Israeli strikes in northern Gaza kill at least 88, officials say

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Update Israeli strikes in northern Gaza kill at least 88, officials say
Palestinians view the damage at a school-turned-shelter hit in an Israeli strike on Sunday, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, at Beach camp in Gaza City. (File/Reuters)
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Updated 30 October 2024
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Israeli strikes in northern Gaza kill at least 88, officials say

Israeli strikes in northern Gaza kill at least 88, officials say
  • Many of those killed in the strike were women and children

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Two Israeli airstrikes in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday killed at least 88 people, including dozens of women and children, health officials said, and the director of a hospital said life-threatening injuries were going untreated because a weekend raid by Israeli forces led to the detention of dozens of medics.
Israel has escalated airstrikes and waged a bigger ground operation in northern Gaza in recent weeks, saying it is focused on rooting out Hamas militants who have regrouped after more than a year of war. The intense fighting is raising alarm about the worsening humanitarian conditions for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still in northern Gaza.
Concerns about not enough aid reaching Gaza were amplified Monday when Israeli lawmakers passed two laws to cut ties with the main UN agency distributing food, water and medicine, and to ban it from Israeli soil. Israel controls access to both Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and it was unclear how the agency known as UNRWA would continue its work in either place.
“The humanitarian operation in Gaza, if that is unraveled, that is a disaster within a series of disasters and just doesn’t bear thinking about,” said UNRWA spokesperson John Fowler. He said other UN agencies and international organizations distributing aid in Gaza rely on its logistics and thousands of workers.




Palestinian remove a body from the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli strike in Beit Lahia. (AFP)

In Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah said Tuesday it has chosen Sheikh Naim Kassem to succeed longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last month. Hezbollah, which has fired rockets into Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, vowed to continue with Nasrallah’s policies “until victory is achieved.”
A short while later, eight Austrian soldiers serving in the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon were reported lightly injured in a midday missile strike.
The peacekeeping force, known as UNIFIL, said the rocket that struck its headquarters in Lebanon was “likely” fired by Hezbollah, and that it struck a vehicle workshop.
Strike in northern Gaza comes as Israel wages a major operation there
The Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency service said at least 70 people were killed and 23 were missing in the first of Tuesday’s strikes in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. More than half of the victims were women and children, the ministry said. A mother and her five children — some of them adults — and a second mother with six children, were among those killed in the attack on a five-story building, according to the emergency service.
A second strike on Beit Lahiya on Tuesday evening killed at least 18 people, according to the Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count.
The nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was overwhelmed by a wave of wounded women and children, including many who needed urgent surgeries, according to its director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya. The Israeli military raided the hospital over the weekend, detaining dozens of medics it said were Hamas militants.
“The situation is catastrophic in every sense of the word,” Safiya said, adding that the only remaining doctor at the hospital was a pediatrician. “The health care system has collapsed and needs an urgent international intervention.”
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller referred to the “horrifying incident” in Beit Lahiya in comments to reporters. He said Israel’s yearlong campaign against Hamas has ensured it cannot repeat the type of attack that started the war in Gaza, but that “getting to here came at a great cost to civilians.”
The Israeli military said it was investigating the first Beit Lahiya strike; it did not immediately comment on the second.
Israel’s recent operations in northern Gaza, focused in and around the Jabaliya refugee camp, have killed hundreds of people and driven tens of thousands from their homes.
The Israeli military has repeatedly struck shelters for displaced people in recent months. It says it carries out precise strikes targeting Palestinian militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but the strikes often kill women and children.
On Tuesday, Israel said four more of its soldiers were killed in the fighting in northern Gaza, bringing the toll since the start of the operation to 16, including a colonel.




A Palestinian holds the arm of a dead a relative, killed in an overnight Israeli airstrike, in Beit Lahia. (AFP)


As the fighting raged, Hamas signaled it was ready to resume ceasefire negotiations, although its key demands — a permanent ceasefire and full withdrawal of the Israeli military — do not appear to have changed, and have been dismissed in the past by Israel. Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Tuesday the group has accepted mediators’ request to discuss “new proposals.”
Hezbollah’s new leader has vowed to keep fighting Israel
Hezbollah said in a statement that its decision-making Shoura Council elected Kassem, who had been Nasrallah’s deputy leader for over three decades, as the new secretary-general.
Kassem, 71, a founding member of the militant group established following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, had been serving as acting leader. He has given several televised speeches vowing that Hezbollah will fight on despite a string of setbacks.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel, drawing retaliation, after Hamas’ surprise attack out of Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. Iran, which backs both groups, has also directly traded fire with Israel, in April and then again this month.
The tensions with Hezbollah boiled over in September, as Israel unleashed a wave of heavy airstrikes and killed Nasrallah and most of his senior commanders. Israel launched a ground invasion into Lebanon at the start of October.
Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday, killing one person in the northern city of Maalot-Tarshiha, authorities said. Israeli strikes in the coastal city of Sidon killed at least five people, the Lebanese Health Ministry said.
Israeli laws targeting UN agency could further restrict aid
UNRWA and other international groups continued to express outrage Tuesday about the Israeli parliament’s decision to cut ties to the agency.
Israel says UNRWA has been infiltrated by Hamas and that the militant group siphons off aid and uses UN facilities to shield its activities, allegations denied by the UN agency.
Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer vowed that aid will continue to reach Gaza, as Israel plans to coordinate with aid organizations or other bodies within the UN “Ultimately, we will ensure that a more efficient replacement for UNRWA takes its role, not one which is infiltrated by the terrorist organization,” he said.




Demonstrators hold baby vests outside the Houses of Parliament as a tribute to infants killed in Gaza. (Reuters)


Multiple UN agencies rallied Tuesday around UNRWA, calling it the “backbone” of the world body’s aid activities in Gaza and other Palestinian areas. UNRWA provides education, health care and emergency aid to millions of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and their descendants. Refugee families make up the majority of Gaza’s population.
Israel has sharply restricted aid to northern Gaza this month, prompting a warning from the United States that failure to facilitate greater humanitarian assistance could lead to a reduction in military aid.
In its attack on Israel last year, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 250 as hostages. Some 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. Around 90 percent of the population of 2.3 million have been displaced from their homes, often multiple times.


Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say

Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
Updated 29 December 2024
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Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say

Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
  • Israeli forces instruct Beit Hanoun residents to leave, causing new displacements
  • Palestinian officials say evacuations worsen Gaza’s humanitarian conditions

CAIRO: Israeli forces carrying out a weeks-long offensive in northern Gaza ordered any residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to quit the town on Sunday, pointing to Palestinian militant rocket fire from the area, residents said.
The instruction to residents to leave caused a new wave of displacement, although it was not immediately clear how many people were affected, the residents said.
Israel says its almost three-month-old campaign in northern Gaza is aimed at Hamas militants and preventing them from regrouping. Its instructions to civilians to evacuate are meant to keep them out of harm’s way, the military says.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say no place is safe in Gaza and that evacuations worsen humanitarian conditions of the population.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of people and razed, fueling speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
The Israeli military announced its new push into the Beit Hanoun area on Saturday.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said it had lost communication with people still trapped in the town, and it was unable to send teams into the area because of the raid.
On Friday, Israeli forces stormed the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. The military said it was being used by militants, which Hamas denies.
The raid on the hospital, one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of Gaza, put the last major health facility in the area out of service, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a post on X.
Some patients were evacuated from Kamal Adwan to the Indonesian Hospital, which is not in service, and medics were prevented from joining them there, the Health Ministry said. Other patients and staff were taken to other medical facilities.
On Sunday, health officials said an Israeli tank shell hit the upper floor of the Al-Ahly Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City near the X-ray division.
Meanwhile, Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 16 people on Sunday. One of those strikes killed seven people and wounded others at Al-WAFA Hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian civil emergency service said in a statement.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.


Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on hospital kills 7

A man mourns over the body of a loved one killed in an Israeli strike on Al-Meghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
A man mourns over the body of a loved one killed in an Israeli strike on Al-Meghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
Updated 29 December 2024
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Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on hospital kills 7

A man mourns over the body of a loved one killed in an Israeli strike on Al-Meghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
  • Strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza
  • Military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant

GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said an air strike hit a hospital Sunday, killing at least seven people, while Israel said it had targeted militants at the no longer functioning facility.
“Seven martyrs and several injured people, including critical cases, have been recovered following the Israeli strike on the upper floor of Al-Wafaa Hospital in central Gaza City,” a civil defense agency statement said.
Israel’s military said it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting members of Hamas’s aerial defense unit operating from a “command and control center in a building that served in the past as the Al-Wafaa hospital.”
“The building does not currently serve as a hospital,” the military said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the hospital was still in use.
“The Al-Wafaa Hospital is partially operational, providing care to patients with physical disabilities,” the ministry’s director general, Munir Al-Barsh, told AFP.
“The hospital had been rehabilitated and was getting ready to receive patients. Had it not been targeted by Israeli shelling today, it would have been ready to fully reopen in the next few days,” he said.
The strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, an assault the World Health Organization reported left the facility empty of patients and staff.
The military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant.
Since October 6, Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territory have focused on northern Gaza, where it says its land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
However, the military has also carried out air strikes and shelling in other areas of Gaza as it presses on with its campaign against the militants.


Asma Assad barred from UK to seek cancer treatment

Asma Assad’s British passport expired in 2020. (File/AFP)
Asma Assad’s British passport expired in 2020. (File/AFP)
Updated 29 December 2024
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Asma Assad barred from UK to seek cancer treatment

Asma Assad’s British passport expired in 2020. (File/AFP)
  • UK foreign secretary says she is ‘not welcome’ in Britain
  • Former Syrian first lady’s passport expired in 2020

LONDON: Asma Al-Assad is effectively barred from returning to the UK after her British passport expired, The Times newspaper reported.

The wife of former Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad will not be able to return to her birthplace, London, despite reports that she is critically ill with leukemia.

The 49-year-old has been given a 50-50 chance of surviving the illness, according to sources.

The news comes as her father, Fawaz Akhras, a renowned cardiologist, left his work at the privately run Cromwell Hospital in Kensington, west London, to care for his daughter in Moscow, where the Assad family was granted asylum this month.

Asma Assad’s British passport expired in September 2020, and it is unclear whether UK ministers have blocked renewal or if the former first lady simply allowed the document’s validity to lapse.

Yvette Cooper, the UK home secretary, said that Assad will be prevented from entering the UK to seek treatment.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that the former investment banker is “not welcome” in Britain.

Asma Assad became Syria’s first lady in 2000 after marrying the country’s new president.

Leaked emails show that she ordered luxury goods in London and Paris during the civil war in her country, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

She played a key role in supporting her husband’s brutal crackdown on opposition protests during the Arab Spring in 2011.

Asma Assad reportedly fled to Moscow weeks before her husband this month during a lighting offensive by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.

Her three children, Hafez, 23, Zein, 21, and Karim, 19, are also in Moscow, where the family own luxury properties.

Sources told The Telegraph last week that the former first lady was being kept in isolation during medical treatment.

“Asma is dying. She can’t be in the same room as anyone,” one source said.

Her father and his wife, Sahar, 75, were placed under US sanctions along with Asma’s younger brothers in 2020, although none of her family has been blacklisted by the UK.


Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents

Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents
Updated 57 min 33 sec ago
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Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents

Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents
  • Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said
  • Baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital

DEIR AL-BALAH: A fourth infant has died of hypothermia in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by nearly 15 months of war are huddled in tents along the rainy, windswept coast as winter arrives.
Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said. The baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Their father said the twins were born one month premature and spent just a day in the nursery at the hospital, which like other health centers in Gaza has been overwhelmed and is only partially functioning.
He said medics told their mother to keep the newborns warm, but it was impossible because they live in a tent and temperatures regularly drop below 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) at night.
“We are eight people, and we only have four blankets,” Al-Batran said as he cradled his son’s pale body. He described drops of dew seeping through the tent cover overnight. “Look at his color because the cold. Do you see how frozen he is?”
Children, some of them barefoot, stood outdoors and watched him mourn. The shrouded infant was laid at the feet of an imam, barely larger than his shoes. After prayers, the imam took off his ankle-length coat and wrapped it around the father.
At least three other babies have died from the cold in recent weeks, according to local health officials.
A Palestinian woman is killed at home in the West Bank
A Palestinian woman was shot and killed in her home in the volatile West Bank town of Jenin, where the Palestinian Authority is carrying out a rare campaign against militants.
The family of Shatha Al-Sabbagh, a 22-year-old journalism student, said she was killed by a sniper with the Palestinian security forces late Saturday while she was with her mother and two small children. They said there were no militants in the area at the time.
A statement from the Palestinian security forces said she was shot by “outlaws” — the term it uses for local militants battling Israeli forces in recent years. The security forces condemned the shooting and vowed to investigate it.
The Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, largely because it cooperates with Israel on security matters, even as Israel accuses it of incitement and of generally turning a blind eye to militancy.
In a statement, the Al-Sabbagh family accused the Palestinian security forces of having become “repressive tools that practice terrorism against their own people instead of protecting their dignity and standing up to the (Israeli) occupation.”
The Hamas militant group also blamed the security forces and noted that Al-Sabbagh was the sister of one of its fighters who was killed in a battle with Israeli troops last year.
Later on Sunday, hundreds of people took part in a demonstration in Jenin in support of the Palestinian security forces. The rally was organized by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian security forces launched a rare operation earlier this month in Jenin that they said was aimed at restoring law and order, while critics accuse the authority of aiding the occupation.
Violence has flared in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for a future state.


Tourist killed in shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort

Tourist killed in shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort
Updated 29 December 2024
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Tourist killed in shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort

Tourist killed in shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort
  • There are sharks in the Red Sea but encounters with them are relatively rare
  • Ministry said the attack occurred in deep water outside the designated swimming zone near the jetties in northern Marsa Alam

CAIRO: One tourist was killed and another was injured in a shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort, the environment ministry said in a statement on Sunday without giving the nationalities of those involved.
There are sharks in the Red Sea but encounters with them are relatively rare.
The ministry said the attack occurred in deep water outside the designated swimming zone near the jetties in northern Marsa Alam, adding that swimming out from the jetties was prohibited and the jetties would be closed for two days from Monday.
Marsa Alam is an Egyptian coastal town known for its coral reefs, marine life and beaches.
The last similar incident was in June 2023 when a tiger shark killed a Russian national in Hurghada, another coastal city on the Red Sea north of Marsa Alam.
Last month a tourist boat capsized in the same area, leaving four dead and seven missing.