HEZBOLLAH carried out its deadliest attack against Israel since the latest escalation in fighting began on Sunday night, sending a ‘swarm’ of drones to a military base in the north of the country, killing at least four soldiers and wounding dozens more.
The deadly drone attack on the base of Israel’s elite military unit shows Hezbollah’s military capabilities are fully intact after a series of Israeli assassinations in recent months, said the former commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohsen Rezaei.
‘Hezbollah has restored its combat organisation after facing a wave of assassinations. Now its war machine has started and hard times are waiting for the Zionists,’ Rezaei, now the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, said.
It was the deadliest drone strike Hezbollah has carried out against Israel in more than a year of clashes.
The Lebanese group says it launched a squadron of drones targeting the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade, an elite unit at the forefront of wars in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and now Lebanon.
An Israeli air attack on the village of Aitou in northern Lebanon targeted a residential building in the village located in the region of Zgharta yesterday, killing at least nine people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
It is the first time the Christian-majority area has been attacked by Israeli forces in a year of hostilities.
- Attacks by Israel on the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) are ‘unacceptable’ and contrary to international rules, Spain’s Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares says.
‘It is contrary to what we expect from any member state of the United Nations, which is ultimately an organisation that protects world peace,’ Albares told reporters.
EU countries, led by Italy, France and Spain, have thousands of soldiers in the 10,000-strong peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, which has been subjected to a number of attacks by Israeli forces in recent days.
Israel has told UN chief Antonio Guterres to immediately move the peacekeepers out of the combat zone. The Spanish foreign minister said only the UN can order the withdrawal of UNIFIL.
Ireland’s foreign minister Micheal Martin has accused Israel of undermining the UN and its peacekeeping force in Lebanon in the wake of increasing attacks against the Blue Helmets there.
Speaking to reporters before an EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting, the Irish foreign minister criticised a statement by Netanyahu on Sunday that accused UNIFIL of ‘providing a human shield’ to Hezbollah and called for it to leave ‘the danger zone’.
‘On the Middle East and on the remarks of Prime Minister Netanyahu in respect of the UN, Israel is essentially now undermining the United Nations and the United Nations peacekeeping force with the very rules-based international order,’ Martin said.
Israeli ‘horror show’ targets hospital tents
AN ISRA
‘It’s a horror show here,’ said Dr Mohammed Tahir, a volunteer surgeon. ‘We were inundated. We had women, men, children as young as one year of age dying in front of our eyes.
‘Patients with significant high percentage burns, unfortunately, their fate is sealed. They won’t even make it to the ICU. They will die. Honestly, sometimes I feel like this is not real life – that this can go on and this degree of suffering is allowed to happen in this world.’
Israel burned Palestinians alive inside their tents in Al-Aqsa Hospital, central Gaza
Dr Fahd al-Haddad, head of the emergency department at Al-Aqsa Hospital, said: ‘This is the seventh time there’s been an attack inside Al-Aqsa Hospital. We need a burns unit, which is not available inside the hospital.’
The National Council of Canadian Muslims expressed its horror, saying: ‘We are all watching with numb horror as we see the videos of Palestinian children being burned alive in flames this evening.’
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, said: ‘Another night of horror. Tents up in flames due to an air strike on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital where people sought shelter.’
Meanwhile, Israeli forces fired artillery shells at civilians waiting for flour in the centre of the Jabalia refugee camp, killing 10 men, women and children and injuring scores more.
The attack was carried out by Israeli ‘quadcopters’ around al-Fouqa School, which houses displaced people, in the refugee camp in northern Gaza. Israel has carried out a large-scale military incursion in northern Gaza for the past 10 days, mainly against the Jabalia refugee camp.
- The United Nations Human Rights Office yesterday accused Israel of ‘cutting off north Gaza completely from the rest of the Gaza Strip and conducting hostilities with absolute disregard for the lives and security of Palestinian civilians.’
It said: ‘The UN Human Rights Office reminds Israel that the forcible transfer of the population of north Gaza would amount to a war crime.’
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