Israeli airstrikes killed at least 31 people in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, said Palestinian medics, with nearly half of the deaths in northern areas where the army has waged a month-long campaign it says aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
A suspected leak of classified Gaza documents involving an aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has jolted Israeli politics and outraged the families of hostages held by Hamas who have been pushing for a deal to get their loved ones home.
Israeli troops recently detained an individual in Syria it said was an Iranian operative who had gathered intelligence on Israeli troops in the border area, said the Israeli military on Sunday.
Israeli airstrikes kill at least 31 people in Gaza
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 31 people in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, said Palestinian medics, with nearly half of the deaths in northern areas where the army has waged a month-long campaign it says aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
Palestinians said the new aerial and ground offensives and forced evacuations were “ethnic cleansing” aimed at emptying two northern Gaza towns and a refugee camp of their population to create buffer zones. Israel denies this, saying it is fighting Hamas militants who launch attacks from there.
Medics said at least 13 Palestinians were killed in separate attacks on houses in Beit Lahiya town and Jabalia, the largest of the enclave’s eight historic camps and the focus of the army’s new offensive.
The rest were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City and in southern areas, including one in Khan Younis, which health officials said had killed eight people, including four children.
Later on Sunday, health officials at the Kamal Adwan Hospital near Beit Lahiya said the facility came under Israeli tank fire and that a child was critically wounded.
Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital’s director, said the incident took place after a delegation from the World Health Organization visited the facility and evacuated some patients.
He said while evacuating the wounded was important, it was more important to dispatch specialised medical teams to north Gaza hospitals that have become overwhelmed by the number of casualties.
Abu Safiya said the tank fire hit the water supplies, the courtyard and the neonatal intensive care unit. The Israeli military said it was checking the report.
On Saturday, the Israeli military sent a new army division to Jabalia to join two other operating battalions, a statement said. It said that hundreds of Palestinian soldiers had been killed in the “battles” since the raid began on 5 October.
Meanwhile, Cogat, the Israeli army’s Palestinian civilian affairs agency, said it facilitated the launch of the second round of a polio vaccination campaign in northern Gaza on Saturday and that 58,604 children had received a dose.
The Gaza health ministry said Israel’s military offensive in northern Gaza was stopping them from vaccinating thousands of children in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.
It said one clinic had come under Israeli fire while parents brought their children for the anti-polio dose on Saturday and that four children had been injured.
The head of the World Health Organization said in a statement the clinic incident took place despite a humanitarian pause agreed upon by the two warring parties, Israel and Hamas, to allow the vaccination campaign.
“A @WHO team was at the site just before. This attack, during a humanitarian pause, jeopardises the sanctity of health protection for children and may deter parents from bringing their children for vaccination,” said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a post on X on Saturday.
“These vital humanitarian-area-specific pauses must be absolutely respected. Ceasefire!” he said.
The war erupted after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s retaliatory offensives have killed more than 43,300 Palestinians and reduced most of Gaza to rubble.
Israeli authorities probe suspected Gaza intelligence leak by Netanyahu aide
A suspected leak of classified Gaza documents involving an aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has jolted Israeli politics and outraged the families of hostages held by Hamas who have been pushing for a deal to get their loved ones home.
Details of the case have been trickling out only slowly because of a gag order.
But a court ruling partially lifting the order has provided an initial glimpse of the case which the court said had compromised security sources and may have harmed Israel’s war effort.
On Friday, the magistrates’ court confirmed that a number of suspects had been arrested as part of the probe into a suspected “security breach caused by the illegal provision of classified information”.
Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing by his office and staffers and said in a statement on Saturday that he was made aware of the leaked document only by the media. The suspects could not be reached for comment.
Details from the document in question were published by the German Bild newspaper on 6 September, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, one of the media outlets that had appealed to the court to lift the gag order.
The article, labelled as an exclusive, purportedly outlined the negotiation strategy of Hamas.
Around that time, the US, Qatar and Egypt were mediating ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, that were to include a deal to release hostages held in Gaza.
But the talks faltered with Israel and Hamas trading blame for the deadlock. The article in question largely corresponded with Netanyahu’s allegations against Hamas over the impasse.
It was published days after six Israeli hostages were found executed in a Hamas tunnel in southern Gaza. Their killing sparked mass protests in Israel and outraged hostage families, who accused Netanyahu of torpedoing the ceasefire talks for political reasons.
On Saturday, some of the families joined the Israeli journalists’ appeal to lift the gag order.
“These people have been living on a roller coaster of rumours and half-truths,” said their lawyer, Dana Pugach.
“For the last year, they have been waiting to hear any intelligence or any information about negotiations for the release of those hostages. If some of that information had been stolen from army sources then we think that the families have the right to learn about any relevant detail,” she added.
Israeli troops ‘detained Iranian operative in Syria’
Israeli troops recently detained an individual in Syria it said was an Iranian operative who had gathered intelligence on Israeli troops in the border area, said the Israeli military on Sunday.
The military named the person as Ali Soleiman al-Assi, a Syrian citizen from the area of Saida in southern Syria. It said the operation took place in recent months, but gave no exact date.
“The operation by Israel Defense Forces troops to detain al-Assi prevented a future attack and led to the exposure of the operational methods of Iranian terror networks located near the Golan Heights,” said the military.
Iran concerned about possible Trump victory
Iran’s leadership and allies are bracing for what they would regard as a dreadful outcome of the imminent US presidential election: A return to power of Donald Trump.
Opinion polls suggest the Republican Trump and Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris remain locked in a close contest. But Iranian leaders and their regional allies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen are concerned that Trump could well triumph on Tuesday and this could spell more trouble for them.
Iran’s main concern is the potential for Trump to empower Netanyahu to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, conduct targeted assassinations and reimpose his “maximum pressure policy” through heightened sanctions on their oil industry, according to Iranian, Arab and Western officials.
They anticipate that Trump, who was president from 2017-21, will exert the utmost pressure on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to cave in by accepting a nuclear containment deal on terms set by himself and Israel.
This potential change in US leadership could have far-reaching implications for the Middle East balance of power and might reshape Iran’s foreign policy and economic prospects.
Analysts argue that whether the next US administration is led by Harris or Trump, Iran will lack the leverage it once held — largely due to Israel’s year-old military campaign aimed at degrading the Islamic Republic’s armed proxies, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
However, Trump’s stance is perceived as more detrimental to Iran due to his more automatic support for Israel, they added.
“Trump will either put very tough conditions on Iran or let Israel carry out targeted strikes on its nuclear facilities. He is fully endorsing a military action against Iran,” said Abdelaziz al-Sagher, head of the Gulf Research Center think tank.
“It’s Netanyahu’s dream day to have Trump back in the White House,” he said.
A senior Iranian official, who declined to be named, said Tehran was “prepared for all scenarios. We have [for decades] consistently found ways to export oil, bypassing harsh US sanctions … and have strengthened our ties with the rest of the world no matter who was in the White House.”
But another Iranian official said a Trump victory would be “a nightmare. He will raise pressure on Iran to please Israel … make sure oil sanctions are fully enforced. If so, [our] establishment will be economically paralysed.”
In an election speech in October, Trump stated his unwillingness to go to war with Iran, but said Israel should “hit the Iranian nuclear first and worry about the rest later”, in response to Iran’s missile attack on Israel on 1 October.
US believes Iranian-American journalist is detained in Iran
Reza Valizadeh, an Iranian-American journalist who once worked for a US government-funded broadcaster, is believed to have been detained by Iran for some months, the Associated Press reported on Sunday, citing authorities.
The imprisonment of Valizadeh was acknowledged to the Associated Press by the US State Department, said the news agency.
Valizadeh previously worked for Radio Farda, an outlet under Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that is overseen by the US Agency for Global Media, the AP said.
Rockets from Lebanon wound 11 in Israel
Rockets fired from Lebanon wounded 11 people in central Israel on Saturday, said Israeli emergency services, after one of them hit a house, as prospects for a ceasefire dimmed.
“We went out and saw dust, children screaming, women screaming and everyone went to the house that was struck,” said Qasim Mohab, a resident of Tira, where the rocket hit. “We were able to evacuate and rescue those who were inside the house, and thank God we were blessed that there was no one killed.”
Around the time the rockets hit, Hezbollah said it had targeted a military base on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Israel’s ambulance service said that 11 people were hurt by shrapnel. Air raid sirens continued to sound in northern Israel as rocket fire and drone attacks from Lebanon continued, said the military.
On Friday, Lebanon’s health ministry said 52 people were killed in Israeli strikes on more than a dozen towns in the Baalbek region, which has Unesco-listed Roman ruins.
The Israeli military said on Saturday it had killed two Hezbollah commanders in the area of Tyre on Friday. There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah.
Iran-backed Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas a day after Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. DM
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