THE Israeli army and Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah traded fire across the border yesterday, stoking fears that the war in Gaza could spark a regional conflagration.
Hezbollah launched a drone attack on an Israeli command base while Israel launched air strikes which reportedly killed three Hezbollah members.
Hezbollah said that it had targeted the ‘enemy’s northern command centre in the city of Safed with several drones’ in retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah field commander Wissam al-Tawil in Lebanon on Monday, as well as the attack on Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri on January 2nd in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold.
The Health Ministry in Gaza reported yesterday that Israeli forces had committed ‘12 massacres’ on the 95th day of the war throughout the Gaza Strip in which 126 Palestinians were killed and 241 wounded.
The Ministry said a number of victims are still under the rubble and lying on the roads, and ambulance and civil defence crews are unable to reach them.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has shared graphic footage on X of an Israeli military vehicle running over a Palestinian man lying on a street in Tulkarem after shooting him during a raid on the occupied town.
‘The Ministry said in a statement that it ‘views this heinous crime as a translation of the racist incitement practiced by the pillars of the Israeli right and the extreme right, who treat all Palestinians as suspects who must be killed.’
At least 57 people killed in Israeli attacks have been taken to the Al-Aqsa Hospital in the last 24 hours, and another 62 wounded have also been brought in, the Palestinian Health Ministry said yesterday.
Al-Aqsa Hospital is the largest hospital in central Gaza, where Israeli strikes are most intense.
Earlier this week, many health workers and hundreds of patients had to evacuate the facility due to heavy Israeli bombardment in the area.
Now, only a handful of doctors are left to treat emergency cases that pile in every hour.
Head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haneyya, affirmed yesterday that the Israeli occupation regime has failed to achieve any of its goals in its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip despite the massacres and destruction.
He stressed that the only way for the return of the Israeli captives to their homes alive is to release all the Palestinian prisoners.
‘The declared goals of the war on Gaza are to eliminate the Hamas Movement, have their captives back and carry out the displacement plan, but I’d like to tell you that the enemy, despite the destruction and massacres, has failed to achieve any of its war goals,’ Haneyya said in a conference on Gaza held by the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Doha.
Haneyya underlined that the Hamas Movement exists across the homeland and abroad as well as in the conscience of the Ummah (Palestinian community) and the world’s free people, so ‘it cannot be eliminated’.
He said the occupation state ‘has only succeeded in exposing its bloodthirsty and murderous face to the whole world after committing all these massacres,’ adding that after some 100 days, Israeli intelligence, its spy drones and its Western ally (United States) have failed to liberate a single captive from Gaza.
‘The only way for the Israeli detainees to leave Gaza alive is when all the Palestinian prisoners are released from Israeli jails.’
Haneyya described the Israeli occupation’s escalation of its aggression in the West Bank as ‘dangerous and massive’, confirming that 350 West Bankers have been killed since Operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ started.
