Israel launches airstrikes on Southern Gaza amidst post-war future discussions
The conflict began with unprecedented attacks by Hamas that resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people in Israel.
GAZA: Israel ratcheted up its attacks in the south of the Gaza Strip on Saturday after its PM Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden discussed differences over a post-war future for Palestine that have suggested a rift between the two allies.
Witnesses said the Israeli bombardment was again focused overnight on Khan Yunis, the largest city in Gaza’s south, although Palestinian media also reported intense fire around Jabalia in the north early on Saturday.
Biden and Netanyahu held their first call since December 23 a day after the Israeli leader reiterated his rejection of any form of Palestinian sovereignty, deepening divisions with Israel’s key backer over the war.
While the two leaders spoke of what might come next, the reality of the war was all too clear in Khan Yunis and elsewhere in the Hamas-controlled territory.
A child with a bloodied face cried on a gurney at Al-Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, while ambulances carrying the wounded and the dead arrived to the sound of automatic weapons in the distance.
The conflict began with unprecedented attacks by Hamas that resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people in Israel.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in response and its air and ground offensive has killed at least 24,762 Palestinians, around 70 percent of them women, young children and adolescents, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Netanyahu has said Israel expects the war to continue for months, but his comments on Thursday rejecting the two-state solution suggested a rift with key backer the United States.
Biden said after Friday’s call with Netanyahu, it was possible the Israeli leader might still come around.
“There are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the UN that… don’t have their own militaries,” Biden told reporters after an event at the White House.
“And so, I think there’s ways in which this could work.”
Netanyahu said on Thursday Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River”, which “contradicts the idea of (Palestinian) sovereignty”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said in Davos a day earlier that Israel could not achieve “genuine security” without a “pathway to a Palestinian state”.
Iran Guards’ Syria intel chief, deputy killed in Israeli strike
Iran Guards’ Syria intel chief and his deputy killed in Israeli strike in Syrian capital Damascus on Saturday.
“Two high-ranking Iranian advisers were martyred in today’s attack by the Zionist regime (Israel) in the Mazzeh neighbourhood of Damascus,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said, quoting an informed but unnamed source.
State-run Press TV reported the same information, adding the two were members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Israeli strike on Damascus killed five people in a building where “Iran-aligned leaders” were meeting on Saturday, a war monitor said, as regional tensions soar over the Israel-Hamas war.
“An Israeli missile strike targeted a four-storey building, killing five people… and destroying the whole building where Iran-aligned leaders were meeting,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The British-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria said the targeted neighbourhood is known to be a high-security zone home to leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and pro-Iran Palestinian factions.
“They were for sure targeting senior members” of those groups, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.
The mid-morning strike, which caused a large plume of smoke to billow into the sky, was also reported by Syrian state media.
An AFP correspondent at the scene said the destroyed building was cordoned off with ambulances, firefighters and Syrian Arab Red Crescent rescue teams all present at the site.
Civil defence were busy searching for survivors under the rubble of the totally collapsed building, he said.
The Mazzeh area is also home to the United Nations’ headquarters, embassies and restaurants.
“I heard the explosion clearly in the western Mazzeh area, and I saw a large cloud of smoke,” a resident told AFP.
“The sound was similar to a missile explosion, and minutes later I heard the sound of ambulances,” he added.
During more than a decade of civil war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes on its territory, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces as well as Syrian army positions.
But it has intensified attacks since the war between Israel and Hamas, which like Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement is an ally of Iran, began on October 7.
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In December, an Israeli air strike killed a senior general with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the military force said.
Razi Moussavi was the most senior commander of the Guards’ foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, to be killed outside Iran since a US drone strike in Baghdad on January 3, 2020 killed the Force’s commander, Qasem Soleimani.
In the same month, air strikes in eastern Syria, “likely” carried out by Israel, killed at least 23 pro-Iran fighters, the Observatory said at the time, reporting four more dead in the country’s north.
Recent months have also seen regular cross-border exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Since 2011, Syria has endured a bloody conflict that has claimed over half a million lives and displaced several million people.
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