Smoke rises into the sky following an Israeli bombardment in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip amid the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. Photo / AFP
Smoke rises into the sky following an Israeli bombardment in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip amid the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. Photo / AFP
The Israeli military said it had killed Hamas official Izz al-Din Kassab in an airstrikein the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis and described him as one of the last surviving high-ranking members of Hamas responsible for co-ordinating with other groups in Gaza.
US envoys had been working to secure ceasefires on both fronts ahead of the presidential election on Tuesday.
But Hamas does not favour a temporary truce, its Al-Aqsa Hamas television reported today.
The ceasefire proposals failed to meet its conditions that any deal must end the year-long war in Gaza and include a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the devastated Palestinian enclave, it said.
Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his priority was to enforce security “despite any pressure or constraints”.
His office said he relayed this message to US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk in Israel on Thursday. Israel meanwhile pressed on with its military offensives against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon on Friday.
Medics in Gaza said about 68 people were killed and dozens injured overnight and into Friday morning local time in Israeli strikes on the city of Deir Al-Balah, the Nuseirat camp and the town of Al-Zawayda, all in Gaza’s central area, as well as in its south.
Fourteen people were killed by an Israeli strike at the gate of a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Nuseirat, according to medics at the camp’s Al-Awda Hospital. Another 10 were killed in a car in Khan Younis, medics said.
Hours later, residents said Israeli tanks advanced on the northern and eastern sides of Nuseirat, and medics said an Israeli airstrike killed four people, including three children.
A man with a portrait of Hezbollah's slain leader Hassan Nasrallah stands amid the rubble of a building, flattened in an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Mreijeh district of Beirut’s southern suburbs. Photo / AFP
The heads of UN humanitarian agencies said the situation in north Gaza was “apocalyptic” with the entire Palestinian population there at “imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence” as Israel pursues its offensive against regrouping Hamas militants in the area.
Israel also pummelled Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday with at least 10 strikes, Reuters journalists said. It was the first bombardment of the area – once a densely packed district and Hezbollah stronghold – in nearly a week.
The strikes came after Israel issued evacuation orders for 10 separate neighbourhoods of the Lebanese capital.
Hamas television, quoting a leading source in the group, said the ceasefire proposals did not meet its conditions for a permanent end to hostilities, such as the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the return of displaced people.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer on Friday discussed resolving the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon and addressing dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza, the State Department said in a statement.
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday accused Israel of blocking any progress in the negotiations.
“Israeli statements and diplomatic signals received by Lebanon confirm the Israeli stubbornness in rejecting the proposed solutions and insisting on the approach of killing and destruction,” he said.
Israeli strikes hit more than a dozen towns in the Baalbek region of Lebanon on Friday, leaving at least 50 dead, according to the region’s governor Bachir Khodr. He told Reuters more bodies were still under the rubble.
A cultural group said some cracks were visible in the Unesco-listed Roman ruins in Baalbek because of nearby Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Palestinians a day after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s retaliatory offensives have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and reduced most of Gaza to rubble, as well as killed at least 2897 people in Lebanon, its health ministry said in an update on Friday.
