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BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Hezbollah warned residents of more than two dozen Israeli “settlements” on Saturday to immediately evacuate, saying they had become legitimate targets because it said Israeli troops were stationed there.
Iran-backed Hezbollah also issued a similar warning to a few communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app.
BEIRUT: Lebanese state media said the Israeli army dynamited houses in Lebanese border villages on Saturday, as Israel said it used 400 tons of explosives to destroy a Hezbollah tunnel, more than a month into an all-out war.
The official National News Agency said “the army of the Israeli enemy has since dawn blown up and destroyed houses” in the border village of Adaisseh.
The NNA also reported “large explosions” in the border village of Kfar Kila, saying the blasts were heard across the south as columns of smoke rose above the area.
Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee said 400 tons of explosives were used to blow up a “strategic underground facility” in southern Lebanon.
The “tunnel” was more than 1.5 kilometers (around a mile) long, Adraee said.
The Israeli military had earlier reported “the explosion of a large quantity of explosives in Lebanon” that was strong enough to trigger earthquake warnings in large parts of Israel.
The Israeli army published a video showing massive detonations at the border.
Lebanese state media has reported several incidents of Israeli blasts targeting houses in border villages in recent days.
Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast footage on Friday that appeared to show one of its presenters detonating a building while embedded with Israeli troops in the south Lebanon village of Aita Al-Shaab.
Hezbollah says it is fighting Israeli troops at close quarters in Lebanese border villages.
The two sides began exchanging cross-border fire last year, but all-out war erupted on September 23, when Israel ramped up its air campaign against Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon, the capital Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.
The war has left at least 1,615 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of health ministry figures though the real number is likely to be higher due to gaps in the data.
The war has displaced at least 1.3 million people, according to the International Organization for Migration. More than 800,000 have sought refuge inside Lebanon while more than half a million have fled to Syria, most of them Syrians, according to Lebanese authorities.
CAIRO/DUBAI: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 124 people in a village in El Gezira State on Friday, activists said, in one of the deadliest incidents of an 18-month war and largest in a spate of attacks in the state.
Following the surrender of high-ranking RSF officer Abuagla Keikal to the army last Sunday, pro-democracy activists said the RSF has carried out revenge attacks in the farming state where he comes from, killing and detaining civilians and displacing thousands.
Gezira has already faced a months-long rampage in which residents told Reuters the RSF looted homes, killed scores of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands.
Al-Sireha village, in the north of the state, experienced the worst of the recent violence when at least 124 were killed and 100 injured in the RSF raid, the Wad Madani Resistance Committee, a pro-democracy group, said on Saturday.
In a statement on Friday, the RSF accused the army of arming civilians in Gezira and of using forces under Keikal’s command, prompting its attacks.
The army and the RSF did not respond to requests for comment.
The RSF has seized control of large parts of Sudan in a conflict with the army that the United Nations says has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The war has displaced more than 11 million people, driven parts of the country to extreme hunger or famine, and drawn in foreign powers that have given both sides material support.
It began in April 2023 when tensions between the RSF and the army, who had previously shared power, erupted into open conflict at a time when Sudan should have been transitioning to civilian rule after a 2021 coup.
“The RSF militia is raiding east, west, and central Gezira, and committing extensive massacres in one village after another,” the committee said.
Images on social media shared by the committee and others purported to show dozens of bodies wrapped for burial and mass graves being dug.
“The people of Gezira are facing genocide by the Rapid Support Forces and it is impossible to treat the injured or even evacuate them for treatment. Those who have left on foot have died or are faced with death,” said the Sudanese Doctors Union, calling for safe passages.
A video circulated on social media purported to show an RSF soldier who said he was in Sireha and who filmed troops lining up men of all ages at gunpoint, using racial epithets, and forcing them to bleat like goats.
Another video, shared by the resistance committee, showed an RSF soldier pulling an elderly man to his feet by his beard.
Reuters could not immediately verify any of the videos.
Sudan’s Combating Violence Against Women Unit, a government body, said in a statement it had received reports of RSF soldiers raping women in Gezira villages as a tactic to humiliate the men and drive people out of the area.
Keikal’s defection occurred as the army renewed a push to regain territory across the country.
Sudanese army general Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan posted on X late on Friday that as more civilian blood was spilled, the Sudanese people’s determination to resist the RSF grew stronger.
But his comments were met with a wave of criticism that the army had not protected civilians in Gezira or elsewhere in the country.
The RSF is accused by the United States and others of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing, particularly in West Darfur.
The army is also accused of war crimes after carrying out extensive airstrike campaigns that have frequently lead to high civilian death tolls but done little to push the RSF back.
“We are monitoring the latest, shocking RSF attacks on civilians in Gezira. The killings and sexual violence are reprehensible,” the US Special Envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello said on X, adding both the RSF and army were failing to protect civilians.
JERUSALEM: Israel struck several military facilities in Iran on Saturday, marking the latest exchange in the hostilities between the two longstanding adversaries in a conflict that has simmered for months.
Israel’s strikes were in retaliation for the October 1 attack by Iran, when Tehran fired about 200 missiles at Israel, though most were intercepted by the country’s aerial defense systems.
Experts AFP spoke to characterised Israel’s latest strikes as a calculated show of force in a conflict that has long threatened to engulf the region.
However, they believe a broader escalation into a regional war remains unlikely.
By hitting Iran’s missile factories, Israel is likely hoping to blunt a potent weapon the Islamic republic has used against the country in recent months.
Iran has hit Israel directly two times this year — once in April and the other time on October 1 — with massive missile barrages that were mostly neutralized by Israeli air defense.
However, some missiles were able to slip through.
“The goal, in my opinion, is to strike Iran’s missile-production industry to decrease one of the main threats to Israel, while also increasing Israel’s freedom of operation by attacking Iran’s air defenses,” Michael Horowitz, an expert with the Le Beck security consultancy, told AFP.
There were also no reports of mass civilian casualties or damage to the Iran’s economic infrastructure, which may provide a route for de-escalation between the two foes while earning Israel praise from its US backers.
“Israel has made a media and political coup and not a military one. It expects rewards from Washington for the moderate nature of its attack,” said Hasni Abidi, director of the Center for Studies and Research for the Arab and Mediterranean World in Geneva.
“At the same time, Israel has conducted a real test of the level of capacity reached by Iranian defense,” Abidi added.
Experts also suggested that the Israeli attack aimed to showcase the country’s ability to retaliate against Iran with a complex operation using precise firepower.
“From Israel’s point of view, it is a huge demonstration of capabilities,” said Sima Shine, an Iran specialist at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv.
“I think it is the first time that many, many airplanes were flying to Iran, attacking in Iran, (and) coming back safely.”
Joost Hiltermann, Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group, said the Israeli show of force also left Iran more vulnerable.
“The importance of attacking Iran’s air defenses is that in a next round Iran would be largely undefended,” he told AFP.
Danny Critinowicz, another Iran expert at the INSS, believes that Israel’s ability to conduct largely umimpeded strikes stems from its successful efforts to weaken Hezbollah, Iran’s key ally in Lebanon.
“It was really the protecting wall of Iran, and the fact that Hezbollah is quite weak in its war on Israel, I think changes Israel’s calculus regarding attacking directly in Iran,” he said.
“This is a direct consequence of that.”
Though Critinowicz called the attack “unprecedented” and “historical” by breaking the taboo of a direct attack on Iran’s military on its soil, he said escalation into a full-blown regional war was unlikely.
Explosions in April shook Iran’s Isfahan province in what US officials, cited by American media, said was Israeli retaliation, though Israel never publicly acknowledged its responsibility.
“Nobody wants to find themselves in a regional war,” he told AFP, adding that Iran’s minimizing of the attack’s impact was a way to defuse tensions.
“Iran shows a lot of flexibility when they don’t want to do something... they know how to find the right excuses.”
However, he said that the strikes “can be a preview for what could happen in the future.”
“Since the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran has not suffered such attacks on its territory.... Iran’s leaders are obviously not interested in a regional war,” Critinowicz said.
“The ball now is in the hands of the Iranian leadership, which has committed in the past to an immediate response to any significant Israeli attack.”
Hiltermann of the ICG said Israel was also under US pressure to reduce the possibility of more escalation.
“The US doesn’t want a wider war and made clear to Israel what it expected,” he said.
Shine also pointed to the United States’ role and said “Israel and the US have also transmitted different messages to Iran not to retaliate to close the cycle of attacks.”
Still, she pointed to Iran’s own capacities should it choose to retaliate, saying it still had a stockpile of ballistic and other missiles.
“But as they have seen the previous two times, there is a very effective defense system” in Israel, she said.
“They have more interest in closing this cycle than opening it.”
CAIRO: Israeli forces withdrew from a hospital complex in northern Gaza on Saturday, one day after storming it, and the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry said the troops had detained dozens of male medical staffers and some of the patients.
Health officials said on Friday Israeli forces had stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of three medical facilities struggling to operate in the area, and also stationed forces outside it.
Footage circulated by the health ministry — which Reuters could not immediately verify — showed damage to several buildings after the Israeli forces withdrew.
Medics said at least 44 of the facility’s 70-member team of the hospital had been detained by the army. It later said the army had released 14 of them, including the hospital’s director.
An Israeli military spokesperson declined comment on the hospital report. On Friday the Israeli military said it operated in the area of the hospital based on intelligence “regarding the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure” there.
Medics said at least two children had died inside the intensive care unit after Israeli fire hit the generators and oxygen station in the facility on Friday.
Medical staffers have refused Israeli army orders to evacuate the hospital or leave their patients unattended. Before the army raid, medics said at least 600 people had been in the hospital, including patients and their escorts.
“The safety and lives of patients who are left inside Kamal Adwan Hospital without medical staff and much needed medication are at risk now,” said Marwan Al-Hams of the health ministry.
Three nurses were injured during the raid and three ambulance vehicles were destroyed, the ministry said.
MILITARY STRIKES
Israeli military strikes on the towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza have so far killed around 800 people during a three-week offensive, the Gaza ministry added.
Israel says its forces returned to northern Gaza to root out Hamas fighters who regrouped there. The Israeli military said on Friday that three of its soldiers were killed in combat in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Senior Hamas official Basem Naim said Israel’s incursions in northern Gaza and storming Kamal Adwan Hospital were a violation of international humanitarian law that it could not have committed without “the protection of Western countries.”
Israel regularly accuses Hamas of exploiting the civilian population and property, including hospitals and mosques, for military purposes. Hamas denies the accusation.
The Israeli military said on Saturday it had expanded the humanitarian-designated area of Al-Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip, where the army has in the past told Palestinians to go when forced to evacuate their homes.
Separately on Saturday Israeli forces killed a Hamas member during a raid in the city of Tulkarm, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Israeli security force said in a statement. It said the man had been planning an imminent attack.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the dead man as Islam Jamil Awda, 29. In a statement, Hamas said Awda had died “clashing with the occupation forces who besieged him for hours in a house in Tulkarm camp.”
Violence has surged across the West Bank since the start of the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians — including armed fighters, stone-throwing youths and civilian bystanders — have been killed in clashes with Israeli forces.
Dozens of Israelis have also been killed in Palestinian street attacks over the past year.
Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
The death toll from Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza is approaching 43,000, with the densely populated enclave in ruins.
ALGIERS: A reading event for a book titled “Jewish Algeria” was canceled on Saturday, the organizers told AFP, after critics said it was untimely amid the war in Gaza.
L’Arbre a dire, a bookshop in the capital Algiers that was set to hold the event discussing Algeria’s Jewish heritage, said it had to call it off without providing further details.
Its cancelation came days after an Islamist lawmaker, Zouhir Fares, said in a statement that the culture ministry was banning the reading following a formal plea.
There have been no official statements from the Algerian authorities on the book or reading events.
Fares also posted the letter in which he had called on authorities to take action, calling the book a form of “cultural normalization with Zionists.”
In the letter, he said the book’s foreword was written by “a citizen of the Zionist entity (Israel) who had served in its army not long ago,” referring to French author Valerie Zenatti.
An earlier book reading on Thursday in Tizi Ouzou, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Algiers, was also called off, Librairie Cheikh, the organizing bookstore, said on Facebook.
In an interview with Algerian newspaper Le Soir last February, the book’s author Hedia Bensahli said “Jewish Algeria” was a book about Algeria, and not about “what’s happening in other parts of the world.”
She said the book, spanning a history of over 2,000 years, had already been on sale when the Gaza war broke out last year.
“Like everyone else, I could not have foreseen the Hamas attacks on October 7, nor the bloody response of the Israeli army,” she said.
L’Arbre a dire said the book was no longer available in its collection but said authorities have not ordered its removal.
