Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani has condemned Israel’s brutal attack on the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and the regime’s crimes against medical staff and patients.
In a statement on Monday, Kan’ani said it is not the first time that the Israeli regime has blatantly violated all international rules and regulations as well as the most obvious human principles.
Heavily armed Israeli forces stormed the al-Shifa hospital early on Monday using tanks and drones, firing at people inside the complex.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says some 30,000 people, including displaced civilians, wounded patients and medical staff are trapped inside the hospital.
Kan’ani said Israel’s power structure has been based on occupation, terror, violence and crimes for the past seven decades, which has now been coupled with genocide in the Gaza Strip during the past six months.
He criticised the international community for remaining silent over Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 and its massacre in Qana, a village in southern Lebanon, in 1996.
Backed by certain Western countries, the Israeli regime has intensified its acts of violence and crime against the oppressed people in Palestine, the Iranian spokesperson emphasised.
He said a ‘painful tragedy’ is unfolding in Gaza as Israel has been targeting hospitals and patients despite the fact that hospitals and patients are spared by international rules and regulations in all wars.
Once again, Kan’ani stressed the international community’s responsibility regarding the tragic situation in Palestine, particularly in Gaza.
He called on the United Nations and its Security Council to fulfil their international duty and stop Israel’s war crimes.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on October 7th, 2023, at least 31,726 Palestinians, including many women and children, have been killed and another 73,729 individuals have been injured.
Israel has additionally enforced a comprehensive blockade on the coastal sliver, severing the supply of fuel, electricity, food and water to the population of over two million Palestinians living there.
In the violent raid on al-Shifa Hospital, Israeli regime forces assassinated a high-ranking Palestinian security officer.
Brigadier General Fayeq al-Mabhouh, the commander of the Police Service in the Gaza Strip, was killed during the Israeli regime’s storming of al-Shifa medical complex in the early hours of Monday.
Local sources said Mabhouh ‘refused to surrender to Israeli forces, engaging them before his death’.
Mabhouh was a leading officer in the security apparatus of the besieged Palestinian territory and most recently was responsible for securing humanitarian aid to the northern Gaza Strip after months of Israeli-imposed starvation policies.
The high-ranking officer was also a coordinator between Palestinian police in Gaza, families in the area and the United Nations agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
The Israeli military claimed responsibility for Mabhouh’s killing as well as the violent raid on the medical facility.
They announced earlier in the day that their troops were ‘conducting a high-precision operation’ at the al-Shifa hospital against what they claimed were ‘senior fighters of Hamas’.
The Gaza Health Ministry has denounced the attack as a blatant violation of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, saying the regime’s military is using ‘fabricated narratives to justify its conduct’.
The Ministry called on all international organisations to ‘immediately stop this Israeli massacre against the sick, the wounded, the displaced, and the medical staff inside al-Shifa Hospital.’
Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip last October after Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
- Iran’s highest-ranking military commander has underlined the need for constant consultation with Syria in the face of Israel’s aggression in the region.
Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Baqeri, made the remark in a meeting with Syrian Defence Minister Ali Mahmoud Abbas in Tehran on Monday.
He said the oppressed and defenceless Palestinian people have created a great epic in the fight against Israel since early October.
An that the resistance of the Palestinian people in Gaza against the ‘heaviest’ Israeli attacks for nearly six months is evidence of the high power and capability of the resistance front.
‘Israel’s crimes against humanity have discredited its supporters,’ the top Iranian general said.
The Syrian defence minister, for his part, said global developments have changed after the Operation al-Aqsa Storm launched by Gaza-based resistance groups against Israel.
The armed forces of Iran and Syria as members of the resistance front have made a major breakthrough in mutual relations and should further improve ties in all fields, Abbas added.
The Iranian general and the Syrian defence chief exchanged views about the developments in the region, particularly Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and condemned the continuation of the regime’s atrocities and inaction of certain countries.
Baqeri and Abbas emphasised that Israel’s attacks on the oppressed Palestinian people and its airstrikes against Lebanon and Syria show that the regime has failed to achieve its illegitimate goals.
Meanwhile, the Secretary General of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights has slammed the report issued by a fact-finding mission mandated by the United Nations on the situation of human rights in Iran, saying the report lacks legal and judicial credibility.
Kazem Gharibabadi said in an address to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday that the Islamic Republic of Iran rejects the report by the ‘so-called Fact-Finding Mission’, which has criticised the country for its handling of the violent protests that erupted in late 2022 following the death of a young woman in police custody.
He criticised Germany for pushing for the creation of the Mission in November 2022 and said Berlin still has blood on its hands for supplying chemical weapons to the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein which led to the death of more than 13,000 people during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
He also named the United States, Germany, Britain, France and Canada as countries who are pretending to defend the rights of Iranian children and women by supporting the Mission while they themselves have violated the rights of tens of millions of Iranians by slapping unilateral sanctions on Iran.
Gharibabadi said that those same countries have also kept silent on the death of more than 31,000 innocent people as well as the destruction of hundreds of thousands of buildings during more than five months of Israeli aggression in Gaza.
He said the Mission assigned to investigate the rights situation in Iran ‘lacked the minimum level of independence and impartiality’ because of its clear connections to certain Western countries.
‘It is shameful that this mission has credited itself as fact-finding but it has turned a blind eye to the violation of the rights of 79 people defending security and the law enforcement forces who lost their lives and more than 7,000 law enforcement forces who were injured as a result of the widespread violence (committed) by rioters and insurrectionists’, said Gharibabadi.
Iran has repeatedly stated that its opponents have capitalised on the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody on September 16, 2022 in order to stage violent riots in the country.
Several people were executed following the riots after they were convicted of killing security forces or ordinary people, while a majority of those arrested during the riots were released under a general amnesty granted by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei in early 2023.
The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) has awarded contracts worth some $13 billion to domestic companies in what the Oil Ministry has described as a ‘historic’ development because the contracts have been unprecedented in the Iranian oil industry in the past decade.
Iran’s Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, Oil Minister Javad Owji and NIOC’s CEO Mohsen Khojasteh Mehr attended a ceremony in Tehran on Sunday to sign the contracts for development of six oilfields in south and west of Iran.
The largest of the four contracts, worth $11.5 billion, is to develop the Azadegan oilfield, a 1,500-square kilometre reserve along the Iranian border with Iraq located some 80km to the west and southwest of the city of Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province.
The Oil Ministry’s Shana news service said the Azadegan contract had been awarded to Dasht Azadegan Arvand, a consortium of nine domestic companies for a period of 20 years and for a total output of 2.558 billion barrels of oil.
Azadegan is shared between Iran and Iraq and is believed to be the 10th largest oilfield in the world with some 32 billion barrels. It is known as Majnoon in Iraq where international oil giants have won various contracts to develop the country’s section of the oilfield.
The NIOC also awarded a 20-year contract worth $1.036 billion to Sarvak Azar Engineering & Development Company to develop the second phase of the Azar oilfield, located along Iran’s western border in Ilam province and connected to Iraq’s Badra oilfield.
Two Iranian companies won a $245-million contract to develop the Soumar, Saman and Delavaran oilfields in western Iran while the Energy Gostar Sina was awarded a $260-million contract to develop Masjed Soleyman, which is the first oilfield to be discovered and developed in the Middle East in the early 1900s.