US pushes for Gaza ceasefire despite killing of Hamas leader; Israel arbitrarily torturing Palestinians — UN

Israel had arbitrarily detained thousands of Palestinians since the start of its war with Hamas, subjecting many to “deplorable conditions” that included torture and sexual violence, according to a new United Nations report.

Israel demonstrated its willingness to risk retaliation after the targeting within a few hours of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders abroad raised the prospect of a regional conflagration.

US to push for Gaza ceasefire despite killing of top Hamas leader

US officials were still pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza, but conceded it was harder than ever after a suspected Israeli strike killed a top Hamas leader in Tehran, according to people familiar with the Biden administration’s thinking.

The viability of the monthslong US effort to secure a pause in the Israel-Hamas war and free Israeli hostages was thrown into question overnight after a missile strike in Tehran killed Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s political chief and a key representative during rounds of so-far futile negotiations.

“This attack, while justified, will be a setback for talks,” said Emily Harding, former director for Iran on the US National Security Council and now an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Israel has been under tremendous pressure to bring home the remaining hostages, so they must have calculated that the operational benefit of killing Haniyeh was greater than the prospect of a successful hostage exchange.”

Key Arab nations involved in the ceasefire talks also said the killing complicated efforts to secure a truce between Israel and Hamas, which the US has designated a terrorist organisation.

Egypt, which has acted as a mediator, said the timing and lack of progress on the talks indicated “the absence of Israeli political will to calm the situation”.

The prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, posted on X: “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”

Israel hasn’t officially claimed responsibility for the killing of Haniyeh. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has vowed to eliminate every Hamas official since the 7 October attack that triggered the war in Gaza.

Pursuing a ceasefire deal has been the Biden administration’s policy for months, and the administration doesn’t appear to have an alternative path.

“I can tell you that the imperative of getting a ceasefire — the importance that has for everyone — remains,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with Channel News Asia on Wednesday, adding that the US wasn’t informed of the strike in advance. “We will continue to labour at that for as long as it takes to get there.”

John Kirby, the US National Security Council spokesperson, told reporters that “we’re obviously concerned about escalation”, although “We don’t believe that an escalation is inevitable, and there’s no sign that an escalation is imminent.”

He said, “It’s too soon to know what any of these reported events could mean for the ceasefire deal” and it “doesn’t mean we’re going to stop working on it”.

Limiting the risks of wider escalation will be a challenge. The killing came just hours after an Israeli strike that it said killed one of Hezbollah’s top leaders in Beirut, increasing the prospect of a wider war in the Middle East.

On Wednesday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke of retaliation, vowing that Israel had “prepared the ground for its severe punishment”.

In April, after Israel killed two Iranian generals in the Syrian capital Damascus, Tehran fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, its first direct attack. Israel and its allies including the US blocked most of the incoming fire.

The latest assassinations are likely to further fuel criticism in the US and elsewhere that Israel’s leaders are avoiding a truce for domestic political reasons.

Israel arbitrarily jailing, torturing Palestinians, says UN

Israel had arbitrarily detained thousands of Palestinians since the start of its war with Hamas, subjecting many to “deplorable conditions” that included torture and sexual violence, according to a new United Nations report.

The majority of arrests carried out by Israeli forces in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank since the 7 October attacks by Hamas appeared to be “fundamentally punitive”, the UN’s human rights office said. Most detainees were held in secret for prolonged periods without any information on why they had been arrested or any contact with their family members, it said.

The issue of how Palestinian detainees are treated has triggered domestic turmoil in Israel this week after protests broke out against the arrest of soldiers suspected of abusing a prisoner. It led to a clash within the administration, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant accusing far-right government colleagues of undermining the nation’s war effort by encouraging the demonstrations.

“Concrete complaints regarding inappropriate behaviour on the part of the correctional staff are forwarded to the relevant authorities and dealt with accordingly,” a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces said in a written statement in response to a question about the report.

“Investigations are opened in cases in which suspicion of misconduct requires the IDF to do so.”

Israel has been carrying out an offensive in Gaza since Hamas invaded the country on 7 October, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to the health ministry run by Hamas.

While conditions faced by Palestinians in Israeli custody before the war in Gaza were “already of serious concern”, the situation “worsened dramatically thereafter”, the UN said. At least 53 detainees have died in Israeli facilities since 7 October and many had reported that they were subject to beatings, sexual violence and starvation, according to the study.

The testimonies gathered by the UN represent a “flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”, said Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief. He called for an independent and transparent investigation into the findings and urged Israel to release all Palestinians who have been arbitrarily detained.

Strikes on Israel’s enemies in Tehran, Beirut raise tension

Israel demonstrated its willingness to risk retaliation after the targeting within a few hours of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders abroad raised the prospect of a regional conflagration.

Israeli officials said the killing of Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Beirut late on Tuesday was a response to a rocket attack last weekend from Lebanon that claimed the lives of a dozen children and teenagers playing football in the Golan Heights. Hezbollah confirmed his death on Wednesday.

The Israeli government didn’t officially claim responsibility for the subsequent slaying in a Tehran guest house of Haniyeh, the political chief of Hamas. But neither did it issue a denial. Privately, its officials did nothing to push back against the claim.

“It’s part of Israel’s long-term counter-terrorism paradigm that you go after the leaders of terror organisations,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a think-tank focused on political reform and critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “There’s a broad consensus among Israelis that all those who perpetrated the 7 October massacre should cease to exist.”

Netanyahu said in a televised address on Wednesday that “there are challenging times ahead.

“Since the attack in Beirut, threats have been heard from all directions,” he said. “We are prepared for any scenario and will stand united and determined against any threat,” he said. “Israel will exact a very heavy price for aggression against us from any arena.” He made no mention of Israel’s attack in Tehran.

But the risks appear steep. Negotiations under way with Hamas to free hostages and impose a ceasefire on the nearly 10-month-old war in Gaza already seemed to be slowing, and may now stall if not break down.

Regarding Hezbollah, the US-led diplomacy aimed at getting it to stop firing missiles at Israel and move its forces away from the country’s northern border could also be undermined.

In a sign of international alarm, China condemned the “assassination” and warned it would cause more turbulence in the Middle East. Beijing sent an official to President Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration in Tehran on Tuesday — the same event that took Haniyeh to the city.

Within Israel, however, the view is different. On Wednesday, there was little sign of panic. The military didn’t increase states of alert for any region and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport was operating normally. In the media, commentators almost universally said the killings would benefit Israel in the long term.

Israeli analysts noted that Haniyeh wasn’t targeted in Qatar, which would have almost certainly hurt the hostage talks and angered the US. Qatar is a key US ally in the Middle East.

“There will certainly be a pause in the negotiations,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser. “But after the initial shock wears off, there will be a cooler-headed calculation by Hamas.”

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ main leader who is hiding in Gaza, is under increasing pressure as Israel makes military gains in the Palestinian territory and more of the group’s fighters die, said Amidror.

“The entire negotiations strategy is based on his understanding that he has fewer and fewer cards to play,” he said.

Less clear is how the Iranians, chief sponsors of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, will react to having a dignitary assassinated in the heart of their capital.

The airstrike will complicate — if not derail — the more Western-friendly diplomacy Iran has sought to project since Pezeshkian’s election win earlier this month. He’s vowed to improve ties with the US and its allies in a bid to get crippling economic sanctions eased.

Death of a Hamas chief exposes failure at core of Iran’s rule

The death of Haniyeh in Iran raises questions about the Islamic Republic’s ability to secure the safety of its most senior state officials and allies — and what it plans to do next.

Given Haniyeh was on Iranian soil and had hours earlier been shown live on state TV applauding Pezeshkian, his assassination is deeply embarrassing for Iran’s intelligence services, and in particular Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran’s top intelligence and security officials will now be assessing their next move. They need to decide whether to respond in a calibrated way that again avoids a full-scale war or if the Haniyeh killing crosses a line, making it imperative that they restore their image in the region.

Iran’s Mission to the United Nations said on X the retaliation would be in the form of “special operations,” suggesting a limited response. Iran has tended to conduct missile strikes on Israeli or US military bases in past retaliatory moves.

“The attack shows the gaping hole in Iran’s intelligence and security apparatus that is leaking information and is hugely embarrassing for Tehran,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. The breach was especially bad as it came just days after Iran’s outgoing Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib said Tehran had curtailed the influence of Israeli intelligence inside the country, she said.

One explanation for the major security lapse can be found in a 2021 statement by Ali Younesi, a former Iranian intelligence minister. In an interview with Jamaran News, he said that “new and competing intelligence services” founded in the early 2010s had severely undermined the Ministry of Intelligence and directly contributed to the infiltration of Israel’s Mossad inside Iran. DM

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