THE spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry has accused the United States and Britain of being complicit in the ‘terrible and inhumane’ crime perpetrated by the Israeli military in the al-Nuseirat camp in the central part of the Gaza Strip.
Speaking at his weekly press briefing yesterday, Nasser Kan’ani again censured the Israeli regime’s carnage at the al-Nuseirat camp on Saturday, which killed 274 Palestinian civilians and wounded 698.
‘The international community must fulfil its legal responsibility to end the crimes committed by Israel and take serious action in order to stop the Zionist regime’s crime machine,’ he said.
He added that the Israeli regime has faced a ‘strategic defeat’ since it started its war in Gaza some eight months ago.
Israeli forces carried out dozens of airstrikes in and around the Deir el-Balah and Nuseirat refugee camps on Saturday before retrieving four Israeli captives.
They launched the raid in broad daylight, claiming to strike at military infrastructure in the camp as part of a ‘rescue operation’ but witnesses and journalists on the ground say they bombed residential buildings, leading to higher casualties.
There are more than 100 captives still being held in the besieged Palestinian territory.
In response to a question about the changes in Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet, Kan’ani said: ‘The replacement of a number of murderers and criminals with other murderers and criminals will not change the nature of this regime’s behaviour.’
And he again called on the international community to fulfil its responsibility and put an end to the regime’s war crimes against the people of Palestine.
Tel Aviv unleashed the genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip on October 7th last year, killing at least 37,124 Palestinians and injuring 84,712 others.
Most of the casualties have been women and children, and more than 1.7 million people in the besieged Strip – where water, food, medicine, power and fuel are blocked by the Israeli regime – have been internally displaced in this time.
Asked whether the West’s mounting pressure on Iran aims to affect people’s participation in the June 28 presidential election, Kan’ani said Iranians will respond to Western states through their high turnout in the polls.
Iran’s Interior Ministry on Sunday released the final list of six candidates for the 14th presidential election, who were vetted and approved by the Constitutional Council, a 12-member election supervisory body.
The snap vote will elect a new president to replace Ebrahim Raeisi, who died in a tragic helicopter crash in northwestern Iran on May 19 along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and six of their companions.
BLINKEN IN MIDDLE EAST!
US SECRETARY of State Antony Blinken is now on his eighth trip to the Middle East since the start of the war.
He is due to push for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war, on Washington’s terms.
However, with neither Israel nor Hamas having fully endorsed the plan, fighting continues with air raids hitting across the Gaza Strip overnight on Sunday and yesterday morning.
In Cairo, Blinken will meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi before visiting Israel for a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
As well as pressing the ceasefire proposal, the US official is set to discuss the reopening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a vital point for aid shipments into Gaza that Israel seized in its ground invasion of the south of the enclave last month.
On May 31, Biden outlined a three-phase proposal to achieve a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip that he said was presented by Israel.
However, neither Israel nor Hamas has fully endorsed the plan, and negotiations are ongoing.
A senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, yesterday urged the US to press Israel to end the war.
‘We call upon the US administration to put pressure on the occupation to stop the war on Gaza, and the Hamas movement is ready to deal positively with any initiative that secures an end to the war,’ he said.
The proposal includes the exchange of Palestinian prisoners with Israeli captives, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, return of displaced Palestinians to their homes across the enclave, and a plan to reconstruct the territory, much of which has been destroyed since October 7th.
More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war and about 84,000 injured, mostly women and children.
Blinken’s trip comes as Washington has been working on multiple drafts of a resolution it aims to put to a vote at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to back up the proposal.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said that the latest version of the proposal differs in some significant ways from previous efforts.
‘First of all, it explicitly states that Israel has accepted the ceasefire deal. A previous version only said that a ceasefire deal was acceptable to Israel,’ he noted.
It also explicitly states that any ceasefire will continue after six weeks, and be renewed as long as negotiations continue.
‘But it’s still not a categorical, permanent ceasefire. That’s what some members of the Security Council want,’ Rattansi said.
Blinken’s trip comes two days after the Israeli military killed at least 274 Palestinians and wounded 698 more in Nuseirat in central Gaza as part of an operation that led to the release of four Israelis from Hamas captivity.
Hamas claimed that three more unnamed captives, including one holding US citizenship, were killed by Israeli forces themselves during the raid.
Meanwhile, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters from across the US have gathered to stage a mass rally near the White House in Washington, D.C.
Leading Hamas official Osama Hamdan has said that the Israeli army is ‘worn out and incapable of keeping up the battle’ in Gaza.
Despite all the ‘conceitedness’ that it displays, the army has been caught up in a ‘war of attrition’ in the coastal sliver.
‘The power of the resistance is greater than the enemy’s power of occupation… the upcoming days will prove the extent of the resistance’s power,’ he said.
