LEBANON’S Hezbollah movement reported that senior Hezbollah commander Wissam al-Tawil, also known as ‘Jawad’, was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike in the south of Lebanon yesterday.
Tawil was killed in an Israeli aerial attack on his car in the southern village of Khirbet Selm, which lies around 15 kilometres away from the border.
Earlier yesterday, Hezbollah said it bombed the Israeli army posts of Ruwaisat el-Alam and Hadb al-Bustan in the north of the occupied Palestinian territories in response to Israeli attacks on different border areas in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah has lost more than 130 fighters in Israeli shelling on southern Lebanon since cross-border bombardment began on October 7th and Wissam al-Tawil is the highest-ranking officer killed since then.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel in two televised addresses last week: ‘Whoever thinks of war with us … will regret it.’
Seventy-three Palestinians were killed and 99 wounded in attacks by Israel on Gaza over the past 24 hours, the Health Ministry announced yesterday morning.
Eight people were killed in an Israeli air strike near Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
‘I wake up thinking this is a passing nightmare, but it is a reality,’ said Gaza resident Nabil Fathi, 51. ‘Our home and my son’s home have been destroyed and we have 20 people martyred in our family. I don’t know where we will go even if I survive.’
More than 22,800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 58,000 wounded since the war began.
More than 10 children per day, on average, have lost one or both of their legs in Gaza since the start of the Israeli aggression three months ago, said Save the Children.
Since October 7th, more than 1,000 children have had one or both legs amputated, according to UNICEF.
Many of these operations were done without anaesthesia, with the healthcare system in Gaza crippled by the conflict and major shortages of doctors and nurses and medical supplies like anaesthetics and antibiotics, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
- Scores of people protesting outside the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem yesterday called for Netanyahu to be removed and for an election.
Netanyahu has grown increasingly unpopular, with 64 per cent of Israelis calling for him to be removed now.
There have been tens of thousands of people protesting in Tel Aviv over the past few days.
It started with demonstrators saying: ‘Bring the captives home’, but now is shifting to calling for an election.
They want to see the Netanyahu government gone.
B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, condemned Netanyahu for starving the people of Gaza.
It said yesterday: ‘Starvation of people in Gaza is not a by-product of war but a direct result of Israel’s declared policy.
‘The horror is growing by the minute, and the danger of famine is real.
‘Still, Israel persists in its policy. Starvation as a method of warfare is prohibited, and when a civilian population lacks what it needs to survive, parties to the conflict have a positive obligation to allow rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid, including food.’
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