrants against Netanyahu, Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders over the Gaza war.
The request requires the approval of ICC judges but their decision has been delayed, partly because of several rounds of legal filings by Israel challenging the court’s jurisdiction.
In a further delay, Romanian magistrate Iulia Motoc, citing health grounds, asked last month to leave the three-judge panel that is reviewing the request for arrest warrants. She has been replaced by ICC Judge Beti Hohler, who is Slovenian.
The Office of the Attorney-General of Israel said in a statement, dated 11 November and seen by Reuters on Wednesday, that Hohler had worked for the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) before she was elected as an ICC judge last December.
“Israel respectfully requests that Judge Beti Hohler provide information to clarify whether there are (or are not) grounds to reasonably doubt her impartiality,” it said.
“Israel does not suggest that Judge Hohler’s previous employment with the OTP necessarily or automatically gives rise to a reasonable apprehension of a lack of impartiality,” it said. “However, judges of this court have acknowledged that previous duties within the OTP may, depending on the circumstances, give rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias.”
Filing the request for arrest warrants in May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor said there were reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu, Gallant and the three Hamas leaders had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. All three Hamas leaders are now dead or believed to be dead.
The court has not set deadlines, but has generally taken about three months to rule on requests for arrest warrants in previous cases.
Hezbollah says it launched attack on military base in Tel Aviv
Lebanon’s Iran-aligned Hezbollah said on Wednesday that it had launched an attack on Tel Aviv’s Hakirya military base, for the first time with drones; however, there were no warning sirens heard and no immediate reports of any impact in a busy area of the city.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on Hezbollah’s statement.
Hezbollah had made no further claims about any outcome around an hour after it first reported it had launched the attack.
The base, which is the military and government’s centre in Tel Aviv, hosts the headquarters of several military entities including the war cabinet.
Entire generation in Gaza will lose education if Unrwa collapses - UN
An entire generation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip would “be denied the right to education” if the United Nations Palestinian relief agency Unrwa collapsed in the enclave under new Israeli legislation, the head of Unrwa warned on Wednesday.
Israel’s parliament passed a law last month that will ban Unrwa from operating in the country when it takes effect in late January. Unrwa Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said its implementation “will have catastrophic consequences”.
“In Gaza, dismantling Unrwa will collapse the United Nations humanitarian response, which relies heavily on the agency’s infrastructure,” he told a UN General Assembly committee.
“Glaringly absent from discussions about Gaza without Unrwa, is education. In the absence of a capable public administration or state, only Unrwa can deliver education to more than 660,000 girls and boys across Gaza. In the absence of Unrwa, an entire generation will be denied the right to education,” he said, warning that this would sow “the seeds for marginalisation and extremism”.
Unrwa was established in 1949 following the war surrounding the founding of Israel in the previous year. It provides aid, health and education to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
Israel’s ally the US has described the role of Unrwa in Gaza as “indispensable”. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said on Tuesday that it was of urgent importance that Israel pause implementation of the law.
However, the legislation is due to take effect in late January, just days after US President-elect Donald Trump takes office for a second four-year term. If his first term is any indication, Trump is likely to pursue a strongly pro-Israel approach, going even beyond the solid support given by President Joe Biden.
Pro-Palestinian protesters again defy Amsterdam ban
Pro-Palestinian protesters rallied in central Amsterdam on Wednesday, defying a ban imposed after violence stemming from a soccer match between Ajax and Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Dozens of demonstrators, some with Palestinian flags, chanted “Amsterdam is saying no to genocide” and “Free Palestine”.
Police with expanded stop-and-search powers in the Dutch capital have detained or removed hundreds of demonstrators since last week’s clashes under emergency measures imposed until Thursday.
Amsterdam’s police department said Maccabi fans attacked a taxi, burned a Palestinian flag and were chased down and beaten by anti-Israeli gangs on scooters after an online appeal to taxi drivers. Five people were treated for injuries and released from hospitals. Police escorted hundreds of Maccabi fans to their hotels.
Israeli and Dutch politicians have denounced the attacks as anti-Semitic and recalled the persecution of Jews during World War Two. Pro-Palestinians countered that they responded to an attack by the Maccabi supporters and provocative anti-Arab chants.
Four out of 62 suspects detained during the violence, which included 10 Israelis, remain in custody. Police are still looking for suspects.
The Netherlands has seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents since the Gaza war began in October last year.
Less than 1% of Amsterdam’s population is Jewish following the Holocaust, while around 15% is Muslim, mostly second and first-generation immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. DM
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