Israel-Hamas War: Hamas command in north Gaza destroyed, Israel says
The Israeli army says it has “completed the dismantling” of Hamas’s military framework in the northern Gaza Strip. Warning: Graphic
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The Israeli army says it has “completed the dismantling” of Hamas’s command structure in the northern Gaza Strip.
“We have completed the dismantling of the Hamas military framework in the northern Gaza Strip,” army spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters, adding that the Palestinian militants were now operating in the area only sporadically and “without commanders”.
Israel kept up its bombing of Gaza on Saturday as its war on Hamas approached its fourth month, with Israelie Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing to achieve “complete victory” over the Palestinian militants.
With much of the territory already reduced to rubble from three months of war, UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths earlier said that “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable”.
Israeli strikes on Saturday hit the southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.
On Israel’s northern border, Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said it had launched its “initial response” to the killing of Hamas’s deputy chief in Beirut, which a US defence official told AFP was carried out by Israel.
The Iran-backed group said it had targeted the Israeli military’s Meron air control base with 62 missiles, while the Israeli army reported “approximately 40 launches from Lebanon” early Saturday, with sirens blaring in the Galilee region.
The Hamas-allied Lebanese movement has been trading near-daily fire with Israeli forces since early October and said the barrage was a response to Tuesday’s killing of Saleh al-Aruri in a strike on a Hezbollah stronghold in the Lebanese capital.
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FEARS OF ISIS COMEBACK AFTER MASS BOMBING
Experts fear a comeback from nihilistic terror group ISIS in the wake of the deadly bombing in Iran that claimed the lives of more than 100 people.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for Thursday’s suicide bombing at Kerman in central Iran at a memorial parade for infamous Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated by a US drone in Iraq in 2020.
That deadly bombing has raised fears ISIS, who once ruled over large parts of Syria and Iraq during its peak in late 2014, is “coming back to life” and is planning to take advantage of the current chaos in the Middle East in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7.
With Iran supporting its proxies in the area including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi Rebels ISIS has now shown it is capable of making its presence felt in a conflict that threatens to engulf the region.
It is believed an ISIS branch, ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, in neighbouring Afghanistan could have been behind the deadly attack in Kerman.
ISIS claimed two of their suicide bombers were responsible for the blasts. In a statement on Telegram, the group said terrorists Omar al-Muwahid and Sayfullah al-Mujahid, “activated their explosives vests” in the southern city of Kerman.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed revenge for the mass killing, which has been viewed as “opportunistic” according to terrorism and military experts.
Retired British Colonel Richard Kemp, who deployed in Afghanistan and featured on an Al-Qaeda death list told The Sun, the Iran bombing was a means for ISIS to re-announce themselves as a force in the region.
“I would imagine it’s to rally support for themselves, if they can appear to seem more active than they are at the moment it’s a way of gaining global support and any type of terror success works that way,” he said.
“It may be that they sense the opportunity with conflicts going on elsewhere to jump in themselves.”
“With the attention of the world on Hamas they may want attention to turn to them to rally support and show people they’re still around.”
“Rather than a warning it’s more of them gaining support around world and recruiting to their cause, getting financial assistance and that sort of thing as they’ve been somewhat marginalised recently.
“It may be an indication that they’re coming back to life.”
Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, from Middle East Forum, told Reuters that ISIS are now looking to return to their former prominence as a leading terror outfit.
“The group’s goals remain ever the same: waging jihad against all the group’s enemies in order to establish the territorial Caliphate that should eventually rule the whole world,” he said.
ISRAELI WAR CABINET MEETING ERUPTS
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut off a highly-anticipated war cabinet meeting after shouting exploded between top ministers about IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, local media reported.
Halevi formed a committee of ex-defence officials to investigate how the IDF was blindsided by the October 7 massacre, leading the raucous meeting to “explode” in a screaming match heard down the hall.
“Why do we need to investigate now,” said Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem, according to The Times of Israel. “So military people are on the defensive instead of busying themselves with winning [the war]?”
The brawl scuttled discussions over the plan for Gaza submitted by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Under the plan, unspecified Palestinian bodies would assume governance of the territory after the IDF dismantles Hamas.
Its release was received with scepticism throughout the region, prompting the US to dispatch Blinken in an effort to prevent a wider conflict in the Middle East.
US SECRETARY OF STATE ARRIVES IN TURKEY
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Turkey on the first leg of his crisis tour that will include Israel, the Palestinian Authority base in the West Bank and five Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
He’s holding talks in Istanbul with his Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of the Muslim world’s harshest critics of US support for Israel.
“We don’t expect every conversation on this trip to be easy. There are obviously tough issues facing the region and difficult choices ahead,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
“But the secretary believes it is the responsibility of the United States of America to lead diplomatic efforts to tackle those challenges head-on.”
Blinken returns for his fourth crisis trip to a region that has seen violence spread to Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Iran.
INDIA NAVY STORMS ‘HIJACKED’ TANKER
In a further escalation, India’s navy said it had rescued 21 crew members from a vessel in the Arabian Sea after a hijacking distress call.
All 21 crew members, including 15 Indian nationals, aboard the MV Lila Norfolk had been evacuated from the ship’s citadel — a fortified section of commercial vessels used as a refuge during pirate attacks, the navy said.
The 84,000-tonne bulk carrier had been boarded by five or six “unknown armed personnel” on Thursday evening but the attempted hijacking was “probably abandoned” after a forceful warning by the Indian Navy, the statement said.
ISRAEL STRIKES 100 TARGETS IN GAZA
Bombing across Gaza, meanwhile, continued in the southern cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah as well as parts of central Gaza.
The Israeli army said its forces had “struck over 100 targets” over the past 24 hours, including military positions, rocket launch sites and weapons depots.
A fighter jet bombed the central area of Bureij overnight, killing “an armed terrorist cell”, the army said, after what it described as an attempted attack on an Israeli tank.
And “a number” of Palestinian militants were killed in clashes in Khan Yunis, a city that has become a major battleground, the army said.
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