Israel further decapitates Hamas. The army and the Shin Bet, the internal intelligence service, have announced that the commander of the Hamas Nuseirat battalion, Ismail Siraj, and his deputy, Ahmed Wahaba, responsible for the massacres at the Beeri kibbutz and other locations, have been killed in an air strike in Gaza on Saturday evening. But not only. The IDF also claimed to have now dismantled the entire Hamas military network in the north of the Strip.
The news comes as the spotlight is pointing north where “the first response” arrived to the killing of Hamas number two, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut: dozens of rockets rained down from Lebanon, at least 62 launched by Hezbollah but also by the Sunni group Jama'a Islamiya, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which targeted the town of Kiryat Shmona. There were no casualties and the Israeli response was immediate: fighter planes attacked a series of Hezbollah sites in the areas of Aita al-Sha'ab, Yaron and Ramya.
Preventing the conflict from spreading is one of the main objectives of the mission in the region of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who began his tour in Turkey, meeting first with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan and then with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and subsequently flew to Greece for talks with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The State Department said Blinken “stressed the need to prevent the conflict from spreading” during more than an hour of talks with Erdogan. He emphasized the need to “work towards a broader and more lasting regional peace that guarantees Israel's security and advances the creation of a Palestinian state.”
Sirens sound in northern Israel: a Hezbollah missile intercepted
A Turkish diplomatic source said Foreign Minister Fidan reiterated to Blinken the need for an “immediate ceasefire” to ensure the smooth delivery of aid. “We want to prevent the conflict from spreading” and “we are making sure that there is no escalation between Israel and Lebanon”, declared Blinken himself from Greece, “we are examining diplomatic channels to try to dissipate these tensions” .
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh addressed him in a video message, urging him to use his mission in the region to “stop the aggression against the Palestinians” and ensure that “the occupation of the Palestinian territories ends”, adding that the US support for the Israeli operation in Gaza has “caused unprecedented massacres and war crimes against us.”
After Istanbul and Greece, the US Secretary of State will be in Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, Qatar, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, also joins Blinken's appeal, hoping that Lebanon is not “involved in a regional conflict. It is imperative to avoid a regional escalation in the Middle East, it is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” he said, speaking in Beirut with his Lebanese counterpart. «I send the same message to Israel: no one will emerge victorious from a regional conflict. The only way is the creation of a Palestinian state”, the only “horizon of hope” for the Palestinians.
[[(Video) Gaza, operazione militare a Khan Yunis vista dalle bodycam]]
A hope that at the moment appears very distant: almost 90% of the 2.4 million inhabitants of Gaza have been “forcibly displaced and have nothing left”, said UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees , who by the hundreds of thousands are facing severe shortages of food, water, medical supplies and fuel. According to UNRWA, 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced across Gaza, of which 1.88 million have found refuge in and around the agency's 155 installations.
Palestinian casualties reached 22,722 killed and 58,166 wounded. A dramatic situation that forced Doctors Without Borders to evacuate its staff from the Al-Aqsa hospital, after days of fighting and the evacuation order issued by the Israeli forces: “With a heavy weight on our hearts we are forced to evacuate”, Carolina Lopez, MSF emergency coordinator at the hospital, made this known.
Moreover, the bombs do not seem destined to stop soon: “The war must not end until all objectives have been achieved”, reiterated Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu on a day which saw thousands in the streets protesting against his line and demanding early elections. The families of the hostages are on the front line: “Three months have passed since Nimrod was kidnapped and it's like a long and exhausting day that never ends”, shouted Rumi Cohen, twin of Nimrod, kidnapped in Gaza.
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